“’I am the living bread that came
down from heaven. Whoever eats of this
bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the
world is my flesh’” (John
6:51).
Though I’m
not preaching on Sunday, this verse from the gospel reading has been haunting
me all week. On the surface Jesus’ words
seem fairly harmless. “I am the bread of life”. I can preach that and maybe even do a fairly
adequate job of it. I mean how hard is
it to talk about getting nourishment from Jesus? I could stand up in the pulpit and point out
the differences between God’s nourishment and the hollow nourishment of the
world. I could point to the times in
Scripture when God has miraculously fed God’s people on their long and arduous
journeys of faith. Or I could use this
text as an opportunity to talk about the importance of being fed weekly at the
altar table of God’s love with a piece of bread and a sip of wine. I could go to all these places and probably
offend no one; At least no one who has made the “journey” to church on Sunday
morning. But I can’t go there. Not this week.
For some
reason the radicalness of Jesus’ words won’t let me go. They won’t let me tame Jesus and his
scandalous call to follow. These words
won’t even let me preach a sermon on the “whys” of Eucharist. Sure I could preach a barn burner of a sermon
about our need to be fed daily with the body and blood of Christ. But I can’t go there. Not this week.
“The bread that I will give for the
life of the world is my flesh”. How in the world can
the religious folks of Jesus’ day even stomach such a shock jock phrase? A good religious person of Jesus’ day knows
that any talk of flesh is unclean. It is
not kosher. So, who does this Jesus think
he is claiming that it is his flesh and blood that truly nourishes? Jesus’ declaration turns everything upside
down. Every faith truth ever told; every
faith assumption ever held is undone by this one sentence. In Jesus’ day, flesh and blood are ritually
unclean. If contact is made with either,
folks are cast out of community. Without
community survival is almost impossible.
Can we even
begin to grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ words? Surely these ancient kosher laws don’t apply
to our lives, but in what scandalous ways does Jesus call us to follow? In what scandalous ways does Jesus call us
out of our safety zones? In what scandalous ways does Jesus call us to abandon our theological certitudes? In this post-modern world in which the church
no longer finds itself at the center of society’s norms and mores, what is
Jesus calling us to do and to be? How
open are we to God acting in new and creative ways? How
open are we to God’s reforming word re-defining all that we have taken for
granted in the last 500 years? How open
are we to God changing the very definition of church? The scriptural canon is certainly closed, but
is it possible that God is still speaking?
Jesus’ words
are radical both for his day and for ours.
But they are also filled with good news.
In keeping with the Hebrew notion of flesh and blood containing one’s
total being, when Jesus talks about giving his flesh and blood, he is promising
nothing less than the giving of his entire self. I don’t know about you, but I can’t begin to
get my head around that kind of love; that kind of love that holds nothing
back. And yet it is precisely that
abiding love which not only nourishes and sustains us, but sends us back out
into the world to feed God’s sheep. How will we feed God’s sheep in the weeks,
months, and years to come holding nothing back? Join me in
worship; in that place where the crucified and risen Christ has promised to
be. And let us discern together where
God is calling us to travel and who God is calling us to be; no matter how
radical and scandalous the call.
Peace and
Love,
Pastor Doug
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