To Whom Shall We Go?

Proper 16B; John 6:60-69; St. Paul’s, 8/26/2018

Jim Melnyk: “To Whom Shall We Go?”

I can almost hear Peter talking with the other 11 disciples sitting to the side at the synagogue in Capernaum.  “I just wish Jesus would talk to me before he goes off on one of these ‘I am’ binges.  If he’d just call me and say, ‘Peter, I’m going to give them the “Bread of Life” talk,’ I’d be able to say, ‘Don’t think it’s a good idea, Jesus.’  But he doesn’t ask.  He never asks!  And now look at what’s happening.  Attendance is going down and the collection is going to be shot!  Why doesn’t he ask our opinion before he gets all wild and crazy like that?”

Somehow, in my musings, Jesus knows what Peter is saying to the others – perhaps because he’s heard the larger group’s murmurings about his talk of being the Bread of Life come down from heaven.  He’s seen the crowds around him dwindling – perhaps even a few well-known faces have disappeared.  “So, are you going to ditch out on me too?” He asks the twelve.  “Have I offended you as well?  Have I shaken your faith that much, or (in the literal sense of the Greek), have I scandalized you to the point of turning away from me as well?”

And then, despite the somewhat bizarre nature of Jesus’ discourse, comes the Johannine version of Peter’s confession of faith: “Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life, and we have come to believe, and are convinced, that you are the Holy One of God” (translation by Raymond Brown, paraphrased).  We can imagine Peter saying, and may want to say along with him ourselves, “Look Jesus, we don’t understand all this stuff about bread from heaven, about the descending and ascending of the Son of Man, about eating your flesh or drinking your blood – which even you have to admit sounds a bit strange, Jesus.  We don’t understand – and can hardly believe – what our own eyes saw and our own tongues tasted back by the sea shore when we sat on the grass and ate our fill of bread and fish.”

“But we know there is something about you that we haven’t experienced or known anywhere else, or any other time in our lives.  We know how you make the stories of our faith come alive; and how you make our hearts dance with anticipation and joy even in the midst of the fears we feel when we think about what following you may cost us.”

“We know,” says Peter, “We know what ‘I am’ implies every time you use that phrase.  And we know the Mystery you’re invoking when you speak of the manna that fed our mothers and fathers in the wilderness, and we don’t quite know how to deal with the idea of ‘living bread;’ of manna that sustains the heart and the soul as much, or rather more, than it sustains the physical body.”

“But as unbelievable as this all is, Jesus, there is something about you that tells me – that tells us – to believe.  And so we do – and so I do believe.  You are the Holy One of God.  In you – through you – by you – we see God.  Where else can we go?”

When you think about it, do followers of Jesus react any differently today in the midst of our twenty-first century skepticism?  We gather together to worship God every Sunday – centering our worship, our praise, and our prayers in the Christhood of Jesus, even though we may find some of the straight-forward teachings by Jesus about social justice, and about the peace and love of God, both challenging and difficult – even when we’re not always sure we want to live those truths out in our lives – or see them lived out in our communities.

Something happens to the early followers of Jesus that changes their understanding of who he is – that gives them the courage to not only believe what Jesus has told them, but that allows them to embrace the radically inclusive call of Jesus that welcomes all into the kingdom of God.  That something is resurrection. The pre-crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth becomes the Risen Christ of faith who shakes peoples’ lives like thunder, and who changes them from disciples to apostles –followers of Jesus who now proclaim his teachings, and who now proclaim him as the Holy One of God – the One who has come into this world to once again make us one with God. 

Those who leave Jesus in John 6 cannot see beyond the down-to-earth humanity of Jesus.  Living Bread makes no sense on a practical, what-my-senses-can-tell-me level.  “Eat my flesh and drink my blood” makes no sense to anyone absent the meal of Holy Eucharist and accordingly must be understood within that context – something those who stuck out their discipleship through Easter Day and beyond are finally able to comprehend. (William M. Johnson, Synthesis Today, 8/22/2018).

The Gospels challenge us constantly – especially words like those we read in the sixth chapter of John.  Our temptation as followers of Jesus – down through the ages – is to find ways to tame the words and examples we receive in the Gospels.  I recently read a comment by an Episcopal priest remarking that we humans often attempt to “be more spiritual than God” despite the concrete and often rather blunt examples that confront us chapter to chapter and verse to verse (Charles Hoffacker, Synthesis Today, August 23, 2018).

Ever and always we who choose to follow Jesus live a balancing act between understanding him as someone who walked the streets of Galilee and Jerusalem, someone who tells us to feed the poor, to love our enemies, to repent and return, to trust in God, to share our bounty, and to love one another as he has loved us; and on the other hand, a Jesus who raised people from the dead, was crucified, died and was buried, who harrowed the gates of hell, and was himself raised from the dead.

And so, we are confronted by a Jesus who not only breaks bread with outcast and privileged alike – a Jesus who reminds us of our need to feed and nurture one another – but we are also confronted by a Jesus who, in the mystery of God, is the very Living Bread which feeds and nourishes our souls.  And because of that we are called – we are challenged – we are commanded by Jesus – to live in both realities as well.  We cannot ignore the needs of our world – the needs of our neighbors – the needs of the person sitting in the pew next to us this morning and every morning.  Jesus doesn’t give us a pass on compassion and care toward others.  The work we’re called to as followers of Jesus is meant to be concrete expressions of the generous love of God made known to us in Christ.  Things like food, shelter, safe schools and affordable medical care are concrete expressions of our faith.  Thoughts and prayers, absent at least our willingness to combine them with action, are not. The gift of Christ’s body and blood – concrete examples of Christ’s love for us – is the spiritual food that strengthens us to follow Jesus faithfully and love one another fully.

The experience of Peter and his colleagues, whether walking the dusty roads of Galilee with the very human Jesus, or experiencing the Risen Christ in an upper room, or at breakfast along the shore, was always the same – a call to continue the work of Christ – a call to embody Christ in their daily lives.  This is our calling as well – for indeed, we have chosen to call ourselves followers of Jesus.  At times that calling may feel a bit overwhelming – we may think to ourselves, “Why not just walk away from it all?”  And then we recall Peter’s response to Jesus: “Lord, to whom shall we go?  We have come to believe, and are convinced, that you are the Holy One of God.”

 

Digested By God

Proper 15B: John 6:51-58 St. Paul’s, Smithfield; 8/19/2018

Jim Melnyk: “Digested by God”

“Jesus said, ‘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).  Not counting the story of the feeding of the multitude, this is the third Sunday in a row that the Gospel of John focuses on Jesus as Living Bread – and we still have one more Sunday to go after today.  Perhaps we can infer from all of this the power of the imagery for the early followers of Jesus.  Living Bread from heaven – something beyond the food of angels consumed by Moses and his people in the wilderness – a food which is given for the world – a food which brings to us the nourishment of eternal life.

Last week Linda Armstrong did a great job differentiating between the bread which we need – and hopefully always have – for the day, and the Living Bread that is Jesus.  We pray a lot about that bread which nourishes us day-to-day, don’t we?  “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Linda spoke about how the bread which we eat enters our bodies, gets broken down to the cellular level, and then fills every bit of us – nourishing us and giving us the energy we need to live.

In the late fourth to early fifth centuries St. Augustine gave us a reverse take on what happens with the bread we receive in the Holy Eucharist: “Normally,” he writes, “we eat bread and digest it and it becomes part of our body.”  That part of his take is just as Linda reminded us last week. The difference, however, between our daily bread and the bread of Holy Eucharist is how “this meal” – the Holy Eucharist – how “this meal digests us and makes us part of the body of Christ.”  As one modern day writer puts it, “That’s a strange sort of wisdom, befitting a God strange enough to take [on human] flesh and say ‘eat me’” (Jayson Byassee, Sojourners Online: Preaching the Word, 8/19/2018). 

Imagine the body of Christ taken into our bodies each Sunday and transforming us at a cellular level – transforming us at the very heart of our being – so that we, gathered together in this place, become the very body of Christ.  That’s what Augustine means when he writes about how this holy meal – this feast of the body and blood of Christ – digests us.”

That said, “In John 6, Jesus makes Communion, and our relationship with God, shockingly physical” (Sojourners Online: Preaching the Word, 8/19/2018).  The Jesus we meet in John’s Gospel tells us, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in them” (6:56).  Those words of Jesus were so shockingly physical that opponents of the early Church charged Jesus followers with practicing ritual cannibalism.  Of course that sounds silly to our twenty-first century ears – but on the other hand, many of us struggle with the literal words attributed to Jesus in this chapter of John’s Gospel.  Think about it – Jesus doesn’t say, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood in a metaphorical sense will abide in me.”  Jesus doesn’t give us that out.

Over the nearly thirty years of my priesthood a whole lot of people have asked me, “We Episcopalians don’t really believe the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, do we?”  My response is always the same – yes we do – at least on some mystical level we cannot clearly define.  Episcopalians call it “Real Presence,” and we leave it at that.  In some way – beyond logic and reason, some might say – we believe Christ to be fully and actually present in this holy sacrament.  Jesus does indeed feed us with his body and blood – and in taking into ourselves the Real Presence of Christ in this sacrament – we take into ourselves the fullness of the Risen Christ, and we become even more fully the body of Christ in and for this world.  “But how can this be?” we ask. 

In the late fourteenth century a woman known to us as Saint Julian of Norwich wrote a book detailing a series of visions about Christ that she experienced while she was near death.  Some of her writings dealt with the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ.  Julian offered an analogy about the Holy Eucharist.  “A mother feeds her child with her milk,” wrote Julian, “but our beloved mother Jesus feeds us with himself.  In tender courtesy he gives us the Blessed Sacrament, the most treasured food of life” (Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, 36).  As the mother-child bond is nurtured and finds strength through the act of feeding, so too is the God-human bond nurtured and strengthened through an act of feeding – the act of Jesus giving to us his body and blood as holy food.

This special bond – this closeness – is what Jesus means when he uses the word “abide.”  Abide.  To live.  To remain. To trust unwaveringly.  Jesus is telling us, “If you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will abide – you will live – you will remain – you will find the strength to trust in me unwaveringly – and I, in turn, will abide in you.”  There is a mutual indwelling of God and the believer that takes place whenever we come forward to the Holy Table and receive the body and blood of Christ.

So, we might ask what this “abiding in Christ, and Christ abiding in us” looks like.  The most obvious answer is it looks like Christ – it looks like Christ alive in us and living through us.  That’s heavy stuff.  But we see it shining through one another from time to time, don’t we?  Sometimes we actually catch a glimpse, or a glimmer, of Christ in the life of another: In the way a person reaches out to welcome or help someone; in the way we show love toward one another and the stranger among us.  Hopefully we can catch a glimmer of Christ even in the face of someone who is lost, hungry, or hopeless – someone who shows us the face of the suffering Jesus.  Sometimes we may even catch a glimpse of Christ looking back at us in our bathroom mirror.

Abiding in Christ is explained more fully later in John’s Gospel.  In the fifteenth chapter Jesus tells us that that abiding in him means that we bear fruit – which, of course, is a metaphor for life in Christ.  “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit” (15:5).  Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, tells us that the fruit of the Spirit – meaning the fruit of abiding in Christ – is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (5:22).  It is hard to abide in Christ if we embrace the antithesis of that fruit.

Abiding in Christ also means we keep his commandments (John 15:9-10).  In John 15 that means loving one another as Jesus has loved us – even to the point of being willing to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (15:12-13).  Ultimately, Jesus tells us that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and we are to love our neighbor as we long to be loved ourselves.

As we come to the Holy Table and partake in the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ we experience communion with him.  We become empowered to bear fruit worthy of Christ’s name and keep his commandment to love.  And so we might ask ourselves, “What do [we] most long for – what is [our] deepest desire? When [we] come to receive Holy Communion, [we might] offer that prayer, that intention to God. For it is in the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ that we can know the most profound moment of encounter with God” (Br. Geoffrey Tristram, Brother, Give Us A Word, 8/14/2018). 

The last verse of our hymn insert reads, “Blessed is the table we gather around, ample and anchored on peaceable ground, center and sign of the Bread we have found, blessed is the table we gather around” (Michael Hudson, “Blessed is the Hunger”, Songs for the Cycle, 2004).  And most certainly, blessed are those who bring their hunger for God to that Holy Table.