Sermon for Aug 25, 2024
John 6:56-69
For many of us, the idea of consuming the
Body and Blood of Christ isn’t exactly news.
If you come from a church in a sacramental tradition, Communion is just
kind of what we do when we worship. I
grew up in the Episcopal Church, and I remember worshiping with a friend in a
Baptist congregation one Sunday. Parts
of the service felt pretty familiar (even though there weren’t any kneelers in
the pews). We sang songs, and prayed,
and heard a sermon … a really long sermon.
But then the service just kind of ended, and I was thinking, “Where’s
the bread and wine? If you don’t have
Communion, you don’t have church.” In
fact, for us in this tradition, we celebrate Eucharist so regularly that it can
become a little too familiar:
“Yeah, yeah, yeah; Jesus’ body and blood, giving us eternal life. What time is brunch, anyway?”
But … imagine hearing Jesus say this for
the first time, without 2,000 years of Eucharistic history: “Whoever eats me will live because of me”
(John 6:57). Yuck. I don’t want that. It’s kind of appalling. If someone today led a religious movement and
asked his followers to eat him ritually, we’d suggest he seek treatment. Then, think about how that command to eat his
flesh and drink his blood would have struck people in Jesus’ own time and
place. Blood is a source of
nourishment in some cultures, but it wasn’t for the Jewish people, whose laws
strictly forbade it. Plus, claiming that
“the living Father” sent Jesus to be “the bread that came down from heaven”
(John 6:57,58) – that was heresy. Not
even the greatest rabbi would claim to have come down from God. No wonder the religious leaders couldn’t
abide what Jesus was saying. But
now, in today’s Gospel reading, the folks in the crowd start shaking their
heads, too. “Wait, what? It’s one thing to take on the authorities,
and heal people, and preach love for everybody.
But you want us to eat your flesh and drink your blood?” It must have seemed like a bridge too far.
So, Jesus pushes back a bit, but it
doesn’t seem like much of an answer. He
says, “Does this offend you? Then what
if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh
is useless.” (6:61-62) I’m not sure that
really makes it easier to hear God’s messiah telling you to eat his flesh and
drink his blood. But maybe Jesus is
setting the stage for the gift of his sacrifice to come. Jesus won’t just be a rebel leader, dying for
a noble cause. Jesus will be sacrificing
his life so that your life can go on – always.
To gain that gift, you don’t have to join in overthrowing a
government. You don’t have to follow him
into battle and sacrifice yourself. In
fact, you never have to fear death again.
Your task is simply to acknowledge who and what he is – “the Holy One of
God” (John 6:69). All you have to do is
receive his life as the ultimate gift and love like he does, forever.
Still, it’s a lot to ask of people in a
religious movement, to eat their leader’s flesh and drink his blood. I imagine this episode is in the Gospel
account because there must have been some historical memory of it – people
saying to each other, decades later, “Remember that time Jesus lost half his
followers…?” Even 60 or 70 years after
the fact, the Gospel writer feels the need to deal with this inconvenient
truth. So, John’s Gospel says, “Many of
his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (6:66). In that moment, Jesus gets a little foretaste
of Maundy Thursday, watching people who’d seemed committed abandon him
instead. So, he turns to the 12
disciples, his closest friends, and he asks, “Do you also wish to go away?” (6:67). Is this too much for you, too?
What’s too much? That’s a good question for us, and one that
came up for our Vestry recently. As part
of our work this year, the Vestry is reading and discussing a book by retired
Bishop Ed Little about being spiritual leaders.
As it happens, the section we read for our meeting last week included
just this question: What’s too much for
you? What might God ask of you that
would seem like a bridge too far?
Bishop Little tells the story of a church
member named Jack. Jack was involved in
his parish and had gifts for leadership.
His church was in a neighborhood where they encountered unhoused people
with mental illness pretty regularly.
Jack was concerned about their well-being, but he was also deeply
uncomfortable being around them – scared to death, honestly. Well, the church’s Vestry decided they should
offer a feeding program for their unhoused neighbors – and the person who came
to mind with the right gifts to lead it was Jack. The priest called him and made the ask. Although Jack wanted to say, “Not a chance,”
he found himself saying, “Well, I’ll pray about it.” And as he did, what he heard was Jesus asking
him to “say yes to his deepest fear.”1 As Bishop Little puts it,
“Following Jesus will often bring us face-to-face with our own worst-case
scenarios.”2
Here's one you might enjoy. Some of you know that my father was a
national champion in collegiate debate as an undergraduate – not once but
twice. He became the debate coach at
Southwest Missouri State University, what’s now Missouri State in Springfield;
and he coached that program to several national championships. It was the stuff of legend: He loved to tell the story of little
Southwest Missouri State defeating Notre Dame for a national title, on TV, on
St. Patrick’s Day. My father went on to
be a professor of rhetoric, and the university ended up naming the debate
program for him.
So, when I was in high school, people
sometimes suggested I should get involved in debate. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” In fact, in high school and college, I
managed never to take a public-speaking class.
Speaking to groups left me terrified anyway. And the last thing my perfectionist self
wanted was to be compared with my father, the rhetorician and national-champion
debater.
So, I focused on writing instead. And after a decade of quietly writing and
editing for a living, I found myself discontented in my work because my job
didn’t mean anything to me. So, one
night, Ann and I had our priest over for dinner. Mtr. Holly listened to me grouse about my job
and how I felt like I should be doing something that made a difference. When I was done whining, she asked, “OK, if
you did have a job that made a difference, what would you be doing?” And without thinking, I blurted out, “I’d be
doing what you’re doing.”
And God chuckled. “So, you get the shakes when you stand up to
speak in front of a group?” God said. “So,
the last thing you want is to be compared with your father, the champion public
speaker? I’ve got an idea,” God
said. “Let’s make you a preacher.”
It’s trite to say that following Jesus
isn’t easy. We all know that, but we
usually think of it in terms of not getting all that we want, right? Jesus has things to say about how we spend
our time, and how we spend our money, and how we treat the people around
us. There might be a common thread there
of self-limitation – that we’re called to put the well-being of others
first. So, I think many of us fear that
following Jesus means I have to be content with getting less than I want.
But I’d say, what’s really scary about
following Jesus is just the opposite – that it means you have to be willing to get
much more than you want. He just
might ask you to use gifts you didn’t know you had. He just might empower you actually to make a
difference in the world. He just might
gift you with eternal life, starting now and lasting forever – which means
dealing with that troublesome person down the pew for all eternity. And he just might give you his own Body and
Blood to empower you for an eternity of learning to love like he does. Jesus has a devilish way of bringing our
hearts to life in the last way we’d choose.
So, what’s your worst-case scenario? What’s the uncomfortable place Jesus is pushing you to explore? If it’s Jesus doing the pushing, at least you can trust that your discomfort is a step toward blessing – for you and for the world. “I get it that you don’t want to go there,” Jesus says. He didn’t exactly want to go where he was heading either. But you know it’s Jesus doing the pushing when, at the end of the day, you find yourself standing there with the apostle Peter – sighing, maybe cursing a little under your breath – and saying: “Lord, where else can I go? You have the words of eternal life.”
1.
Little,
Edward S. The Heart of a Leader:
Saint Paul as Mentor, Model, and Encourager. Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement, 2020. 29.
2.
Little,
28.
