Your Worst-Case Scenario

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.