Eat Me

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; John 6:51-58

“Eat me.”

Seriously. Jesus just said, “Eat me.”

Every single time I preach or teach on this part of John’s gospel - or even just read it - every time I have to wrestle hard with my reactions.

I mean, it sounds rude. It sounds like Bart Simpson would say it. My inner teenager is flinching at the innuendo potential, and my inner child is lost in remembering how “eat me” and “drink me” got Alice in trouble in Wonderland.

And yet, all those reactions and memories are theologically sound, sort of.

Jesus is deliberately being kind of gross, insisting to a bunch of people who would like to like him and follow him that they have to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood.  Ick. 

It’s a terrible tactic for welcoming the seeker, or the lost (unless maybe this is an evangelism strategy for zombies and vampires?)

There is a promise of risk and change in this invitation to eat and drink reasonably reminiscent of those Wonderland adventures, and a not-safe-for-work kind of intimacy implied in eating and drinking Jesus.

All of that’s gospel, and all of that’s real.

Just as risky and gross and intimate in the first century when Jesus first said it as in the 21st century when you and I hear it.

But rude and risky and gross and intimate don’t sound like church, do they?

Is that what you came here for, this summer Sunday morning?

It’s not nice, not welcoming, not safe. Not churchy.

But it is faith.

Because faith is really more about the risky, mundane, sometimes gross things that we do and live with than it is about how we pray in church.  

Solomon’s churchy.

Solomon is a big fan of worship rituals - going all the time to make burnt-offerings at the shrine at Gibeon. In terms of pure righteousness, he’d be better off hanging out with the ark of the covenant in Jerusalem, but he chooses the place where the worship feels comfortable to him, and God meets him there anyway.

God offers Solomon a wide-open invitation to pray: “What do you want? Just ask.”

And Solomon does it all right. There’s praise and thanksgiving in his prayer, humility, and just the perfect request: “give me wisdom so I can take care of your people - nothing for myself, thanks.” It’s good prayer, and boy does God respond, giving wealth and honor and fame right along with discernment and wisdom.

Did anyone teach you to pray that way?
Do official worship regularly.  Concentrate on praise and thanksgiving and praying for what benefits others.  Don’t be selfish. 

God will answer, and God gives blessings.

It’s the kind of abstract standard that I measure myself against. But that’s not what my actual prayer life looks like. I feel guilty about it, but my prayer life is much messier than that,

irregular, far from selfless, and I don’t really look for explicit and prompt answers, which feels like a failure of faith when I compare it to a Biblical standard like this.

I probably shouldn’t say this from the pulpit, but I don’t really feel like my prayer life is what it’s supposed to be.

Maybe you’ve felt that way too, sometimes.

Way too often for my comfort, my prayer life is nothing like Solomon’s, or my ideal, and a lot more like Jesus saying, “Eat me.”

It’s messy and un-churchy. I’m reacting much more than I think I’m supposed to, and I feel awkward.

And today - finally, today - I suspect Jesus is actually talking to those of us who feel inadequate in our private prayer lives. To those of us who can’t manage to pray at the proper times and places, or make time for devotions every day, or in pray a way that feels holy enough, or selfless enough, or answered enough.

Jesus is telling us that faith isn’t really churchy.

It’s physical and practical.

It’s eating.

Now, sometimes eating is a transcendent experience.

But I suspect that most of the time, for most of us, eating is about practical necessity.

You’ve got to get dinner on the table.

You need coffee, right? Because mornings.

You have 10 minutes to grab some lunch; you have to stick to a certain diet for your cholesterol or your weight or your allergies. 

There are plenty of wonderful meals, with tastes and fellowship to savor, meals that are like our ideals, but we also eat just because we have to, or because the food is there.

And that’s how Jesus talks about eating him.

And maybe that’s how we pray, too. Mindful, holy, awe-some sometimes - a blessed experience to savor - but also what we do mindlessly, habitually, reactively, out of necessity. Faith isn't lived primarily in churchy moments of selfless prayer, but in the boringly practical everyday actions of our lives.

What we eat, what we consume - read, watch, use - every day, shapes our relationship with God as profoundly or even more deeply than what we say and pray in church and in personal intentional prayer.

Last week I went out to brunch on Sunday morning, with my dad.

We’d planned this outing because the pancakes at that restaurant are really good, and we paid attention to that and savored them.  We had a little moment of ideal - of food and companionship the way it’s supposed to be.

But we also read the paper, just because it was there.  We didn’t mention or really notice the fresh sea breeze or the flowering vines overhead. I don’t remember what we talked about.

But every bit of that was faith.

Not that we meant it to be.

But the paper and the indifferent conversation and the fresh air were all feeding and shaping our relationship with one another and with God just as much - probably more - than the hymns we sang in church that day.

How about you?

What did you have for breakfast today?
Who did you eat with?

Do you worry about your diet?

That’s prayer,

just as much as receiving the body and blood of Christ in communion here is prayer.

What did you see on TV yesterday?
What did you do at work on Thursday?
That’s faith,

just as much as listening to a sermon, or praying your daily devotions.

It’s a big responsibility, remembering that the practical, habitual, unnoticed, and or even sometimes gross experiences of our lives - organizing your kitchen, sleeping through the alarm, family issues, TV and internet news, dirty diapers, traffic jams - are just as much acts of faith as any churchy prayers.

But it’s also a promise. 

A promise that we don’t have to get prayer right to be heard by God. That we don’t have to know what we’re doing to be fed by God. That the reactive, un-intended, messy, quiet, normal parts of our lives are acts of faith.

So pay a little extra attention this week to your meals - particularly the ones you don’t normally think about. Pay attention to your habits of companionship or aloneness, and to the places you spend time in. Because those are acts of faith, those things we don’t think about, and the things we consume.

Because Jesus really meant it, that we need to eat him, to fill ourselves with God, and not just when we pray.

So pay attention, but also trust.

Trust God to nurture and shape you in your inattentive, imperfect life; in your unconscious acts of faith.

That’s living bread — living in us — Jesus’ promise and Jesus’ self, nourishing us, here and now, and everywhere.