Unappetizing

John 6:51-58

Anyone here need to go grocery shopping after church?

Or maybe you’ve done a little thinking during the epistle, or during those quiet pre-church moments, about what you should have for lunch or dinner?

Well, do you have blood on your grocery list? Your meal plan? Deep, red, iron-rich blood? No?
Okay, maybe a couple pounds of Jesus-flesh?

No?

Maybe thinking about that just now made you feel a little queasy. (You’re not alone.) Gross. Human flesh. A quart of blood. Ugh.

But would you do it anyway?

A couple of years ago, in Kenya, I was with a group of tourists in a Maasai village who were offered an opportunity to witness a “ritual” and taste a Maasai food staple. One of the village cows was held down, a vein nicked in her neck, and blood gathered in a gourd.
The gourd was then offered to our group – a chance to taste the blood – while a guide explained to us that drinking blood is an important ritual for health and life among the Maasai. Blood is given to nursing mothers, sick family members, or elders; occasionally used as a hangover cure, and drunk for births and weddings – because blood is life.

There were about ten of us tourists in the group. Only two, as I recall, sipped the blood, swallowed the life-giving mouthful. The rest of us declined. Our reasons for drinking or declining varied, but to all of us a gulp of blood just didn’t sound…particularly appetizing.

It’s not supposed to.
Although blood is life – and food – in more than one culture, it’s not supposed to sound appetizing to a Moorestown congregation on a sticky summer Sunday. Nor to the religious leaders and the crowds in the synagogue at Capernaum, listening to Jesus.
After all, drinking blood, even eating meat that hasn’t been entirely drained of blood, has been taboo – against God’s laws – for the people of Israel. On the books for five or six hundred years by the time Jesus says this; understood for much longer. So Jesus’ invitation to drink his blood is revolting and unholy. And that’s not even counting his continuing insistence on eating his flesh.

How does this man think he can give us his flesh to eat???

You and I would probably wonder that just as much as the first century leaders of Capernaum, if Presiding Bishop Curry or some other magnetic Christian preacher showed up here and invited us to eat their body’s meat.

(Still a little nauseating, right?)

And then the promise and the catch: Whoever eats my flesh, drinks my blood, has eternal life: God’s life, life without limits.  And if you don’t chew my meat, drink my blood, you’re dead already.

Jesus is deliberately using graphic verbs. There’s nothing tidy or polite about this.

It’s messy, this life-giving nourishment.

It’s gross. Crude, maybe.

And it’s supposed to be.

You don’t become one with someone else in any polite, detached, and tidy ways. Abiding in Jesus; participating in the life of God, becoming that fully united, doesn’t happen in orderly, scheduled, civilized ways.

It happens in the raw, deep, gritty, chewy, bloody parts of our own lives.

Becoming that close with God happens when we invite God into the parts of our selves, lives, and hearts that we’re too uncomfortable to share with anyone. When we trust God with the anger and shame of having been diminished by a boss or humiliated by a family member; the bitterness of disappointment and failure. When we share with God the messy cabinets under the sink and that never-shiny spot behind the toilet; the gritty choices that come with financial stress, oppressive relationships, or sheer exhaustion.

Abiding with Jesus in the unlimited life of God doesn’t happen primarily in orderly Sunday worship. It happens in the gritty weekdays when we chew over and swallow God’s tendency to inhabit the messy, crude, raw and less-than-socially-acceptable parts of our world and common life: generational poverty, partisan politics – and religious politics! – sex and sexuality, finance and money. (Jesus and God’s prophets talk about a lot of those things, if you hadn’t noticed.)

Though it may start to sound like bad news that abiding in Jesus is not, in fact, restful, tidy, and socially acceptable – not at all like the simple moral values we want our kids to learn in Sunday School – it’s actually good news that love and justice and hope and generosity – abundant and eternal life – are actually radical, disruptive, and messy.

Because, frankly, stability in the world as it is right now isn’t good enough.

Not good enough for God,

for our souls,

for our bodies – our very physical and fleshy, bloody selves –

or for our community.

And getting from the world as it is to the world God dreams of for us is disruptive, messy, and full of difficult, un-appetizing choices. It requires confronting our failures, over and over, and the failures of those we wanted to trust. Embracing our own responsibility for the suffering of strangers and neighbors. And sacrificing comfort and security for healing and life-giving.

Eating and drinking Jesus – recognizing and loving the gift of life in unappetizing choices – prepares and strengthens us for embracing the gift of life in the difficult and unattractive choices of our common life.
The consequences of declining a mouthful of life-giving blood are slight for a tourist, but monumental for the people of Jesus. Because the life-giving power of this eating and drinking isn’t just for you and me. That life that knows no limits is meant to flow beyond us, to heal the world.

If we were already better at drinking Jesus’ blood, it wouldn’t have taken multiple decades and hundreds of young lives for the cultures of sexual abuse and the protection of predators in elite college sports and the Roman Catholic Church (among others) to be acknowledged and addressed and stopped.

If we were more practiced at eating the meaty flesh Jesus offers, we’d have already made the difficult choices to stop school shootings, and street shootings, and cop shootings.

The actions we have to take, the choices we have to confront, that stand between us and the healing of these cultures of violence, silence, abuse, and the disregard for human life and dignity are even more difficult than a mouthful of blood, or raw flesh.

But Jesus invites us – like the crowds at Capernaum – to start now, and open ourselves today and forever to the life-giving power of the difficult, messy, and gritty,

without sugar-coating, and without fear.

If you’re a little upset right now, or still a little queasy; if this isn’t the sermon you wanted to hear on a damp summer Sunday but you paid attention anyway; if it wasn’t the sermon I wanted to preach on a quiet summer Sunday, but it’s ten minutes too late to change it now; if we’re confronting our discomfort together, and at the same time finding a spoonful of vivid hope….

Then we might just have taken a sip, a small bite, of that blood and flesh Jesus offers: the messy, gritty, chewy life without limits that God wants to share with us so much that it cannot be suppressed.

We might just have sipped a bit of that difficult, unexpected, powerful; abiding, abundant, eternal life, for you, me, us; and for the world.

What We Already Know

John 6:35, 41-51

Did you know already, before you got to church today, that Jesus is the Bread of Life?
Or were you surprised, when Deacon Leslie read the gospel, to hear Jesus announce that he is bread?

Yes, it’s old news to most of us. Maybe you’ve sung about it. Maybe you’ve noticed a theme around the communion table, in the Eucharistic prayers.

Some nineteen or twenty centuries ago, very early on in the life of the church, probably from the habits and stories of the disciples who literally walked with Jesus, people who knew Jesus knew that Jesus is closely associated with bread. For two millennia, around our holy tables, we’ve told the story of how Jesus gave bread to his friends, saying “this is my Body; eat in remembrance of me.”  For just about as long, we’ve taught one another that something about this bread has to do with eternal life.

Over the last two millennia there have been differences in interpretation and opinion about just exactly how this relationship between bread, Jesus, and life works out. There’s often quite a bit of difference in interpretation and opinion between any ten Episcopalians eating at the same altar, in fact. But we more or less know that Jesus and Bread and Life have a lot to do with each other.

And sometimes, still, it comes as a surprise to read along in John’s gospel and try to understand what Jesus means when he says, directly, “I am the Bread of Life.” Jesus himself (or at least John, trying to tell us what Jesus said) doesn’t seem to make it any easier, thoroughly mixing claims and commitments about who has access to God and how with strong statements about bread and meat and eternity.

No wonder his first listeners were confused:

Wait, what does he mean he’s bread that came out of heaven? I mean, we know him. We know where he comes from – we know his parents, his hometown, his family and history. This man doesn’t make sense.

The grumbling synagogue leadership who objected to Jesus’ “alternative facts” about who he is and where he came from had some reason to complain. They already knew quite a lot about Jesus, and now he’s spouting contradictions, telling them impossible things about himself as truth. And the truth they already know about Jesus – his family, his history, their relationship to him – is blinding them to the rest of the truth; truth they haven’t yet seen and heard and known.

The same thing happens to us, all the time.

Many of us grew up knowing that a nice tan was the glow of good health…and still have a little trouble with sunscreen.

I simply can’t seem to learn the fancier and more capable features in MicrosoftWord or on my phone because I already know how to do a mail merge or put something on the calendar.

What we know – what we’ve known forever, what was always true – keeps us from being able to learn new things, or to see new truths that don’t match what we know (or think we know).

And while you and I generally already know that Jesus is Bread, so we’re not as surprised as the first century crowds to hear it this morning, the same thing still happens to you and me and Jesus.

One of the spiritual growth groups that’s been meeting this summer told me how surprising it was to read right through the Gospel according to Mark and discover that Jesus really doesn’t seem to talk about love.
Because we’ve been learning since childhood that Jesus is all about love. We’ve heard it in Sunday School, we’ve heard it preached, we’ve sung it with our kids… and then we find it’s hard to know this Jesus in the gospel who talks a lot more about death and seeds and even money than love.

There are truths we want to know - revelation and life - in those unexpected words and deeds of Jesus. But it can be hard to wrap our minds around the contradictions.

If we already know what someone does and says and is, it’s hard to believe it when they tell you and show you a new side, a new truth. Hard even to simply see or hear something that doesn’t match what I already know.

That’s how prejudice works. It works naturally, on all of us, not just in the big “isms” of ethnicity or gender or age, but on the way we know individuals in our lives: strong enough to blind us, even when we want to learn more.

So if we already know who Jesus is, it’s hard – very hard – to hear and learn the truths we haven’t always known.

And yet, that’s what God wants from us, wants for us. God wants us to know Jesus, to know God, more deeply and closely and surprisingly than any of us here this morning already do.

And we don’t get that deeper knowledge from absorbing the conventional wisdom, from what everyone knows, or what I already know, or even by reading the Bible for ourselves, though that certainly helps.

“Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” Jesus says. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.”

We can’t do it for ourselves.

We can only get that close to Jesus – only discover the true Jesus, only learn and absorb and know the truths God wants us to know, only get that deep and rich and whole-self relationship – from God’s own calling and teaching.

Sometimes I get uncomfortable when Jesus says these things about “no one can come to me except through the Father” or “no one can come to the Father except through me.”  It doesn’t sound like the welcoming, all-embracing Jesus I already know.

I grumble about it myself, the same way the religious leadership grumbled about Jesus trying to get people to think he came right down from heaven. Or that he’s edible, for that matter.

But if I get past my own blinders of inclusivity, this apparent exclusivity may actually be a more welcoming, giving, generous God, a more loving Jesus, than I thought I knew.

No one is saved by what we already know, Jesus is telling us. God prevents us from salvation of the mind alone: salvation without revelation or relationship, without an ongoing, growing experience of mutual discovery between us and Christ. A relationship and revelation that demands our whole hearts and lives, and gives us more abundant and eternal love and life.

No one can have Jesus without being invited by God. So no one of us, and no one else, can take, can seize Jesus for themselves. I find that reassuring in a world where a whole lot of people of differing opinion want to tell me that they’ve got the rights to Jesus.

In the midst of all that you and I already do know of Jesus; in the midst of a world where most of the people we know think they know enough about Jesus already; God isn’t satisfied. God keeps working to draw us closer.

God works to draw us into an ongoing, deepening, expansive relationship of discovery, of Jesus surprising us with new truth, and of you and I revealing more and more of our hearts and committing more and more of our lives to God.

God draws us, and Jesus surprises us, into new and deeper, more demanding and rewarding relationship: as intimate as eating, as daily and basic as bread, as lasting and abundant as eternal life.

Perspective

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Ephesians 4:1-16

Where do you see yourself in the story that Nathan tells David?

Where do you see yourself in the story of a man rich in flocks and herds, and a poor man who has nothing - nothing but one lamb, so precious that he treats it as a child, feeding it from his own plate?

There’s evidence of love in the poor man’s life. And the rich man evidently has all the comfort and luxury and security one might want. You could want to be either one.

Until the rich man steals from the poor. Welcomes a visitor for dinner, then looks at all the flocks and herds that surround him, thinks “but there’s nothing in the fridge” and takes the one lamb from the poor man to serve as dinner.

Where do you see yourself in this story?

What do you want to do?

David empathizes right away with the poor man. He’s ready to kill the rich man; he demands restitution, he’s ready to leap out of his seat and rush off to right the wrong.

Until Nathan shocks him into recognition, telling him,”You are the man.”

Now David sees himself in the story.  Sees himself as the rich man who has been so brutal, greedy, and callous in his power that he deserves to die.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you suddenly seen yourself from someone else’s perspective, and not liked what you saw?
I have. I’ve felt that slightly nauseous recognition; distress and dismay or defensive shock.

And if you’ve had that moment, you might know might know how David feels to recognize the story of his own actions: the man who has everything taking Bathsheba to please himself, and sending her husband to death to cover it up. Even in marrying her – perhaps thinking to protect her, perhaps just making her his own – David took what did not belong to him, oblivious to his cruelty and theft.

And before Nathan told him this story, he probably thought of himself as a good guy. A man in love, a man entitled to the best because he’d fought and worked hard for it; a man trying to clean up after his own mistakes and protect the woman he loved (or at least lusted for).

It’s a series of perspective shifts that could give you whiplash: Good guy, vulnerable man, justice warrior, cruel death-deserving thief. Yikes. And the perspective shifting doesn’t stop there.

You are this man, Nathan tells him, and goes on to remind him of who else he is: one chosen and anointed by God, given gifts and power and wealth and responsibility – more than he could earn or even desire. And God would have given him as much more again.

Nathan shows David that he’s insulted God by his actions against other people. And now he’ll get what he has earned: trouble and loss in his own house, as he’s brought trouble and loss to others.

And now David experiences his final shift in perspective in this story. “I have sinned,” he says, “against the Lord.”

With this final shift in perspective, David sees what God wants us always to see: ourselves as we are in relationship to God.

Nathan first shows David how he’s been relating to other people, then reminds him of who he is in God’s eyes: chosen, gifted, responsible, blessed – and now, insulting.

By seizing what he wants, instead of receiving what he’s been given, David insults God’s generosity, blessing, and choice.

And when he sees himself clearly as the one to whom God has given so much, he sees how he has hurt God as well as other people.

I have sinned against the Lord.

Has that perspective shift ever happened to you? Have you seen yourself as God sees you: chosen, beloved, blessed with gifts you neither asked nor earned?

I have. I’ve felt that sense of overwhelming blessing, and gratitude.

And then, sometimes, like David, I’ve been overwhelmed by grief at how I didn’t live up to God’s generosity and love, feel an upwelling of confession and repentance flowing from the gratitude and grief.

Has that happened to you?

It’s tempting – not just tempting, but almost mandatory in the everyday world we live in – to see ourselves in terms of power, or our relationship with others. We are taught to see ourselves as employee or boss or client; parent, child, neighbor, stranger, friend. Customer or voter or bystander.

That’s how the world tells us to see ourselves.

Then from that perspective the world tells us we have to get what we can, seize what we want, take what we deserve.

And that’s how the poor man loses his lamb.

That’s how Bathsheba becomes an object instead of a person; desired and abruptly taken by David; how Uriah became an obstacle instead of a human being; an obstacle to be eliminated by David.

That’s how children at our borders become pawns, objects to manipulate their parents, to terrify and distract and deter.

That’s how women become objects in our own day and place; how cities choke on industrial pollution; and children are poisoned by their drinking water; how voters become objects to manipulate and trade and own; instead of citizens responsible for their choices.

That’s what happens when we lose perspective. When we see ourselves defined by power and powerlessness; by what we want and need and earn, instead of by the gifts and choosing and love of God. Instead of seeing ourselves the way God sees us, as gifted and beloved, called to God’s own purpose, called and gifted to build one another up.

And when God’s perspective comes back to us; when we suddenly or gradually recognize ourselves as the lamb in Nathan’s story: beloved, nurtured and cared for as God’s own child, given all that God’s love can give, we can also see God’s grief when we are torn away from God by any human entitlement or ignorance or selfish purpose, and feel God’s desire for our restoration.

Then, like David, we can see ourselves as both sinners and beloved; gifted for God’s purpose even in the midst of our flaws, and be inspired to live up to God’s love all over again.

God sent Nathan to David with a story of a lamb to shift David’s perspective and help him see as God sees.

And God sent Jesus to all of us, a person and a story, to help shift our perspective: to see life in death, to see ourselves in Christ; to see ourselves as God sees us: beloved child; flawed and failed, while still called and gifted – materially, spiritually – for a purpose – God’s purpose – of building one another up.

I beg you, therefore, to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.