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.