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.

Told You So

2 Samuel 11:1-15; John 6:1-21

Every once in a while, the stories we read in the Bible sound to me like God is saying, “See, I told you so!” (accompanied, occasionally, by a head-shaking sigh, “Will they ever learn…?”)

And this is one of those days.

There’s a lot of evidence for the people of Israel that God has chosen and blessed David as their king.  He wins his battles, he’s brought God home to Jerusalem (or at least the ark, the physical symbol of God’s presence), and there are oracles and promises appearing around him that proclaim God’s love for David.

Things are going well.

So well that you couldn’t blame either the people of Israel or David himself for forgetting what God used to say about kings:

They’re dangerous.

A generation or so ago, when the people of Israel got together and demanded that God choose them a king — so that they could keep up with all the other nations — God warned them.

“You know,” God said, “Kings are oppressive, greedy, and power-happy. They take your kids - for soldiers and court servants. Kings take your money, or your produce, the best of what you have, and then still require you to obey them without question. I’m telling you people, kings are dangerous.”

But the people insisted, so God gave them a king.

God chose Saul, and then God chose David, (and then God decided, I’m going to get out of the choosing business; we’ll just run with David and his kids as long as you need a king.)

And now years of civil war have been peacefully settled, David and his army are winning their foreign battles, God’s home is established in David’s city; things seem to be working well.

Which is where today’s story starts: 

In the spring.  The “time when kings go out to war.”

(Hm, ancient Israel, like contemporary America, seems to have gotten pretty used to being at war in foreign countries)

But this time David’s home, wandering his palace, while his army lays siege to Rabbah.

He goes up to his roof which gives him a good view, spots a woman having a bath, and with little further ado he sends for her and takes her.

The text is spare and full of abrupt verbs - smoothed over a bit in our English translation - and it might intentionally echo God’s warning to the last generation of Israel.

David just takes what he sees, takes a woman who belongs to another (who in our contemporary perspective we know should belong only to herself).

He takes what he wants, and then when he realizes he’s about to get caught, he takes an innocent man’s life, which not so incidentally costs David’s army a lot of other lives.

“See?” says God, “I told you so.

Even the best and most lovable of kings are takers.” Dangerous.

There is a whole tangled nest of sin and power and assumptions and harm in this story, a lifetime of guilt, murder, manslaughter, rape.

God condemns all that; eventually punishes David, but seems to look out of this story at the people of Israel, and the rest of us, sighing and saying, “Well, I told you so.”

None of that changes God’s love for us, none of it diminishes God’s love - not even for guilty, messy David. But I’m increasingly sure God wonders, sometimes or often, “Will they ever learn???”

Twenty-first century Americans are no strangers to these habits.

We elect politicians - over and over - who take our children to war, spend our taxes in ways we never wanted or approved, fail our moral standards in mild or spectacular ways, and get caught up in their own power and position.

We defend beloved cultural leaders, often treat charges of rape, drugs, cheating, abuse as negligible. When sports and entertainment heroes have lost their integrity to the seductive corruption of power, we find it easy to act as if this mistake doesn’t really matter, until overwhelming evidence forces us to concede their failure and our own.

None of that changes God’s love for us,

not for Bill Cosby, Tom Brady, Lance Armstrong, Ray Rice, Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich,

nothing diminishes God’s love for them or for you or me.

But I’m sure God wonders, “Will they ever learn?”

Will we only see what we are comfortable seeing,

or will we learn, someday, to see as God invites us to see?

That’s the question John is asking us when he tells the most famous Jesus story of all.

Aside from the crucifixion and the empty tomb, the story of how Jesus fed a multitude until they could eat no more is the only story told in every gospel. It’s the one story about Jesus that everyone knew. 

And when John tells it, you can hear him wondering, will we ever learn?

He tells us that Jesus tests the disciples: setting them up to imagine and dream for a miracle, setting them up to risk extravagant trust in God, 

and then has to work around them when Philip expresses what we all know is true: It’s impossible to feed this many people at once.

So Jesus does it anyway: 

does the impossible, produces extravagant abundance from a couple of fish sandwiches, and feeds everyone.

The crowd is awed and delighted, but you can hear that John is disappointed in them, too. They call Jesus a prophet - they know he’s tight with God - but they’re missing the point of God’s vivid, world-changing presence among them, of God’s miraculous assurance that whatever we have is enough and more.

They want God’s miracles more than they want God’s presence or God’s truth, so they decide to try to make Jesus the king - even though we should all know by now that kings are dangerous.

It’s not only politically stupid — since it makes them rebels against the current government (which isn’t at all fond of freedom of expression or of protest movements) — but it’s a massive theological blunder, a big spiritual mistake, to try to turn God’s promise to us; God’s personal care for us into an ordinary government function that we find easier to understand, to imagine that promise and care are under human control.

It can’t diminish God’s love for us, but I have no doubt that God sometimes looks at us, sighing,  and says, “Oh, will you ever learn?”

We can.

Taken historically and as a group, we don’t have a terrific track record when it comes to trusting God to lead us, shape us, feed us.

Individually we have our grace-filled moments, but generally and predictably, humans like a government, an identity, an economy, that we’ve shaped for ourselves, run by other human beings, and sort of under human control.

But we can learn.

We can use the betrayals of David and our own politicians, the all-too-human failings of cultural heroes, to remind us by contrast of God’s unpredictable but never-failing grace, God’s care for the marginalized, God’s insistence that we, too, love as God loves and reject the glossy sheen of human success.

Or when the news you follow mentions new accusations or admissions from Bill Cosby; another tragic proclamation of official helplessness in the face of gun violence, or the airwaves fill with political candidates promising to run everything the right way, let our human failings and ambitions remind you that God already feeds us better than we could ever feed ourselves, that God wants to be the one we trust with our most basic needs, not just our spiritual fulfillment.

And if you, too, suspect that sometimes God is looking at our world and saying, “Well, I told you so,” then just imagine - and believe! - God’s joy and satisfaction when we do take God’s good advice; when we receive God’s gifts with trust, when we learn to look for God’s promise instead of making our own plans.

Believe we’ll learn, someday.

But know that God’s ready for us to start today.

God has already told us so!

Empathy

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Are you planning a vacation this summer? Do you want one? A chance to “get away” from the busyness - or just the sameness - of work and daily life?  Looking for refreshment and renewal?

I am.

I’m going to the beach in August.

And so are the disciples.

Not going to the beach, but looking forward to vacation.

They’ve been very busy roaming the countryside: calling for repentance, healing people, evicting demons, and teaching about Jesus’ good news.  

Now they’re back reporting to Jesus, so successful that they don’t even have a chance to eat - too many people are responding to their work and clamoring to know Jesus, to hear more, to be part of this fabulous thing that God is doing in the world.

That’s great for the gospel, but the disciples are stressed, so Jesus tells them all it’s time for vacation. “Come with me,” he says, “to get away from it all.”

But when they get to their retreat, what do they find?

Crowds.

You’d think they’d gone to Disney World. Or the O’Hare pickup circle on a holiday weekend.

The crowd heard they were going away and rushed to get ahead of them.

They want more good news, more inspiration, or healing, or a personal moment with the chance to say I got to talk to the famous rabbi (if they’d had selfies in those days, you know everyone in that crowd would be angling for one with Jesus).

Maybe you actually love crowds, but if your mind is on getting away, the most human reaction would be some kind of cranky: annoyance, frustration, even turning around and walking away.

Mark doesn’t tell us how the disciples reacted to the crowd, but Mark does tell us what Jesus felt. “He was moved with compassion, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”
His gut and his heart respond: it’s empathy.

You’ve felt empathy before, right?

You hear about a child’s illness, and your heart twists for the child and her parents. A friend is unfairly fired, and your gut fires up with anger and sympathy on his behalf.

Or you’ve rejoiced with someone, sharing elation and a feeling of success: when the Hawks win the Stanley Cup, when a friend gets engaged, when your child triumphs in a game or lands that fabulous new job.

It seems to happen to Jesus a lot in the gospels, and all the time when he’s confronted with crowds, but for most of us, empathy’s less likely, less automatic  when we’re faced with a crowd in need, instead of one friend or even one stranger.

Last weekend the New York Times ran an article about that.  Studies show that when the people in danger or need are not like us, our empathy doesn’t trigger as readily. When it might cost us more — when we might need to spend money or use more of our time, our skill — empathy is harder to trigger, and we’re less likely to try to feel it.

So I think it’s a fair bet that a bunch of hard-working, exhausted disciples who have spent themselves taking care of people’s needs for healing and inspiration to the point that they didn’t even eat didn’t feel like they had a lot of empathy to give.

Jesus had taken them away for Sabbath, for rest,

and then actually plunges them right into more need, more work.

Perhaps he wanted to teach them something the authors of that New York Times piece say they’ve just started to learn: that we can actually grow our empathy, our compassion, that we can feel and care more, or more deeply just by wanting to.

Even just by knowing that we should.

That we can genuinely feel more, open our hearts more, build up all the benefits of trust and health and understanding and unity that empathy provides, just by wanting to, just by knowing that we should.

And it’s possible that this - this growing empathy - is the kind of Sabbath rest we sometimes need the most.

I know that when I’m worn out, when I’m ready for vacation or just busy busy busy, I feel my heart contract, withdraw, and get grumpy when I turn on the news and it’s full of shootings, economic crisis, arson, environmental mess, and all those other needs or sorrows.

I want to put off until later the needs of my family and friends, or just not worry about everyone’s feelings.

But when my heart does open when I’m tired and busy; when my gut is moved with your pain or joy, with the needs of whole nations struggling to survive, or strangers fighting prejudice or ignorance or hate, I’m actually happier.

I feel my relationships deepen and grow, and know I can make enough difference; that I can - and we can - change the world, even just a little bit at a time.

We promise this at baptism, actually.

You promised, or your godparents promised for you (or you’ll promise today, when we renew our baptismal covenant) to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.

We’ve actually promised to keep on growing our empathy,

to seek the image of God in people who are nothing like us, and to love them as ourselves.

So I tried it out this week.

I listened to the news, and actually felt more optimistic about all that debt and austerity chaos in Europe, because feeling for the pain of the pensioners and the politicians caught up in that mess actually helped restore my faith in humanity.

I read - instead of skimmed - Facebook posts and comments from the many friends or acquaintances who are dealing with illness and family crisis and loss, and was surprised to realize that I felt more whole, even refreshed, when I responded — even if I was clumsy or cliched — than when I passed on by because I was tired or just don’t know what to say.

I can’t promise that it will work for you, but both the New York Times and Jesus seem to think it will, so for Jesus’ sake I think it’s worth a try.

Take one of these cards and put it in your wallet, or on your TV remote or computer keyboard. Slip it in next to one of the ways you interact with the world.

It’s the words of Jesus that we heard today, the invitation to “come away, and rest awhile;”

and on the other side, the words of our baptismal promise:

to seek and serve Christ in all, loving my neighbor as myself.

Use this as a lens to look at others, and into your own heart.

Because I think that Jesus is telling us that in the end these two things are one and the same:

that we’ll find rest in giving love,

that love lasts longer and renews us better than any vacation.

And that’s good news, now and always.