Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

8/20/06 - Proper 15 (Year B)

The Rev. Sarah Ball-Damberg

John 6:53-59

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . whoever eats me will live because of me. . . .”

So says Jesus in our text from John’s Gospel. No wonder the Romans accused Christians of cannibalism.

What Jesus says – “If you want to live, you must eat my flesh and drink my blood” – is shocking. It’s graphic, it’s bizarre, and it’s outrageous. And if it sounds outrageous to us, imagine how it sounded to the people who first heard it. Jesus is in the synagogue. He’s preaching to a crowd of faithful Jews who would never eat a piece of meat until it had been soaked, salted, and soaked again to make sure all the blood was drained out. Jews were forbidden to ingest the blood of any creature. Can you imagine how appalling this sounded to them? Let’s go ahead and add blasphemous to the list.

This is one of those challenging texts I’d like to find some way around -- I’d really rather not eat human flesh and drink human blood. So I look for an explanation, a way to round the corners, soften the edges, and make the text easier to swallow. Which leads me to wonder, “Is Jesus talking about the bread and wine of Holy Communion? Is that what he means by eating his flesh and drinking his blood?”

Well, yes and no. What Jesus says does have to do with the bread and wine that become the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ for us. But we’re not there yet. That comes later. To be faithful to this text, we have to stay where we are. And what’s before us right now is Jesus saying, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” There’s no way around it. It’s shocking, it’s graphic, and there it is.

Why?

It’s tempting to make faith into something esoteric and remote. There’s a certain appeal to the quest for some kind of clean purity. Take, for example, the popularity of the ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement. There are books and workshops on downsizing, getting rid of too many things, streamlining, uncomplicating, and unburdening our lives.

One product of this movement is the magazine “Real Simple” -- which, ironically, seems to be about things we can buy to simplify our lives. Nonetheless, I find myself standing in the grocery store check-out line looking at “Real Simple” and I’m seduced by beautiful pictures of clean, uncluttered, rooms and of the happy people who live in them, blessedly free of the distressing piles of bills, dirty laundry, and clutter the rest of us are stuck with. The path to enlightenment and joy turns out to be a well-organized closet.

But that longing to free ourselves from the mundane, incessant demands of daily life so that we can draw closer to God is part of the history of our faith. Wanting to separate the holy life of the soul from the unholy life of the body is nothing new – Gnostics and Manichees and other heretics believed that our bodies are prisons from which our souls must escape. It’s a simple duality – “body” is bad; “soul” is good.

And we’re still doing that – we like to think of the world as divided into “sacred” and “secular,” as if to say “Over here is this nice clean holy space -- and that’s where God is -- and over here is the real world where we live.” As if the Creator had somehow created the one, but not the other. We’ve trained ourselves to see a gap between ourselves and God. And so when daily life gets overwhelming, we look across the divide and think “wouldn’t it be a relief to escape from this mess into the pure clean light of faith?

But the Gospel won’t let us escape into fantasies of elegant simplicity. Jesus won’t leave us alone with our hopes that if we could just organize our closets -- just get rid of the literal and figurative clutter in our lives -- everything would be so much better. God refuses to stay put in the sacred clearing we’ve made for Him. When Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life . . .” what he’s saying in Greek is “munch,” as in “those who munch my flesh and drink my blood.” It’s pretty hard to spiritualize the word, “munch.”

Jesus came to live with us here, in our everyday, ordinary, flesh and blood world. He closed the gap. If we want to encounter Jesus, there’s no point in trying to hoist ourselves up to some higher, purer plane. We’re going to have to look for Jesus where God sent him – in our messy, flesh and blood midst.

Listen to what Jesus says next – “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

What we’re really after with all our spiritual yearnings, what’s behind all that longing to be free of clutter and distractions and to ascend to some higher, holier place, is our deep desire to abide with God. And here is Jesus and what he’s telling us is that he is the true food and drink that will satisfy our deepest needs. He will feed us and live with us and in us and through us in the most intimate, deeply satisfying relationship possible.

The Bible is full of descriptions of God’s salvation as feasting and banqueting. Wisdom calls us to come eat of her bread and drink of her wine. Isaiah calls us to “eat what is good, and delight [our]selves in rich food.” Jesus himself changed water into wine (really good wine, apparently) at the wedding feast in Cana and fed 5,000 people so much bread and fish there were twelve baskets left over.

Which is another thing about what Jesus says. When he says, “You must eat and drink,” he’s saying “you” plural. Ya’ll must eat my flesh and drink my blood. We’re not invited to come feast and banquet alone, but with one another, in company with all our neighbors, near and far. The feast Christ offers us is communal feast – he calls us into relationship with one another as well as with him.

So it turns out we’re not called to be pure and holy, but to eat and drink. It turns out that the sacred isn’t something esoteric and disembodied, but flesh and blood. It turns out we are what we eat and we eat what we are. It turns out we’re to munch, swallow, and digest what Jesus offers us – himself, his life, the life he gives for the life of the world.

 “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” Jesus makes himself outrageously available to us. You are invited to the feast.

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