Sermon for August 18, 2024

 

August 18, 2024

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

 

 

 

John 6:  51-58

 

 

When I was in the 5^th grade, our class mouse died.  Our teacher gave us a choice:  we could have a burial outside or we could dissect the mouse.  We were 5^th graders.  We voted to dissect him.  It was the 1970’s, so my teacher could dissect a dead animal and not get in trouble—different times indeed.

 Our teacher brought in a dissecting kit, and we gathered round on the floor.  As the teacher pulled the skin away from the muscle, he pointed to the muscle and said, “That’s what you eat when you eat meat.”

 You can probably imagine what happened next:  a room of 5^th graders recoiling in horror.  I was probably not the only child who went home to declare to the hard working person who prepared dinner that I didn’t want to eat the muscles of animals.  I’m far from a vegetarian these days, but that 5^th grade experience was instrumental in teaching me to consider what I’m eating and where it comes from.

 When I look at today’s Gospel, it’s not hard to understand the revulsion of people who take Jesus literally.  We might feel superior to them.  We might assume that we understand what Jesus is talking about, that of course he’s talking about the sacrament that we celebrate every Sunday.

But let’s remember that we’re in the mystical book of John where Jesus has baffled people by saying strange things, like when he told Nicodemus that one must be born again, and Nicodemus wonders how he can crawl back into his mother’s womb.  In today’s Gospel, we see people assume that Jesus is talking about cannibalism, and they respond as people have through the ages when they’ve considered eating human flesh.

 So what does Jesus really mean? We could spend time talking about the differences  between transubstantiation and consubstantiation.  Many denominations have rules, some of them quite strict, about who is allowed to take communion, and most denominations have very strict rules about who gets to preside over communion. Some of these rules are rooted in when or if we believe that the bread and wine actually become Jesus.

 Once I would have assumed that Jesus was instructing people in the need to be sacramental, and I still do.  But as I’ve read week after week of bread Gospels, I’ve found my brain coming back to the idea of what it would mean to consume Jesus in the way that we consume bread or meat.  Jesus asks us to consider how our lives would change if we believe, if we TRULY BELIEVE, that Jesus and our own flesh have become one.

 There is an intimacy to this idea, and this intimacy would have probably been even more offputting to ancient people who heard Jesus say it.  In Roman life, gods could join their flesh to humans, but it was usually a sexual conquest that didn’t go well for the humans involved.  When Jesus invokes human consumption and digestion, when he suggests that we can eat and drink and join our destinies together, it’s no wonder that people recoil—in next week’s Gospel, they’ll talk about how hard the teaching is, how difficult it is to accept this teaching.

 But I’ve returned again and again to the idea of abiding with Jesus.  We let Jesus feed us with his very self, the way a mother breastfeeds her child, a process which transforms the mother’s bodily fluids into everything that the child needs.  I think of the contrast to the other nourishment story that Jesus refers to throughout this passage:  the Israelites in the desert are not abiding with God.  They are escaping, they are journeying, they are complaining—but they are not abiding.

 Jesus calls us to do transformative work, but Jesus doesn’t leave us to do it on our own.  Jesus shows us how to do the transformative work, the teaching, the healing, the feeding, the dreaming of something different.  Jesus not only shows us, but empowers us—by becoming part of us, bound up in our muscle fibers, having us digest him so that it’s hard to tell where Jesus separates from us.

 Author and theologian Madeleine L’Engle says that Jesus came to show us how to live a full human life.  In her book,  Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, she writes, “God is always calling on us to do the impossible. It helps me to remember that anything Jesus did during his life here on earth is something we should be able to do, too” (page 19).

Let those words sink into your consciousness and think about how we'd live life if we had no excuses.  Anything Jesus did, you can do.  Abiding with Jesus will change us—and then we will be equipped to change the world.

 It seems miraculous, yet we are surrounded by so many processes that seem miraculous, and we often no longer see them.  In this month of bread and wine, think about the processes that happen before we get the bread and wine.  A tiny seed falls into dark soil and grows into a vine that gives us the grape from which we can make the wine that will transform questionable water into a safe drink that will resist spoiling.  We mill the grain that wheat produces to get flour, from which we can get bread that is much more digestible—and shareable—than the wheat buds themselves.  A boy offers up his lunch of some fish and barley loaves; Jesus’ audience would know that this boy was impoverished in a way that we’ve forgotten.  But from his generosity, a crowd of thousands has a meal.

In a different long ago classroom, I learned that we’re all made up of ancient stars, nature as the great recycler, where nothing ever vanishes or is thrown away.  It was was a concept that thrilled me and made me want to study astronomy.  I went a different path, but the idea still speaks to me.  Today it seems even more miraculous that we’re not only composed of stars, but of Divinity too. 

 As we celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion each week, let us remember that Jesus comes not only to nourish us, not only to save us, but to transform our very existence on a physical level, to become part of our flesh and bone.  When we feel weary and despairing, let us abide in Jesus.  Let us remember how we are remade and remodeled each and every week, each and every day.   Let us go out to be part of the ongoing creation of the Kingdom of God.