Reason for Joy

Jesus, you can't really mean what you say; this would turn us into cannibals and it is just disgusting, and it gets in the way of our picture of a Jesus that is so pure and holy that his feet hardly touch the ground when he walks.

It's offense began with that first audience, good Jewish people who knew their Bible and remembered Genesis 9, the conclusion of the Noah story, where God says to Noah and his family who are ready to set out upon land-life again:

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I have given you the green plants, I give you everything. Only, you shall not eat the flesh with its life, that is, its blood.

It is a provision that is to make it clear that all life belongs to God, and not to us.

So what are good Jewish people to think when Jesus says You must eat my flesh.?

They, and we, are confused and disturbed by it.

Several weeks ago we pulled out the big word from Christmas, incarnation, and we refer to it again here today.

Incarnation.... we know the root of this word in another form carnivore, a flesh eating animal.

So incarnation means: to be made flesh,

to be a real live human being.

The real Jesus is come close to us, too close for our comfort, dangerously close.

And yet this is precisely what the church across the centuries has found most promising!

That Jesus is God deep in the flesh, come among us, come to be life in us and for us.

Our God cares that much about us!

There is finally no distance between our Lord and his people.

The reality of Jesus, the reality of God himself, can be held in our hand and eaten and digested to become a part of us.

Indeed, we can say that it is God's intention to take us over, bit by bit, from the inside out, reforming us, remaking us, a molecule at a time.

God's word of promise is to affect every part of our being, to overwhelm every one of our senses.

Jesus enters our ears in reading and preaching;

he touches us in the flooding waters of Baptism,

he enters us in the taste of bread, the aroma of wine, and the sight of the whole community gathered at his table as the Body of Christ.

There is something quite striking here.

The crowds are confused, disturbed, annoyed, and finally are driven away...but not by some terribly difficult demand that Jesus requires of them, but rather by the promise that Jesus gives: I am the Bread of life, for you.

They are offended not by demands, but by promises.

They do not have an appetite for what Jesus offers, because of the implications of what follows from it.

If the very being of Jesus enters us in this very tangible way, and becomes a part of us, then God won't be satisfied until he has taken over every part of our being.

We can't relegate God to a Sunday-morning corner of life.
Rather, he becomes the center and enlivening part of our existence.

I can understand why some folks would say that they don't want to have communion too much, too often.

We don't want God to take over our lives; we'd rather keep things under our own control; we don't want too much Jesus around, getting in the way of our other desires!

It would be easier to manage if we kept this Jesus all spiritual and nebulous, something that we could think about from time to time as it was convenient.

Jesus is not satisfied with this arrangement and is determined to be at the heart of our life, always.

This problem of how close is Jesus comes up again and again in the history of the church.

One of those times was in 1529 when the Reformed and Lutheran leaders met to talk about their differing points of view.

For several days Luther and Ulrich Zwingli and their followers talked, and agreed on many things.

But the negotiations fell apart on the one central thing, the nature of the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

Zwingli maintained that the bread “represents” Christ, who remains in heaven.

Luther insisted that the verb “is” means what it says plainly and simply:

This is my body., not just “represents” my body.

And that is where the argument has been stuck since 1529.

How can such a thing be?

Here our very human ability to be curious and to speculate has come to the fore.

Much ink, and blood, has been spilled trying to unravel this question, and it appears that we cannot do it.

--What is the action?

--How does it happen?

--When exactly does it take place?

--How long does it endure?

All of these sorts of questions lead us away from rather than toward the challenge and promise which Jesus gives us.

It is better for us simply to hear the words and take them at face-value.

We take and eat the bread and drink the cup, and trust that thereby Jesus is truly entering our lives.

The very idea will offend some, but to those with ears to hear, it is the purest Gospel Good News for this day.

We have a wonderful piece of furniture here on the north side of the chancel which we call the House of Grace..

In it we keep the chief ways in which God's Grace comes to us:

the oil and shell for Baptism,

the bread and wine of Communion that remain from the Meal until they are used in the next celebration,

and the Holy Scriptures, surmounted by the candle that burns continuously to remind us of the Light of Christ come into the world.

Some have suggested that we should have locks on the cabinet.

I have counseled against doing that because the vulnerability of the Means of Grace is part of the point.

God makes himself available to us,

he offers himself to us,

he makes himself visible to us,

he presents us with the gift of himself and yes, we can mis-use this gift, treat it indifferently or callously.

But wonder of wonders,

not only does Jesus come to us once, but again and again,

continuing to offer, to bless, to strengthen, to challenge us with this promise.

John had already announced this in his first chapter:

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us....

...to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become the children of God.

In spite of all of the troubles and worries that we all have, there is still reason for the deepest and most profound joy.

The God who saved Noah and his family,

the God who brought Israel out of Egypt to the border of the Land of Promise,

the God who spoke through brave prophets,

is the same God who has come even closer to us in Jesus,

and remains among us in the Body of Christ.

It offends some, but let's receive this news with joy.

In, with, and under the bread and wine , and inseparable from it, the very being of our Lord Jesus comes to us.

It is a occasion for wonder,

and a reason for joy.

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.