Chew on this…for the broken and beautiful world

John 6 

Throughout this year, I've been gathering with a small group of pastors and reading women's

theology from around the world in a conversation guided by Deanna Thompson, who teaches theology at Hamline University and is a member of Gloria Dei, one of our sister congregations here in Saint Paul. It's been a good reminder of things I've learned two decades ago... How important it is for us to hear images of God that come from women's voices and experiences... Even here at Christ, where we hear women preach a lot, we still can be a little over-focused because of our tradition, liturgy and songs in male images for God. This small group was a good reminder and challenged me, not only by the images I knew but some that were totally new.

Like this story Deanna shared with us about a book for her upcoming semester course called Holy Fast, Holy Feast[1] about medieval sisters who would eat nothing but the communion wafer (they ate no other food at all)… Why? Because of the depth of their belief that within this body of Christ was all that they needed to live.
Now, my first reaction to this story was... Ugh. I wish these sisters could have known that God is present in all of creation... A blueberry, a potato, a bowl of oats... God is present there, too. But on the other hand, these devout sisters certainly took the images of John 6 totally to heart... For them, eating the bread of life was not only "you are what you eat" in the ways that serious nutritionists and healthy people know to be true... But it was an extreme desire to become more and more like Christ. I imagine that they thought, “If all I eat is Christ, I cannot help but become more like Christ.”
And this is another way these sisters captured a part of the heart of John's gospel—that they took in very deeply how life with Christ begins right now, in real time, in the present, in the everyday. It's not just a future promise... Although eternal life is mentioned in John 6, it’s really about a deep relationship with God that is past, present and future. It begins, it's renewed every time we share Christ, and it never ends... Now and even beyond death.
Maybe at this point, it's good to say out loud that this passage from John is gross at some level. Chewing on flesh, drinking blood... Particularly for the vegans in our midst, this is hard to stomach. You’re not alone if you get a visceral response. This practice of eating the body and blood of Jesus was very suspicious for the neighbors of Christians from the very beginning... What are you doing? What are you saying? It was at about this point of Jesus insisting that people eat him that disciples started flooding away from Jesus... Maybe because we're so used to the idea of communion or because we rely heavily on metaphor, we don't feel it as shocking... But many of us have seen the shock through the widened eyes of a child or heard with a newcomer who hears the words "This is my body, this is my blood..." for the first time, and turns in surprise to another, "Wait…. what did the pastor just say?"
Another problem in the part of the story we read today is how exclusive it can sound, and how it has been used to exclude.... “Unless you do this, you have no life.” Generally, we don't like ultimatums, and we don't like it when it sounds like the God we know in Jesus as "the great includer" appears to be setting up walls... So what do we make of this? How is this good news?
Here’s where I go next... Backward.To the manna God provided... For those who were really hungry. Aren't we really hungry?I think back...to the life-giving power of God to provide for a weary-to-death prophet a loaf of bread and a jug of oil and an angel to say, "Eat, faithful, frightened ones, because otherwise, you won't have enough energy to go all the way on this journey. And then, after a little more rest, again that invitation, "Wake up & eat, you’ll need this, this is what’s going to sustain you for the days ahead."
This particular part about Jesus own body and blood is very physical. It's as physical as feeling your baby's spine across your stomach before birth... I remember the sense of wonder realizing that I could feel each of the bones of my baby's spine, her body forming and moving within my body...It's as physical as the fear that shoots through my nervous systems as a fleet of flashing lights and sirens goes around me on all sides, and I stop & watch as another young Black man is taken away in handcuffs, and I feel like I can't drive away because the life of every person involved, but especially his, is so valuable and fragile and hanging in the balance in these violent days.It's as physical as resting a hand on the paper-thin skin of your grandmother's forehead as she is in the midst of her last labored breaths.
Another friend of mine recently lost his mother...just 68 years old...also cancer.
He’s a pastor... And the reflections he's written have been very beautiful, about his mom and dad, who have both given their lives to music and church and to witness to the inclusive love of God. After his mom’s beautiful life and her beautiful funeral came this beautiful story and image... Of taking her funeral flowers and putting them on the compost pile because that is how death brings new life. But you know what he told me privately? Actually, this is as low as he’s ever been. Yes, the flowers were beautiful but the compost still stinks. Death stinks, it’s still ugly and horrible. My friend doesn't want to be lifted up right now, what is powerful for him about Jesus' promise of eternal life is that God comes down. There is no depth so great that Christ hasn't or won't go there.
Jesus promises to be in the bread and cup because we are forgetful people. We need to be reminded again and again through life's joys and fears and deepest grief that God abides with us all the time. God never leaves us. Even though there is nowhere where God is not, God-in-flesh is as close as the sweet Hawaiian bread or gluten free wafer we're about to chew on...
We consume Christ and become Christ, not fully we know... But more fully, so that the way we love and abide with one another would day after day show Christ to the whole, broken and beautiful world.
Manna fell to people who we're starving.
The actual body of Christ is for us because of God's deep love for our actual body, our actual blood. The actual blood on the sidewalk two blocks from my friend's home after the most recent shooting this summer matters to Christ and so it matters to us.
And we come together to receive the body and become the body so that we will more deeply sense how we are all so connected... In death, in life, in the middle of sirens, at the birth, at the compost heap... We are the body of Christ, part of how God comes down and lives in and with us.
Susan Hylen who writes for Working Preacher this week says...
"Those who abide with (Christ) share in the creative force of the God who brought all things into being."[3] This is a wonderful invitation to new and eternal life, and we will keep practicing because that kind of creative, body and soul force is ongoing, needed, daily…

Deanna, who gathered us to talk about women and life and faith, also has incurable cancer. She's been living with stage four cancer or in one of three remissions for the past nine years. When you have cancer that is so invasive that breaks your back and pelvis bones, it's serious... She’s written three books about her experiences and the newest one is just out.[2] She writes in that one that she spent that first Christmas-with-cancer picking out her burial plot with her husband...and never expected to live to today.

We don’t have to have a good attitude for Christ to come down… in fact, God comes to us just as we are, bad attitude and all.

Come and eat the bread of life today…

Christ promises to be here, so that we can recognize Christ everywhere.

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[1] Holy Fast, Holy Feast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum

[2] Deanna Thompson, Glimpsing Resurrection: Cancer, Trauma and Ministry

[3] Susan Hylen, John 6:51-58 Commentary from Workingpreacher.org, August 19, 2018.

What we need is here

John 6 – Bread of Life week one  

There's a joke you've probably heard about giving at church. The pastor looks out at the congregation and says there's good news and there's bad news... First, the good news. We have more than enough income to fund all the mission that God wants us to do... Now, the bad news. As of right now, that money is in your pockets.

It's a joke that's a little outdated and a little judgey. Many of us don't have cash in our pockets, if we even have pockets... And the joke assumes that all of us are holding back our gifts from God rather than sharing them... That's the bad news. But, the truth of the joke is that it's hard to trust God enough to put our whole lives, including our money, into God's hands... (Even though deeply we know that God, the provider, is always generous to us) and so maybe it should be easier to trust. Easier to give generously... We wish it was easier.

Maybe it helps to know that way of God, the practices that Jesus Christ invites us into have always been challenging.  Way back in Elijah's time, even the prophet Elijah didn't believe that God could feed 100 people with 20 barley loaves. We can sort of imagine that... After all, we practice communion. We can imagine everyone getting a pretty good chunk of bread with 20 loaves to share. But then, it gets more extreme—Jesus asks the disciples to feed a crowd of thousands. And this story is repeated over and over again, it’s told at least six times in four gospels... so clearly, it's a teaching that's very, very hard for people then and people now to grasp.... We expect scarcity and God brings more than enough.

How? Well, in this particular version of the story, the disciples ask who has some food to share, and in a beautiful act of trust, a little child brings forward five loaves and two fish. Jesus prays over this gift, they begin to share it... And by some miracle there is not only enough for thousands, there is extra. The extra is twelve baskets... And I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it's twelve, always symbolizing wholeness and completeness throughout the biblical story.

Now, some of us want to make this miracle understandable. We’re scientists. We’re managers. We want to know the details… how would God pull that one off? We want to make it understandable. We’re feminists! Of course, the women would have had food along. There were no restaurants along the road in those days, so as they traveled, even if the men thought they had nothing, the women would have picnics packed (of course)... But whether this all happened by miraculous multiplying or the miracle of people actually trusting that they could share what they had in order that all could have enough... And then abundantly more... Any way we hear this story, it's a story that clearly, we need over and over again... Because just after the feasting, life's storms come, and we are still just as afraid that Jesus might not be with us, that there's not enough resources to go around. Jesus is still trying to reach our fearful hearts—even today—with the news that with God, all we need is right here.

Wendell Berry wrote a beautiful poem about fall and harvest and wild geese flying overhead and it ends with these words:

… what we need

is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.[1]

You may have heard (but it's okay if this is the first you've heard because we’ve only just begun communicating) that this fall we're entering a Capital Campaign. Together in this 150th Anniversary year, we're going to raise a significant amount of money and make commitments to fund the mission that we trust God is calling us to do. We're going to make feeding hungry people a reality in this place, building on a whole history of feeding hungry people, body and spirit. The way that a Capital Campaign works is that we give according to our ability, and that God challenges us to give a gift of real trust... Because then our gift not only benefits the mission that we do together as church, it benefits us. Like that little child who brought forward the bread made by his mother and the fish caught by his father, the initial gifts inspire all of us not to give small but to give as a practice of trust. Not to give grudgingly but with a spirit of joy because as God makes it possible, we can be the builders of kitchens and food ministries that will serve generations to come.
In the gospel of John, the disciples move right from this amazing, abundant feast into stormy seas. Just as quickly, they move from faith to fear... And understandably so...

On the one hand, we have this amazing celebration, vision and challenge ahead of us, and maybe we can glimpse how God could accomplish it through us... And then we move right into storms. Look at our church finances! Our hoped for income is at 80 percent... How could we possibly gather enough when we seem to have so little? Our economy and political systems are broken, we're worried about the midterm elections and who will be our next governor, and if we have the capacity to make the changes for good in our public life that seem so necessary. And as one recent retiree told me, we are told all the time, particularly in regards to our financial life, that we have to look after ourselves, that has to be our first priority.
Add to all this bad news that people are leaving... Next week is Vicar Bethany's last Sunday, and we are going to miss her. We’ve loved her energy, her hopeful good news, her hard work and presence among us... we’ll miss her and as we think of each one who is leaving because their work here is done or because for a season they’ll be sharing their gifts somewhere else, we wonder… how will there be enough, how will we do all this without them? 

That’s when we’re reminded by Jesus… who invites us to feed the multitudes, who walks over stormy seas to calm us, that what we have is enough because it is never all there is… “what we need is here, if we can learn to trust and draw on the abundance within us and between us.”[2]

It doesn’t mean we over-promise or never say no. Sometimes we’re invited to hold a boundary, to say no order to be able to say yes... we practice that, too. But if we need a push into trust in God, this is the day…        What we need is here.

We see it modeled as Ken gives quarters to children and they (almost always) bring those quarters joyfully up to the jar to share them. What a tangible practice and example of giving what we’ve been given.

Maybe you’ve experienced it in a pay-it-forward coffee line… where—surprise!—you go to pay and someone has already paid for you… wow! Thank you!

We imagine living it out as we plan for a 150^th Anniversary Capitol Campaign to fund our kitchen renewal, and prepare for a pay-as-you-can food ministry… where we will all contribute from what we have been given so that together God’s mission can be accomplished here.

What we need is here…

This morning, in a few minutes, as you receive the bread of communion in your hands, I invite you to look at it before you eat it… what we need is here. It’s our mantra for today, for this week, for this season of taking the risk to trust in Christ’s faithfulness to us in the feast and in the storm, and to know that with Christ, there is and will be more than enough.

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[1] Excerpt of poem by Wendell Berry, shared in an article by Parker J. Palmer, On Being, March 23, 2016. https://onbeing.org/blog/what-we-need-is-here/ Accessed 07/28/2018

[2] Parker J. Palmer, “What We Need is Here,” On Being, March 23, 2016. https://onbeing.org/blog/what-we-need-is-here/ Accessed 07/28/2018