Sermon Archive

"What’s the Matter with Matter?", John 6:51-58

Date: August 16, 2009, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Author: The Rev. Dr. James D. Kegel

MAY THE WORDS OF MY MOUTH AND THE MEDITATION OF MY HEART BE ACCEPTABLE TO YOU, O LORD, MY ROCK AND MY REDEEMER. AMEN.
            Backpacking is not the time to try to lose weight, our backpack guide told us. We were warned to eat even if we had lost our appetite and to drink water and lots of it. Accidents can happen from lack of energy and people can get into distress from dehydration. Eating and drinking are important to health in the backcountry. So I ate my salami and Baby Bell cheese and kept sipping from my camelbak. I added electrolytes to my water too. But it isn’t just backpacking in Yosemite or Grand Canyon or Yellowstone that reminds us of the importance of eating and drinking. Eating and drinking is the key to health in our spiritual life as well. This Sunday we come to end of a series of lections from John’s Gospel, the sixth chapter, and the center of his Eucharistic theology. Jesus says, “VERY TRULY I TELL YOU, UNLESS YOU EAT MY FLESH AND DRINK MY BLOOD YOU HAVE NO LIFE IN YOU…THOSE WHO EAT MY FLESH AND DRINK MY BLOOD ABIDE IN ME, AND I IN THEM…THE ONE WHO EATS THIS BREAD WILL LIVE FOREVER. Jesus is teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum here that it is through eating and drinking, through the Lord’s Supper that our sins are forgiven, that we are reconciled to God, and that Christ dwells with us. The counterpart to the Lord’s Supper is manna in the wilderness and water from the rock, eating and drinking which sustained the people of Israel through forty years of wandering in the wilderness. They had food and drink for their journey but then their life’s journey came to an end; we have drink and food for our journey that does not end. By eating and drinking in faith, Christ lives in us. Christ is with us until we are with him in everlasting life. The little piece of bread and sip of a cup is a foretaste of the great heavenly banquet to come.
            Craig Satterlee teaches homiletics, preaching, at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Some of you may have read his devotion entitled, “Food for the Journey” in Christ in Our Home. He recalls that people have said to him, “We don’t need communion every Sunday. We don’t sin that much.” He answers, “If God’s gift of Holy Communion were only about forgiveness, perhaps we might say such a thing, yet God’s gifts are always bigger than we think…Holy Communion feeds us with bread and wine—the body and blood of Christ—to comfort us and strengthen us to continue our journey…Sometimes we do not come to the Lord’s Table because we need forgiveness; we come because we need comfort and strength.”
            We need the bread of life because we get hungry on our way through life. We know that we are saved by faith in Jesus Christ and salvation is not just in the future but a present event. In Acts we read, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” and in Mark, “Those who believe and are baptized shall be saved.” This is what theologians call, the “Is Now” of salvation. When Christ died on the cross and rose again, our salvation was accomplished. Believing in him we have forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. But our daily life doesn’t always seem like heaven. The ancient Israelites knew they were bound for the Promised Land but in the meantime they spent forty years in the desert being bitten by poisonous snakes and swallowed up by the ground, thirsting for fresh water and hungering for the flesh pots of Egypt. So we too have the promise of God but not yet the fulfillment. As St. Paul reminds us in Romans, we still await the redemption of our bodies, or in First Corinthians we long for the time when the perishable shall put on the imperishable, the mortal the immortal. We look forward to the day when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and pain and suffering and death will be no more. For now, we have the body and blood of Christ given us to eat and drink in faith.
            Oscar Cullman, the New Testament scholar, used an analogy to our life in this world which is a good one. Just after World War II he suggested that it is as if Christ’s death and resurrection were D-Day and the Day of Jesus Christ, VE-Day. The war was effectively over after the Normandy landings though there were many terrible battles yet to be fought and lives yet to be lost and many belligerents yet to concede defeat. VE-Day was not yet in sight, the armistice not signed, but the war was over. Another analogy given by a man I met this summer at the Tantur Institute in Jerusalem, Lee Camp,an ethics scholar. He suggests we are like a mother giving birth. Paul uses the same image when he describes our creation as groaning in labor pains until now. “Imagine,” Camp writes, “any mother say eight months pregnant, on the telephone with an old friend who had heard the news of her pregnancy but did not know the anticipated date of delivery, ‘Do you have your baby yet’? The old friend might ask. To which the mother would undoubtedly be thinking, ‘Yes! Of course I’ve got a baby of which I’m reminded on every frequent trip to relieve my bladder or every time the dear one decides to roll over in the womb or each time she rakes her sweet little arms across my belly’. But then again, she does not yet have her baby. To remain eight months pregnant indefinitely would be nothing short of torment. And so she waits for the day—and the day finally comes with pain and tears. The mother’s body is transformed and everything changes. Crying gives way to laughter, cursing gives way to joy, the groaning gives way to life. A pregnant mother is already a mother.”
            We are saved now. We have the promise that God is with us on our journey giving us strength for each new day and will finally bring to completion all that God has promised. We are given food and drink to sustain us, the great gift of the Lord’s Supper. And this food is real. We might like to spiritualize the teaching of today’s Gospel and some have tried to do that. But if we take the words in their clear meaning we have physical eating and drinking. The words may make us uncomfortable and they certainly did Jesus’ hearers. What Jesus seemed close to cannibalism and that was also the charge made against the early Christians by the Roman authorities. The concept of eating Jesus’ body and drinking Jesus’ blood has been offensive to many Christians through the centuries. They wanted to spiritualize the teaching of Jesus, to turn it into a memorial of the Last Supper or teach that Christ does not come to us but the spirit of the believer somehow ascends into heaven to be with Jesus. I had a teacher in graduate school, Carl Braaten, who would often respond, “What’s the matter with matter?” Jesus was God in the flesh. All the sublime attributes of God were present in the humble Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. The same Jesus, divine and human together, comes to us in, with and under the forms of bread and wine to give his body and blood. I remember when the pastor giving communion would say, “This is the true body of Christ; this is the true blood of Christ.” The real presence of Christ in the sacrament was so important for Martin Luther and his followers that the Protestant movement split over this issue. At Marburg Germany in 1529, all the major reformers met together: Luther and Philip Melanchton, Martin Bucer, Huldrich Zwingli and the young John Calvin to see if there could not be Protestant unity. It was the only time this would ever happen. The meetings were tense but an agreement was forged until it got to the Lord’s Supper. Famously Martin Luther wrote in the dust of the table, “Hoc est Corpus Meum,” This is my body. When his opponents accused him of carnality, he accused them of false spirituality and the Protestant churches divided. Do we eat Christ’s Body and drink his blood or is it only symbolic? Do we actually take Christ into ourselves not just into our hearts and minds but our bodies too? Are the words in our Gospel text a metaphor or literally true? Is Christ really present or really absent?
            We are not saved by our sacramental theology but we are fed by the sacrament. We are called to believe and eat and drink and be forgiven, be comforted, be sustained on this journey. This food is greater than the manna from heaven or the water from the rock. The Israelites ate and drank and died. We eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood and abide in him and he in us. We eat and drink and never die. Amen. 

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