The Earthiness of Jesus John 6:53-59 August 17, 2003, Year B Proper 15 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Those of us who have been here or another lectionary based church have, the last few weeks, heard a lot about bread. We began with the feeding of the masses with a few loaves and a few fish. We heard Jesus question the crowd who had eaten the bread and then followed him to the other side of Lake Galilee as to why they had followed him. Had they come simply because he had fed them their fill of bread or were they looking for something else? Last week, Jesus compared the bread they had eaten and the bread Moses had given to their ancestors in the wilderness to a totally different kind of bread. Today, Jesus finished this comparative dialogue, not only continuing to claim himself as the bread of life, but becoming more explicit: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." In next week's reading from the Gospel of John, we will learn that from the author's perspective, this was the turning point in Jesus' ministry. For many, it was too much! Jesus was too radical. I will not dwell on next week's reading for fear of stepping into Elizabeth's sermon, but the author of John next week will tell us that after hearing Jesus' words today, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. To which Jesus asked the Twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" Hearing the voice of Jesus in our four canonized gospels can be so simultaneously edifying and confusing. Jesus can speak in such concrete, earthy parables and metaphors that they seem so perfectly clear, especially to us who have heard them and interpretations of them innumerable times. However, I fear we too often, come following Jesus from the miraculous feeding looking for more of what satisfies us physically and materially and leaving before we receive what feeds us spiritually and the full meaning of Jesus' earthy analogies. William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, describes Christianity and especially Anglicanism with its sacraments as earthy people. No, for us, unlike other world religions which claim God is on some other plane, a distant, aloof God, separated from our earthiness, there is no disconnection of our earthiness from the spiritual. Instead, we worship a God who lived among our earthiness, walked as one of us, and who is with us via the Holy Spirit in our day to day earthly struggles. We as Anglicans and other sacramental traditions do not take sterile objects to experience God's presence among us. No, we take ordinary water, ideally water in a flowing river or lake water, or here our common tap water to experience the sacrament of baptism: our transformation, our death - if you will - from being self oriented to be Christ oriented; our washing away and forgiveness of our sins; our new birth, our incorporation into the Body of Christ. We take ordinary olive oil, using it as outward and visible signs of God's healing and sealing us as a child of God. We take bread and wine - both objects that began in the earth and through the mystery of life that God provides became grain and grapes; both which were crushed by human hands, ground to the point that they are unrecognizable from their previous existence; both allowed to ferment, the mysterious process in which something that is basically decaying, forms a pungent gas, a breath, that causes a transformation into something else. This bread and wine, we place on the altar and allow God to transform it by God's sacred presence entering these earthy items, and then by our consuming them to transform us and nurture us into imitators of Christ. No matter that we may use fine marble, brass, silver, or even the purest gold to hold them - the water, the oil, the bread, the wine - they are still the most basic earthy things until God does something to them and until they are used for something totally different than their normal earthy purpose. Only the author of John quotes Jesus as saying, "I am the bread of life." Only the author of John gives us insight into the full meaning of the Eucharist not at the Last Supper but in conjunction with the feeding of the masses with a few loaves of bread and fish. I do not think this is coincidental because only the Fourth Evangelist presents the redemption, the transformation of the world, the reconciliation of humanity to God, not in Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, but in his whole life. We find no virgin birth, no star in the east, no wondering magi in the Gospel of John. For John, we don't need any of this, because it was the earthiness of Jesus that is essential. The Word became flesh, the Word dwelt among us, the Word died the same as you and I die. It is in John we hear the earthiness of the resurrection: the discarded burial garments in the empty tomb. For John, neither Jesus' death nor resurrection was the salvation point. No, his death is the climax, the fulfillment of his life. His whole life is a self-giving. He was the Word that became flesh, lived among us, died like us, and opened the same path to the resurrection to which each of us is invited. But I have drifted too long from the very few verses of John we have today. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in my, and I in them." It is critical that we hear the essential verb in the second statement: abide. It is those who abide in Jesus who truly eat his flesh and blood. It is those who live Jesus' earthiness who eat a piece of leavened bread and sip fermented grape juice transformed into the sacred. It is only by making Jesus so integral to who we are - as food becomes our body and nourishes us, becomes part of us - that we will indeed live abundantly and eternally. And what was Jesus' earthiness? Yes, he lived as we do, but he also ate with tax collectors and others considered sinners, and he touched lepers, untouchables of his time. I do not pretend that I understand the mystery of the Eucharist any better than the rest of you. I do not pretend to understand all that we're supposed to do and not supposed to do. I cannot. I only know that my Lord tells me to come and do as he has done, love as he has loved, touch the untouchable as he has touched them, eat with the tax collector as he has eaten with them, come and allow the earthy to be transformed into the sacred, and I come as best I can, in all my brokenness and all my sinfulness. It is a frightening invitation. Next week, the author of John will tell us that many left because of it. Today, all I know is that Jesus says, "My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and in them." It is enough for me.