Nowhere Else to Go

This gospel story can catch us up in the first lines, which admittedly ARE difficult teaching. But perhaps it is Peter’s words – “Lord, to whom can we go?” – that hold the deeper meaning for us in these difficult days.

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John 6:56-69

⁵⁶Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. ⁵⁷Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. ⁵⁸This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” ⁵⁹He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.

⁶⁰When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” ⁶¹But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? ⁶²Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? ⁶³It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. ⁶⁴But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. ⁶⁵And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” ⁶⁶Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. ⁶⁷So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” ⁶⁸Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. ⁶⁹We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

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Dear people of God, grace to you and peace this day from God, the living Father, through Christ the Holy One of God.  Amen.

“This teaching is difficult,” proclaim Jesus’ disciples.

It’s hard to argue with them.  The words Jesus uses, on their face, are hard to hear.  They don’t make sense to us, nor did they to Jesus’ followers.

And so some leave, and no longer go about with Jesus.

It brings a new meaning to “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”  In other words, they take off, they desert the mission.

They don’t stick around in hopes of learning more from Jesus; they get stuck on the hard things.  And they quit.

And when Jesus asks the twelve disciples if they plan to desert him as well, Peter’s answer is one for the ages: “Lord, to whom shall we go?  For you alone have the words of eternal life.”

Lord, to whom shall we go.  To whom can we go.

Each word in that phrase carries a part of the anguish we feel today, as we make our way in a world besieged by climate change, and ravaged by COVID.  A world in which we are confronted by a level of self-absorption that makes fighting the pandemic a very complicated task.  A world in which the appearance of smoke from a wildfire far away triggers our panic from fires past, and draws a literal dark cloud over our homes.

Lord, to whom can we go?

I’m reminded of the beautiful words of Psalm 139:

Where can I go from your spirit?
   Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
   and your right hand shall hold me fast.

Lord, to whom can we go?  For even if we were to try to go somewhere else or to someone else – you would be with us.  Wherever it is we might try to work out for ourselves what your words mean, Jesus – you will be with us.

Think about the last eighteen months, particularly when traveling was basically off the table.

Go was a word that now only related to local things like the hardware store or a hiking path.  Trips that so many of us had planned had to be canceled, and with the current delta variant running rampant, many of those trips must once again be postponed.

Lord, to whom can we go?

As we were jolted into staying home to reduce contact and try to prevent the spread of COVID in those first months – we eventually got restless.  But the amount of energy required to be expended in order to figure out somewhere we could go AND stay safe – frequently overwhelmed us.  “Where CAN we go?” was the question from last summer through today.

Sometimes, “nowhere” has been the answer.  And we’ve had to do our best to accept that painful reality; to put off seeing loved ones for far too long, to adapt what we had hoped for to what is possible.

Lord, to whom shall we go?

In the crisis point where the world seems to be today, to whom else would we go?

When we seek solace and comfort; when we seek wisdom and inspiration: it is as Peter says: “for you alone have the words of eternal life.”

The eating and drinking of which Jesus speaks in the first verses of this passage are not food-related but rather commitment-related.  When we completely take Jesus into ourselves, remembering him in this meal and then going out to take him into the world by our words and our actions – then we truly understand what Peter is talking about.

When we return here, or gather around our tables at home, week after week – we proclaim Christ crucified and risen by our words and actions.  This simple meal and these timeless words feed us for the journey.

And that journey is assuredly not an easy one.  In this gospel story, when the going gets tough the ones who know they are weak stick around.  Because they’ve got nowhere else to go.

That is certainly one way to think of Peter’s words: we’ve nowhere else to go.

But what if we consider Peter’s words themselves as gospel: Lord, to whom else can we go?

God in Christ is in the days of anxiety.  The days of joy.  The days and moments when the enormity of the world’s pain broadsides us and leaves us broken.

To whom else could we possibly go?  Who else would so deeply and completely understand our anguish – because he feels it as his anguish too.

As we struggle to make sense of difficult stories: to whom else could we go?  You, Lord, will open our eyes to understand.

There is a well-known poem by Robert Frost that I think captures much of what Jesus is proposing here: that abundant life lived in God is not without risk NOR is it without the possibility of amazing discovery and amazing grace.

The Road Not Taken 

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Lord, to whom can we go?  For you have the words of eternal life.

Dear friends, that truth makes ALL the difference.           Amen.

Jesus = Body Positivity

I want to make sure I acknowledge the work of Debi Thomas at the blog Journey with Jesus which is paraphrased at points here, and which is always rich with meaning and food for thought. Her latest essay can be found at: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay

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John 6:51-58

[Jesus said] ⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” ⁵²The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” ⁵³So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; ⁵⁵for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. ⁵⁶Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. ⁵⁷Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. ⁵⁸This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

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Dear people of God, grace to you and peace this day from our loving God through Christ, who is the living bread.  Amen.

I think that we would not be out of line if we were to title this particular gospel story “Don’t Take the Bible too Literally.”

As with any ancient text, the challenges of source material, translations, and the infiltration of various agendas through the centuries have combined to remind us that reading an ancient text with literal 21^st-century eyes will only confuse us.

This is one of the reasons I have stayed with the Lutheran flavor of Christianity throughout my life.  We choose to utilize the historical-critical form of analysis when regarding ancient texts, including the Bible.  That doesn’t mean we exclude divine involvement or even authorship, or that God can and will work through the Word to transform us.

Rather, it means that we also take into consideration the context of the text, both its setting and the setting in which it was likely written.  We take into consideration what we know about the source material itself, and what is accepted by scholars about authorship.

So in this fourth week of five about Jesus as the bread of life, I want to offer some reminders about the community for whom this gospel was written.  They are living  about 20 years after the destruction of the temple, and their survival as a community is constantly at risk.  They are experiencing internal struggle and conflict, and a black-and-white kind of dualism is becoming quite pronounced in their beliefs.  It’s either this or that.  You’re either with us or against us.  We hear this dualism throughout John’s gospel.

That in itself is a quiet nudge to look beyond the words on the page and think past the literal.

John emphasizes the incarnate Jesus.  Life in this world is where God in Christ come to meet us.  And yet that idea of incarnate, in the flesh, can trip us up in this particular passage.  But the Levitical laws by which observant Jews still lived in Jesus’ time were clearly against this; he had to have been speaking allegorically.  So what exactly is the point he’s making?

Let us think for a moment about the idea of a human body, and what that means for us today.

We are at this moment in time shifting in our understanding of the human body, both from a scientific and a cultural perspective.  The minute-by-minute research and study of human response to COVID-19 is Exhibit A here.

But culturally, the way we regard the human body is changing too.  How many of us grew up in a time when our bodies were things to be kept hidden, things of which we were ashamed?

Reading Jesus’ words in this text, I wonder how it is that the physical, fleshy, intimate, present Jesus somehow wound up as the center of a disembodied, body-fearful and body-shaming religion?

The current movement towards body positivity is pushing back against the culture of shame around the human body.  Instead, we are encouraged to be thankful for and amazed by our bodies, these fragile yet amazingly tenacious collections of interconnected organisms.  We are encouraged to care for them and celebrate them for what they are, utterly apart from any popular notion of what the human body is supposed to look like or do.

Thus we have the potential to fully accept our bodies, as they are, and move forward.  We can be “all in” throughout life when shame is removed from our understanding of our bodies.

This is what Jesus really means here.  Jesus frees us from sin, from shame, from doubt, from fear.  We can be “all in” when we follow Jesus – and from an incarnational point of view, that “all in” is an intimate and deep engagement with Jesus the Christ.

It’s not an observation kind of engagement, as if we were taking notes while bird-watching.

No, without visceral and total engagement, we can never truly know who Jesus the Christ is.  This is why we emphasize that this is Christ’s table, and it is he who invites us.  Incarnation means we get up and come forward, if we are able.  That we hold open our hands.  That we receive the bread and eat it; that we hold that tiny cup in our fingers and drink the wine or juice.

Incarnation means experiencing the gifts of God through Christ in deeply real-to-us ways.  It means living out our faith through our bodies as well as our minds and our souls.

As Lutheran Christians, we believe that Christ is truly present in, with, and under the forms of bread and wine or juice.  We call this “Real Presence.”  The bread and wine symbolize Christ gathering all people to himself, as grains are gathered for bread and grapes for wine.  And yet – there is so much more here than mere symbolism.

For us to claim that we can fully understand “what happens” during Holy Communion is, I think, depriving God of God’s ability to continue to do a new thing.  The point is not to prove or disprove the literal 21^st-century meaning of Jesus’ words, but rather to recognize his deep desire to feed us – both literally from this table, and spiritually through his life, death, and resurrection.

If these shocking words of Jesus mean anything in the life of the church, then at the least they mean that when we eat and drink at this holy Table, eternity has broken into time in a unique, unrepeatable way. Eternity keeps on dipping into our time. Our sharing in bread and wine joins us with the living Christ, who is forever—and thus joined to him, we are forever. We who belong to (and with) Christ in this feast are in a community that is eternal—made so not by any human doing or by any churchly accomplishment, but only by the action of the One who laid down his life for the sins of the cosmos.

That is why the traditional communion song is “O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.”  We are gathered at the feast of the Lamb.  The very first time Jesus appears in the Gospel of John, John the Baptizer declares: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (1:29).

Christ sets this table because we are hungry – hungry for food, yes, but hungry for him.  Hungry for his grace, his light and life, his mercy, his ability to come alongside the least of us AND the greatest.  At this table ALL are welcome.  ALL are fed.  There isn’t a separate VIP section; we all eat from this table that Christ prepares.

In these words, “the body of Christ, broken for you” we proclaim that Jesus feeds us with the basic food of bread, reminding us of his sacrifice for the life of the world.  In the words “the blood of Christ, shed for you” Christ satisfies our thirst with wine, while reminding us that his blood was shed because of the world’s sin.

But there is more.  In this meal, Christ also reminds us that bodies continue to be broken around the world today and that innocent blood continues to be shed because of the evil in this world.  Our incarnational understanding of Jesus the Christ is that he comes to us in bread and wine – as bread for the journey – and as we are strengthened by him, we are sent out to be his hands and feet in a world that likewise hungers not only for bread, but for peace and justice.

And that’s just the beginning of the limitless possibilities at this table Christ sets.

My good friend and colleague David Nagler served as pastor for Central City Lutheran Mission in San Bernardino, in the poorest per-capita zip code in the US.  CCLM, as it is called, is a collection of social services combined with a worshiping community.  Dave describes his time there as some of the most formative in his ministry, as he came face to face with the healing power of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion each week.

“This font,” he explained to those gathered for worship, “this water is a reminder that we are loved by God.  So if at any point in our time together, if you need to be reminded of that, you are welcome to come over to the font and splash a little water on yourself.”  Dave said sometimes folks would return to that font 4 or 5 times in one service.

Dave explained each week, “Holy Communion is how God feeds us.  We then take that task on by serving a meal after worship over in the hall, and everyone is welcome.”  One week as an illustration for how we take on the work of feeding, Pastor Dave had the congregation pass by on opposite sides of the table, and each person would serve the person across from them.

As fate (or the Holy Spirit) would have it, it came to be that two young men from rival gangs found themselves facing each other across the table.

Dave was keeping a careful eye out, but each young man served the other. “Body of Christ, given for you.”  “Blood of Christ, shed for you.” And the lines continued past Christ’s table set for all.

After worship, everyone headed to the hall for the meal provided by another Lutheran congregation.  And as dinner began, those two young men sat across from each other, talking and laughing over some shared joke or experience.

In this bread, there is healing.  In this cup is life forever.

In these simple elements, Christ comes to us to feed us his very self, that we might then go and feed the world.  With food, of course; but also with the love of Jesus.

God yearns to gather us around God’s table, coax the bread of life into our mouths, and watch us once again thrive and flourish under their care: Father, Son, AND Holy Spirit.

Christ is our bread.  We dwell in and linger over this truth for a reason; this teaching is elemental.  It is rock bottom.  It is the core of who God is, and who we are.  May we ever eat, and live.

Amen.