Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Read today’s scripture lessons: Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:9-14; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

Deacon Krista Lind is Assistant to the Bishop for Vocational Formation at the Saint Paul Area Synod, ELCA.

It is with joy that I bring you greetings from Bishop Lull and the other 112 congregations and worshipping communities of the St Paul Area Synod.  One of the great joys of synod ministry is the opportunity to worship with many congregations across the Synod and see how God is moving people into ministry in their neighborhoods and communities. Thanks for the invitation to be with you today and for your partnership in the Gospel.

Grace to you and peace from God the Creator, Jesus our Savior and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our gospel text for today continues a lectionary journey through John chapter 6. We started this journey with the story of Jesus feeding the crowds with a loaf of bread and two fish.  An astonishing story, full of wonder and mystery, and inexplicable by any scientific standards.  Hearing that the people want to make him king, he withdrew to the mountains by himself, only to reappear to his disciples walking across the water as they make their way to the other side of the sea.  When the crowd catches up to Jesus and the disciples, they have a lot of questions.   Jesus begins talking about the Bread of Life and continunes this teaching with today’s text about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

At first glance, this seems like a very strange conversation.  The Jew’s questions wondering how it is that Jesus can give us his flesh to eat seem like pretty reasonable questions to me.  The idea of partaking in someone’s body and blood aren’t very appealing to me- and it hardly seems like something that will help me live forever.  So what is Jesus up to here?

It’s pretty easy for us Christians on this side of the crucifixion to see the connections to Jesus’ words here and our practice of receiving the bread and wine each week at communion.  We may not understand how it is that Jesus’ body and blood are in, with and under this bread and wine.  But we can see that Jesus is introducing his followers to the idea that eating and drinking are a route to life and salvation.  The more Jesus explains, the less it makes intellectual sense, the less we see any worldly logic that eating and drinking can bring about these things.

Perhaps that’s the point.  What if Jesus words are not meant as a test of our intellectual acuity, but a promise which brings us life?

Diana Butler Bass in her book “Christianity After Religion: The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening” explores both sociologically and theologically the state of the church and faith practice in the western world.  In an effort to understand the rise in people identifying themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’, she takes the reader on a journey of the changes in the last half millennium in the way people come to connect to Christian community.

In recent centuries, Butler Bass writes, it is assumed that religious commitment begins by first assenting to a certain body of organized doctrines. You search for a community whose religious ideas and understandings fit with your spiritual quest and understanding. If through questioning and wrestling with ideas you find a community whose creed or statement of faith makes sense, you then decide to join that community.

Butler Bass goes on to write –quote- “There is, however, something odd about this pattern.  Other than joining a political party, it hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles.  Imagine joining a knitting group.  Does anyone go to a knitting group and ask if the knitters believe in knitting or what they hold to be true about knitting?  Do people ask for a knitting doctrinal statement? Indeed, if you start knitting by reading a book about knitting, or a history of knitting, or a theory of knitting, you will likely never knit.”

She goes on to talk about how one learns to knit by being taught by someone who shows you how to hold your hands and the needle, helping you try your first tentative stiches and then through practice and persistence, you find yourself eventually to be a knitter, with your own ideas and thoughts about knitting.  Relationship followed by Practice which together lead to Belief.

This was the way of people of faith for many generations, who understood that faith comes through relationship and practice.  The community of believers lived in ways that invited others into these communities to experience the love of God through Jesus. And through participating in the practices of the community, belief came to live in their hearts.  So what if that is what Jesus is up to in this text- inviting us eat and drink and through that practice to experience the love God has for us and all the world?

I will be the first to admit that one of the things I love most about being Lutheran is that I’m not asked to check my brain at the door.  In fact, asking questions, debating ideas and challenging the powers that be are among our greatest assets.  We enjoy engaging in lively dialog about the issues of the day and debating the intricacies of theology and the work of God in our world. There is plenty of room for us to live into the grey areas of theological understanding and we work to make room in our church for people whose ideas aren’t exactly the same as ours.

Yet I find myself stuck sometimes when my brain gets ahead of my heart. When I’m listening to a sermon with my mind more on deciding if I agree with every point the preacher is making more than opening my heart to what God might be trying to teach me through the sermon. When I’m reading ahead in the liturgy to see if I agree with what we’ll be saying before I decide if I’m willing say it with the community of faith.  When I close myself off from relationship with those whose beliefs don’t seem to align with mine or when I make faith decisions based only on logic or strict doctrinal understandings, I miss out on the chance for Christ to bring about new life in me.

Jesus’ invitation to eat and drink his flesh and blood is an invitation to experience a living God who desires to raise us all to new life through this eating and drinking.  Remember Jesus feeding the crowd with a few loaves and fish? Jesus knew the people were hungry.  And he sought a way to immediately feed their hunger. He didn’t wait to see if they were worthy of the food.   He didn’t give them a test to see if they met certain faith or trust requirements. He didn’t search their hearts to see if they in fact were holy enough.  He just fed them.  Jesus, the bread of life, available for all.

So why are we harder on ourselves?  I’m not suggesting that we abandon the theology that undergirds our understanding of God or the world, but what if that belief and understanding is enhanced by our spiritual practice?  What if we embrace the practices of our faith handed down by the great cloud of witnesses and through those practices our relationship with God is strengthened, our hearts unburdened, our community emboldened for service?

There are those Sundays I arrive at church and I don’t feel much like singing.  I’m tired of the songs, or it’s not my favorite kind of music or the fears and anxieties on my heart don’t lend themselves to full throated singing.  On those Sundays, the community sings for me- psalms and hymns and spiritual songs- singing and making melody to the Lord in their hearts.  Surrounded by the faithful in song, I might find myself humming along and in time singing a few notes.  And suddenly I notice my heart softening, my faith restoring, my anxiety lessening.

Eat this bread, Jesus says, given for the life of the world.

Those Sundays when I don’t feel like praying.  When God feels far away and deaf to my cries, when the worries of this life make me feel small and insignificant.  On those Sundays, the community prays for me- giving thanks to God at all times and in everything.  Surrounded by the faithful in prayer, I might find my heart opening to recognize that Jesus has been there all along, beckoning me into relationship and reminding me of his great love, even for me.

Eat this bread, Jesus says, given for the life of the world.

Those Sundays when I can’t bring myself to say the ancient words of the creed.  Words written in a different time and place by men who had a very different world view from mine.  Words I can’t always claim to be true for me.  Surrounded by the faithful confessing their faith in this time and place, I can join the saints and sinners from every generation, trusting that perhaps together we can come to believe that God is at work through our humble confession to bring about new life.

Eat this bread, Jesus says, given for the life of the world.

Those Sundays when I don’t feel worthy to come to the Table.  When my doubts and sins seem too big, when it feels like God certainly wouldn’t want me to contaminate the holy meal. Even then, Jesus bids me to come. Surrounded by the faithful who dare to hold out their hands as beggars seeking mercy, I approach the table of grace to once again receive forgiveness, life and salvation.  “Come those of you who have great faith and those of you who wish you had more.  Come those of you who have tried to follow Jesus and those who have failed.  Come those of you who depend on this meal for your life and those of you for whom it is a strange thing” No one is excluded from the living bread.  When we eat and drink we abide with Jesus, and he in us.

Eat this bread, Jesus says, given for the life of the world.

So join me again as we sing, pray, confess and eat.  These are the gifts of God for the people of God.  Jesus body and blood is a gift of abundance, given regardless of worthiness, given for all.  Maybe if we keep practicing, if we keep eating and drinking, we will come to believe and through that belief be sent out for the healing of the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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Butler Bass, Diana, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, New York: Harper One, 2012.