August 2, 2009 Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 78; John 6:25-27, 35-36, 47-59
“I am the bread of life…. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my
flesh…. Unless you eat my flesh you have no life in you…. Whoever eats of this bread will
never be hungry and will never die.”
The crowd of Jesus’ fellow Jews heard him say these words and filled with doubt and
confusion, asking questions like, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” A few verses
past today’s passages we hear that even his disciples complained, “This is a difficult
teaching. Who can accept it?” And afterwards the gospel says, “Many of his disciples
turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also
wish to go away?’”
This passage in John is still a difficult teaching. So I ask you the same thing that
Jesus asked. Do you also wish to go away and just give up on a religion and a teacher with
such a difficult, strange and alienating message?
Before you get up and run out the door, or before you take your scissors to your
Bible, let’s look closely to see if we can find anything useful in this passage that could help
our lives or our world.
The opening scene takes place shortly after the feeding of the five thousand that we
heard last week. Jesus says to the crowd, “You are looking for me…because you ate your
fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for
eternal life.”
Here is the first thing to take from this passage. It matters why we are here. It matters
what we are working for and seeking. Motivation and intention are crucial to the spiritual
path of Christ. As he says in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, we have a choice to
make in our heart, a choice between God and mammon, between two paths.
Later we will take communion together, and it will ask us to make this choice. When
we come to the communion table, are we doing it for the tasty homemade bread and organic
grape juice, or are we going up to take Christ into ourselves in some mysterious way? Are
we going up for the material food that perishes, or the food that endures our whole life and
beyond?
This is not just about food, of course. Jesus is talking about everything we do. It is
not so much a question of what we do, but how and why we do it. We can eat the same
bread in two completely different ways. We can make any and every moment into spiritual
practice.
As the Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita, says, “Desire for the fruits of work
must never be your motive in working…. Perform every action with your heart fixed on the
Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits…. Work done with anxiety about results
is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender…. They who
work selfishly for results are miserable.”
What is at stake in this choice is eternal life, Jesus says. But what is eternal life?
What does he mean when he says that whoever eats of his bread will never die and will live
forever?
The fact is, we do not know exactly what he meant. We need to piece together some
idea of it for ourselves out of the parables and hints that he gave and out of our own
experience. For instance, he says, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and
whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Eternal life is clearly about fullness, about
the quenching of our desires, what the Bhagavad Gita calls being detached from the fruits in
the calm of self-surrender. Eternal life is a condition of peace and contentment.
It is also a condition of union and communion and community where Christ abides in
us and we abide in Christ, as Jesus said in today’s passage. Later in John he says this
mutual abiding makes it possible for us all to “become completely one.” (17:23)
The beloved community of eternal life is often portrayed as a heavenly feast. I have
in mind an image for it. It takes place on a beautiful hilltop surrounded by higher hills, with
a view of graceful mountains across a wide, fertile valley. The late afternoon summer sun is
shining through tall maples, flickering on the lawn of the town green. There tables are
spread and people sit and talk and laugh and eat together, and the children, some with their
faces painted, beautiful and festive, run together or stand eyeing and sniffing the dazzling
array of aromatic desserts. The people who are serving the meal are as full of joy as the
people who are eating, and the love that is being shared is palpable—you can feel it, you
can see it—the love of good food and good company and a good day and all of God’s good
gifts.
That is one image of eternal life that some of us were blessed enough to witness last
evening at the Thetford Hill Fair. There is another image that some of us witnessed in the
Newcomb Room this past Thursday.
We no longer have many people in the congregation who grew up in this church. We
have even fewer people whose family goes back here many generations, but we have at least
one here today, Amy Clark Mansfield. Amy grew up in Maryland, the daughter of Carl and
Betty Clark, but she spent her summers here on Houghton Hill Road where her Farnsworth
ancestors lived, and where the town was filled with Fowles and Vaughans and Slades and
other families who were descended from the Palmer sisters and therefore all her cousins.
Amy says it shaped her way of looking at the world to live in a place where she had
to assume that every new person she met could be a distant cousin. She says, imagine if
everyone in the world looked at everyone else that way. And in fact it is true, of course—
we all do go back to a common ancestry, scientists believe.
Communion says that we are all one because we all share of the one bread. It is part
of what Jesus means by eternal life—that the same Spirit of God abides in us each, and we
each abide in it, and so we are truly one with one another and with God. When we see that
way, we are seeing eternal life. As the character Lena says in the film As It Is in Heaven,
when you can see the angel wings on everyone, you are ready.
What happened on Thursday was that Amy mentioned to me that she had never been
baptized. She and Bryan had been married in this church by Ed Tyler, she had come to this
church summers growing up, but she had not been baptized, and lately she had been feeling
called to be. My response was, why not now? So Amy came down to Prayer of the Heart
and sat in the circle with us in silent prayer and conversation, and just before communion,
the circle stood together and I baptized her. Then we sat again and shared the bread and the
cup.
Amy was surrounded by the love of those there, who hugged her and talked with her
and cheered her. All but Gill Tyler were complete strangers to her, and yet there was a deep
connection in the circle. At the same time we were aware of the generations of ancestors
and saints of this church who were present in the flesh and blood of Amy who were there
like a cloud of witnesses around us. And we were all aware that the Christian ritual of a
circle of people sharing the bread and cup went all the way back to Jesus and his disciples
on the night before he died. All these circles of loving connection are part of eternal life, as
is the timeless presence of those who have died and those yet unborn.
And here is another thing about eternal life. It is not pie in the sky by and by.
Eternal life is present, eternally present. It is here now. We are meant to enter it here and
now. The life that never dies is here, within the reach of each one of us, within the heart of
each one of us. Jesus is inviting us to start living in it right now.
Jesus says, “Whoever believes has eternal life.” Belief is like the key or like the
hidden door into the secret garden—but belief in what? What do we have to believe to get
into this beautiful garden where we will never hunger or thirst, where God abides in us and
we abide in God and we are all completely one? Many if not most churches will tell you
exactly what to believe—and you had better get it right. But Jesus did not say you had to
believe in one doctrine or another, he said simply that you had to believe in him. All we
have to believe is first, that there is this secret garden, this heavenly feast of the eternal
spiritual realm that he taught about, and second, that his teaching and life represent an
entrance point into that realm (an entrance point that other faiths call by other names). To
believe is to choose to walk through that door hidden in the ivy covered wall into a garden
we cannot see most of the time, but believe we can find through Christ’s way.
Jesus says, I am the bread of life. Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you
have no life in you; but those who do eat and drink have eternal life. There is a famous
letter from a Roman official in a distant province writing back to Rome with alarm about the
strange religious cult that eats flesh and drinks blood. I have to admit, it is a gruesome
image, and it is a challenge to say, “Eat this, for it is the body of Christ, broken for you, and
drink this, for it is the blood of Christ shed for you.”
But squeamishness is unnecessary because as we know, the Roman official was
mistaken. Christ is not asking us to be cannibals. We are not eating flesh, we are eating
bread. But while it is a mistake to be too literal about the body and blood, it is also a
mistake to be too literary about them. Yes, they are poetic metaphors, but they are not just
metaphors. They have a real, mystical power, they are like the poetry of an incantation
because by taking into ourselves everything that they stand for, we are changed. If we open
ourselves to believe that there is a spiritual realm, if we choose as access to that secret
garden the door of Christ, if we believe that there is such a thing as food that endures for
eternal life, if we choose that food, if we take everything Christ is into ourselves so that he
abides in us and we abide in him, we find that his flesh is so much more than poetry. We
find that it is the bread of life, of light, of love that we are taking in, and as we fill with it we
find the peace and fullness we crave, and we find union, community and communion with
God’s creation and all God’s children and with God.
Jesus offers all this to us and asks that we choose. So I ask you again, as Jesus asked
the twelve after the other followers had abandoned him, “Do you wish also to go away?”
Peter answered him, “Master, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We
have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
That was Peter’s choice. What is yours?
Let us pray in silence… Amen.
In Twelve Step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous there is a saying: “It’s easy. All
you have to change is everything.” That is what Jesus is asking us to do in eating his bread
and choosing his way. In that spirit, let us sing Be Thou My Vision, printed on the insert of
your bulletin.
Sermon 08/02/2009