Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:47-58; Proverbs 9:1-6.
Dan Brown wrote a series of books about Robert Langdon, a fictional Harvard University professor of religious iconology and symbology. In The Lost Symbol, Langdon tells his class, “Don’t tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.” Of course the students are horrified. He continues, “And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.”
I imagine that Jesus’s audience responded something like those students. We can connect this passage to communion, where the bread symbolizes Jesus’s flesh and the wine or juice symbolizes Jesus’s blood—just symbols. But if we imagine ourselves as Jesus’s followers, we would probably be disgusted at the thought of eating our leader. It’s just a strange passage.
The Gospel of John is heavy on symbolism, though. So let’s go ahead and make that connection to communion. In John’s rendering of the Last Supper, there is no explicit Eucharistic verse, so this is it.
Communion is a time when we eat bread and drink wine or juice as a way of becoming more Christ-like. That is, it allows us to connect to God in a more tangible and tactile way. It allows us to get out of our heads and into our hearts and our bodies. It reminds us that our spiritual lives need nourishment just as our bodies need nourishment.
By consuming the elements, we get a little more Christ in us. We become a little more aligned with God’s purpose and will. It’s a little bit like the way my friend Wayne prepares for elk season. In these last few months before the hunt, he makes sure to eat some of the elk meat in his freezer, so he has more elk molecules in him. That way he’s more elk-like, so he can think like an elk. As we consume the communion elements, we become more Christ-like. And we are reminded that Jesus was not only God, but also human, flesh and blood just like us.
The Gospel of John, or at least parts of it, were popular with the Gnostics. Gnosticism asserted a dualism in which things of the spirit were superior to things of the flesh. They believed that human beings contain a divine spark within themselves, but that all physical matter is subject to decay, rotting, and death. The material world was created by an inferior being and is evil. Here, though, Jesus is elevating the status of his body, and by extension the material world. He is affirming the importance of the material world, our life in the present age, as a way of becoming more Christ-like and more aligned with God’s will for us.
Last week, we heard from Tonya Johnson about the ways Presbyterian Children’s Homes and Services is impacting broken families. As she said, research shows that children of abuse have the best lives when their past is acknowledged honestly, rather than pushed down and “forgotten.” Jesus’s body mattered. Our bodies matter. Each of us has a story that brought us to where we are today, and that affects our relationships with each other and with God. Jesus’s message of love and reconciliation was about healing the brokenness of our world, not abandoning the material world in favor of a purely spiritual existence.
There was a recent column in The Christian Century titled, “Where is my love to go?” It relates the author’s interaction with a Christian ed class in which he shared the “big reveal” about Christianity: When God settled on the single most significant thing of all, it turned out that thing was being with us as a human being just like us. Not to change us, but simply to be with us. This teaches us that relationship is not just the way God does or communicates something more important, but is what God is. This didn’t sit well with one group member. He became increasingly agitated as he described a life of broken relationships. He had lost his partner, his family, even his dog. “Where is my love to go?” The author took a chance and responded:
Imagine eternity from God’s point of view. Imagine God having all that love pent up like you have right now. But the difference is, God’s got that love all pent up potentially forever. God’s like you. God’s thinking, ‘Where’s my love to go?’ So God creates the universe. But God’s got still more love to give. So God creates life, and makes humanity, and calls a special people. But that’s still not enough. God’s got yet more love to give. So God comes among us as a tiny baby. God’s question ‘Where is my love to go?’ is perhaps the most important one of all time. Half the answer is the creation of the universe. The other half is the incarnation. On Christmas Day we find out why the universe was created. It was created for us to be the place where God’s love could go. So when you ask yourself, ‘Where’s my love to go?’ you’re getting an insight into the very heart of God.
Samuel Wells
Jesus came to dwell among us so that he could truly experience that loving relationship with humanity. God does not just dwell in the highest heavens, removed from the messiness of life. God is here, among us by the Holy Spirit. God came down as a human to love us in a personal way, so that we could all learn just what it is to love God and love one another.
Paul describes the church as the body of Christ. That is, Jesus was killed, then rose and ascended, leaving his disciples behind to continue his work. We are the inheritors of that legacy, charged with continuing to be Christ’s body in the world. Jesus circulated throughout Galilee, Judea, and adjacent regions, meeting people of varying backgrounds, preaching a message of reconciliation, forgiveness of sins, and social transformation. So also we are called to be like Jesus, going forth to share this same message. Two millennia have not achieved the social transformation set forth in the Gospels, because every step forward towards equality before God has been met with resistance by those who are perfectly happy with the status quo. So we must continue to learn from Jesus and work towards the peaceable kingdom he described. We must continue to spread the good news of God’s kin-dom and work towards uniting all of God’s people. I read a great quote from Kat Armas on Clergy Coaching Network:
Jesus didn’t ask to be let into people’s hearts; he told them to follow him—dedicating his life to the most vulnerable in society. Following Jesus wasn’t a call to a private piety disconnected from society. Following Jesus was relational, social, and it involved justice.
Kat Armas on Clergy Coaching Network
This is incarnational ministry. That’s kind of a buzzword these days. The goal of incarnational ministry is to live as Christ’s body. This is a part of the PC(USA) Vital Congregations initiative. The core of incarnational ministry is an outward focus: understanding that we live in a world where people are hurting, due to poverty, racism, discrimination, and isolation. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create disparities in society, but it exacerbated them. The world is hurting. The time we have together is an opportunity to be fed by Christ, so that we have the spiritual energy, wisdom, and love that are needed to go out and help in the work God is doing.
One danger in incarnational ministry is to rely too much on our own ideas. I think that’s a particular danger for me, personally, thinking back on some of the ministries I have tried that didn’t work out. Perhaps they were good ideas, but they weren’t God’s ideas. It is essential that Christ is in us, but also that we are in Christ. That means going where God is leading us, not where we imagine that God would probably want us to go. We are right now working through a process that may lead to new ministries or new ways to be the church. Many of us are reading a book that was recommended by Greg Emery called Neighborhood Church, which contains many examples of churches deciding to do something new as they adopted an outward, incarnational focus. But it’s not an instruction book. We cannot simply read about something another church is doing, then say, “Hey, we can do that. Let’s go!”
Truly incarnational ministry is relational. It involves getting out and meeting people where they are, learning about their challenges, and seeing where God is at work. I had an excellent conversation the other day with a colleague who is doing anti-racism work. Like me, he is a straight, white, middle-class, educated man. He commented that his perspective has really changed by spending time with people who are not like him. Part of his challenge, though, is to get people in his circle to also get out and spend time with people who are different. If your only knowledge of Black people, or Hispanics or Muslims or Chinese nationals, is what you see on the news or on the internet, it’s easy to put up walls and stay within your little bubble, imagining that everything would be better if “they” would be more like “us.”
Truly incarnational ministry involves spending time with those outsiders so that we can see the world through their eyes. We are all beloved children of God, members of one family, but that doesn’t mean we all need the same things or have the same challenges. Our goal should not be to convince people that they should dress and act like us and come spend an hour on Sunday morning singing our hymns and reading our liturgy. Our goal should be to walk with people on their unique paths towards God, so that they can enter God’s kin-dom as equals, members of Christ’s body who add new perspectives and new ways of being Christ-like. In doing so, we will see ourselves through their eyes as well. We will see where we need to grow and change and become more of the people that God wants us to be. We will see what obstacles we are putting in our own way, walls we are building between ourselves and God.
Let me return to the Gospel text: Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” How can we eat and drink Jesus? The Gospel of John opens with, “In the beginning was the Word.” Jesus embodied God’s wisdom, the bread of heaven revealed partially in the Hebrew scriptures. We “consume” Jesus by learning God’s wisdom. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, wisdom is personified as a woman calling to us, sometimes known by the Greek name of Sophia. In Proverbs, we read:
Wisdom has built her house,
Proverbs 9:1-6
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
“You that are simple, turn in here!”
To those without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”
To become more Christ-like, we need to ingest God’s wisdom. Jesus came to teach us God’s wisdom by example. He was supremely dedicated to obeying God’s will, but not always in the way that his peers understood it. He showed us that the Law and the Prophets, indeed the whole teaching of God to humanity, hangs on two principles: love of God and love of neighbor. Often, though, it is hard to see how those principles apply. It is especially hard to see how they apply in the abstract. That’s why Jesus did not simply expound on philosophical principles. No, he lived with God’s people and saw first-hand the challenges they confronted, so that he could viscerally feel and understand the ways in which they were not being loved and the ways in which he could show love to them.
Incarnational ministry is not just another program. It is a renewed way of being Christ’s body. Jesus taught those early disciples just as he teaches us today. Abide in Christ as Christ abides in us. Ingest God’s wisdom, the teachings of the whole Bible that reveals God’s relationship with humanity and the lessons the ancient Israelites and first-century Christians learned from their encounters with God. See the world through Christ’s eyes, filled with love. Go out and encounter God in the people we meet. Learn how we can enable each person to see God’s presence, to experience God’s love, and to experience our love for them. Go where God is at work and join in. And as we do, we too will know God’s love and will be transformed into citizens of God’s realm and members of God’s family. Amen.
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