Sermon Preached Sunday, August 23, 2015
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
Proper 16
(John 6)
Today’s gospel brings to an end a
5-week series taken from the sixth chapter of John’s gospel. Among clergy there is a collective groan
every three years when we hit this time of year – 5 weeks to talk about Jesus
as the bread of life! Oy! What on earth can
I possibly say for five weeks? I know
what I’ll do? I’ll go on vacation! And
so I did – and, if Facebook posts are any indication, so too did many of my
colleagues. But in all seriousness, I
think it is critical for us to think about why those who plan out the readings
for our churches would make a decision to emphasize this message for 5
weeks. That’s longer than the time we
spend preparing for our Christmas celebrations and as many Sundays as we have
in our Lenten preparations for Holy Week and for Easter. In other words, some people in the church
think this is really important. Jesus is
the bread of life. Pay attention!
Like me, you may not have been here
for all five weeks’ of the readings, so I’m going to give a really brief
recap: The first week we heard the story
of the feeding of the five thousand with five barley loaves and two fish.[1] This miraculous story is then followed by a
lengthy dialogue between Jesus and those around him. The dialogue begins when the five thousand
seek out Jesus the next day and Jesus calls them up short saying, “you are
looking for me, not because you saw signs, but 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. . . . I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never
be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”[2] What follows is a lengthy conversation about
what Jesus means by these words. Today’s
section of the conversation is the conclusion and offers this summary:
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood
abide in me, and I in them. Just as the
living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me
will live because of me. . . . the one who eats this bread will live forever.”[3]
At this time, John’s gospel reports that many of Jesus’
disciples “turned back and no longer went about with him.”[4]
They found the teaching too difficult.
Jesus even asks his closest companions, the twelve, “Do you also wish to
go away?” Simon Peter, purportedly
answering for the twelve says, “No! Of course not” – after all “We have come to
believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”[5]
I wish the gospel writer had given
Peter’s response more flesh because as it appears here, it sounds too
easy. But, my brothers and sisters, the
question asked of the disciples – “Do you also wish to go away?” – is a question
of life and death. Following Jesus is a
risky affair and though it comes with the promise of eternal life it also comes
with a guarantee of death. Jesus will
die on a cross and the disciples and earlier followers of the Way of Christ
will also be persecuted.
In a 3-day break from vacation, I
attended the North American Association for the Catechumenate’s Annual
Gathering just outside of Baltimore. The
keynote speaker, The Rev. Paul Hoffman talked to us about the way we order our
lives, or more aptly the way the world orders life versus the way in which God
orders life.[6] In the world, we are used to thinking about
beginnings, middles, and endings. We are
born, we live our lives, and, eventually we die. But in God’s order, the end is the
beginning. Christ has died –
ending. Christ is risen –
beginning. Christ will come again –
middle. These words – or something similar
– are spoken in every celebration of the Eucharist in our churches - a reminder
that our lives are no longer to be lived from birth to death but to be lived
instead according to God’s Way - the Way of Christ. It is why we pray each week that when we eat
the bread and drink the wine – the flesh and blood of Jesus - that God might
“Deliver us from the presumption of
coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only,
and not for renewal.”[7]
Let the flesh and blood of Jesus abide in us as we abide in
Jesus. And so we as church arrive in the
midst of death – what Paul Hoffman refers to as the chronic illnesses of our
age (mediocrity, hypocrisy, racism, sexism, classicism, greed,
self-aggrandizement, moralistic deism, you name it). The church shows up in the midst of this
death and destruction and proclaims a new beginning in Christ. The church shows up in the face of death and
proclaims, “Christ is Risen. Alleluia!”
Beginning. And as our liturgy
each week comes to a close and we are sent back out into the world; we are
invited to be a reminder to the world – by the way in which we live our lives –
that Christ will come again. Middle.
Why do we repeat this every
week? Because day after day you and I
have a habit of practicing our faith as if we don’t really have to die. As if we do not need God to transform our
lives in order to follow the Way of Jesus.
As if our prayers on Sunday morning have nothing or little to do with
the rest of our lives. As if the
promises we made at our baptism can be lived out half way. And so, week after week, we return to our
worship – to the sacrament - to be fed again by the body and blood of Jesus to
be reminded that we must live in the middle; to be reminded that we have a
place where we can bring our inadequacies, our insecurities, our heresies and
our sins; to be reminded that we have a place to fall apart, to die again to
whatever must die in us; to be reminded of the power of the bread and the wine,
transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, to transform our lives –
to strengthen and renew us – to be sent out once again into the world where we
are invited daily to abide in Jesus as Jesus abides in us.[8]
“When many of his disciples heard it,
they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ . . . [and] many of
his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”
But there were 12 others who remained because they had come
“to believe and know that” Jesus is the Holy One of God.
Where are you on this journey? Where are we as St. Mark’s on this
journey? What must die in you – and in
us - so that we might live more fully
into the Way of Jesus? And, are you
ready to ask God again and again, day in and day out, week after week, to help with
this transformation?
So, do we really need 5 weeks about
Jesus as the Bread of Life? Yes, we
really do. Because it really matters. In
fact, it is a matter of death and of life.
[1]
John 6:1-15
[2]
John 6:26, 35.
[3]
John 6:56-58.
[4]
John 6:66.
[5]
John 6:67-69.
[6]
Paul Hoffman, “A Baptismal Center for Parish Life,” Lecture at Transforming Congregations through Spiritual
Practice: Creating a Discipleship Community: North American Association for the
Catechumenate Annual Gathering, Bon Secours Conference Center, Baltimore,
MD, July 30, 2015.
[7]
Eucharistic Prayer C, The Book of Common
Prayer, p. 372.
[8]
This is a paraphrase of Molly Baskette’s devotional, “Blessing Everything,”
July 25, 2015. United Church of Christ website accessed online at http://www.ucc.org on August 21, 2015.
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