Is Jesus too hard to accept, or is Jesus offering abundant life like nothing you’ve ever known?

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 21 B
Text: John 6:56-69

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Two questions rise above the Gospel today as turning points for all who hear.

Each is paired with a statement. The first begins with a statement of fact: “This teaching is difficult.” Then the question: “Who can accept it?”

The second begins with the question: “Lord, to whom can we go?” Then the statement of fact: “You have the words of eternal life.”

From these two points Jesus’ disciples divide. Those who ask the first question leave. Those who ask the second stay. And they’re all disciples, John says. We’re not hearing the hungry crowds anymore.

We face both these signposts. It’s important we realize this, since when we answer as the first group we don’t do their honest thing and leave. We stick around, acting as if we’re on board with Christ’s path. While inwardly, there are places we won’t let the Spirit lead.

And it isn’t just Jesus’ teachings on flesh and blood that are difficult.

In our path of discipleship, we resist or reject Jesus more than we realize.

Maybe it is this incarnational teaching we’ve focused on for over a month. It isn’t easy to accept that you take in your body the body and blood of God’s Son, and are changed. You can spiritualize Holy Communion all you want, but Jesus will insist on saying it will completely transform you from within.

Maybe Jesus’ insistence on losing your attachment to your possessions is your sticking point. St. Francis may have given away everything and followed, but you’re not so sure. Financial security, protecting your house, voting for things that keep your stock accounts growing, not thinking of those who suffer as a result, maybe this is Jesus’ hard teaching.

It could be sacrificial love. The cross-shaped path Jesus invites you to follow is a challenging path. To let go of your pride in service to another, to genuinely forgive for no reason other than love, to offer yourself, no matter how inconvenient, to help someone, these are hard to accept. We’re conditioned to look out for ourselves.

And what of Jesus’ teaching that all are loved and welcomed in God, all are valuable and precious? Can you look at your innate racism and prejudice (because most of us have it), and let the Spirit really clear that out? Are you ready for Jesus to challenge your inmost assumptions?

This teaching is hard; who can accept it?

Pay attention to this crisis point for so many of Jesus’ disciples, and ask if you feel the same. It doesn’t mean that you don’t find hope and joy somewhere in all of Jesus’ teaching. Those who left had loved Jesus’ teaching enough to become disciples. But when Jesus insists on following completely, as he always does, do you hesitate?

Yes, I’ll give some of my wealth to charity, to my church. But Jesus says, can you lose all your attachment to material things? Yes, I’ll try to be kinder to those who aren’t like me. But Jesus says, can you be honest about your participation in unjust systems that perpetuate racism or sexism, your complicity that makes kindness not seem nearly enough?

Jesus is a hard teacher, no question. It’s all or nothing: all your heart, soul, strength, and mind in love of God. All your life in love to neighbor. All of yourself on Christ’s path. Don’t start to plow, Jesus says, and quit part way.

But wait before despairing. Before you walk, hear Peter today.

He asks the question you need to ask: “Master, where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

This is the other corner in this Gospel. You follow Jesus, you come here to worship the Triune God whose face Jesus reveals in person. You seek life in Christ because something in you knows you’ve never heard anything like what Christ offers anywhere else.

“Eternal life” is in your words, Jesus, Peter says. Remember, this is before Jesus’ death and resurrection. They aren’t following Jesus so they’ll live in heaven after they die. They have no idea what’s coming. Easter is a surprise and a joyful one.

But eternal life – this they sense in Jesus right now. “Life of the ages” it could translate. Abundant life, Jesus calls it. A life of meaning and purpose. Filled with hope and trust. Where peace fills one’s heart in the midst of the worst chaos. A life shaped by knowing you are forgiven and loved forever. A life, as Jesus keeps saying, lived in the heart of God’s life.

That’s what Peter is starting to sense. Hard as Jesus is to understand and harder yet as he is to follow, something Peter can witness to firsthand, Jesus is life. To hear him, to be with him, is to hear God, to be with God. To follow him is to learn a way of living that is unlike anything you’ve ever known.

These are the points of turning.

Many of Jesus’ disciples leave. They haven’t even seen the cross, faced the worst of doubt and fear. But they know they can’t do this teaching, or be shaped by it.

The others, more than just twelve, stay. They will be traumatized by what is to come, and astounded by what comes after that trauma. They will experience being filled by the very Spirit of God and changed dramatically. They will witness with their lives, some with their deaths, to the eternal love of God that is life right now. And because of Easter, they will also proclaim that bonus joy, that there is life after we die, too.

But right now, all they can say is, “We have nowhere else we’ve ever found such life.” They stay, because in Jesus’ difficult words they hear truth and forgiveness and hope and love and life.

So how will you answer?

Before you do, though, remember one more question and answer from God’s Word. The flawed King David, whose family story we’ve followed all summer, once sang a question and answer you need to sing now: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139)

And his answer was, I can’t. If I turn away because your teaching is too hard, and lie down in death’s darkness, you’re still there. If I turn to you in hope because I find life in your words, ascend to heaven, you are also there.

Whichever disciple in this Gospel reading you imitate, there is One who will never turn away from you. Those who walked away from Jesus, well, Jesus never walked away from them. If you turn away, God will still be there, will still surround you, watch over you, and never take away the love that is yours.

Jesus’ teachings are hard. So hard that Jesus let himself be executed to live them out. But that unimaginable love, God poured out in death to draw all people, all people, even those who turn away, back into God’s life, that’s the answer to the only question that matters.

And if you realize you’ve never found any life like the life you’ve found in God through Christ, then rejoice. Because that life of the ages, the abundant life God dreams for all God’s children, will fill you until you, too, understand and follow even the most difficult of God’s teachings. Until you are in God and God in you, and all together with the whole creation in eternal love and life.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God-in-the-flesh is God in the messiness of our animal bodies and lives, and in this Incarnation God will save and restore all things.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 20 B
Text: John 6:51-58

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”

There’s something shocking about hearing Jesus say this. Not because it’s a new idea. Every week at Eucharist I retell the story of the meal. Jesus said, “Take and eat, this is my body.” “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” But maybe we’ve heard that formula so often it doesn’t strike us as strongly as Jesus’ words here.

Because Jesus here isn’t just shocking. He’s almost disgusting. It’s even more so in Greek. Instead of using one of two very common, very frequently used words for eating, three times here John uses a third word, a word that’s only found once in the New Testament outside of John. Instead of “eat,” a better translation is “gnaw, chew, devour.” It usually describes how animals eat. So Jesus really says, “Those who gnaw my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”

What kind of decent God talks about faith and life like that?

Well, in Scripture, God gets into far greater indecency.

On Christmas Eve in the late 1970s a friend of mine read the Christmas Gospel from Today’s English Version, a new translation speaking in everyday language. He read aloud that Mary was “pregnant.” After the service, a furious parishioner made it clear that sort of language didn’t ever belong in church.

Hold back from laughing too quickly. When did you last consider that the manger scene was full of blood and water, sweat and smells? That’s what happens when a baby is born. God-with-us in the middle of lots of things decent people don’t talk about publicly.

And what of the crucifixion? Do you ever envision what it really was like? The smell of bodies transfixed in fear, covered in sweat. People who are executed often soil themselves as they die. Blood is everywhere. This is where you see the Son of God.

Incarnation isn’t a polite theology. God-in-the-flesh means God in the mess, bodily fluids, smells, human life. Flesh and blood for real. Jesus evacuated his bowels and bladder every day. There wasn’t a portable shower following him around. This is what God Incarnate means.

What kind of decent God would permit this? What kind of decent pastor would preach about this?

It’s not just God. Our culture is squeamish about the reality and mess of our own animal bodies.

Funerals have changed from families carefully washing and preparing their loved ones to professionals sweeping them out of our sight. Anything that happens behind the bathroom door with the fan on is off limits to talk about. We won’t admit that we age, embarrassed to say we need hearing aids, or to be seen with a cane. What would people think?

Polite conversation is fine. Talking about our smells and fluids and dying bodies isn’t conducive to a dinner conversation. But if we’re so squeamish about the very real bodies we have, we’re separated from the gift of God our lives can be, the gift to us of God’s Incarnation. And our lives are deeply diminished.

That’s because intimacy and love live in the reality and mess of our bodies.

The one who has to deal with flesh and blood, with bodily fluids and smells of another, is the one most intimate to them. You like holding someone else’s baby because someone else has to change the diaper.

But when a child is sick in the night, has found a way to vomit between the mattresses and in other impossible places, the one who loves that child, who has already smelled and wiped that child countless times, is the one who washes sheets at two a.m., finds clean pajamas, wipes the walls, tucks the child in.

Near the end of my beloved uncle’s life, several times I needed to help him with some very intimate issues, something neither he nor I ever imagined would happen. Most of us dread the time when someone has to do this for us in our aging. But in those moments I realized the holiness of our broken, messy, fluid-producing bodies, how in these moments of truth we really understand what love can be.

Flesh and blood, all those things decent people don’t talk about: they’re where we experience true love. And where the Holy and Triune God enters into our bodies.

God’s Word took on our human flesh, not a sanitized version of humanity.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Mary, a real woman, experienced the Son of God sitting on her bladder during her ninth month and making her very uncomfortable. God’s Word had all our aches and pains and smells and fluids and embarrassing noises. Was truly human.

Becoming one of us, God says, “Did you not believe me in Genesis 1 when I declared all this – everything about your fleshliness – good? Did you not believe that I still thought it good when in John 1 you learned that I took this flesh on myself, for your life? Did you not hear what Peter was told in Acts, that you may not call something unclean that I have called clean?”

God takes on every aspect of our humanity, and redeems it all as decent, good. Even the parts we call ugly. And now we can hear what Jesus says that means for the whole creation.

Jesus says that if God can enter our human reality, God can enter the very stuff of creation.

Flesh and blood are no different from bread and wine. Gnaw on that bread. Guzzle that wine. Take it in you and understand, but don’t try too hard to reason this out, Jesus says. Just chew. Drink. Feel how this is God’s life for you.

Saying that the eternal and Triune God can be present in such basic things as bread and wine is just as shocking as the rest of what Jesus says today. We try to deflect that shock with doctrine. We mumble things like “transubstantiation; consubstantiation; real presence; in, with, and under.” As if we can explain this.

But if we simply trust Jesus’ word while we gnaw on the bread, and drink the wine, trust that God is not only in Jesus’ messy body but in these lovely, tasty things, a new truth begins to emerge.

That God can also be in you, and me.

If God can be present in Jesus’ human, unsanitary body, and if Jesus says God is also present in simple bread and wine, then God can be in you.

Not a sanitized version of you. You after a shower, with your favorite clothes on and your hair the way you like it. As if you don’t own a toilet, don’t ever soil your clothes. As if you’ve never had a bad thought, or guilt and shame in your heart.

No. You are Christ, God is incarnate in you as you are, messy, smelly, broken, foolish inside and out.

No decent God would ever want to be embodied in you or in me. But who said God was decent?

And now God sends you out as witness in your body.

You go out with God in you, messy and flawed, and witness by your very body, your vulnerability, that God is in all things and in you. That love is incarnate. So that those who meet you might also find this wonder for themselves.

You have gifts, too. Blessings. Strengths you are uniquely prepared to offer the world as Christ. But today remember that all the things you’re not thrilled about seeing in yourself are holy gift, too. I give you my flesh and blood, messy as that is, for your eternal life, Jesus says. I give you as my flesh and blood, messy as you are, for the life of the world.

Do you see why you are so needed? God’s love can only be known in the flesh. Not through books or institutions. Through the flesh and blood and life of a child of God witnessing by their messy presence to the love of the eternal God for the whole creation.

Do you understand how this can change the world?

It’s indecent, really, how joyfully God enters into the depths of creation, into you and me. But this is a holy indecency that will save all things.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God is drawing us into each other and into Christ, and joined together, all our hunger and thirst is truly satisfied.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 19 B
Texts: Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Is Jesus really telling hungry and poor people that they should stop worrying about where their next meal is coming from?

It sounds like it. These four weeks we’re focused on just one day, the day after thousands were fed. Last week the crowds wanted another meal. That’s not out of line. Jesus showed he can do it, and yesterday’s meal was gone.

But last week Jesus told them not to worry about perishable food, or hope for daily food from God like the Israelites’ manna. Basically, Jesus told a bunch of hungry folks that looking for more food was misguided. Instead, we hear today, he said “believe in me – I’m the true bread from heaven. Those who come to me will never be hungry; those who believe in me will never be thirsty.”

Little wonder lots of people left. Many of the thousands who followed Jesus around the Sea of Galilee after the miraculous picnic were poor, working long hours to provide food for their families. If God could take away just that one worry, what a blessing that would be.

This is hard. Jesus uses hunger and thirst, real problems in our world, to imagine a new life of faith. So we need to know if Jesus isn’t really being uncaring. And then, what truth is he trying to get us to see? And that’s not easy, even for people like us who don’t live with food insecurity or water shortages.

To start with, we’re never going to understand Jesus if we don’t better understand our real hunger and thirst.

Our old assumptions about what we need and want need to be transformed. Our world has taught us to long for things that aren’t good for us – wealth, possessions, things that we think benefit us, and actually cost someone else. We need to change from that.

Think of actual food tastes. When you were a child, there were foods you’d have loved to eat all the time, but wouldn’t have given you good nutrition, would be damaging to eat all the time. As a child, I dreamed of getting myself secretly locked into Woolworth’s overnight and having free reign of the lunch counter and the soda fountain. How many milkshakes, burgers, and fries could I go through? But we grow up, and mostly learn to eat food that really is good for us.

And now Jesus invites us to grow into another new way. He uses the idea of hunger and thirst to help us change because we understand those realities. Jesus says we have deep needs that only God can fill. Not for food or money or possessions. Things we really hunger for but often don’t realize it.

This is the heart of Jesus’ words to the crowds after the meal: God wants to draw you into God, where you’ll find all you really need.

Today Jesus says, “No one comes to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” So if faith is being drawn into God by God, Christ the Son then draws us into each other in the same way. Paul’s beautiful description today of our new life comes from being transformed into one new reality together. We become, Paul says today, members of each other.

This is amazingly radical. We’re culturally conditioned to think of ourselves as individuals. Your life is your own, mine is mine. So we hunger and thirst to help ourselves most times. Yes, we have community, friends, family. But for centuries we have taught and lived that ultimately you only have yourself.

But everything Jesus taught, everything Paul proclaimed, assumes the exact opposite. In Christ there is no life of the individual. You are not you apart from me. You belong to me. I belong to you. And we all belong to Christ, and are made into Christ.

Christ’s teachings of faith and life make no sense if we think we’re individuals. They only make sense if we’re all connected. Joined together we then find our deepest hungers and thirsts that can be filled forever in Christ.

When God transforms us into a shared body, our hunger and thirst become for the good of all.

If my knee is damaged, it hurts my whole body, how I walk, sleep, sit. I can’t ignore it as if it’s not my problem. If we could imagine the body of Christ that way – and Paul certainly has tried to help us do this – our lives would never be the same.

That’s why Jesus redirects the crowds away from their very real hunger and thirst. Not because he doesn’t care about their bellies. But because if they see each other as one body in Christ, no one will ever go hungry again. That’s what he taught with the miraculous feeding: all belong, all matter. If one hurts, all hurt.

So knowing in faith we are all part of each other, we find our deepest hunger and thirst is for justice. If any of God’s children are in pain – from hunger, oppression, disease, racism, sexism, violence – so are we. We are as affected as if our own bodies were in that pain. And because God’s abundance of resources, community, and love are meant for all, our hunger for justice will be satisfied when we live into our new reality of being one body with each other in Christ where all are cared for.

The surprise of belonging to each other in God is that our own personal hungers are also filled forever.

At our core, we hunger to belong. None of us wants to think we’re alone, that we don’t matter to someone. Well, you’re part of me, and I of you, and all of us with all God’s children on earth. Your hunger for belonging is forever satisfied.

At our core, we hunger for love. Love that can overlook our flaws, love that brings light and joy to our hearts. Well, you’re part of me, and I of you, and we are joined to Christ whose love for the world and for you broke death’s power forever. If we are members of each other, if we are joined in that love to all God’s children on earth, your hunger for love is forever satisfied.

At our core, we hunger for a purpose. We deeply hope to make a difference, to matter. Well, you’re part of me, and I of you, and we are joined to all God’s children on earth. Each of us is vital to each of us. At every moment you matter to the body of Christ, you have something to offer. And your hunger for purpose is forever satisfied.

So this is Jesus’ invitation: let God draw you into God – God’s life, God’s love.

You’ll be changed. You’ll stop seeing yourself as an individual, and begin to feel your connection to all people, all creatures, the whole creation. You’ll hunger and thirst for new things. Not selfish, material things like the world teaches you to want.  Real things. Things that matter. You’ll finally experience what it is to really be filled, the joy of being so connected that no one can tell who’s doing all the feeding and loving of God’s creation, but joyously it turns out all have all they want.

This is hard stuff to grasp. Next week you’ll hear more challenging things from Jesus. You’ll see more people walk away, some angry, some confused. You might be tempted, too.

But stick around. Take the chance of letting God draw you in anyway. Because if there really is a hunger and thirst inside you that God can fill forever, isn’t it worth sticking around to see how that will happen for you, and for this world?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

God’s abundance is enough for all; how will we live as if we truly believed that?

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 17 B
Texts: John 6:1-15 (16-21 saved for next week); Ephesians 3:14-21; 2 Samuel 11:1-15

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

I gave away well over half of my clothes last week. I didn’t plan to.

I meant to go through my closet and drawers and give the things I never wear anymore to Central Lutheran Church’s Free Store. I cling far too hopefully to clothes I used to fit into, far too sentimentally to clothes I think I might wear again. But after 35 years of adulthood, I finally took the time to thin out. I couldn’t believe how much it ended up being. Shirts, jeans, socks, belts, shoes, dress clothes. 205 pieces of clothing.

I don’t tell you this as a point of pride, or for your praise. You would do better to wonder what it is about your pastor that makes him stubbornly refuse to act for over four decades of John the Baptist’s urging every Advent, and give one of his two coats to someone who has none. Or why when so many have nearly nothing, your pastor accumulated more than twice the clothes he needed, but didn’t wear them for years.

A simple reason is that I could.

Mary and I had lean years, especially when the children were young, but we were blessed that we always could provide for the family. As we both grew older, both with steady incomes, more and more I didn’t have to decide not to buy that pair of jeans (even though I had some already) or that shirt. Over time, bit by bit, I accumulated.

But there is also something in me that doesn’t want to let go of things. A subtle fear that one day I might need it, or regret not having it. In this land of great abundance, I act as if have a deep-rooted fear of scarcity. What if one day I don’t have what I want?

This story of abundant food shared with thousands, revealing Jesus as God-with-us, says there’s a different way to be. I could live in this abundant world as if there is nothing to fear, no need to hoard. I could become someone who doesn’t wait forty years to find the freedom and lightness of not clinging to things that others could find life in.

Today Paul says God, by the power at work within each of us, is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.

This story of thousands fed by a meager lunch proclaims God provides more than enough resources here to feed and clothe everyone. Our weak imagination matches the disciples’. We see only limits to what we can do, with the resources available, to feed everyone, let everyone live a full and abundant life. But God-with-us takes what looks like nothing and feeds everyone. “As much as they wanted,” John says.

This story of thousands fed proclaims God also provides abundant community. These thousands came from all social strata, but now they are at table together, sharing a meal. We limit who is in our family, whom we will eat with. But God-with-us makes a table big enough for all to gather, and share, and know each other as blessed and loved. No one is alone.

This story of an exhausted Jesus feeding thousands also proclaims that God has abundant love, abundant grace, abundant God for all. This act of self-giving love foreshadows the love for the universe that will be revealed on the cross. We limit God’s love and grace, sometimes for ourselves, many times for others. But God-with-us sees no limits, not even the limit of death, and pours out love for the whole creation.

If this is true, why do I cling so tightly to things, and to my social circle, and even to God’s love?

I can’t speak to whether all this is true for you, but it is for me. This is a trap of privilege. Living a privileged life means I can hear of God’s abundance shown in a massive feast and spiritualize it, keep hoarding my possessions, give away a little to feel good. I can limit who’s in my community, and not face that people suffer because of me. I can imagine God only loves those I love, or who see God as I do. And my culture would call me respectable in all this.

Privilege means you can have all you want, and not have to worry about what cost that brings to another person. This terrible story of King David’s rape of a neighbor woman and murder of her husband begins with his abuse of royal privilege. Next week we’ll hear God speak through Nathan and say to the king, “I gave you everything, I made you king. If that had been too little, I would have given you more. But you still destroyed these people’s lives for your own greed.”

Jesus came that all might have life, and have it abundantly.

But Jesus doesn’t promise believers will become rich people, isolated people. Jesus promises walking his way leads to a life that is actually rich, not in possessions and self-centeredness, but in a life that’s truly full and joyful.

In our abundant land, with many of us having more than enough to eat, 40 percent of America’s food gets thrown away. And millions starve in our own country. Jesus’ way is that everyone has as much as they want to eat, and then he has the disciples gather the leftovers, so nothing is wasted. Which is a world you’d rather live in?

In our privileged lives we can pick our friends and acquaintances, and ignore, if we choose, anyone we we don’t want to deal with, anyone we don’t like, anyone who doesn’t share our faith. And millions are lonely, millions suffer under the eyes of those doing well, and religious hatred is destroying our world. Jesus’ way is that every one of God’s creatures are in this together, all belong, all are fed, all thrive, all are loved by God. Which is a world you’d rather live in?

Our new loan program here follows Jesus’ way. When you have more than enough, you don’t build a wall, we’re saying with Longer Table Lending. You build a longer table.

Because that’s where abundance is found. In the freedom and lightness of sharing – your possessions, life, and even God’s love – with all your neighbors. It’s more than just finding abundant food and resources. It’s finding abundant numbers of your community. It’s finding an abundant scope to God’s love.

This story of God’s abundance poured out on thousands is a great challenge to me. Maybe to you, too.

I could leave here today and do nothing. See what Jesus did and what it means, and fall back into my old habits. As if I deserve it.

If you’re like me, so could you. Today’s sermon could be like any other you heard and then did nothing. God’s rich abundance of resources, community, and love, intended for all could be something you delight in but that doesn’t change anything about you.

I know myself well: if I’d been in the crowd that day, hungry, and heard they were giving out food, for much of my life my first thought would’ve been “I’ll bet that basket doesn’t get all the way over here.” I’d worry about getting my share. The fact that I have every reason to be thankful to God every minute of my life for my blessings makes that reaction obscene. But the grace of the Spirit’s working in me over these years means I’m learning to let go of these old ways and find abundant life in Jesus’ way.

So it comes to this: God is able to accomplish for you and for this world abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. I could walk away and do nothing about how my life reflects that. So could you.

The question is, will you?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen