This Teaching is Difficult

 

Welcome back to me! 

I was away for ten wonderful days...driving from Florida to a workshop in Byfield, MA, at Adelynrood. This retreat center is run by the Society of Companions of the Holy Cross, an order if women that has prayer and social justice at its core. 

It was next door to my prep school. That was...how you say...interesting. 

More interesting was the topic of "Into the Blackness of God" with the Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward, one of the first women who was ordained as an Episcopal priest in Philadelphia in 1974. What a treat it was to be with her and to take up the question of how can I, as a white person, enter into a relationship with God not as the "light" and "bright" and very white depiction of God, but as one who sits at the gate with those who have been--as Howard Thurman describes it--the disinherited. 

Am I able to do it? Not completely. 

Can I make an intention of working into that experience? Yes, absolutely. 

Will that come across in my preaching? 

That, dear reader, is for you to see if you sense any shift in what I am saying, and how I am saying it. 

Text: John 6:56-69

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I saw a meme the other day that made me laugh out loud.

It was one appropriate for this time…when so many are just starting another school year.

A teacher asks a student: what book made you cry?

Now…we can probably think of stories that we read in school that made us cry.

The Diary of Anne Frank. Maybe even Animal Farm by George Orwell.  A well-written novel can really tug on the heart strings…

But in this meme…the answer the student gives is not a title. It’s a meme after all…so instead it’s a picture.

And the book that makes this particular student cry?

An Algebra textbook.

And I thought, “Oh, yes! That one made ME cry. A. Lot!”

To this day…I can feel the pain in my head when I see a formula of One over X.

Maybe this was your experience as well.

Algebra…especially with Trigonometry…this teaching was difficult.

Hard to wrap my mind around it.

We hear that in our Gospel lesson that there were those who were followers of Jesus who also found his teachings about bread “difficult.”

These weren’t the usual critics and naysayers…the ones who felt threatened by this rabble-rousing rabbi of Love.

These were the ones who were ready to follow him…wanted to hear him in the synagogue in Capernaum.

But this talk…this eating his flesh and drinking his blood…talk?

No, no. This sounds like cannibalism.

It’s way too much.

It’s as if the deeper we go into this teaching that takes up chapter six in John’s Gospel…the less and less popular Jesus becomes.

Instead of gaining great crowds…people are shaking their heads and walking away.

The five thousand who ate bread and fish…and thought Jesus was such an awesome miracle worker that they wanted to make him a king….now can’t stomach his message.

We might understand that, right?

It does sound a little creepy to talk about eating flesh and drinking blood.

His Jewish followers did find this too much to take…especially since their rules of kashrut prohibited them from ingesting anything with blood.

But any of the Gentiles in the crowd would have been Greco-Roman…and they would’ve been used to the cult of Dionysus…which included a belief that eating raw meat of bulls  and drinking copious amounts of wine brought one closer to God.

For them…this suggestion of eating flesh and drinking blood would have been more normal devotional practice.

But we also need to remember that Jesus is a master of the metaphor.

The Jesus of John’s Gospel is the one who challenges us to not get so caught up in the literal and the physical and pushes us to see those things as more symbolic of something that is in us and around us and moving with us at all times.

That thing is the Spirit…the Wisdom of God…the Sophia that exists and links us to God and each other.

The flesh and blood of Jesus….the living bread….is the Spirit.

That Spirit which feeds us on a steady diet of compassionate love.

And that compassionate love is that taste of God that we get when we spend time with a friend…a loved one….or even a stranger…and listen to their story.

Find out what experience they’ve had that brings them joy.

Sit with them and be with them in moments when they’re in sorrow and pain.

By interacting and participating in each other’s lives in this way…it helps us to not only be better family members in this body of Christ…it aids in our own growth in Christ.

The more we get to know each other…and appreciate each other… the better equipped we are to hold off those cosmic powers of division we heard described in the Letter to the Ephesians this morning.

For many years…both in Tallahassee and Thomasville…I served as a mentor in the Education for Ministry program.

EfM…as it’s known in the church…is a chance for lay people to dig deeper into the Scriptures as well as learning church history and connecting their faith and the teachings of Christianity to their every day lives. As a mentor…it was my role to walk alongside these learners and provide the space for some theological conversations to happen. It was great fun…and a good lead up for me at least before I went to seminary…particularly as people wrestled with scriptures that they found confusing…or uncomfortable.

But even more than doing the type of reflection work we always did in an EfM session…my absolute favorite time in the course is at the beginning when each person gets about ten to 15 minutes to share their spiritual autobiography.

This is their story that goes beyond the vital statistics of when and where they were born…graduated from whatever school…got married or not. This was a chance for each person to share the times when they either felt God very absent…or extremely present in their lives.

And without fail…this room of six to eight people who might have only known each other’s names…and where they typically sat on Sunday morning in church…now was hearing an echo of something in the other’s story….a phrase…or an event…some experience…that would sound like a piece of their own spiritual autobiography.

It was like watching the assembly of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Slowly…over the course sometimes of two or three weeks…these stories would help forge the bonds of the group as the members moved from being casually acquainted to finding their true relationship as spiritual siblings in Christ.

Now it didn’t mean that everyone in the room necessarily “liked” each other. It did mean that they learned how to love each other enough…and be honest with each other enough…that when we times got tough and feelings got raw…they were able to work through their disagreements and remain one body…in that one Spirit.

Through building relationships…across racial…sexual…language…ethnic…ability…age…any kind of differences really…we build up trust.

We remove fear and anxiety.

And we make a way for each person to enjoy the loving…liberating…and life-affirming gift of what it is to experience the freedom that comes from God.

That’s what Jesus was offering as the flesh and blood that would enliven everyone’s flesh and blood if they accept it.

So many would not or could not.

Then…and even today.

The reality on the ground…both then and now of what it can feel like living under empirical forces…and mean-spirited politics…we might find this teaching of trusting in Love too difficult.

But I am often reminded of the words that get repeated so often in Scripture…both in the Old Testament and the New: do not be afraid.

In the words of the psalmist:

No good thing will the Lord withhold *
from those who walk with integrity.

O Lord of hosts, *
happy are they who put their trust in you!

In the name of our one holy and undivided Trinity.