Transcript
Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. Please be seated.
Guess what? It’s official. We have finally come to the last gospel of the Bread of Life. So just in case you didn’t know weren’t here or whatever. Just in case you didn’t know. Jesus is the bread of life. And we must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to achieve that eternal life.
We actually talked about this gospel reading at staff meeting this week and we all agreed: faithfully, this is easy. We’ve been coming to the altar to receive communion for enough generations that this is really quite easy to understand, but intellectually, this is tough. If you’ve watched enough Walking Dead or other zombie movies, then you might be really struggling with the whole “eat my flesh” command. Or if you’re a big Twilight or Dracula fan, then maybe the “drink my blood” part can give you a little bit of the icks.
And I suspect some 2,000 years ago, when those who gathered to hear Jesus speak heard this… I suspect they really struggled with it also. After all, almost everyone who was gathered to hear Jesus speak was Jewish, and to eat the flesh and drink the blood of a living creature broke quite the litany of laws. We’ll actually get to some of them next Sunday, so I won’t go into that today. Plus, if you remember, blood is what we smear on our lintels during the plagues in Egypt to save our firstborn son. Definitely not something we consume.
And yet, in good Jesus fashion, today, this whole concept of Jes- being- Jesus being the bread of life, it flips everything upside down. Again, I will say for us today, it might not be that hard to comprehend, but back then it definitely was. Again, I’m repeating myself. Today, we understand the theology of the Eucharist or Communion or Last Supper or whatever you want to call it. Each name having a different theological emphasis. We understand the call to gather together as one body and come forward. Our weekly altar call.
We place our hands, one on top of the other. I like to tell children it’s like making a bed for Jesus. And then we put them out like beggars, asking, begging for Jesus, for eternal life, for the bread that will feed our souls.
Last week I mentioned being consubstantial or transubstantial people, two concepts around what happens during the Eucharistic Prayer and what happens when we receive those little wafers. If you’re formerly Roman Catholic- or maybe you still are, that’s okay too -then you probably know transubstantiation. The theology that what happens is an actual change. The substance of wafer transforms into the substance of flesh, and what we consume is the actual body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Or maybe you’re more Methodist in your theological stance, which I consider to be kind of the opposite end of the Eucharistic theology spectrum. And you think that nothing really special happens to the wafer in the wine, but the magic, so to speak, is what happens here with us in community. Jesus told us to do this, so we do not because we think we are consuming Jesus, but because we are emulating the actions Jesus told us to emulate.
And then what I consider to be about the halfway in-between point of those two ideas is consubstantiation. This is a very Anglican idea, a very, “eh, we don’t know. It’s a mystery. And that’s okay with us” kind of theology. Very Anglican.
Basically, it’s the idea that somehow and no, we cannot explain it. Somehow the wafer in Jesus’s flesh become one connected in substance. And thus, yes, we are eating wafer and yes, we are eating Jesus’s body. And yes, that doesn’t make sense. And yes, we don’t really care.
Now, real quick, here’s my disclaimer. I might have just said that one stance is Catholic and one stance is Methodist and one stance is Anglican. But the truth is all of them are valid understandings of what happens during communion. All of them are valid beliefs to hold. So don’t think you’re any less or not fully because you believe in one over the others. All are valid options.
So yes, all three of these theological understandings of the Eucharist are valid, as are just about any other version of these or any combination of these. And yes, you might be saying, but if all of this is an option, how do we know what the true bread of life is? How do we fully and truly receive the Bread of Life that Jesus promises will give us eternal life? How do we understand all of that?
And those are very good questions, and I’m pretty sure if anyone of us had the answer, we’d well, probably not be sitting in a pew at Saint John’s. Although just in case, if you do know the real answer to all of that, please come see me afterwards. I’d love to talk.
But for the rest of us who maybe don’t know the answer, what can we do? Where can we go when we crave the bread of life, the true source of eternal life? The word that is God, begotten, not made with God in the beginning of creation and with all of us now in our hearts and in our prayers. Well, we can go here together towards the altar, towards the cross, towards the altar rail, together, not just as individuals, as a community, as Christians, as Saint John’s, as siblings in Christ, adopted by God the Father as God’s own children.
I know that each of us has experienced a lot in church, and not just the 400 plus years of Saint John’s and Elizabeth City Parish, but also each of us individually. We have experienced openings and closings, promises and hope, pain and confusion. We’ve probably felt lost and we’ve probably felt found. We’ve probably felt obligation and hopefully we felt inspiration and invitation.
We’ve probably asked ourselves the same question that Jesus asked his disciples at the end of today’s gospel reading: do you also wish to go away? To go away from church? Is it too much? Is this too hard? Is the pain more than the joy?
And I’m going to guess. While you all may not fully be on board just yet, or in this moment- because let me tell you, I know it can be a challenge to get up on a gorgeous Sunday morning and come to church instead of going to the golf course or the boat dock, or to see your grandchildren, or to just stay in bed and sleep in. Anyway, I’m going to guess that since you all are sitting here, you made the choice to be here. You felt the call the poor to be here this morning.
I’m also going to guess that each of you at some point, somehow had the same answer, that the disciples had the same answer that Simon Peter offered to Jesus. “Lord, to whom can we go?”
Saint John’s is a very special place. I don’t have to tell you all that, though. You all already know that. And I also am certain you all already know that together we- WE- can make it amazing.
We can make this place, this church, this community. We can make it a place to truly receive the bread of life, to truly experience the promise of eternal life, to truly live into the call that Jesus has for each of us. To love God, to love oneself, and to love one another. To offer to one another glimpses of that eternal life by giving to all of us the bread of life.
Saint John’s program year starts in a couple of weeks. We’ll commission some of our program year ministries on September 8th, when we go back to two services, and then on September 15th, we’ll have kick off Sunday, and then we’ll get going in all the business that is the program year, that is doing ministry, that is serving Saint John’s in the community around us, that is sharing that same bread of life that we receive every Sunday here. Remember that that all of the ministry, all of the service, everything we do here is what we do because of the bread of life, the bread of life that came down from heaven and gives each and every one of us eternal life.
Now we can share it with others. Let’s do that. Amen.