Proverbs 9:1–6
Psalm 34:9–14
Ephesians 5:15–20
John 6:51–58
Year B
I.N.I.
Did you ever come into the middle of a conversation, and wonder what’s going on?
The entirety of John chapter 6, verses one to seventy-one, is a wholly contained story and in today’s Gospel we come into the middle of the conversation.
Jesus fed thousands of hungry people with a boy’s lunch of barley bread and tilapia fish, and Jesus, the crowd, and you and I are still chewing on it, the idea of it all.
Spending seventy-one verses and five Sundays on the miracle of loaves and fish is a bit of overkill. It’s the perfect time for a preacher to take a vacation so others can deal with it, but I’m back and we’re in the middle of it, and the gospel writer must think it’s pretty important to link bread with Jesus, as if eating and chewing, chomping, gnawing, gulping, and digesting communion bread is like eating Jesus’ flesh and blood!
Let me say as if it needs saying, Christianity began as a meal fellowship. House churches were redesigned to hold feasts, with the vision of Isaiah 25 offering well-aged wine and chewy meat on the mountain, or like the meal of cakes, curds, milk, and beef that Sarah and Abraham served to the trinity of strangers who announced promise of life in their barrenness in Genesis 18.
Even later when imperial courtrooms called basilicas were retrofitted for the worshipping assembly, and bishops resembled magistrates in their robes, still there was a table plunked down and still the bishops as hosts did serve bread and wine, and were assisted not by courtiers and bureaucrats and guards, but by those who came to be called deacons, those who assisted the vocation of bishop to serve at the table of the Word, the table of the Eucharist, the table of the poor, offering the invitation like Woman Wisdom in the seven-pillared mansion of Proverbs not to the privileged but to the common folk, to eat and drink. [see Gordon Lathrop’s The Pastor Minneapolis: Fortress Press © 2006pp 60-63]
Here today, when we are at our best, even in the middle of the summer, in between what has already happened and what will come, Christianity is a meal fellowship.
This eating and drinking around our table is our viaticum, our life’s provision along the way, our bread for the journey, our manna to sustain us day-by-day, our daily bread.
In his confrontation with the crowds who still didn’t get it, who were stuck on not recognizing abundant life right in front of them, Jesus puts the image in their faces: first eating the flesh of the Son of Man, then crunching the flesh and drinking the blood, then finally saying “eat me”. The gospel writer is all about recognizing God in Christ in flesh and blood, incarnate, living and breathing, held up for all to see finally on the cross, so that all might take on the divine life, the light of God, showered upon the world, full of grace and truth.
One way to describe our family’s trip to Palestine and Israel is to say what we ate our way through it. Our friends wanted to cook Arabic food for us, new dishes every time we shared a meal, stuffed eggplant, stuffed zucchini, and stuffed grape leaves, roast chicken and rice with cauliflower, beans and tomatoes with lamb, hummus and tahini, cucumbers and olives, pita and sesame bread, falafel and platters of fruit with plums, figs, cactus, and grapes. Woe to you if you had an empty plate, because the Woman Wisdom of the house would right away want to fill it again, saying “eat some more, please, come on.” In Ramallah, at one such meal at the home of Khaled, the youth who was not able to join us for the Youth Gathering, his mother Marlin, after we thought we were finally done, after the fruit, brought out chocolate cake and Arabic coffee, and before we left chamomile tea.
These meals solidified our relationships as we shared them together, and we were sustained for the day. The hosts took pleasure in preparing and serving, and all of us in our chewing, chomping, gnawing, gulping, and digesting recognized the gift of one another in flesh and blood.
I consider it a gift that our central act is to gather around a table and eat bread and drink wine. It is truly the action of the worshipping assembly to get up from where we are sitting and make the journey to our communion meal. We physically process forward, to grab torn bread and take wine from one cup. In our eating and drinking we are enacting the viaticum, as the provision for living, the journey of life. I invite you today to particularly savor the moment, to take to heart Jesus’ words to “abide” in him and to allow him to abide in you.
As a child I was amazed at my mother in worship. She closed her eyes in prayer and lowered her head before joining the throng in communion. She held out her hand reverently for bread and wine as my pastor-father emphasized as Luther did the pro me, the body and blood of Christ, given and shed—for you. I marveled as she returned to the pew, seemingly transformed by consuming a mass-produced stamped wafer and Manischewitz Concord Grape wine. The smell of her breath was tranfixiating and I thought for sure that my mom must have had an encounter with Jesus.
Of course she did. She recognized Christ in bread and wine, and through her regular encounter with the Word, the stories and invitations in Scripture, the singing and making melody with her simple voice.
We have made liturgical changes over the years to recover the sense of mealtime in our Eucharist, with a table that is closer to the assembly gathered, using real bread from a common loaf, and a variety of wine from a shared cup--because Christianity at its best is a meal fellowship.
If you are new to this assembly and feel like you’ve come into the middle of a conversation, then I invite you to abide, to stay and seek to recognize God’s abundant life shared through Christ in our midst. One metaphor for the assembly is that it is the body of Christ, and that as we leave this place we will be sent away for our neighbors in the world. As our offering is collected and we concern ourselves not just with sustaining our ministry but remembering the poor and afflicted, so our own bodies are also offered as Christ for a world so in need. In our daily lives, in our Vacation Bible School week, in our serving at Anne Marie House, and in the middle of our summer, we might in flesh and blood be Christ and serve Christ.
At least the idea is something to chew on.
I.N.I.
The Rev. Timothy J. Keyl, Pastor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
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