Grace and Peace to you from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
“Too Tough To Swallow” is the title of this section of scripture in Eugene Peterson’s 21st century translation of the Bible called The Message.[1]
Indeed in verse 66 of our scripture lesson for today we learn that “many of [Jesus’s] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Wow! Something Jesus said must have been really tough to hear. And this detail struck me this week – that “many” not just some, a few or several, but many people turned back and no longer went about with him.
They left the Jesus movement with Jesus standing right there in front of them because Jesus taught something that was a bit “Too Tough to Swallow.”
Now, I hadn’t really caught this detail in my reading of John 6 before – I think I read this part of the text and just envisioned something more like a crowd of people going home after the game ended and not as something quite so final as it really is when it says: “and [they] no longer went about with him.”[2]
The finality of this text reached my soul this week because I had a flashback of when I was a member of this crowd that turned back and no longer went about with Jesus. I was once one of them.
I’m going to share a part of my story that is vulnerable, and I pray that you stick with me as I entrust this part of my life to you all my beloved community here at St. Matthew.
In 2010 I was a freshman in college and was struggling to be honest with myself – not with other people, but myself – about the fact that I was gay. I hadn’t come out to anyone at that point, not even myself. And in the midst of this struggle, I was receiving messages from our culture that being gay would put me into the minority and a heavily demonized minority, even at that time in history. The loudest and harshest voice in the crowd of persecutors was The Christian Church.
Now, you have to know that I was the high schooler who drove myself to church every Sunday morning to sing in the choir as soon as I got my drivers license; and I was someone who led my youth group; I was someone who took copious amounts of notes in my childhood bible throughout confirmation class; and I was someone who felt the power of affirming my faith alongside my fellow confirmation students in a sanctuary filled with family on Confirmation Sunday. So, I was shocked when I started hearing the messages coming from around The Church, both loud and subtle, from a less naïve position and with new honest ears as I was working out how to be honest with myself.
I got angry at what I heard. Angry because I was the “model” Christian youth! And now, all of a sudden, I heard that I was the problem. I was the one who could destroy good church-going families. I was the one who was dangerous to be around. Seriously? The one who taught “Jesus Loves Me” to VBS kids. The one who had circled, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son to save it…” in my Bible.
I walked away from it all in 2010. I no longer went about with Jesus. I became one of the many who turned around and didn’t go with Jesus any longer.
So, I can identify with the people in our scripture passage who left the Jesus movement. Yes, I absolutely can.
But remember, I am standing here in front of you as an ordained minister firmly within the Jesus movement. So, there is hope and good news in the midst of this hard story – mine and the one we hear in our Gospel today.
Because in the midst of moments like mine, when people turn from the Jesus movement, there is also a verse 20 verses before the one we hear today that says: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me…” (John 6:44).
Jesus himself reminds us that it’s God’s work to bring us to Jesus. Our coming to Jesus is a grace filled act of God the Father through the Holy Spirit that brings us to the foot of the cross in the midst of a creation that may beckon us away.
And God stayed active in my life even as I walked in the opposite direction.
Three years later in the spring of 2013, I had my first new taste of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
These are strange words to utter: “a taste of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” They are the very words that were “too tough to swallow” in today’s Gospel passage. And they are still words that confuse my non-Christian friends – and even my Christian friends to be honest. But those are the Grace-filled words of Jesus Christ that worked to bring me back.
One Sunday, I was invited to a little pop-up church in St. Paul at an art museum by a pastor who knew my story - I think because he was a Facebook friend and saw it publicly unfold as I bitterly posted status updates from my college dorm. But, for some reason the trust I had in him and the grace-filled work of God empowered me to show up to that goofy avant-garde art museum. There were 7 of us who sat in a circle around a white stand that had a clay bowl filled with water, a paper cup of wine and a few pieces of sandwich bread on a napkin. It was in this non-church church where I came to the foot of the cross again. I saw, touched, smelled and tasted the body and blood of Jesus Christ that day in 2013 after a pastor invited me – a publicly out gay person – to the table. He looked me directly in the eyes that day with compassion and tenderness, saying the words “this is the body of Christ given for you; And this is the blood of Christ shed for you.”
The experience of taking communion again after three years was a balm to my soul. The rush of Christ’s real presence[3] in the bread and wine went right through my body as I ate and experienced Christ’s embrace – Christ’s abiding in me, literally in me in the bread and wine that I consumed. The hurt and angry young person was encountered that day by the very real Jesus Christ.
It was in that moment that I understood exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” Because, despite the stark strangeness of those words (eat me and drink my blood), I knew what it felt like to have Jesus promising me that he would abide within me and that was the truest experience of eternal life I have had.
So, when Jesus says the words, “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” he reminds all of us that his death on the cross was an act of giving his entire self: mind, soul, body and blood for each and every one of us.[4]
And we receive Jesus’s entire self, his real body and blood as a grace-filled gift from God each week when we eat the bread and drink the wine where Christ himself promises that his flesh and blood are really present and given over to us. Given to ALL of us.
We literally embody this promise because we eat it!
And in that embodiment of Christ, we have an encounter with the opening of God’s floodgates of love and grace. God reaches out to us in this eating, we are drawn to God in this eating and we are given an experience of eternal life in this eating.[5]
This is indeed tough to swallow probably because it’s a huge promise coming to us through some of the most ordinary things - food. But I am standing here before you as an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament today because I ate.
It is now my call to tend this food and invite you, ALL of you, each and every one of you, to come forward to taste and see that Christ is with YOU, that Christ’s body and blood are given for YOU, that your encounter with the Living grace-filled and loving God through Christ Jesus is right here, right now – eat it and it will abide with you forever and ever.
Amen.
Rev. Ryan | August 25th, 2024 | Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
[1] Peterson, Eugene. The Message: Bible in Contemporary Language. NavPress, 2002. John 6.
[2] “In each of these episodes [from John’s Gospel], the people whom Jesus encounters move either toward faith in him, recognizing and professing who he is, or away from faith in him, by misunderstanding and rejecting him and his claims.” From Introducing the New Testament: Its Literature and Theology by Paul Achtemeier, Joel B. Green and Mariaane Meye Thompson. Published by Eerdmans Publishing Company in Grand Rapids, MI. Copy right: 2001
[3] Lutheran theology proclaims “the real presence” of Jesus in the bread and wine citing scripture when Jesus says, “’take, eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’” (Matthew 26:26-28). Lutherans trust that Jesus’s presence is in the bread and wine because Jesus says so himself. This allows us to focus on the promise of Jesus’s presence and gift of himself rather than the substance of the bread and wine. My words are a gloss of pages 344-361 of Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 2, “The Supper” by Robert W. Jenson. Fortress Press, 1984.
[4] Idea that Jesus gives his whole self comes from Fed and Forgiven: Communion Handbook by Darin Wiebe, Edited by Suzanne Burke, Dawn Rundman and Andrew De Young, published by Augsburg Fortress, 2009.
[5] Idea of abiding with God who reaches out to us comes from “Theological Perspective on John 6:56-69” in Feasting on the Word: Proper 16, essay written by Loye Bradley Ashton: “John’s eucharistic theology is offered as means of helping to draw the believer into deeper relationship with Jesus and thus also with God the Creator through a spirituality of abiding, or being with/in.”
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