Flesh and Blood

I’m guessing that we’ve all had the experience of having a sudden inability to remember what it is we’re supposed to be saying, of forgetting words that we’ve said a thousand times, stumbling over phrases that we know we know by heart. Without any warning, when we’re called upon to say them, we find that we suddenly can’t remember the words to the national anthem, or the Gloria or, occasionally in my case, the words of the collect for purity. Where once there was a well-established pattern of text, suddenly there is just an enormous blank page, and the more we think about it, the less likely we are to come up with the right combination of sounds and syllables to get that pattern started again.

One of my colleagues in seminary had this happen to her when she was serving as a new seminarian at a large church in D.C. She had only just begun her field education work there, and she was assigned to the chalice during their very large 11:00 Service of Holy Eucharist. She was nervous, a bit, trying to make sure she followed the right priest and paten, trying not to skip anyone, and, of course, desperately trying not to spill wine all down the front of someone’s Sunday best. She was so nervous, in fact, that she was several rows into her chalice-bearing that she realized that the words coming out of her mouth didn’t sound exactly right. When her brain finally tuned into what her mouth was doing, what she heard was horrifying. She was going down the row, person after person, sip after sip, saying, “The cup of blood. The cup of blood. The cup of blood.” But then once she heard what she was saying, she could of course in no way remember what she was supposed to be saying. The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation was as far away from her lips as the moon from Miami. So she just kept saying, “The cup of blood, the cup of blood, the cup of blood,” all the while apologizing in her heart for repeating this phrase that was so…well…gross.

Because gross it is, ladies and gentlemen, gross it is. It is a cup of blood that we’re offered at the altar, right after we’re fed from a heaping plate of flesh. In today’s Gospel passage that continues on in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus ups the ick factor considerably. He’s been talking for weeks now about bread: I am the bread of life, the bread that comes down from heaven, the true manna that gives eternal life. Bread, bread, bread. But now, just when everyone’s mouths are set to watering by all of this bread talk, Jesus throws in the zinger. I am the living bread that came down from heaven, he says, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Er…eww… And he goes on, telling his listeners that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood – and not just eat and drink it like one might sip tea out of fine china with one pinky raised, but chew on it and gulp it down. His language is visceral here, raw. Take a big ol’ bite and a giant slug of me, he says, and we will abide together forever.

This kind of language is just trouble. It got Jesus in trouble then, as the religious leaders who heard this repulsive talk openly challenged him to explain himself. After all, what he was proposing was not only, well, gross, it also went directly against Levitical law, which contained clear prohibitions against drinking the blood of any animal, against forcibly taking an animal’s life force in this greedy and presumptive way. It got Jesus in trouble then, and it got his followers in trouble centuries later, as it led to Christian persecution based on false (but understandable) claims of cannibalism and bizarre stories of babies baked into communion bread. And it gets us in trouble now, when we find ourselves stumbling around our own theological language for what really happens at the altar. Like last week at our choir camp, when one of our youngest campers looked at me with wide eyes and said with all sincerity, “You shouldn’t drink blood. I don’t think it’s good for you.” I offered some thoughts about how all of this works – about wine and prayer and the real presence of Christ – but honestly, he looked less than convinced.

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t seem particularly concerned about explaining the mechanics of all of this. When the religious leaders ask aloud, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus answers them not with the how, but with the why. Take my flesh because then you will have life in you, because then you can have eternal life, be risen up on the last day, live forever. All good news indeed, but he just keeps pounding out that word – the flesh of the Son of Man, eat my flesh, my flesh is true food. Flesh, flesh, flesh. And is it just me, or is flesh is a word that just gives you the willies. You wouldn’t want a waiter to talk to you about the expertly seared flesh of the cow you were about to eat or the soft flesh of the salmon that’s being prepared for you. Call it a steak, please, or a filet – call it meat, maybe, but not flesh. Flesh is something that quivers or decays, something other and entirely unappetizing.

But flesh is the word Jesus uses here, and Jesus, of course, knows exactly what he’s doing. Because it was flesh that the Israelites craved in the wilderness, the fleshpots of Egypt that they missed with all of their leeks and garlic and meat. It was flesh that the Israelites longed for in the desert instead of just manna. And so Jesus tells his followers that not only is he the true bread that comes down from heaven like manna on the fields, but that his own flesh will satisfy their longings for rich, lasting food. All desires will be satisfied – bread and manna, flesh and meat.

But that word flesh also reminds us of something else – something early and new, a promise made in the prologue to John’s Gospel, that Jesus is not just a prophet or a healer or a feeder or a teacher but God made man – the Word become flesh, human, real, the stuff of you and me. And so when John tells us that Jesus offers us his flesh to eat, he is tying all of his great Gospel together, reminding us that the flesh and blood of the Eucharist is the same flesh and blood of the Incarnation. The flesh born in Bethlehem is the same flesh offered to you and me, on the cross and on the altar.

And this is beautiful. This is glorious. This is a message of powerful, potent hope, of light in the darkness, of God’s purpose being worked out in miraculous and humbling ways. And this is so utterly magnificent that the how of the flesh offered in bread and the blood offered in wine pales in the real presence of the wonder of it all. And Jesus invites us into the very heart of this great mystery – not just to observe it like a snapshot on Instagram but to sit down and to eat, to take this very mystery of God made flesh and flesh given freely into our own weak, undeserving flesh, to absorb this holiness into our own being, to digest it and let it fill us with energy and life. Jesus’ flesh and blood are true food and true drink, a pathway that opens the door for us to abide deeply in him and for him to abide deeply in us.

 And so sit and eat. Hear Jesus tell you to take his flesh and his blood, to take all of it. Eat every morsel and drain the cup to the dregs. Treat this meal less like a delicate sandwich offered on fine china at high tea and more like a hearty stew that you eat by the heaping spoonful and sop up with crusty brown bread. Take it – consume it all, and then come back tomorrow or the next day and consume it again. Find here something true and lasting to gnaw on, something well-aged and wondrous to gulp down. Open your own beautiful, fleshy body to the mystery of the incarnation and the Eucharist and let it abide there, deep within you, this great gift of God that frankly makes no earthly sense but that makes all the difference in the world. Feast on this flesh, on the scandalous self-offering of God and know that when we feel that sense of scandal or shock at what looks like too much love, or too great a gift, or too large a tent, or too intimate an embrace, it’s a pretty good sign that God is there, moving in the world, moving us, showing us what the kingdom of God actually looks like. True food and true drink. A plate of flesh. A cup of blood. Words and a meal to remember.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

16 August 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Is Jesus Good for You?

An acquaintance recently confided that although he had been a Christian all his life, these days (in his middle-age years) he approaches his faith and his religion with all kinds of questions.  I think he expected me to be taken aback by this revelation, as though it were an admission of weakness, and a confession of a failing.  To the contrary, I think it is good and normal to approach both religion and faith with questions at various times of your life – maybe your whole life long.  And one of the most fundamental of those questions is floating near the surface of the Gospel reading this morning, although it may not be immediately evident.

After Jesus’ miraculous feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, a crowd came looking for him, and they were hungry for something.  “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” As though he had not just miraculously fed five thousand people out of thin air, more or less.

Jesus told the clamoring crowd that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 

“Great!” they replied, “give us this bread always.”  And Jesus famously declared to the fickle crowd, in a phrase that would prove to be awkward to set to music, “I am the bread of life.”

“I am the bread of life!”  This is fine as far as it goes.  And we could stand around and wonder what exactly Jesus means by this, except that it is pretty clear from the context that he means that he is the very thing that gives hope in the face of hopelessness, spiritual nourishment in the face of inner starvation, and everlasting life in the face of meaningless death.

There remains a more pressing question, however, that was the underlying issue behind the crowd’s clamoring.  It’s a question that was as poignant a couple of thousand years ago as it is to us today, and that question is this: If Jesus is the bread of life, is Jesus good for you?

Is Jesus good for you?

It is no longer so clear, for instance, that bread is good for you.  I, for one, realize that the less bread I eat the better off I will be – although I love bread and butter, or bread and cheese, or bread and nearly anything.  Unless I am walking the Camino de Santiago and burning calories at a rate of knots, bread equals carbs, and I cannot take it for granted that bread is so good for me.

There was a time, I think, maybe, when people did not have to think much about whether or not Jesus was good for you; just like there was a time when people did not have to think much about whether or not bread is good for you.  But those days are over.  We don’t take very much for granted these days, not even things we once thought were good for us, like butter, or salt, or gluten.  And if Jesus is going to run around telling people that he is the bread of life – or if he expects us to run around telling people that he is the bread of life, then we are probably going to ask at some level, is Jesus good for us?  Does Jesus make us better people?  Does he make us healthier, nicer, smarter?  Do we end up with shinier coats and cleaner teeth?  Does Jesus confer any moral superiority on us?  Do we become better parents, spouses, or workers as a result of our relationship with Jesus?  Will we be any happier because of Jesus?  Any more patient, any prettier, any more virtuous?  Is Jesus good for you?

Many people seem to have concluded that Jesus is not good for them or for you.  To begin with Jesus is so judgmental – or at least he threatens to be.  And nothing is more offensive to a large segment of modern American society than someone who seems judgmental.  “Don’t judge” has become a maxim for our time that requires no further expansion, since its wisdom is unquestioned.  Many people conclude, from the evidence around them, that, in fact, Jesus is not good for you, because he makes you narrow-minded, intolerant, and stupid, if you follow his teachings and belong to his church.  Zen makes you more compassionate, but Jesus makes you a doofus, to put it kindly.

Is Jesus good for you?  By no means is the answer to this question clear to the world, and sometimes not even to the church!  It would appear that what we need are some studies, what we need is some data, what we need is some empirical evidence about whether or not Jesus is good for you; just like we need studies, data, and evidence to determine whether or not gluten is good for you.

The problem is that if we can’t figure out whether or not bread is good for us at this stage of human development, then we will have at least as hard a time figuring out whether or not Jesus is good for us.  Experts will disagree.  The data will be inconclusive.  The studies will be assumed to have been rigged by those who commissioned them.  And ten years from now the conventional wisdom may shift, as it may shift again ten years after that, and ten years after that, etc., etc.  And still the question remains, Is Jesus good for you?

It is tempting to say that the answer depends: that it depends on who you are and what you want in life, out of this world.  Do you want mercy, forgiveness, kindness, justice, peace, generosity, and hope?  Then Jesus is good for you.  It is tempting to throw the ball back in your court like this, as if the question depends on you.  And we often like this way of looking at things because it confirms our sneaking suspicion that the universe revolves around each one of us individually.  By this thinking, Jesus is good for you if you are good for Jesus.  And I suppose that’s alright, as far as it goes.  You do your thing; I’ll do mine.  Go ahead and follow Jesus if you have nothing better to do with your Sunday mornings.  Jesus is good for you if you are good for Jesus.

But this doesn’t sound like tremendously good news to me.  It sounds like pretty good news, or not… depending on you.  And if that’s so, then this way of looking at things doesn’t really tell you anything at all about Jesus.

Is Jesus good for you?

Well, this pulpit is here for a reason, and the reason is this: so that Sunday by Sunday someone may stand here and proclaim that, yes, Jesus is good for you!  Jesus is light, and water, and love, amid a shadowy, parched landscape of fear and distrust.  Light, and water, and love.  The virtues of these elements do not depend on you or on me.  We need them, and they exist in the world by the grace of God: light, and water, and love.  And although we have become a species able to adapt without them for long periods of time, we do so at our own peril.  We stumble over the question, is Jesus good for me? at our own peril, too.

A long time ago, Moses -who had probably had a dysfunctional childhood, and who, as a young man had anger issues so severe that he casually committed murder with his bare hands - found himself face to face (more or less) with God, who appeared to him in a burning bush.  Jesus was there in the bush, whether Moses knew it or not, he was there in the gentle flames that did not consume the bush, and he was there in the voice that spoke to Moses, even if his accent was undetectable to Moses within the thunderous sonorities of God’s voice.

Confused and frightened though he may have been, Moses sensed that whomever this Being was who was speaking to him, he was powerful.  But Moses had seen power before around the courts of Pharoah, and he knew that power was not inherently good.  He’d felt power before in his own hands when he killed a man, and he knew that power was not inherently good.

So here he is facing this powerful Being, whose power is capable of being so soft that it burns with bright flame that nevertheless does not consume the bush.  And Moses must have asked himself, as he took off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy, he must have asked, is this good for me?  He did not yet know that God would lead him and all the Israelites out of slavery.  He did not yet know that God had a promised land flowing with milk and honey to bring him to.  He did not yet know that God would give him commandments of love and justice, and that he, Moses, would forever be associated with those laws.  He only knew that here was this caressing flame, and this powerful voice, and this Presence that was so alluring, so gentle, and so strong.  And I think he must have wondered, Is this good for me?

But you can’t ask a burning bush a question like that; you can’t ask the voice of God a thing like that.  So instead, he asks this: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

And God said to Moses, “I AM…   Tell them I AM has sent me to you.”

You can learn a lot from a burning bush – I wish there were more of them.

For I believe that the answer to the question - is Jesus good for you? - is to be found within the burning bush.

Is Jesus good for you?  I AM, comes the reply, we know not whence – from some caressing flame that burns within the branches of the church, and yet never consumes us.

Over the next several weeks, the church wades around in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, which seems to hear the evangelist repeating over and over Jesus’ declaration that “I am the bread of life: I am.” 

I suppose St. John, too, knew of the pertinence of this question: Is Jesus good for you?  I suppose we are not the first ones to ask it.  Of course in his day, gluten intolerance was as yet unknown, and bread, the staff of life, was an unambiguous gift of the earth and of human labor.  And what they didn’t know about gluten, they made up for with what they knew about burning bushes, and about the name of the One who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light, out of a parched desert of slavery across a river of freedom, and out of a life of fear and distrust into a life of love.

What did he tell Moses his name was? I AM.  I AM.  I AM.

And when they heard Jesus tell them over and over again, “I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.” as John asserts in his Gospel that Jesus repeated again and again, did they not hear the echoes of that holy Name?  And recognize at last the accent once unrecognizable in the burning bush?  And when they asked themselves, as Moses did, and as we do too, and as everyone with questions about faith and religion must do in this complicated world – Is he good for us?  Is Jesus good for us? – did they wink at each other with knowing looks as the answer became so clear: I AM.  I AM.  I AM the bread of life.  I AM.

Is Jesus good for you?

Don’t take my word for it.  Listen to the One who spoke once from the burning bush, and again in the synagogue of Capernaum, and today, I pray, right here on Locust Street.  Is Jesus good for you?

I AM, he says, I am the bread of life.  I AM.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 August 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The end of hostility

The End of Hostility

Father Mullen

He is our peace… he has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2:14)

Although for the past couple of years the Rectory has been home to five or six members of the Servant Year community, it is still the four-footed residents of the household – canine, feline, and murine – that provide me with the best fodder for sermons.  The introduction of a new cat, after the somewhat heart-breaking demise of the last one, has provided me with new reflections on the possibilities of inter-special harmony, since Gus, the new cat, is a much more sociable creature than his predecessor.

On arrival in the Rectory, Gus identified his place in balance of power right away.  He established his dominance over the mouse population with and impressive and immediate efficiency.  And he adopted an appropriate attitude of skittish suspicion toward the two Labrador Retrievers in the house.  But Gus, who has been with us for less than six months, is turning out to be a curious, brave, and assertive cat. For a while he was equal parts nervous and inquisitive about the dogs, and he has been known to find safe perches in high places from which to observe them.

But over the weeks, Gus has steadily narrowed the distance between himself and the dogs, feeling more and more confident and comfortable with less and less space between him and them.  It helps that Gus has realized that he is both faster and more agile than either of the dogs.  He has advanced from watching the dogs safely from an upper landing of the staircase, to lurking around corners to catch glimpses of them, to parking himself on the opposite side of a door against which a dog is resting and playing with the dog’s tail in the gap under the door.  Occasionally Gus would investigate a room recently occupied by the dogs, only to make a hasty exit when they returned to that room, like after a walk.

But very recently Gus surprised me when, as I returned from a walk with both dogs and brought them into my office, I found the cat parked casually on one of the wing chairs in the room, showing no intention whatsoever of vacating the premises.

I myself had elsewhere to be, with no time for complicated social experiments.  I asked Gus if he really meant to stay there with the dogs in the same room, and he glanced at me with a look of steely but casual determination in his eyes.  I put both dogs inside the office with him, and closed the door behind me, wondering what I would find when I returned, but confident that Gus could always find refuge on the mantle or the bookshelves, to which the dogs have no access, being poor climbers of vertical planes.

Amusing as this little scenario is, it also illustrates a quite remarkable refusal on the part of the cat to inhabit an environment of endless hostility.  Despite his initial assessment of the power dynamics of the Rectory, he has apparently suspected that things could change, and that (unlike his predecessor) he need not live in a culture of hostility and fear his entire life.  This is a curious and noble insight for a cat to have.  Why, then, is it so very hard for us humans to see the world in this way?

Whoever it was who wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians, picking up on the tradition of St. Paul, saw in Jesus’ ministry of love on the Cross something like this insight: that we do not need to live our lives enmeshed in hostile relationships with one another, and that among the reasons Jesus gave his life was to make this lesson available to us.  “For he is our peace… he has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”  The writer of these words was addressing the rift between Jew and Gentile, and the question of whether it could ever be spanned, and I have to admit I wonder where his brave and insightful answer came from.

In the Gospel this morning, we hear how Jesus was followed by a large crowd.  Matthew tells us that Jesus “had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”  But Matthew does not tell us what Jesus taught them.

It’s an unusual thing about the Christian faith and tradition that the central figure of our religion provided no written record of his teaching (although he could have), and that the written record about him is mostly narrative, and not much instruction on purity, rule, or commandment.  When people flocked to Jesus he taught them many things – but what were those things?  What was Jesus teaching?  And why did no one bother to write it down?  Is it all covered elsewhere in the Scriptures – like in the Sermon on the Mount?  Were his other teachings so commonplace that no one thought it was worth the time to write them down?

Or, I wonder if perhaps Jesus sat there with his followers teaching them about cats and dogs.  Maybe in a corner of the synagogue, or in someone’s house there was a cat curled up in the warm crescent of a large dog’s belly, the cat’s head snuggled under the dog’s chin. 

And maybe Jesus, inhabiting a world of hostility, as he did, and teaching in a religious tradition pockmarked with hostility, as it was, (just like ours), when he was asked questions about purity, rule, and commandment, pointed to the cat nestled in the embrace of the sleeping dog, and said, “Little children, you remember that the prophet said that the ‘wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’  You have thought that this was poetic license, but I tell you that your heavenly Father wants you to learn to live just like that dog and that cat: without any hostility between you and any other nations, language, peoples, or tongues.”

It’s hard to teach that kind of lesson (of peace and love) while pontificating about purity, rules, and commandment.  And, as Pope Francis recently pointed out to a gathering of children, this kind of peace-nik teaching will always find its detractors, because almost no one gets rich on peace.

No wonder no one wrote it down if Jesus ever taught like this.  This is a children’s tale of puppies and kittens, that grown-ups do well to out-grow, and it is foolishness to pretend otherwise.  The world is a messy complicated place, and hostility is just a part of it.  Far better to teach your children how to stand their ground when it is threatened, how to claim their strength and their power, how to know who’s side they are on, than to point to sleeping pets and find a lesson there.

One thing about domesticated pets is that they are comfortably middle-class.  Their hierarchy of needs is generally well met, which is why they find the romantic notion of nature “red in tooth and claw” so incongruous with their existence.  No dog, no cat is looking to make any money in the military industrial complex that has become a humming engine at the center of the world we inhabit, and that depends on hostility, or at least the promise of hostility, to keep it running.

Someone was selling arms in Jesus’ day too.  Someone was getting rich by exploiting hostilities in his day – there is nothing new under the sun.

And people flocked to Jesus, and he had compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.  No doubt some of them wanted to take up arms, and wave flags, and claim the heritage of the house of David that had once been mighty in battle.

And Jesus taught them many things.  We don’t know exactly what he taught them – much of it is lost to posterity.  But it seems pretty clear that he did not arm them, or give them target practice. 

It’s far more believable, I’d say, that he taught them about a brave little cat, who found his place within the balance of power, and then dared to change that balance, not by challenging the strength and size of his canine neighbors, but by asserting his desire to be close to them, to pose no threat to them, and to insist that they pose no threat to him either…

…by refusing to live in a context of permanent fear and hostility, and teaching his two new friends that if they lay quietly near him, they could hear him purr.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 July 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia