YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT PENTECOST 12 PROPER 15 YEAR B AUGUST 16, 2015 BECKY ROBBINS-PENNIMAN CHURCH OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, DUNEDIN, FL COLLECT OF THE DAY Ever-loving God, your son gives himself as living bread for the life of the world. Fill us with such a knowledge of his presence that we may be strengthened and sustained by his risen life to serve you continually, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. 1 KINGS 2:12, 3:3 14 Solomon sat on the throne of his father David, and his royal power was well established. Now Solomon loved the Lord by walking in the laws of his father David, with the exception that he also sacrificed and burned incense at the shrines. The king went to the great shrine at Gibeon in order to sacrifice there. He used to offer a thousand entirely burned offerings on that altar. The Lord appeared to Solomon at Gibeon in a dream at night. God said, Ask whatever you wish, and I ll give it to you. Solomon responded, You showed so much kindness to your servant my father David when he walked before you in truth, righteousness, and with a heart true to you. You ve kept this great loyalty and kindness for him and have now given him a son to sit on his throne. And now, Lord my God, you have made me, your servant, king in my father David s place. But I m young and inexperienced. I know next to nothing. But I m here, your servant, in the middle of the people you have chosen, a large population that can t be numbered or counted due to its vast size. Please give your servant a discerning mind in order to govern your people and to distinguish good from evil, because no one is able to govern this important people of yours without your help. It pleased the Lord that Solomon had made this request. God said to him, Because you have asked for this instead of requesting long life, wealth, or victory over your enemies asking for discernment so as to acquire good judgment I will now do just what you said. Look, I hereby give you a wise and understanding mind. There has been no one like you before now, nor will there be anyone like you afterward. I now also give you what you didn t ask for: wealth and fame. There won t be a king like you as long as you live. And if you walk in my ways and obey my laws and commands, just as your father David did, then I will give you a very long life. PSALM 111 Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation. Great are the deeds of the Lord! they are studied by all who delight in them. His work is full of majesty and splendor, and his righteousness endures for ever. He makes his marvelous works to be remembered; the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. He gives food to those who fear him; he is ever mindful of his covenant. He has shown his people the power of his works in giving them the lands of the nations. The works of his hands are faithfulness and justice; all his commandments are sure. They stand fast for ever and ever, because they are done in truth and equity. He sent redemption to his people; he commanded his covenant for ever; holy and awesome is his Name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; those who act accordingly have a good understanding; his praise endures for ever. COLOSSIANS 1:9 12 Because of this, since the day we heard about you, we haven t stopped praying for you and asking for you to be filled with the knowledge of God s will, with all wisdom and spiritual understanding. We re praying this so that you can live lives that are worthy of the Lord and pleasing to him in every way: by producing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God; by being strengthened through his glorious might so that you endure everything and have patience; and by giving thanks with joy to the Father. He made it so you could take part in the inheritance, in light granted to God s holy people. Copyright notices: Copyright notices: The Scripture text (except for the Psalm) is from the Common English Bible, CEB, Copyright 2010, 2011 by Common English Bible. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all other content is original and copyrighted by Becky Robbins-Penniman, 2015. All rights reserved.
2 JOHN 6:51 58 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Then the Jews debated among themselves, asking, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Jesus said to them, I assure you, unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. SONG OF THE DAY: I Am the Bread of Life *********************************************************************************** When I was in high school, I helped teach Sunday School. An adult and I were in with the real little kids like first grade. The format every week was about the same: we told a story using a flannel board, then the kids colored a picture or made something out of macaroni and tongue depressors. It was easy duty. I thought I was pretty good at it. One Sunday, the usual adult was sick, and I was put in charge of the class. No sweat. Surely, I was smarter than a first-grader. I was smart, but not very wise. One of those little guys asked me a question about Holy Communion. It did NOT go well as I began to explain to him how we were eating Jesus body and blood. First his chin trembled, then his eyes filled with tears, and then he began to cry, with big hiccupping sobs, I-I-I DON T WANT TO BITE JESUS! I-I-I DON T WANT TO DRINK BLOOD! I handled the situation with great maturity. I told the other high school girl with me to go get the kid s mom. Let her deal with it. But, wasn t the kid voicing something we have all wondered? All this talk of flesh and blood is at least weird, if not actually creepy. I mean, isn t that what zombies do, eat people? Eventually, as we mature and become capable of abstract thought, we just consign the whole mess to the backs of our heads, and just stop asking any more difficult questions that might make our chins tremble, too. So, if Jesus wasn t organizing the first Attack of the Zombies, what did he mean when he told us to eat his flesh and drink his blood? Get your pew bibles and turn to page 862, to the Gospel of John, Ch. 1. Find verse 14: And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father s only son, full of grace and truth. This gospel starts right off right with the amazing, scandalous claim that Almighty God put skin on and came to live as a human being, flesh and blood like each one of us, and that this incarnation, this en-fleshment is actually part of God s GLORY. That s a very affirming view of what it means to be human. Now flip a few pages to page 867, to Chapter 6. We read the story of the feeding of the 5,000 a few weeks ago. In my sermon that day, I said this was actually the first Eucharist.
This feeding of the 5,000 was a sign of God s way of crazy abundance, and God s care for humanity ALL humanity, not just some. Right after feeding the 5,000, take a look at Chapter 6, verse 16: Jesus walks on the rough waves of the sea out to the disciples, who are in a boat buffeted by strong winds. This is a sign of how God comes to us during the storms of our lives, and when Jesus is with us, we need not ever be afraid. Then, we see, the boat goes ashore, and a crowd gathers around Jesus. That same crowd is around for the rest of the chapter. Beginning in verse 26, Jesus begins talking about bread. A LOT. The crowd wants to know about actual, literal bread, and literal manna from heaven, both of which are true enough. Jesus talks about those, but then calls himself bread. As he is not Poppin Fresh, the Pillsbury Dough Boy this is not a literal truth, but spiritual truth. As usual, the crowd has trouble with this. Even though they are pretty dense, in v. 44, Jesus says has come from God to draw people to God even these boneheads to give eternal life to all who believe, who trust in him. In verse 48, Jesus connects himself to manna, bread from heaven, by saying he is the bread of life who feeds people, not for a day, but for ever that the bread that he gives for the life of the world is his flesh. This is the same flesh that we first heard about in Chapter 1: the Word made flesh, God is en-fleshed in the life of Jesus; God the Son lives a real human life, and in our lesson today we are taught by God that the Son gives himself for all humans so that all the world may have abundant life, eternal life. Not only did the Son give his physical life to the point of death, the Son continues to give himself, his very life, to everyone, by inviting all humanity to abide in him, and he in them. How? There are only a few ways for what is outside a human to get inside without a wound of some kind: one is to breathe it, another is to eat it. Jesus talks about both in the Gospel of John. In Chapter 20 of John, which we read on Pentecost Sunday, Jesus breathes on his disciples, and the Holy Spirit enters them. That is why we begin our time of worship with quiet breathing: because the Spirit is everywhere, and we are inviting the Holy Spirit into our selves through the act of simply breathing. 1 God literally enters into us. In the same way, Jesus enters into his disciples by giving them his flesh and blood, which he says they should eat. This reminds me of a terrible joke. A pig farmer invited his friend to come for dinner. They ate a delicious ham with all the fixings. After dinner, the farmer brought in a three-legged pig who sang for them, then played the piano. He was terrific! 3 1 See my sermon of Pentecost, 2015: Just Breathe, http://karposkalos.ning.com/profiles/blogs/just-breathe-sermon
4 The farmer said, apologetically, that the pig used to dance, too, but couldn t since he lost his leg. The friend said, Gosh, that s too bad. How d he lose his leg? The farmer said, "Well, a pig like that, you don't want to eat all at once." Now, Jesus knows no one is about to munch human body parts. That is why, before telling people they must eat his flesh, Jesus goes to great effort to first equate himself with the bread of heaven, with living bread. We all understand bread, eat bread or wish we could. Not only that, God and bread have a long history in Jewish tradition. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God gave manna, bread from heaven, to feed the fleeing Israelites. God gave his bread to his people so they would not die physically. Now, in Jesus, God is giving his bread to his people so they will not die spiritually. By eating this bread, God gets inside us and dwells in us. The astonishing beauty of this is that how it wraps into a single whole the literal AND the symbolic, the concrete and the metaphorical. By eating Jesus, the true bread from heaven, we have eternal life. And blood? In Jewish tradition, blood is equated with life. Why do we use wine as our physical symbol for blood? Because at the Passover meal, wine is drunk. Rather a lot of it. The Hebrews drank wine before their long journey in the wilderness. (Say, I never put those two things together before....) Anyway, in the wilderness, they got the manna the bread from heaven. So we drink wine, but just a little will do nicely. Finally, in the Gospel of John, Jesus also calls himself living water, so we use that, too. When we eat the bread of heaven, and drink the cup of life, the flesh and blood of the Son of God, the Human One, we both literally and symbolically have God s life, abundant life, eternal life, within us, abiding in us. And as I have said time and again, as we do this, day after day, week after week, year after year, God is transforming us from the inside out. Truly, we are what we eat. All that is amazing and wonderful, but there s one more thing. People who eat the flesh and blood of Jesus, the true food and drink, who have God abiding in them, giving them eternal life, are supposed to do the same thing in our own way through the way we live: we are to be food for others. Not just food, but a particular kind of food: fruit. In the letter to the Colossians, the followers of Jesus are told that they are to produce fruit in every good work. In John Chapter 15, Jesus talks a lot about fruit. He says he is the vine, and we are the branches that bear fruit. What kind of fruit? Grapes. You don t sit around looking at grapes. You eat them, or make them into wine to drink. Now, I have a question for us to consider: I ve said we are what we eat. Eating Jesus, the true bread from heaven, gives eternal life. On Sunday, we eat the Body of Christ, the bread of heaven and drink the Bloody of Christ, the cup of salvation. So, at that moment, we ARE those things, too. Right after church on Sunday, that s what people would get if they ate you then.
5 BUT, after we leave, we have the choice to and eat and drink other things. After Sunday, what else do we invite into our selves to become part of who we are? I said that breathing and eating are two ways for what s outside to get in. Do you nourish your body with exercise? take deep breaths of the Spirit? Do you keep yourself healthy with good, wonderful food? I admit that my fruit probably has a fairly chocolaty flavor. In addition to breathing and eating, we invite things inside through what we see, hear and touch. We are what we stuff into our lives every day; it becomes our fruit. What do you invite inside through your eyes? What do you watch on TV? What do you read? Are they images of peace, grace, compassion and patience? Whose voices do you listen to? Are they voices of hope, wisdom, understanding, and thanksgiving? Look at what Solomon did. He, as David s son, could have anything. He listened to God, and what did Solomon ask God to stuff his life with? Wisdom, understanding, discernment, not the wealth, fame or military victory that most kings desire. Are we wise like Solomon? When your life touches other lives, does it proclaim the Gospel? Do your neighbors experience love? justice? dignity? respect? How about the touches you receive from others? Do you demand to be treated with the respect and dignity that all God s children deserve, or do you put up with violence and abuse? We are what we eat. We are what we stuff into our lives every day. What fruit are you becoming? If we spend our days stuffing our eyes and ears with fear and hatred, stuffing our bodies with junk food, our days with violence, stuffing our time with selfish activities and ignoring our neighbors, closing our ears and eyes and hands to their needs or our own, what kind of fruit will we be? what would people get if they ate us? Isaiah 5:1-4 has an answer for that: we will be sour, bitter grapes, because we are what we eat. Do you want to be a sour, bitter grape? If not, how about we stuff ourselves, as it says in Colossians, with the knowledge of God s will, with all wisdom and spiritual understanding, living lives that are worthy of the Lord and pleasing to him... If Jesus walked in, would you really want to invite him to sit next to you on the couch and let him watch what you are watching? If he asked what book you were reading, would you want first to wrap it inside a comic book? How about we stuff ourselves by doing every good work, growing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened through his glorious might and enduring everything and having patience. If we are what we eat, and that s what we are stuffed with, what kind of fruit will we be? What would people get if they ate us? The kind of fruit that goes great with living bread and resurrection wine. Bon appétit!