News You Can Use (Mark 8:27 - 38)

     When I began to prepare to preach on this passage, I was delighted to find that a recent archeological dig found a recording of a news report about this very incident! Unfortunately, there’s no video because it was before the invention of TV.

Thaddeus: This is Thaddeus Ames, Jerusalem Radio News, coming to you from our studios in the heart of the royal city. Tonight on JRN, an adorable donkey meets an even more adorable little girl. Marcus Elijah—great, great, great, great grandson of the prophet—marries an Edomite, shocking friends and members of this ancient, historic family.. And one-named superstar Phoebe is expecting a little bundle of felafel, and you’ll never guess who the father is . . . well, ok it’s her husband . . . But first: is he or isn’t he? Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter’s son from Nazareth, has been healing and teaching and exorcising his way across Palestine. Many observers think he could be preparing for a run for Messiah, a notion which he has until now discouraged. But a recent incident has fueled speculation once again. JRN correspondent Mordecai Jones is embedded at Caesarea Philippi with the Jesus entourage. Mordecai?

Mordecai: Thank you, Thaddeus. I’m outside the compound where Jesus and his retinue are staying, and all is quiet in this quaint village perched high above the Jordan valley. But though things seem calm, sources within the disciples tell me deliberations continue into the night. The latest round of controversy began when Jesus asked about his name recognition, how he is viewed by what we presume are potential voters: “Who are people saying that I am?”. And let me tell you, Thaddeus, the answers were all over the map. Thomas said people thought he was John the Baptist, even though everybody knows he was beheaded. James said “I heard a couple of shepherds say he’s Elijah, come back to life, or maybe one of the prophets, like Micah or Jeremiah.” Everybody laughed at that, because nobody who’d been with Jesus any length of time could believe he was a prophet.

Mordecai: But I have to say, Thaddeus, that Jesus looked a little worried, or maybe concerned, or maybe he just wanted a little reassurance, because he asked them “But who do you think I am?” And that’s when Peter—Jesus’ spokesman and most ardent follower—stepped up and said “You’re the Messiah, of course!” And immediately Jesus ordered them not to say anything to anybody. Back to you, Thaddeus.

Thaddeus: Thank you, Mordecai. Tell me: what do you make of all this? Why, if he’s running for Messiah, would he tell his followers not to say anything? You’d think just the opposite.

Mordecai:  Why indeed, Thaddeus . . . seems he’s not as interested in running as some potential backers might like. And what he said next muddied the water even more. He told them that he must—must, he said, as if it were a necessity—that he must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and scribes—basically the entire religious establishment—and be killed and after three days rise again. Those were his exact words, Thaddeus: “he will undergo great suffering and be killed.”

Thaddeus: That’s a stunning prediction, Mordecai. Not very reassuring to potential voters. In a recent Pew survey, fully eighty-seven percent of respondents wanted a Messiah like the last one: a mighty warrior who will lead the Israelites to glory. Predicting you’ll get killed doesn’t fit those expectations, to say the least. What could he have meant by that?

Mordecai:  It’s not completely clear, Thaddeus, but one thing is certain: it made Peter very angry. He took Jesus aside—grabbed him by the arm, no less—and tough they were out of earshot, it was obvious that he was rebuking the boss. And it didn’t make Jesus too happy, either: he immediately turned and looked at the others, to make sure they heard, and rebuked Peter right in front of them: “Get behind me, Satan”—that’s another direct quote, Thaddeus, “get behind me Satan, ‘cause you’re setting your mind on human things, and not those of the divine.”

Thaddeus:  Amazing, Mordecai, just amazing . . . he likened his trusted aid and confidant to Beelzebub. The adversary. The accuser. A stunning development in the Jesus campaign.

Mordecai:  Verily, Thaddeus, verily. And I can say that it really shook Peter up, too. Listen to an interview he gave JRN not long after:

Mordecai:  Peter, were you shocked when Jesus called you Satan?

Peter: Yes, yes I was. We had spent months together, Mordecai, months. I’d been with him through healings, exorcisms, Pharisee controversies, everything. I thought we were close, closer than just mere teacher and disciple, at least. Guess I was wrong.

Mordecai:  What did you talk about when you took him aside?

Peter:  Well . . . I admit I did most of the talking. I told him how disappointed I was that he spoke of going to his death, just like that, as if it were a foregone conclusion. We disciples want a Messiah—I’d just called him that, you know—we disciples want a traditional Messiah, you know? One who’ll kick some Roman booty and not look back. Not some, some . . . patsy, who’ll let himself be taken and killed.

Mordecai:  In other words, you rebuked your teacher.

Peter:  I suppose . . . if you want to put it that way. But he didn’t have to call me the devil.

Mordecai:  What did he mean when he said you were putting your mind on things of the world and not those of the divine?

Peter:  I have no idea. Maybe wanting him not to die? How is that “of the world and not of the divine?” And doesn’t the divine want us to be free and independent? After all, we are God’s people, we’ve been chosen and everything.

Mordecai:  All good questions, Peter. Thank you for your time.

Peter:  My pleasure.

Thaddeus:  Stunning interview, Mordecai, simply stunning.

Mordecai:  Indeed, and to make things worse, shortly after that Jesus called a crowd together and told them things that were pretty peculiar for a man who would be Messiah. Things like if any want to follow him they must deny themselves and take up their cross. And people who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will save it , which when you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense. And how many citizens of Judea want to deny themselves anything?

Thaddeus:  Not many, I’ll wager. Well. Stunning developments in the Jesus campaign. Next, Timmy was in the well, but a plucky dog—a collie, it is believed—has rescued him. But first, a word from our sponsor Coliseum Toothpaste, the Roman way to brush your teeth.

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Well. That is, ah, stunning. It seems the media back then could be just as clueless as they can be today. More to the point, it’s pretty obvious that the disciples, if Peter is any indication, are clueless as well. Of course, this shouldn’t come as any surprise to any of us, they never really get it, from the day they’re called from their homes and jobs and families to the day when they scatter like quail at the crucifixion.

And this episode points out that they really don’t know him at all. Peter says he’s the Messiah—note that Jesus doesn’t confirm it, just tells him to shut up—but as the story continues, it becomes painfully obvious just what the major sticking point is. Like our newscasters, Peter has a completely mistaken idea about what kind of Messiah Jesus will make. Human society, maybe even human nature wanted a warlord, a conqueror, a political leader who will make Israel great again, like it was under King David, the greatest of all to hold that job. Like any occupied nation, Israel chafed at the rule of their overlords. So much so that several decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, the Israelites revolted. Which turned out pretty much as you might expect, with Jerusalem in ruins.

That’s what Jesus meant when he told Peter his mind was on things of the world: it’s code for thinking in human terms, in ego terms. In terms of what he might call the self. And we all do it, don’t we? Or at least, not wanting to speak for anyone else, I do . . . like a lot of folks, I tend to think in terms of winners and losers, getting up the old ladder of success. It extends to our country, too: we love thinking of ourselves as the greatest nation on earth, even as people in every other nation think the same about theirs.

But beyond all that, this passage is about the mental pictures we have about something or someone, the image or idea of a person versus the reality. Who do you think I am, Jesus asked the disciples, what image or idea about me do you have? We get some idea about somebody or something, and it colors our all our thinking, and from there, our actions. Peter’s idea of Jesus was so at odds with the reality that he reacted violently when confronted with the truth, he pulled Jesus aside and rebuked his rabbi and friend, the man who had given him new purpose and new life.

What images of Jesus do you have. Maybe it’s Jesus the free-marketeer, defender of the capitalist way. Or perhaps Jesus the purveyor of prosperity doctrine, which says we are prosperous because we’re good, because we’ve done what God likes. Or Jesus the social justice crusader, or—my new favorite—Jesus the sage, who out-Buddhas the Buddha himself. The point is, we all have concepts and notions of who Jesus is, and they mediate how we as Christ-followers behave towards ourselves, others, and the rest of creation. Today’s passage shows the consequences of that kind of misconception.

And speaking of Buddhists, Zen master Lin-ji once famously said “If you see the Buddha on your way, kill him.” What he meant by that is that if we have a concept or notion about the Buddha—or anybody, really—that prevents us from seeing reality, that prevents us from experiencing that reality, we must extinguish that concept. And in our passage, Peter needs to extinguish (or “kill”) his notion of the Christ as military leader and earthly king, because it’s getting in the way of his seeing, his experiencing the truth.

How do we do that? How do we extinguish our concepts and notions that get in the way of seeing and, more importantly, experiencing the risen Christ? Prayer. Prayer and practice. Practice and prayer. Every time we prayerfully discern what Christ would have us do, then do it, we participate in his life, we experience it, and somehow—and don’t ask me how—our false ideas and notions slip a little more away.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, as the old hymn goes, but do more than that: experience him, do what he did, that’s what he meant by giving up ourselves and following him. Those who do will find that the things of the earth, our ideas and concepts our ego has constructed, will go strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace. Amen.

Border Crossings (Mark 7:24 - 37)

     Jesus was tired.  Weary.  Worn out.  Done in. He was weary to the bone, and what he did when it got to him was what a lot of us do, and that’s get away from it all.   He went up on a mountain, or got into a boat on the ocean . . . just like we do, he escaped from his responsibilities as teacher and went away for awhile.  This time, he goes into the region of Tyre and enters a house, and he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s there.

Why was this a getaway, you ask?  Well, although today we don’t generally know the geography well enough, Mark’s audience would’ve been keenly aware of this point: Tyre was Gentile territory.  So was Sidon, for that matter, where he goes in the second half to heal the deaf man.  Tyre and Sidon were in Gentile territory, and so Jesus was retreating from his own people—remember, Jesus was a not a Gentile but a Jew.  And that he should do that was entirely understandable:  he’d not been making much headway with them at all . . . he’d fed a bunch of them—Mark says it was 5,000 men, which meant upwards of 15,000 people total—and he’d taught the crowds about the kingdom of God.  He’d healed the sick with such compassion that wherever he went, people brought them and laid them at his feet.

And then came the Jewish leaders, and it was like cold water on it all: here he was, feeding and healing and teaching and leading, and religious folk were concerned that his disciples were eating without washing up.  As we saw last week, it was a little more serious than that: their tradition—not the Torah itself, mind you, but their interpretation of it—their tradition made it mandatory that everyone washed up before supper, and truth be told, it derived from the purity laws in the Torah, about what was clean and unclean, but it was picky, you know?  It’s like what can happen in a church that’s been around for awhile, and after a great celebration, a great evidence of God’s acting in and around it, and people come up and complain about the little, picky stuff, like, oh,  the bulletin had a mistake, or somebody forgot to pick up something or clean up after themselves . . . and what it means is that they’re not happy, usually about the way things are going, but they dare not say it, so their irritation comes out in the picky stuff.

And because Jesus knew what was what, he knew what was going on: the synagogue leaders couldn’t complain about healing and feeding and teaching, so they went to the little stuff, but he knew they weren’t buying into the program, the leaders of his own religion: he’d been out ministering, and seeing the power of God working in mighty ways, and they come up to him and say: “uh, the disciples didn’t wash their hands . . . and they doubtless didn’t clean up the communion bread, either, or put the kitchen back into order.”  And you’ll remember that right before our passage, right before he retreats to the land of the Gentiles, where there were no pesky Pharisees, Jesus gets into a long, argument with them—and to fully appreciate our passage, it’s important to note that the argument is all about purity, about holiness, about what makes a person that way and what makes her not, or—more subversively—what makes a people pure and what makes them not.  And Jesus does something shocking in that conversation with the synagogue leaders, he tells them that it isn’t what goes into people that makes them unclean . . . and the implications of this are so shattering to the ancient worldview that Mark says it outright: by doing this, by saying it wasn’t what goes into people that makes them unclean, he declared all food clean.  Oy vey.

So anyway: this wrangling with his own people, with the very people he came to free, was very tiring, and Jesus was heartsick and in need of a respite from it all, so he goes on a retreat to the land where his people weren’t, to Tyre and Sidon, the land of the Gentiles, and in Tyre he tries to hole up in a house, but—as do many of his attempts to get away—it doesn’t work.  Even in the land of the unclean, the land where people wouldn’t know a messiah from a hole in the ground, he couldn’t get away.  A woman whose little daughter was dying came and bowed down at his feet.

And in telling this story, all of a sudden Mark shifts our attention away from Jesus onto the woman, as if he wants his readers—back there in the first century and us here in the twenty first—to be very clear who she is.  And the first thing we notice is what she does: she falls down at his feet.  She gives him deference, she recognizes him for a man of power.  Does she know he’s the messiah?  No. She’s a Gentile.  Does she care that he’s the messiah?  Nope.  But she has hope, she’s heard of this man, even in Tyre, and she has hope that Jesus can save her little girl.  Would any of us do any less?  I don’t think so . . . and the Syrophoenician woman must have been desperate, at the end of her rope to even approach this bumpkin Jewish preacher.  For that was how he appeared to her: the Jews, with their insistence on only one God, were viewed as quaint by many of the more sophisticated Gentiles.

And she was probably sophisticated, or at least wealthy: when she goes home, after Jesus has healed her daughter, we see that her child is in a bed, and only the most well-off could afford one of those.  But for Jesus’ part, from the perspective of his faith, she had more than one strike against her: first of all, she was Syrophoenician, a Gentile, and it was greatly frowned upon for him to have any truck whatsoever with her because of that, a teacher was not even expected to be in the same room with an outsider like her, but the second strike was that she was a woman, and that by itself would have gotten him in trouble, being in the same room with a woman, alone. . . and you remember those Pharisee scolds?  The ones who got mad just because Jesus and his disciples hadn’t washed their hands?  Well, they would’ve gone off the deep end over this.  The fact that Jesus even had spoke with her was, like, the worst.

And the brazenness of it all, the unclean, foreign woman, having the temerity, the chutz-pah, the gall to approach a teacher like Jesus.  Women didn’t approach teachers, they weren’t even allowed to sit at their feet.  Good Jewish women knew their place . . . no wonder Ezra and Nehemiah were so gosh-awful insistent that good Jewish boys marry only good Jewish girls.  And here this Syrophoenician hussy was, begging the master, the Teacher to heal her daughter.

So you get the picture: right after wrangling with his own people about what’s clean and unclean, and declaring all food clean, he goes off for a rest and he’s accosted by somebody who is the walking embodiment of unclean.  So maybe he can be forgiven if his response is a little snippy.

But is it?  Is it really snippy?  He answers this woman with a theological point that is entirely correct, from a Jewish standpoint: “Let the children”—that’s the Jewish people, the children of God—“be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  It was common theology that Jesus came first for the Jews, and then the Gentiles.  Jesus even says something along those lines over in Matthew.  And unlike these days, when we’re uncomfortable at the thought that Jesus would call anyone a dog, Mark’s audience would have thought “Quite right.  Quite right.”  The analogy—for that’s all it is—the analogy is very apt: the Jews are the children of God, and they come first, and everybody else is inferior.

And over the years, everybody—including yours truly, I know it’s hard to believe—has gotten hung up on this . . . how could Jesus gave called this poor woman a dog?  Well, we say, times were different, which is true, and only we in today’s world would get upset about this, and that’s true as well, but all of this misses a huge point:  that Jesus answers her at all!  She’s a woman, remember?  Not eligible to be taught like males at all, much less engaged in rabbinic argument.  Regardless of the analogy Jesus uses—and granted, it’s one that doesn’t sound too good to our ears—isn’t the point surely that he answers her at all?  It’s this that would have shocked Mark’s audience, the congregation to which he wrote his Gospel, not the dog remark.  Jesus—a teacher, whom Mark’s people believed to be The teacher, you understand, the anointed Son of God—in a theological debate with a gentile and a woman. He engages her in theological debate, just like he did the Pharisees, just like he does men, he engages with her in rabbinic badinage.  In other words, he treats her like an equal!

And while we say “Quite right, why shouldn’t he?” Mark’s first-century auditors’ heads would have exploded, it was so outside the pale, it so overturned the rules of the world.  And because she answered him well, with an answer that showed she understood her real place, that she understood her place in the Kingdom of God, her child was healed.  Far from punishing her, far from cursing her as in “how dare you say anything argumentative to the master”—as doubtless his disciples would have said—he says “because you have said this, your child has been healed.”  The Syrophoenician woman’s child was healed because her mother was already participating in the Kingdom of God.

I’ve made a lot of the timeline in this sermon, of where this fits into the overall scheme of things, the overall flow of Jesus ministry, because I think it is absolutely pivotal.  This story—and the one after it, also about a healing in Gentile territory—comes as part of a discussion of purity, of what is clean and what is not, what is common and what is not, and it’s bookended by stories of great feeding and healing . . . the timeline goes like this: Jesus feeds the 5,000, he heals and teaches all over Galilee, he engages in theological argument with the Pharisees over who’s pure in which he implicitly declares all food pure, then he engages in theological argument with the avatar of impute, the ultimate outsider, an unclean woman with an unclean, demon-possessed daughter, then he declares them pure, and after healing another Gentile, he feeds another crowd—in the next chapter—only this time they’re Gentiles, and this time there are 6,000, there being after all more Gentiles in the world than Jews.

And it’s clear to me what has happened: Jesus first declares all food pure, then he declares all people pure, women and foreigners and outsiders, people not like the male, ruling class of religious people of the day.  Jesus declared all people pure, all people wanted, all people clean, in that little scene with the Syrophoenician woman and her sick child.

Jesus declared all food clean, and we modern Christians have no trouble following that . . . most of us love our bacon, after all.  But why do we have so much trouble following the other? Go into any protestant church, any Catholic church, for that matter, and look around.  Who is not there?  Who are not in positions of power, in position of authority, and who just flat-out isn’t there?  Jesus Christ has declared all peoples pure, but the church came along not too many years later and begun shutting folks back out once again.  The most obvious example are women: Jesus engaged a woman as an equal, as a rabbi, as a leader of the synagogue, and yet most Christians in the world belong to churches that exclude them from ordained leadership.  That’s just the most obvious example, I’m sure you can think of others . . . who are the Syrophoenician women of the modern Christian church?

But as an old preaching professor of mine used to say, always leave ‘em with the gospel, and there is good news in this passage, and it’s the same as that which convicts us, to use a good old Baptist phrase.  Jesus declared all people pure, the Syrophoenicians and the Greeks, Jews and Gentiles.  Good, church-going community pillars and murderers on death row.  Jesus declared everybody pure and therefore welcome in the Kingdom of God, welcome to participate in the life-giving nature of his reign on Earth.  And the good news, of course, is that that also includes us.  Amen.

Forest and Trees (Mark 7:1 - 23)

     Amy Howe, a parish associate at a Memphis church, tells a story a lot of pastors can relate to. She came into her office one Sunday morning to find a note on her desk: “It seems that our youth don’t know how to spell any better than they know the Bible.” When she looked out her door, she could see the offending specimen: a bulletin board created to welcome church members back to Christian Education. It was a happy-looking thing, brightly colored and flamboyant, and it invited everyone to attend “Sunday Skool,” spelled S-k-o-o-l. Reverend Howe said the misspelling was obviously done to attract attention, and admits to being irritated about the note because she knew for a fact that the youth had sacrificed part of their Saturday to make a welcoming banner. And most of us pastors can relate to this because most of us have had it happen to us, some petty complaint that completely ignores the big picture.

And I think Jesus feels a bit irritated at the Pharisees’ and scribes’ complaint. They come upon him and the disciples having dinner, in a moment of relaxation, and some of them haven’t washed their hands! And rather than saying “what’s for supper?” or “excuse us for disturbing you,” they ask “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” They completely miss the forest for the trees, they miss the deeper message: Jesus’ followers had sacrificed a lot to follow him. Some have given up families, some careers, and others worldly status. It would only be understandable if Jesus were a little ticked off on their behalf.

Beyond that, he probably knows what most pastors do, that when a complaint is that petty, it’s rarely about what the complaint is about. In the case of Pastor Amy, it may have been jealousy about too much money or pastoral attention on the youth, or the youth director, or even the pastor, and in Jesus’ case, well, the Pharisees were never his biggest fans.

Anyway, Jesus knows a teachable moment when he sees one. Quoting Isaiah, he says “This people”—Ouch! This people!—honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” And Jesus isn’t dissing the Torah here, he isn’t downplaying the received Law of God . . . it’s not commanded by scriptures that everybody wash their hands (and dishes and pots and pans) before they eat, just the priests. But the Pharisees had generalized it to include everybody, and that’s how Jesus can say they’re “teaching human precepts as doctrine.”

And you can hear Jesus’ irritation in his reply: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites,” and that’s not any nicer an accusation in those days than it is today. It comes from the Greek words for “acting out a theatrical role” and “pretending,” and refers to the disconnect between the moral values and standards that we espouse and those that we actually practice in our behavior.

But how’s that hypocrisy? How is extrapolating from scripture to additional rules—something every denomination has done since time immemorial—how is that not practicing what you preach? He goes on, in an unmistakably sarcastic vein: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!” And as example he uses an apparently common practice of denying support to your parents because you’ve declared resources Corban, or dedicated to God.

And that’s clearly hypocrisy in Jesus’ book, because of the commandments in the Law to honor your father and mother—those are clearly from God, they’re in the Scripture, for Pete’s sake! They profess to follow the commandments of God, yet do not honor their father and mother. I guess it’s hypocrisy in my book as well.

And Jesus doesn’t like hypocrisy one tiny, little bit. Don’t be like the hypocrites, he says, who sound a trumpet before themselves, who pray loudly in public, who spread ashes on themselves when they fast so they can get that fashionable starving-waif look. He calls them "whitewashed tombs:” pure on the outside, dead on the inside. Oy vey!

Jesus knows that few things can derail the mission of God faster than hypocrisy. If people see that you don’t practice what you preach, then . . . well. When I talk to ex-church-goers, or never-been-churchgoers, the number one thing they cite is the hypocrisy of church folks. They see them profess concern for the poor, yet hoard their finances like misers. They see them support war when Jesus was clearly a pacifist . . . they don’t call him the Prince of Peace for nothing. And they see them piously quote Jesus about adultery and then support politicians who cut a mile-wide swath through half the women in the country. I myself have been guilty of that, supporting a president who abused his power because his political views corresponded with mine. (That was in the nineteen-nineties, in case you’re wondering.)

Anyway. Up till this point, Jesus has been talking to insiders: his disciples, the scribes and the Pharisees. But now he gathers a crowd, indicating the general importance he attaches to what he’s about to say. “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” And while Mark interprets this as Jesus declaring all foods clean, and he might have been right, I rather think Jesus has bigger fish in mind. Right at the outset, he castigates the religious authorities for being concerned with outer conditions—whether they washed their hands or not—then goes on to complain about their lip-service to God while their hearts—the seat of the soul to the ancients—are far away. And now he’s saying what goes in from the outside can’t defile—like dirt and food—but it’s what’s inside that matters.

And by extension, the outer trappings of religion —ritual, hymn-sing, public praying and the like—isn’t an indication of what goes on in our hearts, either. We already know what Jesus thinks about ostentatious public prayer . . . and what does he tells us to do instead? Go into our rooms, close the door and pray to God in secret . . . and the God who sees in secret will reward us. And it’s useful to ask: reward us how? Could it be that we’ll hear God speaking to us as well? It’s hard to hear the Lord when we’re in public, when we’re doing all the talking, struggling not to embarrass ourselves and say something stupid.

Well. Any of Jesus’ disdain for empty ceremony, for meaningless religious observance, for not seeing the forest for the trees is nothing new, it’s squarely in the prophetic stream in which he waded. In another part of Isaiah, God—through the prophet—chides the religious authorities of his day: “Is such the worship that I choose,” God asks, “a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?” And you can imagine the elders bowing their heads at the proper time like nodding reeds, oh-so-chicly humble in designer sackcloth and ashes, sort of like all the tailored black we saw yesterday at John McCain’ funeral.

In that Isaiah passage God goes on to say what worship he does choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke . . . to share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our house . . . and take care of our own kin. And that gives us an insight into Jesus’ own words . . . he’s not just talking literally, narrowly, about only what comes and goes into and out our out of our mouths—I.e., food and drink and words—but in larger terms as well. He’s not talking just about wagging tongues or kosher meats, but about external observance, observing the traditions of the elders—washing this or that item, singing this or that hymn—versus what you actually do, how you obey the commandments of God.

And like Isaiah, for Jesus it’s all about actions . . . not just the literal words that tumble out of our maws. Of course, he mentions slander and deceit, which are often couched as words, but his list of evil intentions mostly result in actions: licentiousness, adultery, murder . . . all actions that arise in the heart. This list is very like one of Paul’s lists of fruits of the flesh, like the one in Galatians, and like that one, it concentrates on things that harm community. In fact, the example he uses to support his claims of hypocrisy—using man-made rules to get around supporting one’s parents—undercuts the family unit, the foundation of first-century community.

Our passage records a teaching of Jesus that moves from the relatively trivial—Pharisitical complaints about dirty hands—to hypocrisy to community discord and disruption, and does this mimic a progression that happens to organizations? I think it might, and you can see it in all kinds of denominations. Rules are set up to provide structure and order, which can provide obvious benefits—hand-washing, for example, has obvious health consequences of which even pre-scientific cultures were aware. Structure leads to hierarchy—somebody’s got to decide on the rules and then enforce them—which leads to calcification, rigidity and protection of positions of power. All these things are inimical to true community.

They crop up in local congregations, too . . . the leadership gets arrogant and too used to having its own way. Groups within silo themselves up, protecting resources and turf . . . especially when they are in short supply. There’s nothing more vicious than a choir protecting its own (that’s a joke). Jesus says that it is from within us that all these things come, all these evil intentions, as he puts it.

When you look inside of us, you might see these things, latent—forming what the Buddhists call seeds, that require the proper watering, the proper conditions to flower. But you know what? If you look there—really look—you also find Christ himself, you find the Holy Spirit, who Paul says holds everything together. Christ holds rocks together, trees, birds of the air, and he holds us together as well, or he can, if we’ll only let him. That’s why they call it “good news.” Amen.

Body Image (John 6:56 - 69)

     Once again into the breach of John Chapter Six, dear friends. And once again, this week’s reading includes a substantial chunk of last week’s. This mirrors John’s infamous habit of structuring Jesus’ speeches so they are repetitive, but for the lectionary’s own reasons: when we’re working our way through an important passage like this, on a weekly basis, it’s good to remind ourselves of where we left off last time. And where that is is Jesus’ startling statement that “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

And today, 2000 years—give or take a few—after the resurrection it’s hard to understand the full impact of this statement, just how offensive it was to Jewish ears. After all, we know that he’s not advocating that we rip off a hunk of gristle and stuff in our mouth, then wash it down with a goblet of O-positive—ah . . . 33 AD, a very good year. We get that he was speaking figuratively, not literally . . . metaphorically, not actually. But back in the day, wow. This was some hard stuff to get your head around. Seven times it says we are to eat him. And four of those occasions also refer to the drinking of his blood. Our life depends on it!

And not only is it just gross, it’s ritually offensive too. As Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh remind us, God explicitly tells Noah (and thus, humans) not to eat blood: “Every living thing shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only, you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” They go on to point out that blood—and fat—is ritually dedicated to God: “the prohibitions of fat and blood … single out those organs ... that serve as the seat of life. Life is from God alone and belongs to God alone. To ingest fat or blood is to strive to be like God.”

So, the crowd listening to Jesus would hear his words, "eat my flesh and drink my blood," as blasphemy, as an abomination, as inciting his followers to try to become like God. And we know how that turned out once before … that little episode with Adam and Eve and the snake? Would Jesus’ followers, and the onlooking religious authorities, assume Jesus was trying to get them to repeat the original sin? I think that might be . . .

And then, after he describes what many would see as cannibalism (in fact, some of the locals accused first-century Christians of just that), he disses Moses, one of the heroes of Judaism: “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died.” And to top it all off, as he often did, he said these radical things in the Capernaum synagogue, the local center of the Jewish faith.

It was even too much for his own followers, whom I picture standing around like polled oxen with dazed looks on their faces: “This teaching is difficult . . . who can accept it?” And they set about muttering and complaining about it. And because Jesus is, well, Jesus, he knows what they’re saying, but does he soften the teaching? Does he come out with “It’s okay . . . I don’t mean that literally . . .”? Of course not . . . Jesus isn’t there to comfort anybody, but to make them think, to get them off their keisters . . . he’s there to afflict the comfortable, to pull them out of their comfortable little theological boxes. Does this offend you? Does it shake up your little comfortable world? Would it help any if you could literally see me taken back up into heaven? Would you believe then?

And of course, we know this is no idle threat, don’t we? They will see him ascending back to where he was before. Right after they see him nailed to a cross and hung up to die . . . and would that offend them? In point of fact, it’s the spirit that gives life, y’all, the spirit. All that stuff about eating sacrificial flesh and blood, that it’s reserved for God, it’s just ritual poppycock. It’s only my flesh and my blood that gives life . . . it’s why I say that nobody can come to me unless granted by God, who we all know is spirit.

No wonder a lot of his disciples up and leave his company, and don’t travel around with him anymore. And when he asks the twelve—his innermost, hard-core followers—if they don’t want to leave as well, Peter sounds more than a little plaintive, more than a tad lost: “Lord, where else are we going to go? You have the words of eternal life . . . We know that much, even though we may not understand all the ins and outs . . .”

And in fact, they are hard to understand, even for us 21st century types, who have a couple millennia’s worth of theology and Biblical studies to draw on. Just exactly what is it supposed to mean? How literally are we to take it? My old friends in the Baptist and other evangelical denominations tend to take it as simply a memorial—do this in remembrance of me—without any indwelling of Christ. On the other side are transubstantialists—like Episcopalians and Roman Catholics—who believe that when blessed by a priest, bread and wine are transformed into Christ’s actual body and Christ’s actual blood.

We Presbyterians take a predictably middle road, saying little about whether or not Christ is the bread and wine—or Christ is in them, as the Lutherans would have it. We prefer to follow Papa John Calvin when he opined that we’re “lifted up” to be with him in a special way, not as a symbolic, but real foretaste of the Messianic banquet at the end of time.

But you know what? I think that the reality—if we can even approach it with words—is a lot closer to the Catholic or Lutheran end of things than we sometimes like to think. After all, doesn’t John himself say in that magnificent prologue that all things came into being through Christ and that not one thing came into being without him? Without the Word—who both was with God and was God--nothing came into being, and we usually read that in a facultative sense, as nothing came into being without Christ’s help, or without his creative action, but it can also be read as without Christ’s presence. Like saying, no Snickers Bar has come into being without peanuts or a chewy caramel center.

And that’s how mystics read it—without Christ inside, without that divine spark, not one thing came into being. Every rock, every tree, every person, every flower, all of creation contains what Aldous Huxley calls “a divine Reality substantial to the the world of things and lives and minds,” and what we call simply Christ. Paul put it this way: In Christ all things hold together, and Teilhard de Chardin knew it from experience, he experienced it, and it fueled his love affair with matter.

As modern-day mystics James Finley and Cynthia Bourgeault say, there have been two incarnations: the original at the creation of the universe—God as Christ incarnate in all created things—and in and as Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary and Joseph, laid in a manger on a cold Bethlehem night.

Do you see the special grace, the good news in all of this? Not only does Christ the Divine pervade all reality, he pervades us. And not only is he in us, but he’s in our friends and neighbors as well, so that Jesus wan’t just whistling Dixie when he said whatever you’ve done to the least of these you’ve done to me, he could have said just as well “whatever you’ve done to anything you’ve done to me.”

So eat heartily of life, my brothers and sisters, and drink deep . . . for that’s what Christ literally is, life: all that nurtures and strengthens us. And if you want to see Christ, look at the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and mountains and oceans deep. If you want to see Christ, you don’t have to come to church to do it, all you have to do is look around and see that he’s everywhere, in the stone with which we build and dust motes dancing on the summer air. Everywhere, in the atoms and quarks and gluons and muons of all matter, and in the biggest stars and whirling planets, galaxies and black holes. If you want to see Christ, you don’t have to say ten Hail Mary’s or sing Amazing Grace til you pass out from the heat. No. If you want to see Christ, just turn and look in your neighbor’s eyes. Amen.

From Bread to Abiding (John 6:51 - 58)

     Today we finally get to where Jesus—as presented by John—wants us to be with what we’ve been reading the past few weeks, anybody figured out where that might be? That’s right . . . the Eucharist. Communion. The Lord’s Supper. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” Jesus says, “and I will raise them up on the last day.” And if that’s not a reference to the Lord’s Supper, I’ll eat this iPad. Of course, we should have seen it coming: in the very first lesson we drew out of Chapter Six—the feeding of the five-thousand—John describes it this way: “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.” And it has the same flavor as the the four-fold formula found in the other Gospels—take, give thanks, break and give—only it’s missing the “break” part. But for the sharp-eyed it’s there, and all this talk of Jesus being the bread leads up to the stunning statement about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

In fact, in John’s gospel there is no formal institution of the Eucharist as there is in the other gospels, where it is associated with the Last Supper. And because it is associated with that last meal, “on the night when he was betrayed,” as Paul put it, it is in those other Gospels associated inextricably with his sacrifice, his death on a cross. Here, in John, it’s not so much . . . in fact, as some biblical scholars a lot smarter than me have figured out, this scene happens in the middle of his ministry, which in John is three years long, and so is at least a year away from his death.

And so, the closest thing to the institution of Communion in John is much less about death than life, a theme that comes up over and over in the bread discourse. Of the 98 times “life” is mentioned in the Gospels, eleven—over ten percent —are in this one chapter of John. And when we think of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus—of course it’s just a metaphor—we have to ask ourselves “Just what are we being asked to eat?” Well, Jesus puts it this way: “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” And here, the Greek word we’re translating as “true” isn’t in the sense of a statement that agrees with fact so much as “genuine” or “real”. My flesh is genuine flesh, it’s the real deal. And by extension, is everything that isn’t his flesh questionable? Is it counterfeit, dishonest, false? Is this a backhanded swipe at what popular culture feeds us?

Well. Let’s drill down a bit more into this notion of the character of Jesus flesh and blood, what it might mean when Jesus says his flesh and blood are true. And to do this, we can look at John’s conception of just who Jesus is, his Christology, as theologians like to call it. And the thing about John is that his Christology is notably higher than that of the other gospels. For John, if Jesus isn’t actually God the creator in human form, he’s awful darn close. To the other gospel writers, he is Son of God in the same sense that King David was: the Messiah anointed by God the Father.

But for John, Jesus is  himself divine, and the best place to see it is way back in the first chapter. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What we ingest when we eat of Jesus’ flesh and drink of his blood is the Word of God, who “became flesh and dwelt among us.” And this has enormous symbolic weight for John: prophets are known to ingest the Word, to take it in so they can digest it and spit it out again, clothed in humanity, in terms that even we might understand. Thus, our eating of the Word is the beginning and empowering of our own prophetic ministries.

And another thing: what we eat and drink becomes a part of us, and so in our eating of Word become flesh, it not only dwells among us but within us as well. The word becomes flesh and dwell within . . . As Jesus himself says, when we eat of his flesh and drink of his blood, we abide in him and he in us. And just as he lives because of God—whom he calls “Father”—so do we live because of him. This last is what I call the chain of God, which is preeminent in John’s gospel: God endows upon Jesus certain characteristics and Jesus, in turn, passes them along to us. In this case it is life itself. Jesus is the Word made flesh, and he’s dwelling among us because he’s been sent. It all leads back to God . . . everything Jesus was and is and will be is because of his relationship to God. In the same way, everything we are is also because of God, Jesus says, through our relationship to him. God bestows it on Jesus, Jesus bestows it on us.

In 1945, Aldous Huxley—yes, that Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World—wrote a book of “comparative mysticism” called “The Perennial Philosophy.” Though the term was coined by Gottfried Leibniz—yes, that Gottfried Leibniz—Huxley popularized and expounded upon the notion, and gave numerous examples of it from scriptures of the world including, of course, the Bible, as well as other sacred writings. The Perennial Philosophy can thought of as a stream flowing through, or a structure undergirding, all major religions, and most minor ones as well. A common denominator, if you will, spoken of in every faith, albeit using different words and concepts. These religions include, but are not limited to, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

It must be emphasized that Huxley was not saying these religions are the same, or even equivalent, just that they have a common baseline, consisting of three main ideas: first, there is a divine Reality substantial to—over, under, around and throughout—the the world of things and lives and minds. Second, within each human being is an entity—a soul or ”divine spark” or atman as the Hindus call it—that is similar to, or even identical with, this divine Reality. Lastly, a person’s final end is the knowledge of and access to this immanent divine Reality.

And Jesus uses metaphors to speak of this reality, especially here in John, and this “mutual abiding” is the primary one. His abiding in us—and we in him—seems to be the equivalent of the third idea in the Perennial Philosophy: our final end is knowledge of and access to the immanent divine reality. And according to Jesus, abiding in him and he in us is how we produce fruit in our lives: “I am the vine,” he says, “and you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

Way back in the first sermon on the bread discourse we talked about “believing in Jesus,” and I opined that believing in Jesus meant not just a simple affirmation that what he says about himself is true, but that it means the whole shebang, an immersing of our lives in him, aligning our lives with him. Giving up our own lives for him. And this week, we see the results of believing in him, of “coming to him,” to use another metaphor: abiding in him. We believe in him, that’s the process, we give up our lives, ourselves, our egos, just as he gave up his life and self and ego, and we come to abide in him. And those who abide in him—and he in us—bear fruit in this life, never mind what happens in the next.

Jesus said “Those who eat of my flesh and drink of my blood abide in me and I in them,” they realize and have access to the indwelling Christ-spark within. And it seems to me that that is our purpose: to bear fruit. And is that what Paul lists as fruits of the Spirit? Is it our purpose—as some Wisdom teachers would say—manifest these fruits into the world? Compassion, loving-kindness, patience, generosity, self-control?

Now, as a response to the Word made flesh let’s symbolically bring that flesh of Christ to our friends and neighbors.

Take Eat (John 6:35, 41 - 51)

     Last week, today, and next week, we’re spending some time with the bread discourse, Jesus’ enormously influential sermon that takes place just after the feeding of the 5,000. If you’ll recall, the crowd he’d fed follows him across the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum—after trying to kidnap him and make him king—and confronts him there, and in response to a series of questions and misunderstandings, he talks to them about how he’s the bread of life, come down from heaven: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry . . .”

And now, on the North shore of Galilee, there are apparently some folks who knew Jesus back when, who knew Joseph and Mary and everything, and it’s like the story over in Mark when he came to his hometown of Nazareth, and you’ll remember that because of their lack of belief, he could do no deeds of power there. Here in John, the same kind of sentiment is expressed, only this time it’s a reaction to Jesus’ claims. They begin to complain about him, they begin to grumble about him, saying “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Its like they think claiming he’s bread from heaven is more than a little uppity . . .

And I use that language deliberately . . . uppity. It’s the language used by people who want to keep others in the boxes they’ve placed them in. Of course, it was most famously used by white folks in the bad old days to try and keep black folks in their place, keep them in the boxes they’d been moved into. Emmett Till was a black kid who said something uppity to a white woman, and they lynched him in good, old Mississippi—where Pam and I lived for a decade, and where we have lots of friends—they strung up his skinny, fourteen-year-old body for something he said, only whaddya know? The woman he supposedly said it to now says it didn’t happen.

Thank goodness that doesn’t happen these days. Thank goodness white folks don’t put African Americans in boxes, paint them all with the same brush. Only . . . wait. Isn’t that kind of the idea behind profiling—either intentional or unintentional? Black folks barbecuing in a park have the police called on them in Oakland. A black student taking a nap in a common room in her own dorm has the police called on her. The other student—white, of course—says she appears out of place. And of course, we all know this can have fatal results, as seen by the spate of un-armed blacks being shot and by police. Jesus knew this as well, when he fled the crowd that wanted to shove him—by force, if necessary—into the box of glorious, triumphant king.

In fact, you might say that Jesus’ whole life—from cradle to grave—demonstrates the folly of this sort of thing. Everybody has a misconception about him, everybody’s got their own box. His parents search frantically—and understandably—for him when he was twelve, only to find him teaching, in temple, saying “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” His mother and brothers are embarrassed when he’s preaching, and try to get him to stop—after all, they think, he’s just a small-town carpenter’s son. The disciples never understand who he is until it’s too late, and in fact his crucifixion is arguably about the Roman authorities placing him in the box labeled “revolutionary” and “agitator.”

Well. Jesus scolds them for murmuring amongst themselves, and proceeds to offer a theology of “coming to” him, which he seems to use interchangeably with “believe in”. And remembering last week, we saw that to believe in Jesus means to give yourself over to him whole hog, to align yourself with him, to have faith in him and to unify with him. In other words, the whole enchilada. And now he’s saying that nobody can do all this unless drawn by God, who Jesus calls Father. No one can come to him unless drawn by the God who sent him. And this is very different from the presuppositions of the Jewish crowd here at Capernaum. For Jews, they are the chosen people, God has designated them as such, and for their part, there is that matter of circumcision and those 613 mitzvoth to attend to.

The idea of being “drawn” has a different flavor, a different feel. There’s no vengeful God kind of stuff, no saying “you shall be my people and I shall be your God.” Drawing has an altogether more gentle connotation. Augustine thought so, anyway: in his Tractate on the Gospel of John he wrote “See how (God) draws: Not by imposing necessity” but by grace enabling the “inner palate” of the soul to find its greatest “pleasure” and “delight” in partaking of the truth. Even for Calvin, infamous for the doctrine of pre-destination, it’s gentle: “As far as the manner of drawing goes,” he wrote, “it is not violent, so as to compel by an external force; but yet it is an effectual movement of the Holy Spirit, turning us from being unwilling and reluctant into willing.”

Most of you know that I’m a graduate of Richard Rohr’s “Living School of Action and Contemplation,” out in Albuquerque, and one of the first things we were told was that we were called there, that if we were there, we were already on the contemplative path . . . and nobody comes to that path except one who has been drawn by the Father, no one comes to that path unless drawn by God. Similarly, no one comes to Jesus, no one comes to belief in Christ on their own, without first being drawn by God.

Is this being drawn any different from being called, a bedrock doctrine within Reformed Theology? I’m not sure, perhaps it’s in intensity? Just thinking about the words, if someone calls you, you can hear the call but there’s no compulsion to answer. If someone draws you, theres perhaps a tug, a pull involved. I don’t know . . . have any of y’all out there felt drawn?. Have you ever felt pulled by the divine?

Well. Whoever believes has eternal life, whoever has faith, whoever aligns themselves with Christ, will have eternal life. And we all think we know what this term “eternal life” means, that it means we’ll go to heaven when we die, and that maybe true. But especially in here in John, it has the connotation of fullness, of abundance. And it makes a certain kind of sense, doesn’t it? After all, the word eternal indicates that it begins right here on earth, that our lives take on a different, perhaps more blessed character. Elsewhere in John, Jesus is likened to the stem and believers the branches, nourished by him as a vine nourishes it’s fruit and leaves. Still elsewhere in John, Jesus promises that he will be in us just as God is in him . . .

In the Wisdom tradition, which is what I studied at the Living School, it is said that all have the spark of the divine within them, and the task of the seeker after Christ is to uncover, to realize, and ultimately unite with that spark. Roman Catholics call this the unitive stage of spiritual development . . . is that what Jesus is talking about when he says “eternal life?” This idea of “eternal return” is integral to many spiritualities, where at the death of the physical body this spark, our true essence, returns to being part of God . . .

Jesus is the bread of life, not death . . . the world’s bread—the miasma, the waste, the constant stream of sounds and images we are fed daily by our culture—does not give life. We can eat the manna from our wilderness and still die, but those who eat the bread come down from heaven do not die. Jesus is that living bread, that bread of life. Just like bread from wheat, from the soil, when we eat it becomes a part of us, that is the heart of the metaphor . . . Jesus feeds us, nourishes us and becomes a part of us . . . and whoever eats of this bread will live forever.

And now, during this time of meditation, close your eyes and get lost in the smells of fresh-baked bread . . . know that when you inhale it you are taking the bread into your body, it is becoming a part of you, and in the same way, Jesus becomes a part of you as you partake of him . . .

A Fulfilling Sign (John 6:24 - 35)

Let’s recap, shall we? Last week, we read John’s version of the feeding of the 5,000, with its boy, its five loaves and two fishes and its green, green grass. We saw how Jesus took a small amount of food—more than enough for the boy but not nearly enough for the crowd—and served all that multitude. And not only did they each get some food, they were filled, and the disciples collected baskets-full of left-overs in order that, as Jesus explained, “nothing may be lost.” Or, given the symbolism of the “twelve baskets of Israel,” so nobody might be lost.

Well, the people were so amazed that they declared “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” And they were so impressed that they were fixing to grab him and make him king. Now. Jesus knew this kind of deal never works out, and that further, they’d be enraged when they found out just what kind of king they’d made, and so he beat feet back up the mountain to avoid the whole thing.

Meanwhile, with Jesus gone and all, the disciples went down to the Sea of Galilee, got into a boat, and headed for Capernaum, which was on it’s north shore. Peter’s mom lived there, if you’ll recall, and it was kind of a base of operations for Jesus and his ministry. Well, you know the story: it got dark and the wind started to blow, and they saw Jesus coming toward them walking on the water, and they were terrified, thinking he was some kind of ghost, but he told them “It is I: be not afraid,” and if I were preaching that passage, I’d explain that the Greek translated there as “it is I” is literally “I am,” which is what God called Godself up on another mountain, but I’m not so I won’t.

And now the people—the same ones he’d fed, remember—see the disciples getting into the boat, and also that Jesus isn’t with them—they hadn’t seen it when he’d given them the slip—so when some boats from Tiberius show up, they get themselves into them and go over to Capernaum looking for him.

Now, by this time, they’re getting a bit testy, and they think they own Jesus or something—after all, they’d tried to kidnap him and make him king—so they ask, with not a little snottiness, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” And Jesus answers their question with a typical, Johannine non-sequitur: “You don’t want me because you saw some signs, but because you ate your fill.” Jesus knows that a lot of people can do flash and dazzle—remember the Pharaoh’s magicians?—but not everything—or everyone—can fill you up.

It’s kind of like Hollywood’s obsession with computer-generated imagery. The wizards of Hollywood can make anything come to life, in living color and incredibly lifelike detail, so they do—and every year there’s a boat-load of CGI-heavy movies that are beautiful to look at but empty of heart and spirit. There are only one or two every year that have both lots of CGI and emotional and spiritual weight, because anyone with a big enough budget can do razzle-dazzle, but only a very few can fill you up.

It’s a metaphor for our modern society, isn’t it? We love the flash and dazzle, the shiny exterior, the red, red apple and ignore the squiggly little worm inside. Hollywood is the prime example: the #metoo movement has exposed its seamy underbelly—and much of corporate America as well. All the glitter, all the glamour, all the record-quarterly-earnings razz-a-ma-tazz is only a veneer for an abusive, white-male dominated culture.

Well. Jesus knows all that—after all, he’s had to deal with Herod, the Harvey Weinstein of Palestine—and he also knows that the bread that fills you up, the food that endures for eternal life —which he himself gives them through his relationship with God—comes not from fishing or farming or working as a day laborer. And when the crowd asks him what kind of work does get them this food he says “this is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.” AKA Jesus his own self.

Now. I always feel the need to drill down a little bit on this verb believe. I inherited a sign on my door—I presume it’s from Marsha—that says “just believe.” It doesn’t say what one is to believe, though its presence on a pastor’s door does give a clue. But it could mean believe anything, because it has no object. Here, of course, Jesus—the one whom God sent—is the object, but it’s not just “believe Jesus,” as in believe what he says, but “believe in Jesus.” And here’s what I’d like to ask: what does it mean to “believe in” Jesus? Obviously, it’s not literally believe in Jesus, like one might believe in Santa Claus. If it were, it’d be pretty trivial . . . after all, Jesus was right there with them, right there in front of them, it would be like believing in this pulpit or that chair. Does it mean to believe Jesus is the Messiah? That is, the Christ? Are we supposed to weigh all the evidence, all the pros and cons, and decide “he’s the Messiah, all right?” Is that the “work of God?”

Here’s a hint: the Greek word we translate as “to believe” is pisteuow, and the one for faith is pistos, and they sound alike for a reason: faith is a noun form of the verb. As a result, it might be possible to translate “believe in Jesus” as “have faith in Jesus,” but we don’t. And the question is why not? Well, here’s what I think: when Jesus said “believe in him whom God sent” it’s like he’s talking “all of the above.” Does he mean believe what he says? Yes. Does he mean follow his teachings? Of course. Does he mean act as his body on earth, both as individuals and together as the church? Undoubtedly. Does he mean trust in God’s promises, be open to the Spirit’s workings, live one’s life for the divine? Yes, yes and yes.

Our evangelical brothers and sisters have a saying—“give your life to Christ”—that catches the flavor, as does a phrase I heard recently: align yourself with Christ. This last approaches the goal of the perennial wisdom, that flows underneath all religions. That is, unification, or becoming one with God.

Well. After Jesus answers their question, after he fills them in on the work of God, they proceed to totally not get it: What sign are you going to give us so that we’ll believe? Apparently forgetting the sign they’d just been given—aka that they’d been fed in the wilderness—they ask for some good old flash and dazzle: “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness,” they tell him, “as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” And once again he doesn’t answer with what they want to hear but with what they need to know: It wasn’t Moses who gave you the bread from heaven but God, whom Jesus calls “Father,” who gives them true bread from heaven which, in the manner of all bread, gives life to the world.

And of course, the people once again misunderstand—he’d just told them it wasn’t he who gives them the bread, and they proceed to ask him for it. And that’s when he comes out with the most iconic “I am” saying in John: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” It was just like Moses in the wilderness, only Jesus wasn’t Moses at all, but the manna. Or maybe Jesus was both Moses and the manna, the prophet and what the prophet brings.

And this is a good place to stop. Next week, we’ll continue our look at the bread discourse, and we’ll deepen our understanding of just what he means. In the meantime, meditate on his words, breathe them in and out, dream upon them in the watches of the night:  Jesus is the bread of life. Whoever comes to him, whoever believes in him, will never be hungry or thirsty again. Amen.