Flesh and Blood

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

August 27, 2006; 12 Pentecost, Proper 16, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(John 6:56-59) – Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever." He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum. When many of his disciples heard it, they said, "This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?" But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, "Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe." For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. And he said, "For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father." Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."
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This flesh and blood language is pretty coarse and earthy. Nice people, proper people didn't talk this way in Jesus' day. They still don't. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood, ...whoever eats me will live because of me." Some stomachs turned when Jesus said these things. We get a polite version of their reservations: "This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?" Somewhere behind these public words someone was saying, "Gross. I'm outta here."

I quit using one of the chants for the breaking of the bread at the 8:45 service. Some parents complained. Their children were bothered and asked uncomfortable questions when we chanted, "My flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed, says the Lord." One child didn't want to risk drinking from the chalice at communion. Children are very literal.

The language in John's Gospel is intentionally blunt. He's challenging people who would like to clean up Jesus' story. John insists "the Word became flesh." God gets down and dirty into our real flesh and blood material, and that is the way the Spirit is manifest through Christ. Jesus takes on our human lives in all of their earthy reality, including personal death, and in Jesus all of that becomes eternal life. Eat and drink of this material reality and you will live -- truly live. Forever.

The disciples saw Jesus' flesh torn and his blood poured out in his painful and humiliating execution on the cross. It was gross. Horrifying. Human beings can do terrible things to the bodies of other human beings. The disciples got outta there.

And yet, just a couple of days later, while they were breaking bread and sharing wine, they knew him to be alive. He appeared to them in the breaking of the bread. Jesus had transcended all of the limitations of flesh and blood. He was no longer limited by the time and space of location. Yet he showed them the marks of his wounds. He was the same Jesus who had suffered so much physically and mentally. Now it meant something different. It was not just meaningless pain. Everything was taken up into the resurrection. Flesh, blood, pain, suffering, injustice, death. Everything was raised to new life. Eternal life. Forever.

I have a friend, Larry, whose grandmother was a great blackberry picker. He says she seemed born to blackberry picking. If you've ever picked blackberries, you know that it is hard work. The chiggers bite and the blackberry briers scratch. Sometimes the tips of the blackberry thorns will embed themselves in fingertips. Larry remembers his grandmother's berry picking dress that his grandmother kept at their house because there was a field packed with wild blackberries right next door. She would take Larry's sister outside in the middle of July to go pick blackberries. Like most kids, Larry's sister complained about the heat and ate more berries than she put in the bucket. But his grandmother would fill her own bucket and then his sister's bucket as well. "She could strip a blackberry brier clean in no time at all," Larry says. She knew about thorns and blood and berries.

The cotton berry picking dress was "a faded print whose hem was ripped after years of crawling through barbed wire fences to get to the berries, and it was stained with blackberry juice and a few little spots of blood where she had wiped her hands, blood that is inevitably pricked from the fingers of every efficient berry picker." Larry writes of her, "This was the garment of her humanity, a tangible sign that there are many thorns in life, and that life can be simultaneously hard and nourishing, paradoxically imperfect yet grace filled. She kept the dress ready, for she knew that to feed her family she would need to stand among the briers."

Though Larry's grandmother is long dead, his "mom still has that dress packed away in her cedar chest. I don't think my family will ever get rid of it," he says. "It has become a symbol ...of what life looks like -- life as stained, marked occasionally with our blood, scarred, looking oh so plain in a world where excess is the desired norm." For his family that dress is their "symbol that God and nourishment are present in hard times, and that we will be fed. It is good news, a reminder of where God will be the next time calamity might come. And where God will be is in the picking of the berries, in the thorn in the flesh, in the brier that surrounds." *

It is important that the Christian gospel proclaims that God is encountered in the real flesh and blood of earthy human life. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. In Jesus, God embraces all of our earthiness and raises it to eternal life. John's gospel makes those claims in explicit language. "I am in the Father and the Father is in me," says Jesus. "I am in you and you are in me," says Jesus. "I pray that they may be one even as I am one with the Father," says Jesus. He goes out into the human berry field and picks a fruitful and nourishing life from it, and he is bloodied by the thorns in the process. All of it is raised to eternal life.

This "eternal life" business is not delayed. Eternal life is here and now. It is the quality of resurrection life here and now. Jesus says those who eat of this flesh and blood live, right now, right here. They abide in him and he abides in them, right now, right here. They are living forever.

They are all around us, these living risen beings. You and I are among them. Because Jesus has entered fully into the flesh and blood of human life, every human being is an encounter with Jesus; even the thorniest of human beings is still an encounter with the risen and living Jesus. It takes some courage and intention to work around the thorns, to survive the finger pricks, and to find the fruit and sweetness sometimes. But it is there. In every person.

In some sense, each of us is creating our own berry picking dress. Maybe you remember the parable about the royal wedding feast and the wedding garments. Everybody's invited to the wedding feast, but you need to wear your wedding garment. For Larry, his grandmother's dress is a symbol of her heavenly wedding garment, "a tangible sign that there are many thorns in life, and that life can be simultaneously hard and nourishing, paradoxically imperfect yet grace filled."

In Ephesians we heard another version of a spiritual garment, being clothed with the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel of peace and the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and a sword that is completely non-metallic, the Word of God, who is Jesus the wounded healer. The writer calls this the armor of God. But note how totally non-aggressive is this armor. In these garments we simply stand, says the writer, because Christ has already won the victory, and we are completely safe in his resurrection life.

I want you to know one more thing about Larry. He's somebody I know fairly well -- he's a colleague, a priest. And he's a lot like his grandmother. He doesn't mind crossing a bit of barbed wire to do a little hard, hot work. He's had to brave some briars and thorns, and he's worked hard to collect some good fruit to share with others. He's a lot like his grandmother in those ways. Which of course means he's a lot like Jesus in those ways too.

For all of us, flesh and blood has become the Spiritual garment of eternal life. God is in it all. God is in your flesh and in your blood. Here in this Eucharist, we eat the flesh and drink the blood and know ourselves to be one with God through the life of Christ poured out for us. We are invited to put on our spiritual clothing -- like Larry's grandmother's berry picking dress -- to go out into the thorns and berries in the fields of our own lives, and to bring home some fruit for everyone to enjoy. That is how eternal life continues. Forever.
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* Larry R. Benfield, Rector of Christ Church, Little Rock, a sermon preached on July 9, 2006, from the Christ Church website.