Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 147; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:53-59

I remember well the first time I preached on today’s readings. It was six years ago, and I’d been a priest for less than a year.  I was assisting at a church in Baltimore while I was doing my pediatric residency, and so I only preached once every month or two. The rector and I usually did the schedule well in advance, and I typically didn’t look ahead to see what readings fell on which days.  I figured it would all just work out.

I bumped into my old adviser from seminary in early August that year, and he asked me when I was going to be preaching next.  I told him the date, and he just laughed. Then he asked me if my boss had specifically assigned me that date, and I said yes.  Then he laughed some more.  “Wait until you see the Gospel reading for that day, and you’ll know why he put you down on the schedule for it.”

That was the first time I realized that parish priests dread some days just like they look forward to others. Some days the readings are wonderful and full of hope and sermons just seem to leap out of them.  But others, like today, are more challenging. Today’s gospel is so demanding and some rectors dread it so much that they assign it to their naïve but enthusiastic assistant, so they don’t have to deal with it. Not that I’m still bitter about that or anything.

Why is today’s gospel reading so challenging?  First of all, it’s rather repetitive. In the space of just seven verses, Jesus tells us that his flesh and blood contain eternal life, that they’re the true food and drink, and whoever eats and drinks of them will be raised up on the last day, abide in Him, live because of Him, and live forever.  And if you don’t eat his flesh and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

So there’s no getting away from all this flesh and blood stuff, which is pretty awkward, and unnerving. It’s sort of like being at a dinner party, and having someone say something that makes everyone feel a little awkward.  “I’ve got this really annoying rash on back,” they might say, and you nod politely and hope that they’ll move on to another topic soon. But they keep going on about the rash: about how long they’ve had it and what they’ve done for it and how no one can figure out what it is, and eventually you end up asking questions about it and maybe even looking at it, and the dinner party isn’t quite so festive anymore.

All this talk about flesh and blood is a little like that because it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Let’s face it: taken literally, it sounds like cannibalism, which was an accusation often leveled against the early church.  On top of that, most of us, I’d wager, don’t really understand the Eucharist, even though it’s the central part of our worship together which we do every single week. We know what it means to us, which I’d argue is the most important part about it, but we’d be hard-pressed to explain exactly what happens to the bread and wine when the priest says all the prayers over it.  Critics of the church picked up on this uncertainty long ago, and that’s how the Latin phrase for “this is my body,” hoc est corpus meum, got turned into the more common phrase “hocus pocus.”  Maybe it’s just sleight of hand, the hand is quicker than the eye, that sort of thing, some would argue.

Different Christian denominations have very different ideas of what happens at the Eucharist.  The Roman Catholic church holds to the doctrine of transubstantiation, which says that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus. To get a little philosophical on you, the Catholic belief relies on the distinction between substance and accident. Aristotle said that every object is made up of both substance – what it is by nature – and accident – what it specifically appears to be.  So all loaves of bread share the same substance – they’re all bread – but they have different accidents: one loaf might be dark brown and we call it pumpernickel, another might be lighter and longer and thinner and we call it a baguette. The Catholics believe that at the moment of consecration – when the priest says hocus pocus – the substance of that stuff on the table gets changed into the body and blood of Christ, even though their outward appearance – their “accidents” – remain bread and wine.  Only the substance is changed, thus transubstantiation.

The Lutherans always have to be different than the Catholics – that’s the reason they got started, and that’s how they’ll always be. So they throw out all this substance/accident stuff, and come up with the view that the bread doesn’t stop being bread, it just has the real presence of Jesus right there with it.  The image they use is putting an iron in a fire – after a while the iron burns hot and turns orange, and the fire and the iron are united.  But the iron isn’t replaced by the fire – the two substances are there together.  They call that consubstantiation.

On the far other side of the spectrum are the low churches who don’t have much use for Aristotle and big technical theological terms. They believe that communion is a memorial to the death of Jesus, where we remember Him by recreating the last meal He shared with His friends. Kind of like making granny’s favorite meal on the anniversary of her death, and reminiscing about all the good times we had together.  They call their view memorialism.

And the Anglicans? Well, being Anglicans, we choose the middle ground.  In a way, we choose every ground, because we say that the meaning of the Eucharist is in the heart of each person who takes part in it. If you think that it’s the literal body and blood, then that’s what it becomes for you. If you think it’s a ceremony remembering Jesus’s last night of freedom, that’s OK, too.  We affirm that Jesus is really present in the sacrament, but He’s present in the heart of the recipient, not so much in the wafer and the wine. We call our view receptionism.

What each of these four theological interpretations of the Eucharist has in common is they take a step back from the feast itself. They try to explain the unexplainable; they try to control the uncontrollable.  They try to put words to the inner workings of our hearts, which is always condemned to failure.  It’s like asking me why I love Pam – I can give you a million reasons why, but I could never tell you how. I just do. I know it in my heart, but I can’t explain it. It almost feels wrong to try.

I think Jesus realized that, too.  Because if you look at what He said in today’s reading, He did almost no explaining.  He didn’t say what it meant to eat his flesh and drink his blood. He didn’t say how often you had to do it, or whether you should drink from the cup or dip the wafer in it, or what you should be thinking when you did whatever you ended up doing.  He spoke only in deeper meanings, and consequences: eat my flesh and drink my blood, and you’ll have eternal life, you’ll be raised up, you’ll abide in me, you’ll live because of me, and live forever.

He kept repeating all of that because it didn’t give His listeners any wiggle room.  They couldn’t ignore what He was saying, like the well-mannered guest at the dinner party tries to do. They couldn’t write it off as not being all that important, because He obviously felt it was important enough to go on and on and on about it.  He forced His listeners to look at this whole flesh and blood stuff square in the eye, and figure out what it meant to them.

And that can be pretty unsettling, as we’re faced with our difficulties understanding exactly what’s going on. More than that, though, we’re confronted with the naked intimacy of this action.  This isn’t some polite, genteel event that we can just go through the motions with. This isn’t something that we can take or leave depending on our opinions or state of mind.  This is life or death we’re talking about, the very flesh and blood of Jesus.  The dictionary defines “flesh and blood” as “human nature with its emotions and infirmities,” which fits perfectly with what Jesus says. He wants every part of us – not only our strengths but also our weaknesses, our fears, our doubts, our uncertainties – and in return he offers us all of himself, his very flesh and blood, given for each of us.

If that’s the case, then flat, bland bread may not be the best symbol in the world for the body of our Lord, but wine is a pretty good one for his blood. This is what Frederick Buechner says about it:  “Wine is booze, which means it is dangerous and drunkmaking.  It makes the timid brave and the reserved amorous.  It loosens the tongue and breaks the ice especially when served in a loving cup.  It kills germs. As symbols go, it is a rather splendid one.”

So rather than looking at the Eucharist in terms of transubstantiation or consubstantiation or memorialism or receptionism, I think we should, today of all days, look at it in terms of danger.  It’s dangerous because we’re forced to confront our humanity, in all of its weakness and need. We come face to face with the person of Jesus – with his very flesh and blood – daring to be intimate with Him, revealing ourselves to Him, loving Him in ways that words cannot express. And we risk being changed, which is perhaps the most dangerous part of all. 

In just a few minutes we’ll ask God to “deliver us from the presumption of coming to [the] Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.”  What that means is that the Eucharist is not just about removing negatives – cleansing us from sin, comforting us in sorrow. The Eucharist is about living, about having a relationship with God so intimate that it makes us so uncomfortable sometimes that we’re tempted to hide behind fancy theological terms that explain the love away.  But we can’t explain the love away, because when we kneel at the rail, and feel the dryness of the wafer and the sting of the wine upon our tongues, we’re united with Christ in ways that no one can or should or need explain. All we need to know is that we’re taking part in a sacrament of life and death, and because we’re nourished by Christ – because we’re strengthened and renewed by His very flesh and blood – because of all that, we have life, and life eternal.

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