Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost – 20 August 2006

St Paul Lutheran Church, ABQ NM – the Rev. P. L. Holman

Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

“Be filled with Life”

The past three weeks were quite full ones for me – traveling by plane and car and even train, touching the soil of six different states, being touched by the love and care of family and friends who’ve been important sources of support and strength for me along the way.  My weeks were filled with all sorts of blessings.

That’s how the summer often goes – change in routine, travels and celebrations, ventures and adventures that fill us in unexpected ways.  Taking time to remember and explore, to share table and home, to share stories and build new chapters – such times are so essential to the well-being of personal, family and community life. 

God’s word reminds us that such gatherings are essential to what we’re about as a people of God as well: being a gospel community means gathering to remember and feast, to share hopes and dreams, to participate in the future of Christ.  Taken out of context the words from John’s gospel today can sound pretty bizarre, almost too harsh and cannibalistic.  They were directed to a people for whom the Holy Communion had become an established practice, almost routine.  These words of Jesus reminded the people just exactly what was at stake in partaking of this meal – that to gather around the table and break bread together meant to be filled with the power and the presence of Christ.  Being filled with Christ meant being formed in the image of Christ.  It meant sharing in a life shaped by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus AND the promise of eternal life with Christ.  “Living bread,” not some flaky sweet stuff that would vanish with the sun, not some nourishment lasting only a few hours but living bread – filling us for Life beyond death itself – that is the promise and reality of this meal.  As it was then, so it is for us now, a foretaste of the feast to come, a glimpse of heaven, for you and me, here and now.

We Lutherans are a faith community that celebrates two sacraments.  In Baptism we welcome the newly cleansed into the family of God as fellow members and workers with us on this gospel journey.  Think about one of the journeys you’ve taken this summer – in town or miles away.  At some point you needed to eat, right? Maybe at times finding the right food or place to eat proved a challenge.  The ‘food’ that matters, God’s word reminds us, is Christ’s very self.  The second sacrament, the Holy Communion, is for us the nourishment we need to carry on.  As the images our first communion students select for their collages show, this is a meal with personal, communal and cosmic significance.  As we share Christ we become what we eat – together a people who shine for the world the light of God’s grace. 

Mother Theresa once said that before she could embark on a day of offering mercy to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, India, she herself must receive the Holy Meal; she needed that strength for the journey.  Our daily challenge is nothing like that Mother Theresa faced, and yet the challenges of our time are real and often life threatening.  Our lives are filled with questions, and instead of offering fixed answers to those questions God gives us bread for the journey – the Living Word to guide our way and the Living Bread to empower us to live the questions faithfully.

I did a lot of “people-watching” in the past three weeks.  At airports and in other public places I was astounded to see how many people seem permanently attached to their personal electronic devices.  As I took time to catch up on my reading, I was amazed to learn that there are now more obese people than there are hungry people in this country.  And as I talked with folks from a variety of backgrounds it made me sad to hear time and again how great a shadow anger and fear are casting over their relationships in the present dimming their hope for the future.

Like Mother Theresa and the faithful before us, we need strength beyond our own providing if we are to know the life and be the light God intends.  It is a cross-shaped life – life lived in relationship to God and to one another – with which God has blessed us, to which our Baptism calls us.  This is fullness of life for which no mere earthly food will suffice.

In our isolated and insulated lives it can be hard to relate to that cruciform expectation.  God’s Word reminds us that that’s nothing new  – just a few verses beyond the end of today’s reading in John’s gospel some of the disciples are heard to say, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”  Is that where we are too?  Perhaps such fullness is too much to hope for, so we scale back our expectations of God.  Or maybe the promise of a cross-shaped life of joy and suffering is too close to reality, to the questions we face every day, and we’d rather opt for happy answers…or at least some sense that WE are in control.

Several years ago a young couple I knew were struggling -- the challenges in their family life seemed almost overwhelming.  He never could get around to finishing the projects at home, always busy with teaching and mentoring his high school students.  She was so busy managing the household and their two young children’s schedules along with teaching piano lessons that the house was usually in disarray and the laundry room filled to overflowing.  Life was a challenge.  Then one night her husband dropped dead of undetermined causes – he was 36.  Eight months later she gave birth to their third child…  My friend eventually moved with her three children to the west coast, and a few years later shared this wisdom born of her pain:  “I wonder how we get the notion in our culture that pain and suffering and death are the exception rather than the rule.  When it does happen to us or to those we love, it makes us feel too  ‘singled out.’  Maybe you have a clearer perspective than I did, since you have helped so many others through illness and tragedy.  But I’m sure nothing can prepare us for when the bottom drops out of our world.  God offers sustenance but it’s so hard to accept when all we really want is for things to be as they were – and we know they won’t be.”

No, there is little that can prepare us personally for such times, for the harsh reality of life-changing events.  But to be a people of the table, a people of the holy meal, is to be a community that knows suffering AND hope, loss AND love, brokenness AND forgiveness.  It is to be a community that lives in the stark reality of the present illumined by the hope of God’s future.  To be a people of the Jesus meal is to be a people shaped by the promise that there is always Life, no matter the crisis or conflict or loss, a people called to trust that promise and to welcome all God’s children to that promise.  There is always room at this table, for here is always Christ in whom God’s fullness dwells.  Yes, as that sister in Christ so powerfully named it, there are times when it is hard to believe; those are the very times the community believes for us.  There are times when we know only despair, or anger; those are the times the community in Christ carries us in hope.  There are times we feel so empty and so lost; those are the very times God comes to us, finds us and binds us in strong arms of love and feeds us with this meal of grace.

As we break bread together today this Bread of Heaven, and this Cup of Salvation, renew the promise of our future in Christ.  What does that future look like?  I don’t know any more clearly than you do, but I am convinced in my heart that it includes hope for peace in the middle east for God’s children on all sides of those conflicts; freedom from fear and relationships reconciled for children and adults mired in anger and abuse; restoration to community for those isolated by the lie that they can go it alone; and for all those whose “obesity” in body and soul is choking the life out of them, a new focus that shifts the center of their lives from the angst of “wanting it all” to the joy of simplified needs.