Encircled By Love
Proper 16B-24
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
“Alleluia, Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. Alleluia. Alleluia” (ELW). Peter’s words sound familiar because they we often use them to announce the gospel. Yet, to my ear, Peter sounds almost deflated and disappointed. Upon hearing Jesus’ weird words about flesh and blood, “Many of those who up to that point had been following him said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60), “…and many of them no longer went about with him” (John 6:66).
“Eat my flesh. Drink my blood.” Jesus’ teaching conjured images of cannibalism in his follower’s minds. They thought he was talking about eating the material Jesus standing there in front of them, rather than the incarnate combination of flesh and spirit that gives life to the world. Judas appears to have been among those to cash in his chips. Jesus’ incendiary language about consuming flesh and blood seemed to go against a thousand years of biblical teaching and, among other things, set Judas on a course toward betrayal.
The Messiah people wanted was not the Messiah who appeared. Jesus invited the disciples to participate in their own costly transformation and to walk the way of the cross. But who wants that? Why can’t Jesus just redeem the world while we cheer from the sidelines? We’d all buy a ticket for that wouldn’t we?
Instead, Jesus says, ‘You are my blood. You are my body.’ You that eat this bread become part of me and members of each other, one with the poor, the helpless, the outcasts. This body expands way too far! This isn’t what we were hoping for.
This isn’t really what we had in mind.
And yet…to whom can we go?
Lord, you have the words of eternal life (John 6:68).
John chapter six, which we have been chewing on for the past 5 weeks, could be read at Christmas. Might it bring us closer to understanding the scandal and terror of incarnation more than the happy manger story seems to do? The point of Jesus’ teaching isn’t dietary –it’s incarnational.
“Incarnation” literally means “enfleshment.” By his conception and birth Jesus became a living manifestation of the presence of God, not just now and then, not sometimes, but full-time, for all time. By our baptism into Christ, the Spirit is incarnate or enfleshed in us too, so that wherever we go, God goes with us. Immanuel—means God is with us—so we can pray with St. Patrick the encircling prayer he used like a shield and breast plate of protection wherever he traveled, ‘Christ with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.’
John proclaims in chapter one: ‘All who receive him, who entrust their lives to his name, he gives power to become children of God, who are born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). As members of Christ, we are born from above by water and by Spirit (John 3:4-8). Jesus’ teaching honors our frail mortal bodies. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Faith is an invitation to walk all our days in the awareness that we are encircled by God’s loving presence. We put on this heavenly garment of Christ to cloth our earthly bodies in grace.
Clothed in grace, we listen to the stranger. We forgive our enemies. We are generous toward the poor. Love is a more powerful motivator than the threat of violence. Being encircled in God’s life means that we are in the constant presence of a loving parent who broods over us, who counsels and teaches, who prays for us, and cries over us. This brooding Spirit gives life. It inspires creativity and transformation. It challenges us to look beyond our own interests to an integration of our well-being and the well-being of the planet.
Jesus’ words provoked a crisis of faith among the disciples. It caused them to rethink, re-order, and reform their religious life and identity. This would prove too demanding for many and they turned away. Throughout our history, Jesus’ teaching has repeatedly broken the church open to widen our vision, to redraw the boundaries of inclusion, and promote a deeper understanding. This natural, simple process of transformation—moving from order to disorder to reorder—does not often come without suffering and loss—whether in our personal lives, in our church, or in society.
We live in a time when scholarship has brought the teaching of Jesus into sharper focus, and we are now freer to proclaim the gospel with accuracy and confidence more than at almost any point in the past 1,900 years. Yet, we also live in a time when many religious institutions are in decline. It is a time of spiritual exile in the Western world in which we are once again being invited to reorder our understanding, to widen the circle of fellowship with those of a different faiths, and of no faith, and with all life, including non-human life in union with the living God who is revealed to us here, in Christ Jesus, in bread and wine, in water and the Word.
The body of Christ of which we partake has no address, no zip code. It is not limited to one people, nation, or ethnicity. The divine lure invites us to remember what our souls, at some level, have always known, ‘…which is that our true spiritual center is not Rome, or Jerusalem or Mecca or any of the other places that religion has claimed to hold special authority over us. Our true spiritual center is Earth and the human soul. Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and so on, have occupied a significant place in our faith traditions over the centuries but, essentially, they exist to serve Earth and the human soul, not the other way round….The source of truth is deep within each one of us and deep within everything that has being. Just as new science enables us to know that physically we live in an omni-centric Universe, so it is spiritually. The center is everywhere’ (John Philip Newell, The Great Search).
Lord Christ, “You have the words of eternal life,” as Peter said. In a complex, changing world, we affirm the constancy of God’s encircling love moving within all things. We put on Christ, like a warm blanket, like a suit of armor. So we may join ourselves to Jesus, heart and soul, body and mind, confident that God’s encircling and eternal care surrounds and protects us even as we to face life’s challenges and conflicts, sickness and death, threat and uncertainty. (Bruce Epperly). “Oh Word of God incarnate, O Wisdom from on high, O Truth unchanged, unchanging, O Light of our dark sky: It is the chart and compass that, all life’s voyage through, mid mists and rocks and quick sands still guides, O Christ to you” (ELW # 514).
