Staying and Going

Text: Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Other texts: John 6:51-66

[Last week and this week we heard the same passage from the Gospel of John. Today’s remarks carry on from last week’s.

Last week we heard that Martin Luther considered Holy Communion to be daily sustenance in the fight against evil. We talked then mostly about the sustenance part, and how the body and blood of Christ feeds a hunger that we all share. This week, we’ll talk more about the daily part. Last week we talked about how the followers of Jesus were put off by what he said, and many left. This week, we’ll talk more about those who remained.]

“Lord, to whom can we go?” asks Peter. Jesus has placed his disciples at a crossroads. Go one way, or go the other. Go with me, or don’t. To both those who left and those who stayed, their choice was the obvious correct one. For Peter and his eleven friends, the obvious choice was to stay with Jesus. We approve of that choice, which seems obvious to us, also. Peter’s words have become a part of Sunday worship in many Lutheran churches, where they introduce the Gospel reading. They are like a street sign that confirms that we are walking the same road that Peter and the disciples took.

But for Peter, choosing to go with Jesus was not like choosing the main street but taking instead the little dirt path off to the left. Following Jesus was unusual and risky. When Peter asks “to whom can we go,” the word he uses makes it clear that going to something implies going away from something else. “To whom shall we go from?” would be more accurate but more awkward. Peter gives up some other way of life to have a life with Jesus.

In this sense, Peter is not following Jesus so much as turning toward Jesus. Lord, to whom shall we turn? is more like it. It is a question of orientation. Changing direction. As Peter lives his life, which way will he be facing?

The same question is presented by Joshua to the Israelites. Make a choice, says Joshua, between God and the other gods. There are a lot of gods in the world, he says. Go with them or go with God. You can serve the Lord or you do not have to. It is up to you. Make your choice; follow whom you want. But as for me, Joshua famously says, as for me and my household, we will serve God.

The people answer: Far be it from us that we should forsake God for other gods. This is the answer to Joshua’s version of Peter’s question. For Joshua and his people, there is no other way to turn. This is God, who freed the people from slavery in Egypt, did great things, and protected them from all dangers. To whom else, we can hear them say, to whom else can we go? We will turn to face our God, they say. They declare: We too will serve the Lord. And yet, Joshua immediately tells them—in verses just beyond our reading—tells them they won’t. And he is right. As time goes on, they don’t.

Joshua is not condemning them, or invalidating their promise. Their promise, like Peter’s, is not some potion that makes other gods disappear or makes them less seductive. Their promise, and Peter’s, is a vow. Like a marriage vow, it binds people together in good times and in bad, in times of bliss and times of hardship. Sometimes it gets so bad that the promise is all that remains, for a while. A thread between two people, or between us and God. Joshua is validating their promise, praising its power against the powers of other inevitable attractions.

Following Jesus, being a Christian, is not a one-time decision but an ongoing and recurring one. The story of faith in the Bible is a story of good intent followed by betrayal, then revival followed by faithlessness. The choice placed before the people by Joshua—serve God!—is the same choice placed earlier by Moses—choose life!—and placed later by Jesus before the disciples.

It seems that the choice once made must be made again and again. We cannot just declare ourselves for Jesus once and be done with it. Peter, who here declares un-rivaled loyalty to Jesus later denies him.

Following Jesus is at best adopting a new way of life. To see things as Jesus seems to. To be a peacemaker, as Paul writes in the second reading today. To love one another. I am the way, Jesus said. The early Jesus movement was called the Way. It is a habit of existence more than a one-time statement of loyalty. It requires constant maintenance, nurtured not by our will to be good and true—which will always fail, as Joshua said of the Israelites—but by the spirit of God, and reminders of our promises, and the support of others. The same things that nurtured our spiritual ancestors.

This is the reason we repeat these same stories about God and humans. This is the reason why we share in the body and blood of Christ each Sunday. Why we gather each week to confess sins, pray, praise God, recite dogma. They are reminders. Our pattern of worship echoes the story of Joshua: gathering, re-hearing the word of God, responding, re-committing, going out again. We affirm the promises we made in baptism. We repeat the creed, and the Lord’s Prayer.

There will always be authorities and powers of evil, as Paul describes them. Competition for our souls. Ways of life. There are lots of other places to go, in spite of Peter’s proclamation. There will always be other gods. What they are for you, you’ll have to say for yourself. You know them.

Our task is not to destroy those gods. But rather to put them aside, to put them away as Joshua says. Out of sight and hearing. Not literally burying them, as Joshua meant—though that might work for some of the material gods that command our allegiance. But to turn our faces away from them. To turn to Jesus for guidance instead. To think: whom am I serving by doing this or that? Am I serving God? Whom am I following? I have made a vow to Christ. Is this thing that I am about to do in line with that vow? Am I still on the way?

Joshua and Peter are both rhetoricians, great public speakers, good politicians. They make it sound like choosing God over other gods, choosing to go to Jesus from some other way, requires nothing more than a good heart and firm resolve. But to describe what people do here is as choosing is misleading. We cannot keep a vow to always be true.

To follow Christ turns out to be not an act of will, but a willingness to make a risky promise. God offers us daily invitations to a new way of living. A new way of seeing. By declaring that we follow Jesus, we can make this vow: to accept those invitations—with the help of God and as much as we are able—one day at a time, again and again.

Not As Difficult

Text: John 6:51-69

There is a magical realism in the Gospel of John. It makes John both the most-loved and the least-liked of the four Gospels. Things happen in this Gospel that happen nowhere else. The most magical stories of Jesus are in John. The conversion of water to wine. The raising of his friend Lazarus from the dead. These are works of divinity. But also in John, Jesus is the most earthy and human. He is annoyed at his mother at the wedding at Cana, and he weeps before the tomb of Lazarus. John is full of seemingly opposing pairs: divine and human, light and dark, body and spirit, concrete and figurative.

What, then, are we to make of today’s passage about eating flesh and drinking blood? What is this? Is it metaphorical or literal? Is it magic or real? This teaching is difficult, so say the disciples, and two thousand years of Christians after them agree. Can we dismiss it—as often has been done—as fantastical? Just another one of those over-the-top things that Jesus says. In the category of turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, giving away all your money. Can we, as we sometimes do with the other difficult sayings of Jesus, domesticate it and change the subject?

There are a lot of weird things about Christianity, and this is one of the weirdest. On hearing this teaching, many of the followers of Jesus left him. “They no longer went about with him,” John writes. Only the twelve were left. His followers went from thousands surrounding him at the beginning of the chapter, wanting to make him king, to just a dozen. Yet for Christians in our day, eating flesh and drinking blood is central. The body of Christ, given for you, we say. The blood of Christ shed for you.

Martin Luther said of this passage that Jesus could not mean it literally. Surely he does not mean, Luther said, that one man should devour another. That seems right. Jesus does not follow this speech up with an offer to take a bite out of him right then and there. Luther also said that the passage was not about the Eucharist, about Holy Communion. We’ll talk in a minute about how, in spite of Luther’s opinion, it might have been.

But perhaps Luther was right. There is no mention of a meal here, no Lord’s Supper. The story does not take place before the crucifixion (as in the other Gospels), but rather after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. The emphasis here is on life, and the life-giving properties of food and drink. What Jesus asks us to remember here is not the presence of Jesus in our midst, as in the Last Supper, but instead the provision of manna in the wilderness—the original bread from heaven—and that God provided nourishment for God’s people. In some way the physical body of Jesus is like that.

We are creatures that eat. We cannot create our own energy or substance. We steal them from other things—plants and other animals. As a consequence, we need to eat or we die. Eating and drinking are not optional. To compare our need for Jesus to our need for food is to say that Jesus is essential for human life.

Since we are creatures that eat, we are not our own. That is, what we eat becomes us, and we become in some small part what we eat. Its substance is our substance. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them, Jesus says (here and elsewhere). There is a kind of biology science going on here. In spite of John’s interest in the divine side of Jesus, Jesus nourishes us—according to this passage—not primarily in a spiritual way but in a physical way. How that works, it does not say.

The church—people, followers of Jesus—tries to make these theoretical words of Jesus practical. That is, if we are to follow Jesus about eating flesh and drinking blood, without actually gnawing—the earthy word that Jesus uses here—on his limbs, we must learn a way to do this that is physical, mundane, and convenient.

Which brings us to Holy Communion. In spite of Luther, the Eucharist is a possible way to interpret these words. And it may have been how the readers of John saw it. Because by the time John was written, followers of Jesus had been sharing the Lord’s Supper for decades. Using the words we use every Sunday—called the words of institution—that come from Paul, who wrote his letters long before John wrote his story of Jesus.

When we eat the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion, we honor and obey the words of Jesus spoken both at the Last Supper and here in John. We eat bread and wine. How this becomes body and blood, no one can say. Or at least, no Lutherans can say. There has long been a theological debate about this, but Luther said we should leave all that to the philosophers. It is interesting but neither urgent nor important. “This is my body” Jesus said; and Luther said that was all we need to know.

Luther also said that the bread and wine as body and blood of Christ was essential nourishment, needed daily (“given,” he said, “as a daily pasture and sustenance”) to get the strength to fight the devil. It is food. God gives us this food of Jesus to sustain us.

Our worries about this strange thing that is happening with body and blood and bread and wine turn out to be unfounded in practice. At least in practice among Christians. We do not judge it theologically but instead from our own experience. There is something physical going on and something mystical. We feel it when we share Holy Communion. Something of the flesh and something of the spirit. In our experience, the sacrament is effective. That is, it has a real effect.

We come forward to the altar, we kneel, we eat bread—hearing the words “the body of Christ given for you”—and we drink wine—hearing the words “the blood of Christ shed for you”—and we return, some to quiet prayer, and eventually sent out thankfully into the world—“go in peace, serve the Lord.”

None of us has to do this. None of us has to be here. We are here because we know that we need to be nourished and because we have found ourselves nourished here. The sacrament works for us.

The difficulty imagined by the disciples (and by us) turns out to be exaggerated. The uneasiness that we feel regarding these words in John is in fact not carried over into its effect in the Lord’s Supper. We might feel Holy Communion to be powerful, mysterious, comforting. But the weirdness that people sometimes find in it, though understandable, is at odds with our own personal experiences. Many of the followers of Jesus left after Jesus spoke these words. But twelve did not. We are heirs of those twelve who did not.

Christianity is based on the conviction that God became incarnate—literally, made into meat, into flesh—in the person of Jesus. We share with Jesus flesh and blood, life and spirit. Our whole self hungers for food in order to live. When we eat the body and blood, the bread and wine, it is as real as hunger is, and as magical as life is.

Duty and Joy

Text: Ephesians 4:25–5:2

As we begin the prayer of great thanksgiving every Sunday, we recite a portion called the preface. The preface varies with the season, but it always starts with our proclaiming that it is our duty and our joy to praise and thank God. This phrase, “our duty and our joy,” was a new addition, added in 2006 when the current hymnal was published. Before that, we said “it is salutary,” a word that means “of some benefit,” which was less specific and also less edgy.

It was a good update. Duty and joy are semi-old-fashioned words that together are the heart of Christian action. Their interplay is a constant theme of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and especially the passage we just heard. The words belong together. Without the other, each becomes flat and weak. Duty without joy becomes mere obligation. Joy without duty becomes mere sentimentality.

This letter, probably not written by Paul—but let’s call him Paul anyway—this letter does what Paul’s other letters often do: tells people how to behave. These letters to the churches reveal problems when they propose solutions. There is no point in telling people to change their ways if their way is just fine.

What is the problem in Ephesus? Imagine a world in which people remain angry with one another all the time and criticize each other. Where they speak evil of others. A world in which people are bitter, and quarrel with and slander others. It is not hard to imagine such a world because this is the world we live in now. We are, sadly, not surprised. This is how things work. We are old hands at letting the devil in, as Paul describes it.

But this is neither how things should be nor the way they have to be. For Christians, Paul writes, there is an alternative way to live. And the letter to the Ephesians is like a user guide to that life, written to people who claim to follow Jesus. The Christian identity of the readers brackets these verses, explaining at the first why we should behave the way Paul says and explaining at the end how we can go about doing that.

For starters, we are all members of one another. We are part of one body, the body of Christ as Paul put it a few verses back. We are all members of one organic system, working together, in different parts. The parts must tell the truth to each other. If we are one body, we cannot by definition do otherwise. If we do otherwise, we are not one body. Falsehood breaks the connections between people, and nothing works as it should.

This is making room for the devil: To consider ourselves to be unconnected, or not importantly connected, to other people. To mock relationships that center on love and to glamorize relationships that honor competitive and warring enemies. To see ourselves as independent, not interdependent. Otherwise, like a physical body, humanity will be weak and ill.

Once we become followers of Jesus, we are part of a new way of being, Paul says. A better way. We are no longer alone. We cannot act as if we were alone. Our decisions are not made by us alone, and we do not make decisions for ourselves alone. What we do is affected by and affects others. Do not steal, Paul writes, not because stealing is wrong in the abstract, but because otherwise one could be providing for others in need. Do not speak evil, because otherwise one could be giving grace to others. It is an opportunity thrown away.

The instructions in these verses are not achievements to be accomplished. Nor are they simply marks or identifiers of a Christian life. They are duties to be performed. They are things we must do, and we must do them because we follow Jesus.

We are to heed Paul’s instructions because it is our duty. This is not a question of merit (we are not better persons because of it), and it is not a question of salvation (God will not love us more or less). But just because we are saved by grace, or just because we know that we are loved unconditionally, does not mean that we are off the hook and should not judge ourselves. We should.

But we need to distinguish between judging and evaluating. It is clear, as someone pointed out in Bible study a few weeks ago, that God judges us. But judgment is not the same as an evaluation. God’s evaluation, we teach, is always positive. That does not mean God likes all the things we do. God seems to have goals for us—that are made clear in scripture passages like this or through the prophets or in the life and teachings of Jesus—but those goals are not the same as expectations. God is not disappointed in God’s children, whether or not we meet the goals.

The list of instructions in this passage is founded on three principles. First, that we tell the truth to one another. Second, that we rely on one another. And third, that we try to imitate God as revealed to us in Jesus. The instructions do not work if we ignore any one of these things.

We will not succeed if we lie to each other (or to ourselves, I imagine). Or, as a corollary, if we lie about each other (bearing false witness). We will not succeed if we try to live a good life without the help of others. And we will not succeed if we try to do this without God’s help and guidance.

Paul is not asking for superhuman efforts or results. He is not promising that we can transform the world all at once. This is not a miracle cure. He is not demanding purity, but an intentional effort to put aside, as he says, what is usually so compelling to us. No one claims that it is easy to put away bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, and all malice. Or to be kind to one another, tenderhearted, and forgiving. But it is our duty to, nonetheless. Paul is asking the Ephesians—that is, us—to remember that they have become new people. And that in calling ourselves Christians we have made a commitment to being new people who are trying to live a new way for the sake of a new world.

Practically, we are likely to act the same old way and for the same old reasons. But Paul’s manual says that—even so—when we make decisions, when we act, when we speak, we must be mindful of the instructions that we have heard. And we must ask ourselves: am I speaking, acting, deciding for good or evil, for life or death, out of malice or out of forgiveness. What am I thinking about?

When we become followers of Jesus, we adopt the view that a different way of living is possible. The conviction that this is so is the joy that blossoms out of this passage. Bitterness and malice do not have to be the way of things. We have signed up to be part of that project. It is our duty and our joy.