Church of St. John the Evangelist: Sermon B 13 Pentecost 16 Proper 26 August 2012

1 Kg 8: [1,6,10-11] 22–30, 41– 43; Ps 84; Eph 6:10–20; JN 6: 56–69

Happy are we who dwell in your house! We will always be praising you! O Lord of hosts, happy are we who put our trust in you. AMEN.

Today we have another facet of John’s Bread of Life discourse in this Mark year. This week, this phrase leapt out at me. “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” The week was filled with men discussing again—in political situations—what women should or may do with their own bodies, and with our deep sadness for Michael Harnois’ death. While our flesh is often a burden, I don’t it has to be named “useless” too. “Bah,” I say, and “fie.” So much bad theology has risen from that sentence and thought, and yet it cannot be God’s attitude, intention, or way, or why bother with Creation at all? God created people in God’s own image, and saw that it was good. That’s our elemental reality and our place to start; flesh was proclaimed as both made in God’s own image and as good.

Simon Peter understood this bottom line, “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.” Here’s the trail of thought that gets me to shrug my shoulders with Simon Peter, and back into this declaration of Jesus as the reality, the real presence, the bread of life, the pledge and promise of eternal life, the Holy One of God.

A starting point is this piece of the chorus from Auden’s unmanageable Christmas Oratorio, John Hooker sent me.

Hear this poem in its three phrase shape: a John I am/He is statement, an imperative to reader/hearer of what to do linked by a semi-colon to the reward to follow.

“He is the Way.

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love Him in the World of the Flesh;

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.”

It’s the Christmas title that helps understand this. I hear the He as Jesus, and you as us, and we live and inhabit the World of the Flesh, and Jesus bonds us to him to make us dance for joy at all occasions. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and will come again, not to judge us as the quick and the dead, but to insure we’ll have unique adventures, to welcome us into a great city that has expected our arrival, our return for years, and to marry us with him into eternal joy. Somehow the Land of Unlikeness, the Kingdom of Anxiety, and the World of the Flesh— all sound a lot like life as we experience it, even though I’m not exactly clear what the Land of Unlikeness is.

1 Kings understands this promise “’There shall never fail you a successor before me to sit on the throne of Israel, if only your children look to their way, to walk before me as you have walked before me.’ Therefore, O God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you promised to your servant my father David. But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! ...so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built.” The repeated emphasis on God’s house as David’s house underscores two points. First that the world God created around David, his kingdom, his realm, his lineage, his world, is encapsulated in the image of house; it’s not a literal house or even a family tree’s line. It’s a world comfortably situated in metaphor, as is Jesus’ as the flesh and blood of life. It is more concrete and so less nurturing as an image, than Jesus as the bread and wine of life. This world of metaphor comes from David’s line, and it is the second point repeatedly emphasized that Jesus is of David’s House. David has delighted in God’s dwelling; it is dear to him. He sings, “Happy are they who dwell in God’s house; they will always be praising God.” Jesus knows he is part of both David and God’s house, and that that is secure, happy, and well defended. He knows that the Lord will withhold no good thing from those who walk with integrity trusting in the Lord.

Jesus says, “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…but the one who eats this bread will live forever.” If the disciples and other hearers weren’t having enough trouble with this explicit imagery, Jesus goes on to say, “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is useless.”

Most clearly, Jesus is in no way dismissing himself as useless flesh, and only really living in Spirit. People have considered through the years, that God couldn’t really live for true life as a living, breathing, bleeding, loving human. He more realistically must have been real God, and so as a human, just a spirit-presence looking, acting, behaving indistinguishably like a human, living as a human, but actually being a spirit. That’s a heresy. For Jesus to fulfill God’s mission to live, to try out human life, he had to have no escape other than death, no vanishing like Caspar the friendly Ghost, through walls, or poof into invisibility. Besides, were Jesus a spirit, nothing he told us to do, to try, to be, would have a touch of validity—zilch, zero, nada. Only Jesus’ slogging through the Kingdom of Anxiety leads us with some confidence to that great city that has expected us for years, with his celebrating with a dance for joy for us.

What about the “flesh as useless” then? Are we supposed to live above our flesh and blood existence and aim to live without food, love, or any gritting into human life? Are we supposed to live ethereal lives, aiming to be drifting spirits and distance ourselves from our humanity or our pinchable selves? Is it more noble, more god-like to live ignoring, discounting, or devaluing our flesh? Whoever eats the bread of life, whoever eats the flesh of Jesus will abide in him forever. As Jesus is God incarnate, so we abide in and with Jesus. We know, we honor flesh as the location, the reality, and the house of God.

John Hooker goes to Auden in his thoughts, but I could only hear Luther echo in my mind’s ear, “The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him who with us sideth:/ Let goods and kindred go; this mortal life also; /The body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still, his Kingdom is for ever.” We are stuck with our own flesh and blood; we are humans, and we don’t get to flit away into some spirit-smoke up the chimney of our burning lives. Flesh is our conveyance to live life. Flesh is the conveyance God used to see what human life was like. Flesh was the medium through which God learned how hard living an ordinary life, committed to bringing about God’s reign was to live, day by day, in the face of evil, distractions, Unlikeness, and Anxiety.

The only way through all of it, to being with Jesus is to abide in Jesus. That means to share in the community of Jesus we are to participate in every part of that community with hope and curiosity. We are to be together: to hear the Word read; to be present at the blessing and giving out of bread and wine; to share in the food of life, the bread of heaven to sustain us here, and to go out to proclaim this good news. That’s the mystery of the Incarnation, Jesus offering us himself as an abiding presence, until we abide with him. Luther’s comment points out the transience of our bodies, own flesh and blood, but God’s truth, Jesus’ nourishing presence, abides still. God’s kingdom is for ever.

That’s what Simon Peter came to. If he believed God was in Jesus and to believe in, to share in Jesus’ life through bread and wine, a mystery of his flesh and blood, well there it is. Jesus had the words of eternal life; Jesus was the Word of eternal life, so where else to go? It’s not easy but we have come to believe, or we practice believing together that Jesus is the Holy One of God. Not easy, but there it is. God’s kingdom is promised both to and for us.

Hear Auden’s poetry again, and live into its images: