Wednesday nights at my internship congregation were pretty raucous occasions. Every Wednesday, we would have dinner together, followed by children’s time and a worship service for the adults, which the kids would join at the passing of the peace. The free meal and fun games attracted numerous children from the nearby apartments. The result was a communion service of around sixty of whom forty or so were marginally or totally unsupervised children under the age of ten. Chaos, as you might imagine, was the name of the game. On one particularly crazy evening, I found myself seated in the front row, surrounded by a hoard of six-year-old boys. My internship supervisor, a larger than life figure who always seemed to feed on the energy in the room, took the cup, held it aloft, and, his deep voice booming through the sanctuary, proclaimed “This is my blood, poured out for you.” And the six year old to my left all of a sudden turned to me, eyes huge, and said, “wait, there’s blood in that cup! GROSS!”
And I panicked. How in the world was I supposed to explain the complicated nuances of consubstantiation—a long word you may not be familiar with that I am using deliberately right now to make the point that this is a complicated subject—to a six year old in the middle of a worship service. My mind raced through hours of seminary lectures, pages of hastily scribbled notes, books upon books upon books by brilliant theologians, and just as I was opening my mouth to utter a long, confused, stalling, “um,” the six-year-old to my right conveniently chose that moment to begin to beat the kid next to him with his folded up bulletin. I turned to break up that situation, and in the seconds it took to grab the offending bulletin and end the scuffle, my budding theologian had turned his bulletin into a bullhorn and was attempting to shout the Lord’s Prayer as loudly as he could over the combined voices of the rest of the conversation. Then it was time for me to go forward and assist with communion. As the kid came forward, hunk of bread gripped firmly between two grubby fingers, I knelt down to his level and, hands shaking, held out the cup, uttering the familiar words, a hint of hesitance in my voice, “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” I wondered what I would say if the question came up again? What if he balked at taking the cup? What if he said something and it freaked the other kids out so much that they stopped coming to church? My worry was unfounded. We used a sweet bread, and the kids liked the sense of danger they got from getting to have wine. “Jesus is pretty delicious,” one of them once told me. This meant communion was always the high point in the evening. The kid looked up at me, face broken into a huge, gap-toothed grin, and shoved his hand into the cup with such force that wine sloshed out of the cup and onto my hands. He held the bread in the cup for a moment, wine up to his knuckles. Then he stuck the thoroughly soaked bread in his mouth and made a huge production of chewing with great enthusiasm, loud smacking to indicate his pleasure at the treat, making sure every single kid still waiting in line understood that because he had sat in the front of the church, he had gotten his snack first and they had to wait. Seminary logic, as so often happened, was no match for the unbridled joy of a six-year-old.
So here we are, week four of the five weeks of the bread of life texts. We’ve been muddling through this sixth chapter of John for a while now, and as is the case with all of the long speeches in John’s Gospel, the longer Jesus talked, the more confusing he became. Finally, this morning, we reach the tipping point. Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” And the crowd responded, “wait? What? How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” They will get more firm in their confusion next week, but this week it still takes the form of an uneasy question. And Jesus responded with like the most Jesus-y comeback ever. The kind of comeback that makes Jesus both such a great teacher and such an incredibly frustrating one. Because Jesus didn’t answer their question. Jesus didn’t break down the doctrine for them, he didn’t define what he meant, didn’t throw in a bunch of fancy words like “consubstantiation” or say something in Latin or name-drop a theologian. Jesus instead gave them a promise. Instead of answering their questions, Jesus simply promised, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood with have eternal life.” That’s it. It’s that simple.
Except, it’s not at all simple, right? The crowd didn’t respond, but you can hear their unwritten questions because they are the same questions rattling around in our own heads as we hear this story. But wait Jesus, you’re not telling us that you are made of flour and water? You’re not advocating cannibalism? What if I don’t eat of your flesh and drink of your blood? What if I don’t understand what you’re talking about? Can I do this wrong? How often am I supposed to do this? Once a week? Or does too often make it not special? How do I get ready for this? Do I have to confess first? Should I not come if I’m not yet ready? How do I know if I’m ready? What if I think I’m ready and then I eat and then I’m totally not ready? Are you going to be mad?
So in verse fifty-seven, Jesus drops the flesh and blood part, simplifying it even more. “Whoever eats me will live because of me.” These words Jesus spoke, this meal he calls us to, it isn’t about believing or understanding or getting right with God. It is about Jesus. It is about what Jesus is going to do because of who Jesus is. Jesus promises to meet us and feed us and give us his entire being.
Just come. Just eat. Eat and drink and receive God. It really is that simple. This morning in the first reading we heard in Proverbs about wisdom, in John six we see Jesus’s bold declaration that the wisdom of God is not knowledge or understanding, the wisdom of God is relationship. The wisdom of God is a God who encounters us in our very bodies and transforms us from within. In the third chapter of John, Jesus talked about believing, but here in chapter six, Jesus moves from belief to promise. Bishop Craig Satterlee wrote, “Eternal life does not come through understanding correctly or believing the right things. Eternal life is being in close communion with Jesus. Eternal life is to remain in Jesus and to have Jesus remain in us. We take Christ’s body and blood into our mouths, into our stomachs, into our bodies, so that Christ remains in us and we remain in Christ.”*
Since the conversation with the six-year-old, I read a lot more books about teaching communion to children and adults. I wrote a paper about that experience and all that reading. I graduated seminary. I have been “set apart” for word and sacrament ministry, a fancy phrase that means I get to preside at communion, for three years now; I’ve been ordained for one. Even so, if you ask me after the service or, if you really want to put me on the spot, at the communion rail, if there’s blood in the cup, you’re likely to get the same frantic blank, backpedalling stare that I gave the six-year-old many years ago. I can define consubstantiation for you, it is a theological doctrine that asserts that during the sacrament, the fundamental substance of the body and blood of Christ are present alongside the substance of bread and wine, which remain present. However, I will also tell you that consubstantiation is not our Eucharistic theology as Lutherans, and you can really safely forget that word. So instead of you asking me, and me awkwardly stumbling through an explanation, let me tell you what I believe. No, more than believe; let me tell you what I know to be true because I have experienced this truth. Jesus Christ meets us in this meal. In this meal, we encounter, we take into ourselves, the Word made flesh. God incarnate in Jesus Christ enters our very bodies and transforms us from within. What I have experienced is that this meal gives me life. This meal changes me. This meal feeds me in ways that food cannot. So come. And eat. Come eat of the flesh of God and drink of his blood. Come and meet Jesus. You will be transformed. Jesus promises you this. Thanks be to God. Amen.
* Bishop Craig A. Satterlee, "Commentary on John 6:51-58," Working Preacher, August 16, 2015, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2552.
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