KINGDOM KIDS
Once a great preacher had finished his sermon and was leading his congregation through the prayers of communion one of his youngest parishioners showed she was really listening. When he got to the part of the prayer that repeats Jesus words, “This is my body broken for you… this is my blood shed for you” mall girl suddenly said in a loud voice “Ew, yuk!”
Do you know what a cannibal is? A person who eats another person.
A long time ago when there weren’t very many Christians around and their worship was secret, even guests were asked to leave the room before Communion started. The neighbors wondered, “what’s going on?” And they started to spread rumors. One rumor was that during worship the Christians were eating babies during their worship services. The neighbors thought Christians were cannibals.
In the scripture today we read about some of Jesus’ listeners who thought he wanted them to become cannibals! Enjoy the fact that they were wrong. Jesus did not want people to eat one of his arms or legs. But he did say that those who love him should eat him. What could that mean?
Grace and Salem and I borrowed a great CD of music of Woody Guthry songs from the library and we're listening to it in the car. One song is a mama bouncing her baby on her knee. “
Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, giggle, giggle, giggle, giggle
little sack of sugar I could eat you up!
Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, giggle, giggle, giggle, giggle
little sack of sugar I could eat your toes!
When we really love someone – when we really want to be with them – sometimes we say we’d like to eat them.
So today when we eat the bread of communion think of Jesus being really with us. You are what you eat. We eat and swallow bread, taking it inside our bodies and it becomes part of us. The bread that stands for Jesus, and all that he gives to us, and how he wants us to live. When we eat the bread it becomes part of us just as God becomes part of us.
I passed out chunks of bread for worshipers to chew on during the sermon.
SERMON
The second half of this summer we’ve exploring a Holy Mystery. Like detective searching for clues we’ve been carefully mining the riches of John 6. This is the fourth week of five week series. If you’ve been away for any of the past three weeks you can find the sermons on-line. But just for a quick review.
The first week we started by reading John’s version of Jesus feeding the multitude. We noted that he invited everyone even though the crowd and even his disciples didn’t understand what the meal was all about.
No one can fully understand the holy mystery of Communion. For that reason, and because we are convinced that the sacrament is a sure and certain means of receiving God’s grace, United Methodists welcome the youngest baptized person to the table and won’t even turn away someone who has not yet formally joined the Church in baptism. Jesus is faithful and feeds all who are hungry.
The second week we remembered that communion was once served to all the peoples of Europe in Latin. The prayers the priests said (hoc est corpus) sounded like hocus pocus. This was one reason the Protestants split from Medieval Catholicism, to fight off superstitions, by giving the word of God to the people in their own language. Since Vatican II the Catholic church agrees with this. Clergy do not have magic words to turn bread and wine into some kind of mystical medicine. Yet most Christian churches affirm Christ’s real presence among us when we gather to hear the word and share communion.
Last week we turned to the metaphor of eating Christ. There are different levels of this metaphor. Last week we came to see that Jesus was talking about learning from the word of God – developing the practice of taking the word of God into ourselves every day – as our daily bread. You are what you eat. How many tried to establish or strengthen the habit of being nourished by God’s word every day?
Now we will look at the metaphor of Christ as living bread from a different angle. From the perspective of sharing Holy Communion together as a gathered body. When the believers eat from the one body we become united as the church. We become the body of Christ.
In western culture we are schooled to think of ourselves as individuals. Thomas Long notes, “We often say things like, ‘Worship helps me get through the week. I couldn’t make it Monday to Saturday without worshiping on Sunday’ or ‘Worship is where I get my spiritual batteries charged.’ There is truth in this, of course,” Long muses, “Worship at its best can be truly uplifting and inspiring, and worship can fortify us for the mundane tasks of life. But it is finally too shallow to think of worship mainly as a kind of holy pep rally.” (Testimony)
Worship does more than inspire each of us on our own. When we do it rightly, worship transforms those of us who gather here in Jesus name into a community, a koinonia, a fellowship of brothers and sisters who need one another and work together just like the parts of a body. Jesus is not just talking about individuals, he is also talking about the community – the gathered church.
How can I tell? Where does today’s scripture lesson hint at this idea, you might ask? This is where it helps for holy mystery detectives to know some Greek. One way that Greek is very different from English is it has different words for our one word “you.” If I say, “I love you,” in a room full of people it’s not easy to tell if I’m speaking to my husband Joe, or to the whole group. In Greek there are different words for you - individual, and y’all – a group. Old English had some of that – the word “ye” was the plural for talking to a group of people. “Hear ye, Hear ye.”
With that in mind turn in your pew bibles to page 91 of the NT. Let’s see if we can tell if Jesus is talking about individuals, or a group of people here. The pew Bibles are the Revised Standard Version. Verse 51 says “if anyone eats of this bread he will live forever.” Verse 54 says “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” And verse 56 says “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall dwell in me and I in him.” These are written in the singular form.
Our pulpit bible is the New Revised Standard Version. One of the main differences is the translators changed all the masculine words for people so that women would be included. The pronouns used in that version are “whoever” in verse 51, and “those” in verse 54 and 56. This translation makes it impossible to tell if Jesus is talking about single individuals, or a group of people.
If you had a King James Version it would give you a better clue. In verse 53 it uses the word “ye” because the Greek version of the scripture uses the plural word for you. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” Let’s replace ye with the more familiar “y’all.”
This would be a great scripture verse to memorize – verse 53
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Jesus isn’t just talking to us as individuals when we eat his flesh and drink his blood in the sacrament of communion. He is talking to us as a gathered community. As that church.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Here then, is encouragement from Jesus himself for sharing communion frequently; at least every Sunday when we gather for worship, and perhaps even more often than that.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Could frequent communion be a means to helping congregations become revitalized? Could it actually help us grow, to become more full of life?
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
The other week we talked about the importance of gathering. We noted that worship begins with the first two or three arrive in the sanctuary. When people gather for a common purpose there is a kind of energy – a synergy – that people experience. Sociologists know that that community can be enhanced by a certain kind of charismatic leadership. But people who gather together for a common purpose are not always filled with the life of Christ.
The crowds pressed against the shopping mall doors on Black Friday are not fueled by the Spirit of Christ. There is no life when they use elbows and fists to get to the bargain table first. There is no life when some are trampled underfoot.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Crowds that flood the streets of Boston after the Patriots win the super bowl – turning over cars and wreaking havoc with their boundless energy are not fueled by the Spirit of Christ.
Neither is Christ leading any group of people when they become a violent, angry mob.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Even assemblies of people in churches are not necessarily fueled by the Spirit of Christ.
For several years the youth group of my home church created a Haunted House as one of our fund raisers. We had a perfect place for it, a 100 year-old public school which we used for Sunday School. It featured a dank basement, creaking floors, dark stairwells and high ceilings. Ten or twelve guests were let in one at a time, and guided by someone dressed like Dracula, moving from room to room where we tried to give them the shivers.
One year I joined a small group of friends – peers I looked up to – I really wanted them to like me. We decided to create an “unga bunga room” in the lower level of the school. We decorated our room to look like a jungle and made a cardboard likeness of a cauldron on a camp fire. We dressed ourselves like we thought “primitive” cannibal people might dress. During the Haunted House one of us would sneak upstairs and capture an unsuspecting persons from each group, and bring them to our room, so that when their party came through they would see us dancing around the fire with their friend in the pot shouting “unga bunga.”
I was elated to participate is such a creative project and feel so fully accepted by these peers. It was a highlight of my time in the church youth group. Everyone worked hard in the youth group to pull off this event and it did something to help us bond as friends.
Yet looking back at my participation in this church activity now I cringe inside. The unga bunga room was a sign of our racist understandings of people who are not of European descent. We depicted these others, not as beloved children of God, potential brothers and sisters in Christ, with their own beautiful culture and language. Jesus tells us that he is the bread of heaven that he gives for the life of the world. But we portrayed the non-European peoples of the world as violent, ignorant and dangerous – not even fully human. I have come to repent of participating in this activity that worked against Jesus purpose of giving life to the world.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Not every activity that members and leaders of churches participate in are fueled by the Spirit of Christ. Perhaps more frequent communion could help us turn that around?
What if we had begun every youth group meeting with worship including communion? What if our leaders and our pastor were consistently reminding us of Christ’s humility, his sacrificial love for us and his call to not only eat the Bread of Life, but to become bread for the sake of the world? What if we were regularly reminded who we were and whose we were as Baptized members of the Body of Christ – with brothers and sisters in a church that stretches around the world. Perhaps then one of us would have spoken up at the idea of a haunted house that had nothing to do with the good news of Jesus and said "Ew, Yuk!" Maybe instead of trying to give neighbors a scary thrill, we could have introduced them to the Love of God by surrounding them with images of the witnesses who are remembered on November 1 – All Saint’s day. What if we invited the people of the world to hear about the Work of God in the world by giving our testimony of how God changed our lives and gave us life.
Picking up on Thomas Long’s reflection, he said, “Worship does more than inspire us; it transforms us. It changes the way we live, changes the way we view life’s challenges, changes what truly matters to us, changes the way we see ourselves and others. If worship is only a way to get pumped up so that we can “keep on keeping on” then worship can too easily be reduced to a means to perpetuate the way we are already living. But worship is about more than spiritual motivation. It is about vision and hearing, and worship gives us new eyes and ears, a new set of lenses to look at the world, a new vocabulary allowing us to listen afresh and speak what we could not have said before. To see and hear differently is to live differently, to have the ways we think and feel, make decisions and act as Christians transformed.” (Testimony)
When we gather for Holy Communion we have an opportunity to be truly transformed. Yes as individuals as we turn away from our sin, toward Christ and take him into ourselves in our personal devotions, but we also do this as part of a community, united in love.
Saint Augustin said that individual Christians were like the grains of bread. When we take on the practice of fasting, or repentance for doing anything outside of the will of God it is like the grains being crushed. When we are baptized, water is added to us to make us into dough. Then the Fire of the Holy Spirit bakes the bread and the church becomes one – one with Christ, one with each other and one in ministry to all the world.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
But if y’all take the Body of Christ into y’all, ya’ll may be for the world the body of Christ redeemed by his blood. May this church always run on the Fuel of Christ.
Once a great preacher had finished his sermon and was leading his congregation through the prayers of communion one of his youngest parishioners showed she was really listening. When he got to the part of the prayer that repeats Jesus words, “This is my body broken for you… this is my blood shed for you” mall girl suddenly said in a loud voice “Ew, yuk!”
Do you know what a cannibal is? A person who eats another person.
A long time ago when there weren’t very many Christians around and their worship was secret, even guests were asked to leave the room before Communion started. The neighbors wondered, “what’s going on?” And they started to spread rumors. One rumor was that during worship the Christians were eating babies during their worship services. The neighbors thought Christians were cannibals.
In the scripture today we read about some of Jesus’ listeners who thought he wanted them to become cannibals! Enjoy the fact that they were wrong. Jesus did not want people to eat one of his arms or legs. But he did say that those who love him should eat him. What could that mean?
Grace and Salem and I borrowed a great CD of music of Woody Guthry songs from the library and we're listening to it in the car. One song is a mama bouncing her baby on her knee. “
Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, giggle, giggle, giggle, giggle
little sack of sugar I could eat you up!
Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, Jiggle, giggle, giggle, giggle, giggle
little sack of sugar I could eat your toes!
When we really love someone – when we really want to be with them – sometimes we say we’d like to eat them.
So today when we eat the bread of communion think of Jesus being really with us. You are what you eat. We eat and swallow bread, taking it inside our bodies and it becomes part of us. The bread that stands for Jesus, and all that he gives to us, and how he wants us to live. When we eat the bread it becomes part of us just as God becomes part of us.
I passed out chunks of bread for worshipers to chew on during the sermon.
SERMON
The second half of this summer we’ve exploring a Holy Mystery. Like detective searching for clues we’ve been carefully mining the riches of John 6. This is the fourth week of five week series. If you’ve been away for any of the past three weeks you can find the sermons on-line. But just for a quick review.
The first week we started by reading John’s version of Jesus feeding the multitude. We noted that he invited everyone even though the crowd and even his disciples didn’t understand what the meal was all about.
No one can fully understand the holy mystery of Communion. For that reason, and because we are convinced that the sacrament is a sure and certain means of receiving God’s grace, United Methodists welcome the youngest baptized person to the table and won’t even turn away someone who has not yet formally joined the Church in baptism. Jesus is faithful and feeds all who are hungry.
The second week we remembered that communion was once served to all the peoples of Europe in Latin. The prayers the priests said (hoc est corpus) sounded like hocus pocus. This was one reason the Protestants split from Medieval Catholicism, to fight off superstitions, by giving the word of God to the people in their own language. Since Vatican II the Catholic church agrees with this. Clergy do not have magic words to turn bread and wine into some kind of mystical medicine. Yet most Christian churches affirm Christ’s real presence among us when we gather to hear the word and share communion.
Last week we turned to the metaphor of eating Christ. There are different levels of this metaphor. Last week we came to see that Jesus was talking about learning from the word of God – developing the practice of taking the word of God into ourselves every day – as our daily bread. You are what you eat. How many tried to establish or strengthen the habit of being nourished by God’s word every day?
Now we will look at the metaphor of Christ as living bread from a different angle. From the perspective of sharing Holy Communion together as a gathered body. When the believers eat from the one body we become united as the church. We become the body of Christ.
In western culture we are schooled to think of ourselves as individuals. Thomas Long notes, “We often say things like, ‘Worship helps me get through the week. I couldn’t make it Monday to Saturday without worshiping on Sunday’ or ‘Worship is where I get my spiritual batteries charged.’ There is truth in this, of course,” Long muses, “Worship at its best can be truly uplifting and inspiring, and worship can fortify us for the mundane tasks of life. But it is finally too shallow to think of worship mainly as a kind of holy pep rally.” (Testimony)
Worship does more than inspire each of us on our own. When we do it rightly, worship transforms those of us who gather here in Jesus name into a community, a koinonia, a fellowship of brothers and sisters who need one another and work together just like the parts of a body. Jesus is not just talking about individuals, he is also talking about the community – the gathered church.
How can I tell? Where does today’s scripture lesson hint at this idea, you might ask? This is where it helps for holy mystery detectives to know some Greek. One way that Greek is very different from English is it has different words for our one word “you.” If I say, “I love you,” in a room full of people it’s not easy to tell if I’m speaking to my husband Joe, or to the whole group. In Greek there are different words for you - individual, and y’all – a group. Old English had some of that – the word “ye” was the plural for talking to a group of people. “Hear ye, Hear ye.”
With that in mind turn in your pew bibles to page 91 of the NT. Let’s see if we can tell if Jesus is talking about individuals, or a group of people here. The pew Bibles are the Revised Standard Version. Verse 51 says “if anyone eats of this bread he will live forever.” Verse 54 says “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” And verse 56 says “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood shall dwell in me and I in him.” These are written in the singular form.
Our pulpit bible is the New Revised Standard Version. One of the main differences is the translators changed all the masculine words for people so that women would be included. The pronouns used in that version are “whoever” in verse 51, and “those” in verse 54 and 56. This translation makes it impossible to tell if Jesus is talking about single individuals, or a group of people.
If you had a King James Version it would give you a better clue. In verse 53 it uses the word “ye” because the Greek version of the scripture uses the plural word for you. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” Let’s replace ye with the more familiar “y’all.”
This would be a great scripture verse to memorize – verse 53
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Jesus isn’t just talking to us as individuals when we eat his flesh and drink his blood in the sacrament of communion. He is talking to us as a gathered community. As that church.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Here then, is encouragement from Jesus himself for sharing communion frequently; at least every Sunday when we gather for worship, and perhaps even more often than that.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Could frequent communion be a means to helping congregations become revitalized? Could it actually help us grow, to become more full of life?
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
The other week we talked about the importance of gathering. We noted that worship begins with the first two or three arrive in the sanctuary. When people gather for a common purpose there is a kind of energy – a synergy – that people experience. Sociologists know that that community can be enhanced by a certain kind of charismatic leadership. But people who gather together for a common purpose are not always filled with the life of Christ.
The crowds pressed against the shopping mall doors on Black Friday are not fueled by the Spirit of Christ. There is no life when they use elbows and fists to get to the bargain table first. There is no life when some are trampled underfoot.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Crowds that flood the streets of Boston after the Patriots win the super bowl – turning over cars and wreaking havoc with their boundless energy are not fueled by the Spirit of Christ.
Neither is Christ leading any group of people when they become a violent, angry mob.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Even assemblies of people in churches are not necessarily fueled by the Spirit of Christ.
For several years the youth group of my home church created a Haunted House as one of our fund raisers. We had a perfect place for it, a 100 year-old public school which we used for Sunday School. It featured a dank basement, creaking floors, dark stairwells and high ceilings. Ten or twelve guests were let in one at a time, and guided by someone dressed like Dracula, moving from room to room where we tried to give them the shivers.
One year I joined a small group of friends – peers I looked up to – I really wanted them to like me. We decided to create an “unga bunga room” in the lower level of the school. We decorated our room to look like a jungle and made a cardboard likeness of a cauldron on a camp fire. We dressed ourselves like we thought “primitive” cannibal people might dress. During the Haunted House one of us would sneak upstairs and capture an unsuspecting persons from each group, and bring them to our room, so that when their party came through they would see us dancing around the fire with their friend in the pot shouting “unga bunga.”
I was elated to participate is such a creative project and feel so fully accepted by these peers. It was a highlight of my time in the church youth group. Everyone worked hard in the youth group to pull off this event and it did something to help us bond as friends.
Yet looking back at my participation in this church activity now I cringe inside. The unga bunga room was a sign of our racist understandings of people who are not of European descent. We depicted these others, not as beloved children of God, potential brothers and sisters in Christ, with their own beautiful culture and language. Jesus tells us that he is the bread of heaven that he gives for the life of the world. But we portrayed the non-European peoples of the world as violent, ignorant and dangerous – not even fully human. I have come to repent of participating in this activity that worked against Jesus purpose of giving life to the world.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
Not every activity that members and leaders of churches participate in are fueled by the Spirit of Christ. Perhaps more frequent communion could help us turn that around?
What if we had begun every youth group meeting with worship including communion? What if our leaders and our pastor were consistently reminding us of Christ’s humility, his sacrificial love for us and his call to not only eat the Bread of Life, but to become bread for the sake of the world? What if we were regularly reminded who we were and whose we were as Baptized members of the Body of Christ – with brothers and sisters in a church that stretches around the world. Perhaps then one of us would have spoken up at the idea of a haunted house that had nothing to do with the good news of Jesus and said "Ew, Yuk!" Maybe instead of trying to give neighbors a scary thrill, we could have introduced them to the Love of God by surrounding them with images of the witnesses who are remembered on November 1 – All Saint’s day. What if we invited the people of the world to hear about the Work of God in the world by giving our testimony of how God changed our lives and gave us life.
Picking up on Thomas Long’s reflection, he said, “Worship does more than inspire us; it transforms us. It changes the way we live, changes the way we view life’s challenges, changes what truly matters to us, changes the way we see ourselves and others. If worship is only a way to get pumped up so that we can “keep on keeping on” then worship can too easily be reduced to a means to perpetuate the way we are already living. But worship is about more than spiritual motivation. It is about vision and hearing, and worship gives us new eyes and ears, a new set of lenses to look at the world, a new vocabulary allowing us to listen afresh and speak what we could not have said before. To see and hear differently is to live differently, to have the ways we think and feel, make decisions and act as Christians transformed.” (Testimony)
When we gather for Holy Communion we have an opportunity to be truly transformed. Yes as individuals as we turn away from our sin, toward Christ and take him into ourselves in our personal devotions, but we also do this as part of a community, united in love.
Saint Augustin said that individual Christians were like the grains of bread. When we take on the practice of fasting, or repentance for doing anything outside of the will of God it is like the grains being crushed. When we are baptized, water is added to us to make us into dough. Then the Fire of the Holy Spirit bakes the bread and the church becomes one – one with Christ, one with each other and one in ministry to all the world.
“Unless y’all eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, y’all have no life in y’all.”
But if y’all take the Body of Christ into y’all, ya’ll may be for the world the body of Christ redeemed by his blood. May this church always run on the Fuel of Christ.
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