ONE LOAF, ONE BODY
(John 6:26-35, 48-59;  First Corinthians 10:1-4, 14-17)

            Thank you again for the privilege of preaching here this morning.  Because today is Communion Sunday, I thought perhaps I would make the Lord’s Table our focus.  I recently spent almost three weeks on a spiritual pilgrimage to the near east—Jordan, Palestine, and Israel.  My wife and I, along with three other protestant couples from Trinity, joined a large Catholic group out of Mt. Angel Abbey led by Father Odo, who is also a monk at the Abbey.  It was a profound trip on many different levels, but most surprising of all for me was how sharing the Lord’s table together became a crucial part of our whole pilgrimage.  

            And so I thought it might be beneficial for you also to stop and reflect on why this table represents the very heart of why we even bother coming to church every Sunday.  You probably don’t come together because you are all intimate friends.  In a church this size you hopefully do have many close friends here, but there are probably some people you hardly know at all.  And I would guess that you certainly don’t come together because you all have the same political convictions or social concerns or aesthetic taste, because I suspect that you represent a very wide spectrum on all those topics.  And neither do you come together because you were all raised in this denomination.  Truth be told, I doubt if many of you were raised in the Covenant.  The vast majority of people in this denomination have come from Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Episcopal, Baptist, or no religious background at all.

            And yet here we all are—together—week after week.  So what does bind us together? Well, presumably it’s Christ.  But what does that actually mean?  People are drawn to Christ for a whole lot of reasons.  They may like the general tone of his teaching or the benevolent way he treated people.  Or they may think that Jesus can meet some personal need.  In fact many people are drawn to Christ for the same reason that the crowds tracked him down in our gospel reading this morning—they wanted something from him.  In fact, this may be the biggest reason for why people come to church, because they need something.  It might be a momentary break from the harshness of everyday life.  It might be a safe place for their children.  It might be to heal a hurting marriage or enlist God’s help in sorting out some serious personal problems.

            But like the crowd in John’s gospel, people are often surprised to discover that Jesus isn’t a Santa Claus who dispenses random gifts.   Yes, he had miraculously fed them all with only a few loaves and fishes, and so now the crowd wanted Jesus to keep on feeding them.  They were even willing to come and take him by force, if necessary, and make him their King.  Knowing this, Jesus and the disciples secretly slip away to the other side of the lake, but the people tenaciously tracked him down.  

            Is Jesus impressed with their zeal?  He is not.  In fact, the first words out of his mouth are,  “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.  Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”

            The problem with this crowd is they hadn’t really understood the miracle in the first place, or they would have seen beyond the mere supply of food.  They would have understood that Jesus hadn’t come to give us endless free meals.  Rather, Jesus’ point is that he can take care of us, no matter what the need is, and thus we are set free from our endless anxiety about things like food, clothing, and shelter.

            At this point the crowd senses that they have been criticized, and so they try recapture the high ground by asking Jesus, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”   They are essentially saying: Okay, Jesus, you’re right.  Food isn’t the most important thing in life.  You say we should work for the food that endures to eternal life.  Okay, so what does God want us to do to get this never ending life?  So, tell us, Jesus.  What does God want us to do?”

            Isn’t this how we humans most frequently respond to God—in a kind of quid pro quo, “let’s make a deal” sort of approach?  We assume God is like us, with his own private agenda.  He wants something from us, and we want something from him.  So tell us, Jesus, what does God want?  If he would only tell us, we would do it, and then perhaps—just perhaps—God will finally be pleased enough with us to give us what we really want.

            With remarkable simplicity and directness, Jesus answers them as follows: The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.  And that, in a nutshell, is all there is to it.  Before anything else and underlying everything else, this is what God calls each of us to do: believe in Jesus.  Rather than give us stuff, God gives us his Son.  He gives us his very own life, so that we might be transformed—all of us— into the likeness of Christ.

            And all we have to do is believe.  Now the word “believe” in scripture never describes a mere intellectual process.  Nor does it mean having the right theology.  Theology has its place.  We should always be seeking greater clarity and understanding as to the meaning of our faith, but always remember this: even correct theology cannot save us.  Only God can.  That is why Jesus himself said there will be many in the final judgment whose theology may be impeccable but who never really knew him.  On the other hand there will be others whose theology may be a bit sketchy, but who possess a deep, authentic faith in Christ.

            For you see, the essence of faith is found in that little word trust.  To believe in Christ means to lean into him, to risk staking your very life on him.  To believe is to recognize that the Living God has revealed himself uniquely and definitively in Christ, making it possible for us to give all our concerns, all our ambitions, and especially our autonomy over to him.  This is the core of faith.  The opening words of Psalm 62 capture it well:

My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him.  He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken.

            And so to reinforce this and to make it a practical, ongoing focus in our lives, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus gave us this simple meal.  And please note: it was a meal.  He didn’t dole out the bread and wine and then tell the disciples to individually find some private corner of the upper room and think about things.  This was a meal, a common table in which all the participants were shoulder to shoulder, sharing from the same loaf and the same cup. 

Was Jesus simply trying to cultivate some kind of esprit de corps or to foster a more chummy feeling among his followers?  No, he was not.  Think about what this loaf and this cup represent—the very broken body and shed blood of our Lord.  Jesus was there in the midst of them all and essentially telling them, “I am your life.  I give to you my body and blood so that I might save you from death, and that I might dwell in you and you in me.  And because you all share my body and blood, you all share in the same life—you are now related.  Indeed, today you become a single life.  That is why you must feed on me together.”

And so Paul in his Corinthian epistle, writing to a church that was literally torn asunder by factions and conflicts, writes to them:

I speak to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say.  Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ?  And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?  Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.

God didn’t save us through Christ in order to create some amorphous, loosely connected mob of fiercely individualistic believers.  God has saved us in Christ so that we might become his people, a deeply spiritual, organic unity that is simultaneously the body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the temple of God, a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a people set apart from the world in general so that by our holy love for God and for one another we might become God’s brightest light in this dark world.

All of which means that our becoming the body of Christ is so much more than just “getting along,” or “tolerating our differences,” or “being nice to each other.”  It means feeding on the same Lord, sharing in the same Holy Spirit, being nurtured on the same scripture, and seeking to know the mind of Christ together.  It means consciously, deliberately deciding to be a servant to those among whom God has called us into fellowship.

Now some of you might be thinking at this point, “Mike, your emphasis today is much too ingrown.  What about our service to the world?”  Well to be honest, that comes later.  Unless we have already learned to deeply love and serve one another—right here, right now, up close and personal—then all our service to the world will have no greater impact than any other generic, humanitarian relief agency.  All service to the poor or suffering of this world—whether it comes from the church or from the local Rotary Club—is a good thing and should be supported by us all.  But that is not what Christ meant when he says that the people of God have a unique calling in this world.  You can inoculate a child against disease and give it a better life on a physical level.  But let that same child actually see—in living, visible, concrete terms—what a community of Christian love is all about and where that love comes from, and you have exposed that child to the transforming power of God himself.

And that is why this simple sacrament that we participate in today is so important.  It contains within it the essential core of what we Christians are all about.  First, it speaks so graphically of our Lord’s atoning sacrifice that makes our salvation even possible.  To use the words of Christ himself at the first communion, “Drink from it, all of you.  This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Or as Paul describes it in Second Corinthians, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Second, Christ not only saves us, but just as important, Christ alone sustains us with his resurrected life.  We feed on Christ in this sacrament so that we might feed on him every moment of every day.  And by doing so we learn that the food Christ gives is more powerful and satisfying and lasting than anything else we could ask for.  As he said to that crowd that was trying so hard to get a free lunch, “…my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.  Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.”

Finally, and this is my particular focus today, this sacrament not only embodies how Christ saves us and feeds us, but just as important, it reveals how much God longs to makes us into one people.  Alone we are each a very narrow and refracted portion of God’s light.  When we come together—in both truth and love—we become a blazing torch, a radiant beam with all the colors of God’s total light.  This is why we share this common meal.  It doesn’t mean we all think alike on every issue, nor does it mean we live out our unique giftedness or calling in the same way or with the same impact, but it does mean this: we all kneel before the same resurrected Christ, share the same faith in his atoning sacrifice, are sustained by his same indwelling life, and live out the same calling to be one people and not just individuals.  We zealously nurture and protect our unity, for only together can we individually know Christ in his fullness.

And so I would ask you this morning, as we come up to the front to receive the body and blood of our Lord, that you prayerfully look at every person that is walking forward today.  Whether you know them well or hardly at all, pray that God would give you his eyes to see them as he does, his compassion to care for them as he does, his faithfulness to be there for them even when it’s uncomfortable, even if they are someone you might not naturally connect with.  If they have ever offended you, bugged you, or simply disagreed with you, pray for the humility to see in them the image of Christ, to see them as someone God loved so much that he gave his only son to save them, just as he did for you.

The sacrifice has been made.  The meal has been prepared.  Come, let us keep the feast.

Amen