August 19, 2018

John 6:51-58                       

Proverbs 9:1-6                   

Ephesians 5:15-20

                Part of my pastoral training was a year-long chaplaincy at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.  During that time, I was assigned the patients awaiting heart transplant that were too sick to wait at home.  Norm was the longest-waiting patient on the floor.  He lived at that hospital for over a year. 

                The patients there felt a mixture of fear, guilt, and hope.  They wondered if a match would ever come.  The hoped a match would come.  They hoped for the new life made available by a donated heart.  They dreaded that a match would come.  They didn’t want someone else to have to die for them to have life.  They feared organ rejection, and immunosuppressant drugs that would isolate them.  They feared the organs wouldn’t work for them and the organs would be wasted on them.

                Organ donation is a way for a person to share life with another.  The first heart transplant was only 51 years ago, and the patient only lived a couple of weeks.  Now organ transplant is common.  I’ve made it known to my loved ones that if possible, I’d like to live on in new life, that if conditions are good that my organs can be used by someone else and if I don’t need them anymore, by all means, donate them.

                This Gospel reading is about sharing life.  They didn’t have organ donation then, of course, but they knew life could be conveyed through eating.  Vegetables share their energy and nutrients with us when we break them down with our teeth and digest them in our gut.  For those of us who eat animals, they share their energy, they give their life, to give us energy and life.

                The Israelites knew that blood was the life force.  They had laws about not spilling blood, not eating blood, not touching blood, and they had laws about butchering animals in a way that removed all their blood.  So when Jesus said this about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, to a group of Jewish Israelites, it must have been really shocking.  What is he asking us to do?  It sounds like cannibalism.  Cannibalism is feasting on the dead.  It is a theft.  But this is about conveying life, and the one we eat is alive.  Cannibalism is consuming flesh.  This is about a shared life, abiding together, being one, in unity. 

                We are alive right now.  But are we?  We are in a daze.  We fail to notice what’s going on around us.  We are going from one thing to another with little direction.  We dismiss the injustice of this world because we don’t know what to do about it.  We are physically alive, but are we really living?

                Jesus invites us into new, abundant life.  He says to us, “Come eat with me, receive my power that comes through giving myself away.”  He says, “Come eat with me and learn how to give yourself away for the life of your neighbors, for the sake of the poor, for the sake of the world.”  He says, “Come eat with me and be drawn into a relationship. Come eat with me and experience being fed in a way you never have before.  Come sink your teeth into my flesh, into this relationship, into a life shared.”  And not only eat with Jesus, but eat Jesus and take his power within ourselves.  Life is a transference of power.  God lives.  Jesus lives.  The world lives. We live.  Our neighbors live.  The world lives.  The cosmos lives.  Each lives for the rest.  All share power.  All share life.

                I heard a phrase this week, “The sacramental nature of life.”  I’ve been mulling it over.  Every moment of life is a miracle, that this combination of elements and molecules would come together in this way at this time.  It’s wondrous.  It’s baffling.  A sacrament is God’s promise and presence in a physical way.  In life, we experience God’s presence with us in each other, in the trees and mountains, in our challenges.  Everywhere we look, we can experience God, because God’s handiwork, God’s artwork is all around us.  This is not only the evidence of God, but God’s very presence continuing to create, God’s breath breathing into us.  God’s voice is on the wind, in the sound of bird song, in the voice of someone in need.  God is Spirit, and yet God comes to us in the flesh, in a physical way, so we can touch and hear and eat him.  Our five senses are our way of knowing, given to us by God to experience the world.  They give us information about how things work and how to relate to the world.  And God comes to us in the physical world, and when we still didn’t get it God came to us as Jesus.  We, like Thomas, after the resurrection, say we want to see him and touch him too.  We want the physical experience of Jesus, because we can’t get it through our heads, it won’t make sense to us otherwise.

                Sacrament is also the holy in the ordinary.  We won’t be awake every moment to the presence of God, but we can train ourselves to see God more readily and to be ready to respond in a loving way.  Jesus walks with us in the very ordinary boring sleepy times.  Just because we haven’t had an epiphany, doesn’t mean God’s not there.

                Some say Jesus is a spirit within each one of us.  Some say Jesus was a person like anyone else.  But Jesus is both spiritual and physical, and that is a good example for us.  It is easy to get so wrapped up in physical life, in providing for our needs, in accumulating material things, in making life comfortable, in going from place to place, in experiencing life through our 5 senses.  We start to act like that’s all that matters.  However, we do all these things for our physical bodies and then we find we still aren’t fulfilled, we aren’t happy, we aren’t connected.  We’ve been neglecting our spirit.  There is more to life than the physical.

                It can also be easy to get focused on our spirit.  We can walk around listening to Christian radio, praying quietly in our room, coming to church, making sure we believe the right things and say the right words.  But we have missed the point if we don’t take it to a physical level, if we don’t get our hands dirty doing God’s work, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and imprisoned, providing shelter for those out in the cold.  We are both physical and spiritual and we can’t neglect either part of ourselves if we want to truly live.

                The readings today speak of wisdom.  Wisdom is not only a knowledge in our brains.  Wisdom is about our actions, as well.  We learn wisdom through our actions, through our mistakes, and thinking through those situations to consider how we might have done it differently.  Then we use that wisdom to inform our future actions.  When we have wisdom, that doesn’t mean we only know something, but that we act on it, and learn from those actions, and apply that learning, as well.  Wisdom results in action not just for ourselves but for others.  Wisdom results in justice.

                Life is a transference of power.  God lives.  Jesus lives.  We live.  Our neighbors live.  The world lives.  The cosmos lives.  Each lives for the rest.  All share power.  All share life.

                At Wisdom’s table, all us senseless, simpleton, fools come together.   Wisdom, Sophia, Holy Spirit, all names for the same one.  We are all invited to this table of the Holy Spirit, to be fed with both food and wisdom.  The way to gain wisdom is through experience, but the other way we learn wisdom is through relationships with those wiser than us, more experienced than us.  So we are invited to God’s table, to learn from each other and from God the wisdom of abundant life, sharing life.

                The last week of my chaplaincy, Norm got his heart.  He was a mix of emotions.  He was grateful.  He was scared.  He was overjoyed.  And the new family he had built on the 6^th floor of the hospital rejoiced with him, who had eaten with him at the table, shared with him at support group, and held their breath every time a heart became available.  This new family now gave thanks with him, grieved with him the loss of the person who donated this gift, and prayed for the new life that was now possible.  Norm had plans, not to just use this new heart for himself alone.  He had experienced the gift of someone who gave themselves away for him, and he had a strong faith, so he knew the love of Jesus who had given his life for the sake of Norm, and for the whole world.  Once Norm healed, he looked forward to giving of himself, serving others that they might have life.  He walked out of that hospital ready to give himself away for the sake of his neighbor, the world, the cosmos.

                Jesus is giving us a heart transplant.  We have hearts of apathy, hearts of stone, hearts of confusion, of fear.  God takes out that heart and gives us God’s own heart.  So when we love, we love with God’s love.  When we hurt for someone, we do so with the compassion God feels when people are hurting.  When we see someone in need our heart then goes out to them, as God’s heart has for us, and so we are people with hearts beating in the rhythm of God’s mercy. The blood pumping through our veins is to empower us to act with spirit, with justice, with love, with compassion, with hope.