Today’s Gospel story of Jesus teaching his disciples gets in our face, you might say. Jesus talking about us eating his flesh and drinking his blood. We can deal with grape juice and bread cubes but eating flesh and drinking blood? One thinks cannibalism.
Not surprising some of the disciples are offended. To add insult to injury Jesus accuses them of backsliding then coyly announces, “I suppose some of you are going to leave me.”  Which, of course, they do.The disciples are more than a little confused. “This is a difficult teaching,” they say to one another. “Who can accept it?” John reports many of them did indeed turn back and not go with him.

It’s a little reminiscent of the commercial that pictures two guys out of the 1970s. One says very excitedly to the other, “it’s called a chip and stores lots of information.” The other guy faces the camera, rolls his eyes with a look of nausea as if his friend has lost his marbles, then politely excuses himself. When Jesus starts talking about eating flesh and drinking blood I picture some of those disciples, not getting it, nauseated, running the other way.

I’d like to consider with you this morning what we do when God gets in our face. When our spiritual sensibilities are stunned or theological common sense confounded. When God is too strange or offensive or doesn’t fit our image of who God should be.
I once heard someone refer to Westminster, after getting a tour of our beautiful, well-maintained building, as “The Church of the Tasteful Redeemer.” There is nothing tasteful, no pun intended, about this passage from John. It verges on rude and crude. Tasteful, middle class Christians are offended.

Be honest. What were your thoughts when Sandy read the passage today? When I came across those words last Monday what went through my mind was: Am I really going to subject the congregation to these unpleasant images? There are nicer ways to talk of Jesus’ sacrifice. Why bother with this one?
 
But I was hooked. Jesus had my attention. He was in my face. I couldn’t just walk away. There was a theological stone in my shoe. Those words burrowed painfully into some vulnerable, unprotected side of my discipleship. Eating flesh, drinking blood are taboos, for good reason. Was this some pagan moment, some bizarre aberration in the Christian story? Laying down your life, having your body broken for the sake of others – is one thing. Talking flesh as “true food” and blood as “true drink” is another. The biblical scholars were of little help. At least at first. “The real difficulty here,” said one, “is not the disciples understanding the metaphors, but their accepting Jesus’ demand for participation in his death as the way to ultimate life.” What a flimsy explanation, I thought. Exactly the kind of pulpit pap that glazes eyes in the pews.  I felt cheated. Since I had allowed myself to be disturbed I wasn’t about to swallow that pious placebo. It’s the old game -- when in doubt smooth the rough edges of God’s dealings with us by uttering pious platitudes and theological formulas that no one understands.  And I wasn’t buying.

Then I had an amazing insight. We don’t always have to have explanations for everything. Some things can’t be explained – at least by Sunday morning. It’s like a conversation I had with a business consultant about a friend who was looking for a job. “Ah,” he said. “This is a wonderful time for her. You see she is uncomfortable. She could do this. She could do that. It isn’t clear which direction she should go.” “Encourage her to hang in there. To live with the ambiguity. To use it to explore all the options. This could be a very creative moment in her life. Someday she will have a job again. Her search will be over. The question ‘what shall I do?’ will be answered. But now she can play with and ponder how the pieces of her life might fit together.”

Harvard Chaplain Peter Gomes says the same thing really when he talks about mystery. The deep things of God of which the Bible speaks in nearly its every breath are not, says Gomes, problems waiting to be solved but a mystery into which we are invited to enter, to discover, to explore, and indeed to enjoy, forever. Problems give us the illusion of power, for in solving them we are able to put them out of the way and to clear the decks for the next problem. But mystery lingers, deepens, and develops – dare we say it? – a meaningful relationship with the one who is drawn into it. Rather than looking for a way out we are enchanted by what we find within, and within the interstices of mystery one has a chance to discover, not to resolve, the greatest mystery of all, which is the love in which we are held by God and united to one another.

I love Gomes’ use of mystery stories to make his point. Invariably, he says, Agatha Christie sets up the police, the professionals in the murder business, as problem solvers. Somebody is dead, somebody has killed him, the problem is to find out who as quickly as possible. This problem must be solved so that one can get on to other problems. Thus her policemen are usually in a hurry, eager to follow obvious leads, anxious to jump to conclusions. The problem-oriented police are what we might call tidy-minded. But the annoyingly fastidious Hercule Poirot or that master detective Sherlock Holmes are always fascinated more by the inexplicable than by explanations. Especially those drawn from clues that stifle the imagination. Basing their investigations upon what isn’t there, the absence of the explainable, Holmes and Poirot go on to solve the mystery and get their man. Now there is a way to listen to Jesus! “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” What ever those words did mean or might mean there is mystery in them to enter into.

Actually one biblical scholar was helpful. Duke Chaplain Will Willimon. “The reason this passage is so tough,” he says, “is that we are modern people who live in flattened, cause-effect worlds full of data and facts. We simply may not have the intellectual imagination to deal with words and images like those Jesus serves up today.” Willimon is on to something. We do live in flattened 9 to 5 worlds. Force life into bite sized data, facts, time-frames. Translate our joy and sorrow into tidy cause and effect formulas.  When something terrible happens how often have you heard someone say or said yourself, “there must be a reason.”
Being able to clutch onto reasons gives us the illusion of control, security, and power. If we become too tidy-minded we run the risk of acting like the Bible police. Then thinking our spiritual comfort zones have expanded. Which they have but only in a sense “on paper” not in any real, three dimensional way in which we can live and move and have our being  when the vicissitudes of life confront us.

The value, it seems to me, of losing our grip once in a while like I did when I read these grating, disconcerting words of Jesus last Monday or perhaps like you did when you heard them this morning is that it makes possible our being caught by the mystery of life, which is to say God. Just like that woman searching for employment lost her grip and had a chance in her unemployment to hear again the call deep within her from that place where her great gladness and the world’s pain intersect.

You see I’d like to suggest today that, if we really admit it, if we suspend for a moment the infrastructure of our reasoned faith, there are lots of things that mystify us. Words of Jesus for sure. Other words and stories in the bible. Times in life when we become unemployed or when a loved one is hurting or when we are perplexed or lonely or depressed. Or maybe we are mystified too in moments of such exquisite, ecstatic joy that we can’t believe it and don’t know what to do with it. So rather than entering into joy we think of it as a dream…or some cosmic error – like happened to me once when the bank teller actually cashed my check for ten times the amount because she misread the decimal point. Joy not as real but as a dream or mistake.We do live in flattened, tidy, cause and effect worlds and when the mystery of life does not fit into the spaces allotted rather than feeling ashamed or embarrassed what we ought to do is throw the form away. Find some new way of expressing and entering into our wonder or awe or even fear before the mystery of life.

It means giving up control, loosening our grip, letting God take hold. If we can show Jack and Grace whom we baptized this morning that life is not so much a problem to solve as it is a mystery to enter into then we will have fulfilled that pledge we made to them to be the church, the family of God. It will take a combination of discipline and courage, a certain reckless abandon and an abiding trust in the Giver of life, and judging from this morning’s reading a strong stomach on occasion.

Which gets back to eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. I don’t have a tidy answer for you this morning. I am not sure there is one. But my hunch is that it has something to do with our total dependence on Jesus – which in this day of self-sufficient, self-impressed, narcissism many in our culture find repulsive.

If you don’t run away after the service nauseated, I’d love to know what you think.

Amen.