"On Being Drawn, And Not Turning Away" August 27, 2006 Proper 16

(First, read the text for this sermon: John 6:56-69)

“The purpose of preaching is to comfort the afflicted – and to afflict the comfortable.” (I think it was Reinhold Niebuhr who said that.) Most preachers do a good job with the comforting part. But not many are willing to give a poke to those who are too comfortable! The reactions are not pleasant, when someone is afflicted! So, most preachers do their best to avoid offending people.

For instance, how would you react if you heard a preacher say that global warming threatens to destroy God’s good creation, and that you and I share in the responsibility for global warming, with our low-mileage cars and large houses and constant use of air conditioning, and so that is an instance of sin? Some would be offended, to hear a preacher challenge to our comfortable lifestyle.

What if you were to hear a preacher say that, throughout all of the Bible, the single criterion that God uses, to judge whether a national leader is righteous, is how well he cares for the poor in society – and so, according to the Bible, a politician who does not emphasize the care of the poor does not please God, no matter how many so-called Christian groups he gets to endorse him? Some would be offended, to hear such a challenge to their politics.

What if you were to hear a preacher say that, no matter how necessary a war may be, in geopolitical terms, according to Jesus’ example in the Bible, a President cannot present any war as something that God approves of? Some would react to that by being offended!

Why am I afflicting you in your comfort? It’s because of the tough passage that we’re dealing with this morning, from the gospel of John. Who here expects to be offended by Jesus?

Here’s my next question: I wonder why not? We’ve been reading from the sixth chapter of John for five weeks now, and Jesus has been offending people right and left!

There are verses 41 and 42: Then the [Jewish leaders] began to complain about [Jesus] because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven." They were saying, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, 'I have come down from heaven'?"

Then Jesus begins telling his listeners that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood – which were horrific notions for a law-abiding Jew (which includes all of Jesus’ followers, of course!). And so we read: When many of his disciples heard it, they said, "This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?" But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, "Does this offend you?” Then Jesus says a few things to offend them even more, and we read, Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. (How many of you often think about the fact that Jesus progressively lost followers, as his ministry proceeded?)

It’s quite a tough passage to deal with, and it’s embedded in the gospel of John which is tough to deal with in its entirety – because, over and over again in John, as Jesus proclaims and acts out God’s desires, he often goes out of his way to offend those he’s dealing with! In the gospel of John, Jesus is not what you and I would call “a nice guy!” And so, Jesus would offend you – because, in our culture, the highest accolade that can be given is that someone is a “nice guy!”

Here’s where we are in this morning’s passage: Because of this many of [Jesus’] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. What about his closest followers, “the twelve?” Are they also so put off by Jesus that they’ll abandon him too? Here’s what we read: So Jesus asked the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" I wonder if Jesus asked that with tiredness in his voice? With frustration? "Do you also wish to go away?" I wonder how long the silence lasted, after Jesus asked that question? Finally, Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God."

I have entitled this sermon, “On Being Drawn, And Not Turning Away.” You see, for Peter, as hard as it is to receive, as offended as they all are by what Jesus is doing and saying as he afflicts them in their comfort, as Jesus blasts apart all of their prior religious presuppositions, Peter does not turn away. Peter is still drawn to Jesus. Peter accepts the things that Jesus has been saying about himself in chapter six of John, things like: “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day." (6:40) And, “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.” (6:47) And, “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." (6:51) And, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” (6:54) And, “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever." (6:58)

Peter accepts all of that as true – and so, he finds that he cannot turn away from Jesus. "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life,” Peter says to Jesus, who is the living bread of life, and who greatly afflicts the comfort of anyone who takes the Jesus the Christ seriously, and tries to live in the same self-sacrificial way.

There’s a famous joke about preaching, you know, when the preacher has gotten too personal: his listener interrupts and says, “Now you’ve stopped preaching and you’ve started meddling!” Well, the gospel of Jesus Christ meddles into every aspect of our lives – including the miles per gallon of our vehicles, and where we set the air conditioning thermostat, and the foreign policy of the leaders we elect, and what our nation’s tax policy promotes, and what’s done to Medicare and Medicaid and Head Start and food stamps.

Let me tell you something that I love about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Our congregations are full of people who don’t think alike! That’s a strength of our church – because most human groupings, including many religious denominations – are made up of people who agree with each other! Barbara Brown Taylor (in Leaving Church, p. 67) says this about her Episcopal congregation in Georgia, and this describes us too: “People who canceled out each other’s votes in every county election cooked soup together at the Clarksville Soup Kitchen.” I love that! Here, in this ELCA congregation, we are all over the political spectrum, and that’s a wonderful thing because, here, people who disagree with each other hang in there together. Even when the gospel offends us, and it would be easy to retreat into our comfort zones, we challenge each other not to turn away.

We are drawn to Jesus the Christ, and that is one reason why we are drawn to this place. Here we use language that we do not use anywhere else in our lives. “God of all mercy and consolation, come to the aid of your people, turning us from our sin to live for you alone….heal us and forgive us.” “Lord have mercy.” “Christ have mercy.” “The Lord be with you.” “And also with you.” None of us would dream of saying that in the grocery store, but by saying it here we remember that there is another way to address each other, a gospel way, a grace-filled way. “Lift up your hearts.” “We lift them to the Lord.“ (In the above paragraph, I have stolen liberally from Taylor, page 93)

We are drawn to Jesus the Christ. We hang in there. We do not turn away – even when it offends us to be confronted by that gospel of dying to our own self-centered self-importance, and witnessing to God’s presence through suffering for others, and refusing to respond to violence with more violence, and giving away our money and living simply because our wastefulness has such a huge effect of the rest of the world, and... (There’s all kind of offensive stuff in that Bible that we read each week and, hopefully, each day.)

But still, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” And so, drawn to the Christ, we give sabbath time for worship in this place. This is time to try to make sense of our experience in our daily lives – discerning what is life-giving and what is not. We gather here to receive what is necessary for what is most important – your ministry, out in your daily lives. There, in your places of ministry, you are drawn to be formed by the model of Jesus – who teaches us not to rule the world, but to wash the feet of others, to be the servants of others, because it is in self-giving that there is true joy and eternal life.

As God forms you in that way of life, it will offend you and me every day, because we are so deeply mal-formed in our own sense of self-importance. But when you’re offended, just return to Peter’s words and make them your own: "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.


Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia

"We Come To The Table To Be Fed" August 20, 2006 Pentecost 11 Proper 15

(First, read the text for this sermon: John 6:[41-50]51-58)

You and I are drawn here each Sunday morning. We assemble in this place. We pray, we sing, we listen, we speak. And we come to the table, in the center of our worship space, to be fed.

It is a high privilege for me to place bread in your hands, to meet your eyes, and to say, “This is the body of Christ, given for you.” Sometimes you come to the table with such hungers, and I am so glad to see you there, that it’s all I can do to keep my composure. A worshiper whose depression has been so smothering that it is a triumph for him just to be in public. Another who comes to the table alone, because her husband is in the hospital with a life-threatening diagnosis. Another, holding out her hands for the bread, still reeling because her son was sentenced to prison that previous week. Another, who has felt rejected because of her sexuality, coming to the table to be fed.

Of course, it’s not my table in the center of our worship space! I’m just a server. The host is Jesus the Christ. It is the Lord’s Supper, offered to feed our deepest hungers.

We read in the gospel of John that this feeding is literal! We’ve been reading from the sixth chapter of John the past couple of weeks. I printed last week’s reading in the bulletin to give some context to this morning’s verses. In last week’s excerpt, Jesus calls himself “the bread that came down from heaven,” and “the bread of life.” He contrasts that to the manna that God provided to our ancestors. (Remember the story of Moses leading the people in the wilderness? Remember how, at one point, they were about to starve to death, but then every morning they got up and gathered manna that had appeared on the ground overnight, food from God?)

But the manna was ordinary food, feeding ordinary hunger. Listen to how Jesus differentiates himself from that, in verses we read last week: Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever;…” And now watch, as the “bread of life” metaphor suddenly and shockingly shifts, to be literally about Jesus’ flesh! Jesus continues, “and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

What?! Are we to be cannibals? The [Jewish leaders] then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” All of this is extremely offensive to the Jewish leaders – because they are custodians of God’s holy law and, according to that law, the drinking of blood is horrendous! It trespasses against holy dietary laws that are given by God to keep the chosen people pure from the uncleanness that is all around them.

Jesus continues: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.”

Isn’t this shocking? You and I do not have the same concerns for protecting dietary purity laws as did the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day. But don’t you also react to these verses with revulsion?

Indeed, many react with shock to learn that, for Lutherans, the bread and wine of Holy Communion is the true body and blood of Christ. Many of you might tell me that the bread and the wine “represent” or “symbolize” Christ’s body and blood. But that’s not Lutheran teaching! In the Small Catechism, Luther writes this about the Sacrament of the Altar: “It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine.” This is not the same as the Roman Catholic teaching that, at a particular moment in the mass, the bread and the wine change into Christ’s body and blood. Luther teaches that the bread and the wine remains bread and wine. But the bread and the wine is also the true, physical body and blood of Christ. In the Large Catechism Luther writes, “Now, what is the Sacrament of the Altar? Answer: It is the true body and blood of the Lord Christ, in and under the bread and wine, which we Christians are commanded by Christ’ word to eat and drink. And just as we said of baptism that it is not mere water, so we say here, too, that the sacrament is bread and wine, but not mere bread and wine such as is served at the table. Rather, it is bread and wine set within God’s Word and bound to it.”

As we receive Christ’s body and blood “in and under the bread and wine,” we eat and drink that Word from God, that Good News of God’s love and forgiveness and mercy. We receive that promise of salvation, which we in no way deserve. We come to the table and we are fed. Hear what Luther writes, in the Small Catechism, about the words that are said with the bread and the wine: “’given for you’ and ‘shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’ These words, when accompanied by the physical eating and drinking, are the essential thing in the sacrament, and whoever believes these very words has what they declare and state, namely, ‘forgiveness of sins.’”

According to the gospel of John, there is further, mystical reality. In the eating and drinking, we are nourished by physical intimacy with God. Listen: Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. It is deeply Trinitarian: you and I participate in the intimacy between God the Father and God the Son. We abide in Jesus, and Jesus abides in us.

And we are fed, as we bring our hungers to the table. We come in fear over the medical diagnosis, and God is intimately, physically present to us, in the bread and wine, and in the brothers and sisters surrounding us at the table. We come, fighting through depression and despair, and God is intimately, physically present to us, in the bread and wine, and in the brothers and sisters surrounding us at the table. We come, anxious about our loved one in Iraq, anxious about a child whose behavior has turned dangerous, anxious about a job that may not be there in six months, and God is intimately, physically present to us, in the bread and wine and in the brothers and sisters surrounding us at the table.

“By the Word in bread and wine, which are the body and blood of Christ, God nourishes our faith, forgives our sin, fills us with new life, and gives us power to witness to the gospel. As we receive Christ’s body and blood in the holy meal, Christ conforms our lives to his own. We participate in God’s new creation and are united with God’s people of every time and every place. The Lutheran confessions invite the church to celebrate communion every Sunday, because of Christ’s command, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19), in anticipation of meeting Christ, and because God wants to nourish us even when we cannot name or feel our hunger.” ("With the Whole Church: A Study Fuide for Renewing Worship," published by the Cvangelical Lutheran Church in America, 2005, page 44)

We come to the table to be fed, and we receive the bread of life, living bread, deep nourishment, mystical physical intimacy with God.

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.


Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia

Christian Practices August 13, 2006 Pentecost 10, Proper 14

First read the text for this sermon: Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2

How might someone know that you are a Christian? For instance, you know by the yarmulke on his head that a man is an observant Jew. When you see a woman wearing a chador, you know that she is a practicing Muslim.

You and I are not so easily identified by outward appearance. So, how might someone know that you are a Christian?

It could be that that’s a strange question for you. It might be that you’d say, “Well, you can’t tell by looking – because the most important mark of a Christian is his or her beliefs.” It is true that I’m often asked what Lutherans believe about this or that issue. But the Christian life of faith is not a matter of “justification by right answer alone!” Words are just words, and beliefs are just intellectual concepts – unless they show up in how you live, in your actions, in your Christian life. And so, here is what I propose as the answer to my question: Others see that you are a Christian as you practice the faith. Christian faith practices are distinct and, indeed, counter-cultural.

The author of Ephesians names some of those practices, in the verses we read this morning. Listen to them again, open to the idea that these might identify us to others, as Christians!

•So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.

•Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.

•Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.

•Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

•Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

•Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
What is there to notice about these Christian faith practices? Most importantly: all of them concern how we treat each other. The author of Ephesians’ first priority is building up and strengthening Christians in community.

Notice why, for instance, truthful speech replaces lying: for we are members of one another. We are truthful because of the obligation we have towards one another, because we have been baptized into the body of Christ, together, and in that communion we are joined.

We see this concern for the health of the Christian community in all of the teachings in this passage. Anger is a common human emotion (and is often a gift from God!), but anger can lead to destructiveness among the brothers and sisters.

Honest work is taught – not because of some Protestant work ethic, but so the worker will have something to share with the needy!

Evil talk destroys community, and so what comes out of our mouths must only be what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

Then come two of the most beautiful verses in all of Scripture: Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Why are we to be this way? Because then we are imitators of God, as beloved children. Then we are living in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.

Is any of this easy to do? If you answer “yes,” it’s because you’re sitting in church, and you’re fooling yourself! In the “real world,” in our daily lives, it takes the regular discipline of remembering, to engage in Christian practices. It takes the daily return to our baptisms to live as imitators of God, who is revealed in the human flesh of Jesus the Christ.

How, then, does God the Holy Spirit form us to imitate God? How does the Holy Spirit form us in such self-giving practices, following the Christ who loved us and gave himself up for us? That formation happens in Christian community that is counter to the culture.

Now, I don’t want to set up “the world” as an entirely alien place. There is much that is good in the world. God created the world! God loves every person and every creature! But, since your ministry takes place in the world, you know better than I that there are forces in the world that encourage falsehood (to take just the first of the teachings in this morning’s reading). These days, we call falsehood “spin.” Those who “spin” well are paid well! Political operatives in both parties are experts at distorting truth to manipulate public opinion. When you hear corporate spokespersons speak, don’t you assume that their versions of the truth are self-serving? And let’s get more personal. When you’re caught up in something controversial, when you’ve screwed up, don’t you feel strong pressure to present an interpretation of the facts that places you in the best possible light? Most everyone knows of these initials: “CYA.”

Here’s my point. There are forces in the culture that will form us in falsehood, and to be angry and impatient people, and to be selfish and self-centered, and to be bitter, and to hold grudges – unless we resist that formation and, instead, practice the counter-cultural Christian virtues of honesty about ourselves, and generosity towards others, and spoken words that build up others, and kindness and forgiveness towards others. By the formation of God the Holy Spirit, as we engage in these Christian practices, we are imitators of God, who is revealed in the human flesh of Jesus the Christ.

Here is a chief reason why we exist, as a congregation: it is to be a community of formation in such Christian practices.

Our central activity is worship – and in worship we confess the truth about ourselves and we receive our gracious and self-giving God.

In this counter-cultural community of formation we emphasize the importance of a day of sabbath time each week, and a period of sabbath time each day – holy time set aside when you don’t have to worry about a schedule or produce anything or accomplish anything, but, instead time to be immersed in Scripture and prayer and singing directed towards God our creator, and in activities that give you renewed energy!

In this counter-cultural community of formation we remind ourselves to care for the poor because each one of us is impoverished in God’s eyes, and we encourage each other to be generous in money and time and speech towards others who are in need.
In this counter-cultural community of formation we teach each other that sex is a sacramental gift of God’s presence, to be given only to another person in a life-long relationship of safety and commitment.

In this counter-cultural community of formation, we hear the truth that not a single one of us is without sin, and that each one of us deserves only punishment from God – and so, as imitators of God, who in human flesh gave himself up for us, we must be forgiving and open and compassionate towards each other.

Doesn’t all of this describe good news? As one participant in the Bible study in-between the services put it, “This describes the life of grace!” What joy is given to us by God when we practice Christian virtues of honesty about ourselves, and generosity towards others, and spoken words that build up others, and kindness and forgiveness towards others. By those Christian practices, as imitators of God, we are transformed in Christ! The Holy Spirit is at work in this community of Christian formation, empowering holiness, effecting a new way of life!

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.


Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia