"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