Om-Nom-Nom-Nom!

2024-47
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15B), August 18, 2024
Proverbs 9:1-6 ; Psalm 34:9-14 ; Ephesians 5:15-20 ; John 6:51-58

One night when my sister-in-law Patty was pregnant with her first child, she had a dream. Here’s how she tells it:

“I dreamed that I was lying in bed, and we had a little crib next to the bed, and in it was our new baby. So I picked the baby up, and it was tiny—just about the size of my hand. I lifted the baby up to my lips and kissed it, and that’s when I realized the baby’s head was soft like a freshly baked sugar cookie. It didn’t just smell like a sugar cookie; it looked like a sugar cookie. So I ate the baby. In the dream, I wasn’t upset about it at all. But when I woke up, I was horrified!”

OK, everybody sing it with me:

C is for cookie! That’s good enough for me!

C is for cookie! That’s good enough for me!

C is for cookie! That’s good enough for me—oh!

Cookie cookie cookie starts with C![1]

A couple years later, when my own child was an infant, I dreamed that I had successfully converted Sarah into liquid form and was storing her in a two-liter soda bottle in the fridge. The label on the bottle was a cartoonish image of a screaming baby. And I remember thinking, “This is a great achievement, but I must remember not to drink her.” Well, what do you think happened next? That’s right—I poured some of her into a cup and gulped her down!

I find these dreams both hilarious and haunting. Such images feel archetypal, deeply psychological, exploring ideas so deeply forbidden that we don’t dare talk about them. To consume another human being—especially our own child? It’s monstrous!

Yet do you remember Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are? How many parents do you know who, in a moment of overflowing love, have said to their little one, “I’ll eat you up, I love you so!”? Then they come zooming in with ticklish, giggly, nibbly kisses. I have never known this situation to terrify a child. Even the youngest among us instinctively understand that the urge to love and the urge to consume are not that distinct. Parents and children want to cuddle—to come as close as possible to occupying the same space. In their own very different way, adult lovers do, too.

Maybe this is why eating and drinking, the most necessary acts for sustaining our existence, are things we usually do publicly, not privately. I remember my dad’s kneejerk disgust at anyone who dared chew with their mouth open—not just his own children! Well, if mastication is so unsettling, why don’t we all eat in private? Yet we don’t. (I wonder if a psychiatrist among us might have more to say about this?)

Having just heard today’s gospel passage, I hope you see where this is going. Jesus has just said, “Whoever eats me will live because of me.” Not once have I read this passage without experiencing both humor and disgust. Indeed, Jesus’ detractors cry, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” What is this, a zombie movie? (And Jesus hasn’t even risen from the dead yet!)

Now add to this disgust the religious taboo against consuming blood. From Leviticus 17, verses 10-12:

If anyone of the house of Israel or of the aliens who reside among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut that person off from the people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar, for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement. Therefore I have said to the Israelites, ‘No person among you shall eat blood, nor shall any alien who resides among you eat blood.’

For Jews then and now, the proper preparation of meat is crucial for following the Law of Moses. The roots of the practice go back to an ancient understanding that the blood of a creature is its life—given by God, and always to be respected for that reason. In the cultic practices of maintaining a healthy relationship with the divine, blood is used for sacrificial purposes—not for consumption. (If you want to go down a glorious rabbit hole, look up the Wikipedia entry on shechita, the proper practices for the slaughter of animals in Judaism.)

Well, we know that Jesus frequently used metaphors that would have sounded insensitive, tasteless, or even shocking to his audience. Just a few weeks ago we heard about mustard, an invasive species that will grow anywhere. This is what the Kingdom of God is like—weeds?

In another parable, Jesus describes God as being like a judge who refuses to render a just verdict until the plaintiff annoys God to the point of giving in. This is what prayer is like? Really?

So it is here with Jesus talking about the people eating him. It’s almost as if Jesus relishes their confusion, because he changes verbs to deepen the shock. First he restates his point: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” But next the gospel writer has Jesus begin to use a different Greek word for “eat,” and this one has earthier connotations. Especially in conversation about animals, people might use this version of “eat” to mean “crunch, munch, gnaw, or nibble.”

For all our efforts thus far to say, “It’s only a metaphor,” this one starts to push back. We are not to think of eating Jesus as a mere absorption of a gnostic spiritual concept, devoid of any physicality. This kind of eating makes slurping noises. Or maybe it's like Cookie Monster: “Om-nom-nom-nom!!!”

Anyway. Here Jesus pushes his metaphor so far as to dare his audience in Capernaum to walk away. It may be that only our cultural familiarity with Holy Eucharist keeps us from doing the same. But is Jesus talking about a Sunday morning ritual? Well, we don’t know what the practices of Eucharist were like in John’s community, but for the sake of the story chronologically, note that we haven’t gotten to the Last Supper yet. Furthermore, John is the only gospel writer who never describes Jesus instituting Holy Communion! Instead, he has Jesus washing the disciples’ feet on the night of his arrest. If you want bread and wine as body and blood in John’s gospel, this is the closest you’re going to get.

“OK then,” you continue, “does this mean that only those who become Christians can go to heaven when they die?” But now we’re getting bogged down by assumptions that have only taken hold in the last few centuries—and that have become malformed by overzealous missionaries more concerned with spreading their own cultural assumptions than maintaining an awareness of God’s presence throughout the world.

Jesus never talks about everyone in the world “becoming Christians”—he simply urges the disciples, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, to baptize all different kinds of people. And Jesus says almost nothing about “heaven when we die.” He only asserts that the overprivileged and self-assured will be judged and punished for not taking care of those in need in this life. But most of the time, Jesus’ concerns are earthly and embodied.

Even Paul, writing to the early church, seems to have literally no concept of hell![2] Projecting out beyond death is merely a distraction from what we need to be about right here, right now. The Letter to the Ephesians, most likely a later compilation of Paul’s ideas, focuses on how we must behave daily, for since Christ is risen, we are all one community and there is no need to allow fear to lead us into sin. Gratitude is the proper response to God’s love, and gratitude enables us to participate in eternal life right now in community—not merely after we die as individuals. So in this new, resurrected life without fear, it is enough for Jesus simply to say, “I will raise them up on the last day.”

So what does it mean to eat Jesus? I think it’s about the deep human urge to come to occupy the same space as the one we love. Sometimes this might even feel like an urge to consume, to take our beloved one into ourselves bodily! And that’s unnerving. And shocking. And a great descriptor of what it means to be in love with God as revealed in Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, Emmanuel … God-With-Us.

So today, chow down! Come to this table and receive Christ, who gives his very body and blood to sustain your life, for the life you live today is indeed the origin of your eternal life. Take Jesus into your mouth and chew, and slurp, and swallow. Feel your jaw working, and become aware of your tongue. Note the role of your esophagus, and feel Christ taking up space in you on the way down, and the alcohol from the wine tingling in your throat.

Jesus came to be with us, not to promise us a disembodied infinity, but to feed us with embodied eternity. Taste and see—taste and keep learning—that God is good. Amen.

  [1] Joe Raposo, “C Is for Cookie,” from Sesame Street.

[2] Astute Bible readers may want to refer me to 2 Thessalonians 1:5-9, but most scholars agree that Paul did not write this letter, and certainly not this passage in it, with theology so far removed from that in Paul’s genuine letters.