The Sacraments-The Eucharist
May 2017
We live in a very political culture, we are very partisan. On any social issue, ethical issue, religious issue we know what side we are on, we know why anybody who is on the other side is wrong and probably evil. Or at least I used to know what side I was on. An issue seems simple but then the more that you get into it, the more folds it has. It soon becomes clear that there is right on both sides and wrong on both sides and we are expected somehow to balance them. We are convinced that righteousness should be simple, just apply a few rules and the answer will present itself. All of the problems in our lives come from somebody not following the formulas. There is a feeling that life was simple at some previous time and that somehow we have complicated it all to the point that simple answers, maybe any answers at all are impossible. What kind of inconsiderate jerk has made our lives so complicated? Who would be so thoughtless as to muddy the waters in so many of the issues of our lives? Don't they know that our righteousness, our future, our very salvation depends on finding the right way? It is as if the way to Heaven was once a broad and easy path, and Someone made it into a narrow, mountain pass, a continual struggle with failure and death close enough to taste.
Why can't people just follow the Bible, let God be our guide, decent, Christian folks don't have this constant struggle to find the right way do they? I mean there are things in the Bible that are hard to understand, but the big ideas make everything else plain. What could be simpler than God forgiving sins, than a Virgin birth and the baby literally being God, than an Innocent man being judged guilty and guilty men being judged innocent by a Judge who is never wrong, than true and eternal Life existing in the Death of the Cross? What could be simpler than a physical washing producing spiritual cleanness, than bread and wine being the body and blood of God, than a part, a man, being greater than the whole, and an Individual being greater than the Law that binds us all? These are the simple, plain, direct things at the heart of the Christian religion. These are the message that we believe and preach. And to anyone who thinks that they are crazy, that they are not just insane but impossible, I say, Yep I'm with you.
The Law is a simple matter. Do it, follow the rules, apply the formula, color inside the lines, and live. Don't do it and die. Motives don't come into question. Well, when they do they are only a part of the formula. Have the right motives or you lose. Your heart, your mind, your soul, You yourself are just something in the balance, Make the cut or the writing is literally on the wall, "You have been measured and found wanting" as it was written for Belshazzar. The complication, the mystery, the Paradox, the Sacrament comes in with the Gospel.
When we open the New Testament the very first thing that we find is a Virgin having a baby. That really kind of sets the tone for the whole doesn't it? The miracles of the New Testament are actually the most plain and believable parts of the whole thing. Christ feeds five thousand with one little boy's lunch with the plainness and simplicity of a cook at Waffle House. He casts out demons like a carpenter hammers nails. But when He comes to Himself, to explaining Who He Is and what He is doing, all of a sudden things are not so simple.
28 Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?”
We start with a simple and direct question. What can we do to please God, to contribute to the Kingdom, bottom line to be saved.
29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.”
Kind of a strange answer that is about to get WAY worse.
30 Therefore they said to Him, “What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You? What work will You do? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
32 Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
34 Then they said to Him, “Lord, give us this bread always.”
35 And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.
He takes this plain question and His best answer is to start comparing Himself to a loaf of bread. I can only imagine how helpful this must have been to them. I mean it could be worse He could start confusing the whole thing with, I don't know, what is the most off topic confusing thing He could bring up? Maybe the mystery of predestination?
36 But I said to you that you have seen Me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. 39 This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. 40 And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”
If He was deliberately trying to make the issue as complicated and confusing as possible would He have done anything differently? Their complaint seems perfectly reasonable to me.
41 The Jews then complained about Him, because He said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” 42 And they said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Our wonderful teacher's response? He is going to mention predestination again, this time in its even more offensive form, reprobation, the election to damnation, followed by telling them that they have never seen God, in other words don't even have a chance to understand.
43 Jesus therefore answered and said to them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. 44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father. 47 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.
When I read this, I get the impression that after He said all that, He felt that He had just been too direct and plain and inoffensive and must have been like, "Hmm, what could be more offensive than predestining people to Hell? I know! They want to know what God wants them to do, Let's tell them that to be saved they have to become cannibals."
48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”
52 The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”
53 Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. 56 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. 58 This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.”
Why? What is the point of this totally indirect, vague, deliberately confusing diatribe flung at such an inoffensive question as "What does God want us to do?" It is said somewhere that Christ spoke in parables so that people wouldn't understand, even the prophets were sent with this charge,
"9 And He said, “Go, and tell this people:
‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand;
Keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’
10 “Make the heart of this people dull,
And their ears heavy,
And shut their eyes;
Lest they see with their eyes,
And hear with their ears,
And understand with their heart,
And return and be healed.”Isaiah 6
The whole goal of Isaiah's ministry, and of Christ's parables and the text we just looked at is not to lay out God in the form of a systematic theology, not to draw a map that leads you to Heaven, its not to give you some Eureka moment, it's to make it clear that you don't understand and...never will. Now we have obscured this fact. We have decided that this message, the message of being excluded from understanding, is just for some people, and that those people are not us. It is them out there. All the people in here get it. We don't need anybody to give us the talk about birds and virgin bees. Virgins have babies, obviously. Yeah, God is God and He is a man, could be some guy in Walmart and He is God at the same time. I get it. And I should eat that guy?
Traditionally Christianity has called these issues, Sacraments, literally Mysteries, things that we don't get. But I prefer the word Paradoxes. I think that word makes the point nicely that the issue is not just that we are messed up and don't get it, there are plenty of things like that that maybe we will figure out someday, but not this. The Mysteries of Christianity aren't just beyond you or me and accessible to some better human, they aren't above all humanity and comprehensible to some angel, they are above all Creation. We can no more understand them than we can understand God Himself. In fact, if, and I want to insist on that if, IF God understands these paradoxes, it is only because He understands Himself. Then what's the point? If it isn't understanding?
To say that God is above us, beyond us, is just a tautology, a truism. We hear it and immediately begin to imagine how He is beyond us and draw out the plan of His transcendence, make a system out of it. And then, once we understand God's transcendence, He doesn't really transcend us anymore. He is still better than us but we get it. We know how, and where, and when He is better. All the unknowns are known unknowns. We can lay odds on the incalculable. Our explanations of mysteries always start with making them not be mysterious, making them not be themselves, which is fine for ordinary earthly things but if we do it here it will leave us with no Christianity or worse a Christianity that is not itself. Our calling, then is not to understand, but to accept our inability to understand, and believe anyway. Now to head off a misunderstanding, we don't believe first and understand later. Belief doesn't produce understanding. We believe, and we believe that what we believe cannot be understood. This is the form that a revelation of Someone who is truly beyond us must always take. A Creed and a Theology are truly and forever contradictions. Belief and knowledge are not just separate, not just different but contradictory, and the statement "I Believe" contains in it the idea, "I don't understand. I can't explain."
The Paradox isn't to be explained, it is to be preached. It is to be brought to life. The contradiction, the collision isn't to be softened and smoothed out, it is to be made as stark and irreconcilable as possible, that is to say as stark and irreconcilable as it really is. Now we don't do that by clever ways of speaking, by artfully chosen phrases, or people will get the impression that we are taking something that is plain in itself and making it mysterious to keep people's interest. No, we just present it as it is, without clogging it up with all of our reasonable, agreeable, synthesizing, syncretistic, opposite combining religious garbage.
Something that we understand can be a revelation, but not a revelation about who God is. Because something that we understand isn't divine it is human, and if there is anything that is human, that isn't divine, about God then He isn't God. Which brings us against the brick wall of our first paradox. That God is a man. And I want to insist that all of these revelations, these mysterious Sacraments, ARE revelations of God's eternal, divine character, of who He is, especially His humanity.
The humanity of Christ, of God, is the cornerstone of the entire Christian revelation. God is really a man, not He looks like a man, not He acts like a man, not He was a man a long time ago, but He is really, from all eternity to all eternity in the absolutely divine essence absolutely human. Not that some man is like God in a lot of ways, not that some man is called God but is really a creature, not any of the million evasions we have come up with. But if God is really and truly a man and there is a man who is really and truly God, then what does that reveal about Him and what does it reveal about us?
So, I wrote everything up til here about two weeks ago. And I hit a wall. It looks like it is time to explain how God is a man and what that means. And that is what I thought I was gonna do. Which is pretty funny if you think about all of my insistence on the mysterious and paradoxical nature of the whole idea. But it is what I thought. But what I actually should do, and might can do, is not to explain the paradox but just draw a picture of it. So that I can see it and you can see it. I don't really know what it is like to be God, but I have some idea what it is like to be a man. I think the first, most obvious thing about being a man is that most of the time you really don't know what is going on. The older that I get, the more clear it is to me that the causes of most of the things in my life are hidden from me. I don't even understand the things that I think and feel myself. Is that what Christ's life was like? We spend so much time analyzing His actions, "Why did He tell His mom it wasn't time for Him to work miracles? Why did He deliberately push away all of the good people? What about His bizarre answers to Satan's temptations?" And we ask these questions trying to sniff out hints of the divine, trying to find the hidden God within the Man. But when we do that we miss the man, and Him being a man is allegedly the whole point of the Christian religion. We try and sniff out the divine but His actions fairly reek of the human; the strange combination of shyness and stubborn courage and angry compassion and compassionate anger that we don't like but that feels real familiar to us.
Maybe the second thing about being a man, is that even when you know and understand that something is good, a lot of the time you don't like it. Second guessing, buyer's remorse, fear and trembling is the touchstone of being a man. Have any of us had something good come into our lives without feeling, at least a little, that Gethsemane moment? That crying, "God, I know this is good but I don't want it. I don't like it." And in that moment, we can't miss the humanity of Christ. And this is where we make the opposite mistake. We can't miss His humanity when He cries and fears so we miss His divinity. We take the whole Christ and say this part is His human side and that part is His divine but we cannot divide what God has joined, there is not a human Christ and a divine Christ, but one Divine-human Christ, not the Law and then the Gospel separately, but the two of them together, this is the mystery, the sacrament for which Christ, a man, left His Father and cleaves to us, and the two are one flesh, in the marriage of the Divine and us, represented in the bread and the wine that is flesh and blood. And that is where I am gonna end this. With the challenge to myself, and to you, to see the divine in the Garden. To believe that it is really God that says and does these things.
From Matthew 26 36 Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, “Sit here while I go and pray over there.” 37 And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed. 38 Then He said to them, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me.”
39 He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”
40 Then He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “What! Could you not watch with Me one hour? 41 Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
42 Again, a second time, He went away and prayed, saying, “O My Father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done.” 43 And He came and found them asleep again, for their eyes were heavy.
44 So He left them, went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. 45 Then He came to His disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. 46 Rise, let us be going. See, My betrayer is at hand.”