God’s grace, peace and
mercy be with you. My sermon title is What the Body Believes about the
Body, and my focus is our Gospel (John 6:51-59). Let us pray. Heavenly
Father, the psalmist wrote, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go
to the house of the Lord.’” Now that our feet are within
your gates, we rejoice to hear your Word. As we listen, may your Spirit
enlighten our minds and move our hearts to love deeply as Jesus loved. This we
pray to you, Most Holy Trinity. Amen.
Body. When I say the
word body, what is your first thought? I begin with that question
because the word is used in numerous ways. My doctor advises me to care for my
own physical body by keeping a good diet and getting plenty of exercise. I can
use the word as a descriptor by saying, “He had a fat body but thin arms and
legs.”
If my car is involved
in a fender bender, I take it to an auto body repairman. A group of people join
together to form a student body or an advisory body. Justice Antonin Scalia
left behind a body of work as his legacy. An ocean or a Great Lake is known as
a body of water. So, when I entitle my sermon, “What the Body Believes about
the Body,” I make three points: church body, what we believe about our Gospel,
and the Sacrament.
Body of Christ is a
way of naming and connecting Christian experiences: the physical body of Jesus
of Nazareth; the reality of the Resurrected Christ; the community of Jesus’
followers in communion with Him and one another; and the presence of Christ in
the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper.[1]
When St. Paul began
using the word body to name the covenanted people or the Church, he
relied upon his Hebrew experience. The origin of that is Joshua 7, a strange,
barbaric, but remarkable tale which shows how the people of Israel belonged to
one another. We find it strange because our culture interprets reality
differently. We think of ourselves as unconnected individual persons until some
attraction or tragedy occurs. Friendship develops because we are neighbors,
coworkers, classmates or teammates. It also occurs when we band together after
a tragedy. When surviving family members from 9/11 met, they bonded as one.
When a person in a congregation suffers an accident or death, individual
Christians come together.
But St. Paul was a
Jew, and his interpretation of human reality was in rooted in his background.
His conversion experience[2]
describes how he was on his way to persecute Christians, and in a white-hot
moment of divine revelation, God spoke to him: “Why are you persecuting
me?” The answer to his question, “Who are you?” was “I am Jesus
whom you are persecuting.” He eventually understood that his
persecution of this body of people was actually the persecution of Jesus
Christ. He then began to teach Christians that because through baptism and the
Lord’s Supper we are physically joined to Jesus Christ, there are moral and
immoral activities. There are rules for living. As members of this Christian
body, the Church, we can eat whatever food we choose, but we cannot engage in
sexual activity with another unless we are married to that person, because, as
Paul wrote, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?”
(1 Cor 6:15)[3] As individual
Christians, we are joined to Christ and to one another, and as individuals, we
must avoid giving scandal not only to one another, but also to unbelievers who
seek to dishonor and destroy us.
The Body of Christ (His
Church) embraces and transforms us into one people. Baptism makes us all equal.
There is no privileged hierarchy in our Church. St. Paul wrote about this in
Galatians 3:25-29, where we read that “you are all one in Christ.”
We lay that teaching next to what Paul wrote regarding different ministries in
1 Corinthians 12:27-30, to understand that not all of us can be apostles,
prophets, teachers or healers. These two parallel teachings are in accord with
Jesus’ teaching to his disciples, which ends with, “Whoever exalts
himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
(Mt 23:12)[4]
My point is that as
the Body of Christ today, our beliefs about almost anything are rooted in
Scripture with a whole history of discussion and debate, councils and creeds,
arguments and anathemas. The Church has something to say not only about worship
on Sunday, but also about moral and immoral living throughout the rest of the
week when we interact with one another and others, believers and unbelievers.
We are the Body of Christ, and we remain intimately connected to Jesus Christ
and one another.
Now, what if I choose
to separate myself from this Mystical Body? In 1st Corinthians (12:12-26),
Paul teaches that being connected to Christ once means being connected eternally.
Whether it likes you or not, your big toe does not get to decide it’s no longer
going to be part of you because you stub it so often. It is connected whether
it likes it or not. In a like manner, we do not get to decide if we are
connected to the Body of Christ or not. We are. Being baptized into the
suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ redeems our connectedness and
deepens it beyond anything I can describe.
Like you, I sometimes
ponder if I am connected to all of you. You may feel more closely connected to
your dog than to the people sitting around you, and if that is the case, let me
ask you: When did you last take home the bulletin to pray for the people listed
in it? When is the last time you had free time and reached out to another
member of this Body? Is your time during the coffee social spent talking to
people you do not know well or do you always sit with the same people? When is
the last time you laid awake at four in the morning and prayed for all the
people around you and the people who have not yet returned to this church? If I
do not feel connected, have I tried to understand my connection to everyone
else in the Church the way Paul did after his white-hot experience with the
Living Person of Jesus Christ? Remember, Paul’s personal relationship with
Christ eventually led to his communal and cosmic relationship with our Triune
God, His universal Church and all of creation.[5]
On to my second point,
Believe. What do we believe about what Jesus said in the Gospel today? To
believe is to accept that something is honest or true. It also means that I
accept someone’s word or the evidence. Since the Greeks put stock in the
teaching of the ancient ones, we begin with some of the early Church Fathers
before going to the text itself.
When some challenged
Jesus’ statement, they asked, “How can this man give us his flesh to
eat?” St. Cyril of Jerusalem stated that we should not think of the
bread and wine as mere physical food. “In accordance with the Lord’s
declaration, they are body and blood. If our senses suggest otherwise, let
faith confirm you. Do not judge on the basis of taste, but on the basis of
faith be assured beyond all doubt that you have been allowed to receive the
body and blood of Christ.”[6]
When Jesus responded
to his critics, St. Cyril of Alexandria taught that the “power of learning
follows on those who believe. … Faith should first be rooted in [belief] before
understanding.”[7] A more recent
author wrote that when Jesus speaks of eating his flesh and drinking his blood,
it means the whole man, which is why we receive Eucharist under both species.
In faith, we receive the whole Christ.[8]
Now, why did Jesus say
that his flesh is true food and his blood real drink? First of all, Jesus was
not contrasting his flesh and blood with manna in the desert. Rather, He
insisted on the genuine value of his flesh and blood as food and drink. Eating
and drinking the whole Christ and receiving His abiding presence into our lives
harkens to the vine and branches statements Jesus spoke, for that too is
eucharistic. St. John echoed this in his first letter, where we read, “God
sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”
(1 Jn 4:9)
There is no Last
Supper scene in John’s Gospel like those in the Synoptics; so, when you read
chapter six, read it this way. Think of Jesus explaining to his disciples just
what he meant when he gathered around the table with them and said the words of
institution. In Matthew, we read that after blessing and breaking the bread,
Jesus gave it to his disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.”
He took the cup, gave thanks, and then after he gave the cup to them said, “Drink
of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out
for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Mt 26:26-28) St. John was
inspired by the Holy Spirit to write this section as a way for us to understand
not only what happened at the Last Supper, but also what happens each time we
take the Lord’s Supper in church, in the home of a homebound person, or in the
nursing home or hospital.
This Bread of Life
teaching (John 6) represents a convergence of Jesus’ twofold presence to
believers in the preached Word and in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This
twofold presence is the structural skeleton of our liturgical service. Imagine
Jesus standing before you explaining what it is we are doing here when we
worship. Through Word and Sacrament, we who have an individual personal
relationship with Jesus are made one with Him, the Father, the Holy Spirit and
one another – even those who we need to forgive – every time we take the whole
Christ in Holy Communion.
That brings me to my
third point in What the Body Believes about the Body. As Lutherans, we take
Christ’s words “This is my body” and “This is my blood” at face value. He spoke
those words, and as His last will and testament, we cannot change them. We also
find them in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 11:25). We believe and
teach that the presence of Christ’s body and blood are in, with
and under the bread and wine, In reminds us that where the bread
and wine is, there is the body and blood of Christ. With reminds us that
with the bread and wine we receive the body and blood of Christ. Under
reminds us that the body and blood of Christ are hidden yet present since the
bread and wine continue to exist. If I put a napkin or cloth over a loaf of
bread, the bread under the napkin is still present even if I cannot see it.
The reason I point out
what we read in the Small Catechism is because not all Christians believe this.
Catholic transubstantiation means that that Christ’s body and blood replace the
bread and wine. The Reformed Churches, those that are based upon the teachings
of Zwingli and Calvin, do not believe that it is possible for Christ to be at
the right hand of the Father in Heaven, and in the bread and wine. They teach
that the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper are not Christ’s Body and Blood,
but only symbols. We accept what Christ said, and do not change the
meaning of His word “is” to “symbolize”.
At a recent study
session, one of the pastors noted this difference as written in the Book of
Concord, adding that many Protestants point out the errant teaching of
Catholicism, but fail to see the danger in Calvin’s teaching that Christ cannot
be present at the Lord’s Supper. If Christ is not present, how does He offer
comfort to us, and how do we offer thanksgiving to Him?[9]
“The Sacrament was instituted to comfort terrified minds. This happens when
they believe that Christ’s flesh is given as food for the life of the world (Jn
6:51) and when they believe that, being joined to Christ, they are made alive.”[10]
Martin Luther and the Fathers of our Evangelical Church remind us to believe
Christ’s words that He is in the bread and wine for the forgiveness of our
sins. They also remind us that the act of eating and drinking His body and
blood assures us not only of the forgiveness of our sins, but also everlasting
salvation.[11]
I have recently
completed a biography on Luther in which the author points out that for Luther
“the Real Presence of Christ in the Mass (Worship) was not something that could
be explained.” As the controversy created by Zwingli and Calvin continued, “it became
clear that insisting on the Real Presence was a fundamental part of Luther’s
theology.”[12]
That Christ is truly
present is not only Luther’s teaching, but we can cite others such as
Augustine, John Chrysostom, Irenaeus, St. Paul and Christ Himself. But what
does an understanding of Christ’s Real Presence in the Sacrament have to do
with our daily living? It has to do with the realization that as each of us
consumes the whole Christ in the Sacrament, we are made one with Christ and one
another. We go from being 50 or 80 individual believers to one body of
believers. In this Sacrament, Christ makes us one Body.
Earlier I spoke about
Paul’s view of human reality and how he came to see that we are the Body of
Christ. Several weeks ago, I spoke about how little time we spend in prayer
each day, less than ten minutes per day. I asked if you take home the bulletin
and pray for those people listed in it. And providentially, some one sent me a
link to a sermon, in which the pastor asked the same question to his church
members: How much time do you pray for the Church?
Praying for my own needs
is too small for us. Praying for the needs of others is what we should be
doing. I pray for the needs of others, and the greatest need you and I have is
an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, His Father, the Holy Spirit, the
saints of the church (one another), and the world’s sinners because Christ came
to redeem all of mankind. Friends, when you pray for me and one another, pray
that all the people you know and do not know experience a dynamic relationship
with Jesus Christ and His brothers and sisters. When you do, may the peace of
God that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ
Jesus. Amen.
[1]
Bernard Lee, “Body of Christ,” The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality.
Collegeville MN: The Liturgical Press (1993), p. 100.
[2]
See Gal 1: 12-17; Acts 9:1-14; 22:5-16; 26:10-18.
[3]
See chapters 5-8.
[4]
See Mt 23:8-12.
[5]
See Ephesians 6:12; Roman 1:20; Colossians 1:15-20.
[6]
Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament IVA John
1-10, Ed Joel C. Elowsky. Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press (2006), p. 239
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Brown, 282.
[9]
The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article XXIV: The Mass, Par. 75.
[10]
Apology, Article XXII: Both Kinds in the Lord’s Supper, Par. 10.
[11]
Formula of Concord: The Solid Declaration, Article VII: The Holy Supper,
Par.62ff. See also the Small Catechism, Question 362.
[12]
Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. New York: Random House
(2016), p. 280
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