Fairhaven UMC

I don’t know when they came up with the food pyramid, but I do remember the first time I ever noticed the food pyramid, the first time I ever paid attention to it. So I was sitting at the kitchen table, and I was enjoying a handful of chicken and a biscuit crackers. They might have been twigs, may they rest in peace. You remember twigs? But I flipped the box around and looked at the little diagram that was on the side.

And I’m sure you remember this, the 90s food pyramid. Every Nabisco package had it for a really long time. There was this black 3D pyramid that featured all the different food groups. There were grains at the bottom, then the next level was split between fruits and vegetables, and the next one was split between dairy and proteins, or meat and nuts and everything.

And then at the top, the point of the pyramid, was oils and fats and sugars, which for whatever reason were abstractly represented by a bunch of little dots. So at first I read that as a child, and I thought, Oh, cool. Sugar, grease, fat at the top of the pyramid. Great.

That is of course not what that means, which I believe is part of why this particular model of the food pyramid was phased out over time. A lot of people seem to perceive it that way. But whenever I did realize what it was saying, I remember looking at the bottom of the pyramid where the recommended amount of grains was listed, and it was, I checked this to make sure I remembered it right, up to 11 servings of grains per day. That’s what the food pyramid said.

That is a lot of grains. Think about that. That’s like half a loaf plus of bread. That’s almost two full boxes of pasta.

Don’t get me wrong, I love carbs more than any other food group, but 11 servings, 11 slices of bread a day, that’s just crazy to me. On the other hand, our world, when you start to think about it, is built on grains. And that’s not even an exaggeration. Human civilization is built on grains.

Archeologists and anthropologists will tell you that human civilization, including the first building of cities, like cities were only invented once we began cultivating grain. And that first happened in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, where Abraham was from. And to this day, staple crops account for 90% of the calories that are consumed around the world. 90%.

And basically, every inhabited region on the earth, excepting like Southern Africa, South America before colonization, and the Pacific Islands, where they prefer like starchy root vegetables, you know, South America had the potato, same way. Every region besides those has had their own staple grain for thousands of years. The very thing that their entire diet, their whole civilization was built on. It’s still true.

For us in the US and Mexico and Canada too, it’s corn. We use it for everything from like flour to sugar to gasoline. It was used by countless Native American peoples the same way. And in Europe and the Middle East, throughout Northern Asia, it’s wheat.

They have that all the way through Northern China. In Japan and Southern Asia, it’s obviously rice. Jesus was in a wheat culture. And the people of his place and time, like throughout the entirety of the Bible, relied on it heavily.

So back then, actually, the most fertile, productive, valuable territory in the Roman Empire was Egypt because they grew so much wheat along its banks. Egypt provided food for the entire Mediterranean area, and it was all wheat. And wheat was far and away the main fuel for survival. The form that it was eaten, of course, was as bread.

Bread was such a staple in the Middle East that in the Hebrew language, the word for bread, lechem, isn’t just bread. It has a much broader range of meaning. The word lechem, bread, can be used for meat, for fruit in some cases, or really just any kind of solid food in general. Bread is everything you can eat.

Bread is a general purpose word that refers to all food. And interestingly, the name of Jesus’ birthplace, Bethlehem, actually means house of bread, which takes on a whole new meaning when we look at this morning’s Gospel reading from John. Bethlehem was actually the home of the bread of life. So Jesus here, whenever we break into chapter, what are we, chapter six, right? Yes.

Is teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. And he says in front of the synagogue, I am the living bread that came down from heaven. And he’s saying, what he’s saying is very obvious, that he’s the base of the food pyramid so to speak. He is the most crucial element upon which life is built, more than anything else.

If he’s bread, he’s everything. He is the staple food for survival. And obviously a claim like that, they would have known that he was saying he was very important, that was confusing for his listeners. But they definitely understand how important he’s claiming to be when he describes himself as bread.

He’s saying that he’s life itself. And he goes on, Whoever eats this bread will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Now this is starting to get a little alarming here, to say the least.

This is one of those familiar biblical themes that we have trouble hearing with fresh ears because it’s so familiar to those of us who know about Jesus. But imagine hearing that for the first time. And I think even as you heard Kathy say flesh and blood over and over again, you might start to get it. Imagine some new religious teacher gets up in front of you in church and says, You’ll live forever if you eat his flesh.

It’s really grotesque. It’s kind of alarming, right? And so naturally, a commotion bubbles up among his Jewish audience that’s sitting around him. How can this man give us his flesh to eat? They’re whispering back and forth. This is some crazy stuff that he’s talking about.

What is he trying to say? But their question, I think, expresses a mix of discomfort, but also serious interest. They don’t just say, Ew, right? They say, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Because living forever sounds pretty good, but what’s all this about eating Jesus’ flesh? We don’t know about that part. But Jesus, rather than answering their question, continues on teaching and pointedly doesn’t ever answer the question. Typical, right? And instead, he pushes it further.

They’re already uncomfortable. He makes it worse. To eat the flesh of the human one, the Son of Man, he says, and to drink his blood is not optional, but is the only way to life. Whoever doesn’t eat and drink of him has no life in them, he says.

Has no life in them. The same way that someone who doesn’t eat bread in that culture has no life in them because they starved. But whoever does eat and drink of his flesh and his blood will be raised up in the last day. They’ll be alive now, and they’ll be alive forever.

And so now he’s still talking in front of the synagogue, right? And no one is less confused than they were four sentences ago. And he makes it worse. He says, Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. And he says that’s because he’s been sent by the Father as the means by which life itself is given to the earth.

And he compares himself to a really familiar story to them, one that we know pretty well too. The manna that the Hebrews received in the Sinai Desert day by day as they were fleeing Egypt for 40 years. They complained they didn’t have any food, so God would send them every morning manna, this bread that would gather like dew upon the ground to keep them alive. He’s saying he’s like that, but different.

Because that bread would rot away each night. They were only allowed to take enough for the day, and then it would rot away into the ground, become impossible to save. And everybody who ate it, meanwhile, would die eventually. Almost all the people who started out on that trip to Sinai were dead before they got to the promised land.

And that is not the case for those who consume Jesus as the bread of life. This is something completely new. This is a bread from heaven that will never decay, but nourish us from death into eternal life. And there, it seems like he ends his teaching in this moment.

He probably steps down from the podium or whatever, and nobody feels like they’ve gotten anything satisfactory. If his listeners were looking for answers they could comprehend, they don’t get them. If they were expecting some kind of day-to-day practical life application they could take away from this sermon, they’re going to go away empty-handed. They’re not going to get that.

What does it mean, Jesus, to eat your flesh as the bread of life, to gain eternal life through it? Well, it’s not clear, if specifics are what you’re looking for. He doesn’t give those. And this is incredibly frustrating to the Jews of Capernaum, and a lot of grumbling emerges. The rest of the chapter, if you continue on through chapter 6, talks about how his message here is finally a step too far.

They’ve been tracking with him for a good while. He’s talked a little bit about the bread of life, but now that he’s said it’s his flesh, you know, a lot of them end up leaving him over it. The 12 stay, and some others stay, but John tells us that a lot walk away at this point because this is just too much. And they’re facing a challenge that faces us as we read this passage.

Can we live with a mystery? Can we live with hearing something from God that is true, that is beautiful, but just might have us spending our whole lives trying to figure out exactly what it’s supposed to mean? I think that we’re being invited into that here. You know, don’t worry about how what Jesus said works. Don’t worry about that. Dig into instead what he’s saying, why he’s saying it, why it’s for you.

You don’t need to understand the mechanism, right? His own body he’s telling us is bread. That singular food that is so crucial it might as well be synonymous with all food. The staple that makes all the difference between a death of starvation and a prosperous life of feasting between despair and hope. His listeners that day in Capernaum don’t know what we do, that he’s going to be crucified and killed.

They don’t know that yet. But he’s telling them what that’s going to mean. His bleeding body will be given to them, to us as food. The kind of food from which we’ll never go hungry because it’s all we need for eternity.

He’s given it to us. Now it’s easy to get into a kind of routine anywhere in our spiritual lives, but especially at the communion table, I think. You know, we quietly consume our tiny piece of bread, our sip of juice without ever thinking about the magnitude of the mystery that Jesus is describing here. And I’ll be honest that this is a big reason that I hate the little prepackaged cups.

I really don’t like individualized servings, but I get why we do it. You know, you’ve got the hygiene thing, right? But how, whenever you have the little prepackaged cup where you take off the plastic, how are we supposed to feel that as the body and blood of Christ? It is, right? But you really have to squint to imagine that the body and blood of Christ is in this little styrofoam wafer, a few milliliters of preserved grape juice. I think it’s a little bit easier to immerse ourselves whenever we have a loaf of bread to tear from. Whenever we have a silver cup whose interior seems to like glow blood red.

And maybe whenever we take communion that way, maybe, you know, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Lutherans take it by sipping. Maybe it’s good in some ways that it’s a little bit gross, that it’s a little bit more messy. Stick with me here, right? The flesh, the blood of Christ, what Jesus is describing is something alarming, something that should be different. You’re able to grasp even a little bit in that the repulsion that the disciples, the people of Capernaum would have felt when he first told them to eat his flesh.

Something is happening whenever we consume his flesh, the bread of life and his poured out blood. This is something powerful, something kind of other worldly, something that is imparting eternal life into us through him. Something that I think often surprises Methodists, even people who have been Methodists their whole life, is that we do not view communion as a symbol or as a memorial of Jesus’ sacrifice, but as a sacrament in which Christ is really present, really there. So we don’t offer a clean explanation of that.

The Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine turn into his literal body and blood somehow. We don’t have that, you know, but somehow he’s there. The great Southern author, novelist Flannery O’Connor famously wrote about communion, you know, If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it, she said. If it’s not just a symbol, but it’s not just a symbol, it’s not just a ritual, it’s us doing precisely what Jesus is talking about here in John’s gospel, eating his flesh and blood to be raised up on the last day to enter into eternal life.

Jesus feeds us, nourishes us, gives us life, and one of the ways he does that is by offering us his body and his blood. And this is puzzling, it’s weird, it’s uncomfortable, we can’t possibly understand it, it might freak us out a little bit when we start thinking about all this bloody imagery, right? The first listeners in Capernaum would have felt the same way. It’s good that we’re able to access that, but it’s the truth. The gospel is puzzling and uncomfortable and weird, more than we like to think about.

And if we lose track of that, we’re losing a big part of our faith’s power, the mystery of it all. Think about it. Jesus’ body, you know, not so long after he preaches to the people at Capernaum, Jesus’ body, God’s body, is chewed up and swallowed by the world on the cross, like a chunk of digestible bread, dishonored, lowly, earthly, and then he’s raised to resurrection life. And we’re invited to come participate in that.

God offers his flesh to us the same way every time we come to the table, or even just approach him in prayer. Whenever we go to Jesus asking for something, he hands us the bread of life. He gives himself to us willingly to feed us in our deepest needs. He is broken that we are made whole.

And the key is that Jesus is nothing less than life himself, this staple, this bread. We ourselves, every one of us are bound for death and decay before long. We’ll disappear into the ground the same way that manna did every night. But through Jesus, something else entirely is open to us.

Whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood remains in him and him in us. He has conquered death and through him we do too. Martin Luther, the great reformer who was also a pretty good preacher, once preached to his congregation, I wish I could get you to pray the way my dog goes after meat, he said. Do we go to the communion table or even just go to Jesus at any point in our lives the way a starving person longs for bread, the way a dog tries to get something off the counter that they want really, really badly? Jesus reminds us that we are starving, failing, dying on our own, but he offers us himself, come down from heaven to fill our emptiness, to give us food so that we’ll never be hungry again.

You don’t have to understand what he does for us, how that all works. It’s a mystery. But whoever eats this bread will live forever. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

In high school, and regrettably no further than that, I always tell myself I’m going to start again, but who knows. I was a runner. I started running track in middle school. I was a sprinter at first, and I was okay.

You know? And if I’m honest, I think the reason that I started out sprinting was because the events are just so quick. You know, it’s literally a sprint. At worst, whenever I was running the 400 meter, the longest sprint event, one of the hardest events in my opinion, it was done in like a minute or so. So the pain was relatively limited.

But by high school, I’d started cross country, and so I’d switched to long distance. And that consists of a 5K race, 3.1 miles, and it stretches over fields and hills, along trails and paths through the woods, open fields. And I was significantly better at this, but it was certainly much harder mentally.

You’re suffering for the whole thing. You’re huffing and puffing. Your legs are burning for something closer to 20 minutes, not one, as you strategize when to push, when to pass another runner, when to save a little bit of juice for the very end. There’s a little bit of a mind game there too.

And it was very much a love-hate relationship for me. I have never, ever been the kind of person who just loves running because it feels so good, who enjoys it. Those people are nuts. Not even when I was putting in 40 miles a week.

I did not like it, and yet. I don’t know. But there is nonetheless a deep thrill in every race. You blow past someone after pursuing them for a mile.

Feels great. You overtake a few people with a last-minute burst before the finish line. Just an amazing feeling. And my parents were always extremely supportive.

Always present at each race across Western PA. I ran in D10. So in Pittsburgh, you got the whip-yole, which is very compact. You don’t have to travel that far for races.

But in District 10, my parents were traveling to Erie, Greenville, all the way around, almost out to Punxsutawney. My parents were always present, and they would jog from point to point along the course to cheer. And I appreciated that. I really did appreciate that.

My parents were some of the few that were always there. But my dad would drive me nuts. Let’s go, Dylan. Pick up the pace.

Run faster. Push him. Pass him. Push.

Some positive cheering, you know. Let’s go. Keep it up. Nice job.

I could accept that, you know. Nice job. I want to hear that. But being told what to do was infuriating.

I hated it. I am trying, Dad. I’m running as fast as I can. I’m doing my best.

Please shut up. And I’d complain to him about it when we got in the car. And what got me about it, I think, was this clear implication that I was not performing at the level of my ability, which no one wants to hear. When their lungs are on fire, when they’re staring up a 200-yard hill.

But of course he was correct. He was right. Which is part of why it bothered me so much. I was almost always able to push harder, to set my mind to it, to improve my race over the previous week.

I was able to get ever closer to my potential. And so this morning we turn to the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Ephesus. We’re in the fourth chapter here. We didn’t read the first three.

We kind of jumped here. But he’s switching direction in the letter. So this is how it starts. First of all, you can tell that he’s switching direction by the use of therefore.

That’s a classic Paul thing. He spent the first three chapters of Ephesians focusing on Christ and the nature of the church. He’s speaking very mystical here. He’s emphasizing that God has welcomed both Jews and Gentiles into the church.

Is uniting us together for the purpose of working out our salvation and reaching all the world. He’s talking about how the church is God’s chosen medium to change and save the world. So from chapter four onward, Paul is moving into something more practical. He’s answering the question, Okay, so what? Now what does this practically look like? So keep in mind above all that Paul is a pastor himself.

He’s writing to a congregation in the city of Ephesus. This is not a general book that he wrote to be part of the Bible. This is a pastoral letter to a real church. And he’s giving practical spiritual direction to people who are still trying to figure out what it means to be Christian.

As the Ephesians have gotten this far in the letter, they’re saying to themselves, Okay, we’re followers of Christ. We are the church. So what are we supposed to be doing? What are you saying to us, Paul? Paul has made his case now for the relationship between Jesus, who’s ascended now into heaven, and the church that remains below until he returns. Paul says that Christ is the head of the church and we’re his body in the world, all the members, the arms, the legs.

And so now he leads with a really strong command to open chapter four. Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, Paul’s in jail here in Rome, I encourage you to live as a people worthy of the call that you received from God. That, he says, is living with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. But the line that really pierces, I think, is that opener.

This is the NRSV. It’s a little bit different. Lead a life worthy of the call to which you have been called. How does that make you feel? How do you receive that? Live a life worthy of the call to which you have been called.

I’ll tell you that for me, it’s kind of like I’m running a race and I’m hearing, Push! You can run harder! Push! And it stings, as it would have for the Ephesians, because I know quite well that, like my dad, Paul is right. We are called to be more than wherever we are. Are you living a life worthy of the call that Jesus has placed on you, that he has opened to you through his life, death, and resurrection for you? Are you living as the crucial part of Christ’s body, the church that you are called to be? It’s a heavy question, and it ought to feel kind of heavy. Jesus has called us, made us part of his body by grace alone, not because we worked for it, not because we are worthy of it, but are you living in such a way that you are trying to be worthy of all that you are called and freed to be in Christ? You’ve been pulled into the body of Christ as a gift to you, but are you making use now of that gift to the fullest? Paul is deeply committed to expressing something here that we often either forget or ignore that we’ve kind of lost.

The Christian life is both individual and collective. John Wesley famously said that there is no religion but social religion. So we’re called to grow both as individual Christians, but also together as a body. One feeds into the other.

You help me grow in love, and I help you. You and I are able to become better followers of Christ, and then we become a stronger body, more able to do the will of Jesus in the world, who is our head. And the church, then, isn’t just a place that we go to. It isn’t one that we choose out of many because we like it, although we do like it here, right? It is a living, breathing body to which we belong that shapes you as you shape it.

You cannot be a Christian on your own. Listen to how Paul describes the various spiritual gifts and callings. He gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. His purpose was to equip God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God’s Son.

The entire purpose of every gift that you or I may have is for one another, to equip the whole church in service and in growth until Jesus returns. And this sounds very pleasant, but Paul moves in this chapter to make clear that it’s not just sunshine and roses and kumbaya, everyone working together in peace and harmony, right? Paul tells the Ephesian church and our church that we are striving to reach the unity of the faith and knowledge of God’s Son. God’s goal is for us to become mature adults, to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. That’s what he says.

And that comes with expectations and accountability. That is, are you doing it or are you not? A key component of the church’s job is to hold one another to that task of becoming mature adults in Christ, to affirm and support one another when we’re actually working on it, and in Paul’s words, to hear and speak the truth in love when we’re off track. Almost no one in the church expects to be challenged, even lovingly. Paul says it’s got to be lovingly, you’re speaking the truth in love.

No one expects in the church to be challenged by their pastor, let alone their sibling in Christ. We want to hear, Good job from the sidelines, not, Pick up the pace. I know you can do better than that. I know that you are better than that.

But if we’re one body, and there is no religion but social religion, we have no choice but to be actively invested in one another’s spiritual growth and pursuit of holiness. That’s inescapably part of being Christian. This is in Ephesians, this is all over the epistles. And it is the crucial piece of our Methodist tradition.

I’m not going to pour my whole trip into this sermon. I’m not. I’ve been very careful of that, but I want to talk about Wesley for a minute. You’ve heard me say this before, but this is how we get the name Methodist.

John Wesley led his people to be methodical in their faith. He had a routine that you were going to follow. You were regularly committing to pray, to fast, to visit the sick, the imprisoned, the needy, the old. And above all, above all, this was their thing.

To meet together every week, every week, in small groups called class meetings to check in on how it was going with each other and to push each other towards continued growth. That was the social part of social religion. And in Wesley’s words, they watched over each other in love. So you meet with your group and you said last week, I’ve been having a lot of trouble keeping up in prayer, or I’m having a lot of anger against my neighbor.

They would check up on you next week. How’s that going for you? And the whole goal was that you would have an answer, that I’m working with God on this, the Spirit’s moving me in this way or that way, and here’s how things are changing. And if you came back and nothing had changed, and nothing had changed, and nothing had changed, then how do we speak the truth in love to get you on a better track towards maturity in Christ? And you can see how that’s a straight line from Paul telling the Ephesians to speak the truth in love. We have to build these spaces of trust where we can speak the truth in love.

Anyone who joined one of Wesley’s class meetings, one of his groups, his societies, and wasn’t interested in receiving constructive support was politely but firmly asked to leave and come back when they were ready. There’s been a real revival of interest in the Wesleyan method for the last 40 years or so. For about 150 years, class meetings, these small groups had faded. I remember Mary Louise telling me, whenever I talked about this a couple years ago, she remembers her aunt talking about a class meeting.

Mary Louise is 94. It’s been a long fade. And there’s good reason for interest in this revival. David Lowe’s Watson is a Methodist theologian and early pioneer of this revival, and he wrote in 1990 that every American Christian, see if this feels right, I think it does, seems to feel like we’re missing something.

That there’s a hole in our faith lives, but one we’re having trouble locating. It’s not more involvement in mission, he says, or learning more in Bible study. It’s not a lack of action. It’s not a lack of knowledge.

Definitely not that, though those things are great. It’s good to be more involved in mission. It’s good to go to Bible study. He says that the lack is a lack of collective, mutual accountability and growth in discipleship.

The exact thing that Paul is describing here to the Ephesians. So oftentimes we’ll start coming to church, or we’ve been here our entire lives. We get confirmed as teens, join the church as adults, and then we totally plateau in growth and settle into routine instead. So it’s no wonder, I think, that most kids seem to leave church after confirmation, or even in my experience, people will join the church and then rapidly kind of fall off over the course of the next year or two.

Kids leave after confirmation because they feel like they’ve graduated church. They feel like they’ve finished with all we have to offer them. Where do I go now? This is it. But that’s not the kind of Christianity that Paul is describing.

Whether you’ve known Jesus for one year or 80 years, the question is, have you met God’s goal for us to become mature adults? I bet not, because Paul has a pretty high standard for maturity. He says it’s to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. And so are you as mature spiritually as Jesus Christ? Our whole journey of faith is a quest to be remade together in the image of Jesus himself, to become like Jesus in all of our thoughts and words and actions. There is always so much room to grow, and this is intended to be a major function of the church.

Again, listen to Paul in verse 15. By speaking the truth with love, let’s grow in every way into Christ, who is the head. The whole body grows from him as it is joined together and held together by supporting ligaments. The body makes itself grow, that it builds itself up with love as each one does its part.

Our growth is not supposed to stall. You’ll have moments, but it’s not supposed to stall when we are still infants, he describes, who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes. You can do better than that. You can do better than where you are.

You can live as one worthy of the call you receive from God. So how might we become a church that builds one another up in this way, where we’re ready to help one another grow and both offer and accept the hard truth about where we need to grow and change to make that growth happen? For one, here’s my plug, we’re going to restart our small groups in the fall. We had two that lasted about a year and a half. We’re going to start them again, round two, in the fall.

And the purpose of those groups is exactly that. It’s the same as the class meetings. So I’d ask you to start praying now about whether you need to join one, whether you should, whether you’re ready to take a big step in discipleship. I’m happy to talk to you about that.

This is a revitalization of the thing that Wesley did. We had our first groups, we learned what worked well, what we need to change, we’re going to try again. But outside of that, consider, God has given you a wondrous calling, one that lasts a lifetime and beyond. And so if you’ve plateaued in your faith and growth, if we together have plateaued in our faith and growth, let’s change that and use your gifts to build up this body and be built up by it.

Run faster. I believe in you, God is saying. In a few minutes when we come to this communion table, I’d ask you to do it as a recommitment to living a life worthy of your calling. Growing in maturity in Christ.

We come to this table together. We eat this meal and run this race together. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, Paul says. One God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.

So hear Jesus and your brothers and sisters in Christ from all times and places, shouting to you on the sideline, pick up the pace. I know you can do better than that. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.