Lectionary:  I Kings 8: 1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-43
                    Psalm 84
                    Ephesians 6 10-20
                    John 6 56-69

"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.   Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me."  John 6 56-57

These words from John’s gospel are very familiar to us.  They evoke the mystery of the communion liturgy.  They fit well with two of the other selections from today’s lectionary.  In the first book of Kings, Chapter 8, religion has shifted from the hilltop worship of Baal to the centre of Jerusalem.  The priestly writer of Kings stands in awe at the dedication of Solomon’s temple: “a cloud filled the House of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord  (I Kings 8 10-11).  And in the psalm we have sung, David longs for the communion of the sanctuary “a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere” (Psalm 84 10).  To Jew and Christian alike, it seems that the religious experience brings awe, wonder, mystery and miracles.

I have a cousin who is a great believer in minor miracles.  Always, it seems, God has a busy day intervening to save her from some small crisis that she could have avoided by using her little grey cells.  She and a friend come to Squamish, knowing that we live in a temperate rain forest.  They bring no rain gear.  The heavens open, and what do you know, God sends rain upon the just and the unjust.  But- miracle of miracles- God has a friend who helps them to find two large umbrellas.  Then the sun shines, and off they go to the beach, forgetting their sandwiches.  But wonder of wonders, the Lord leads them to a bench where someone has enough food to share with them.  The time comes to return home.  They set off without checking the bus schedules, and are about to miss the last bus back to Abbotsford.  But by yet another miracle, God finds them a city bus driver with a cell phone who calls a taxi to speed them on their way to the bus depot.  Praise the Lord, Alleluia!

We don’t always recognize that John presents the communion liturgy in the context of a populist miracle.  Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us the bald facts.  Five thousand people find themselves on the wrong side of the lake, with no sandwiches.  But, miracle of miracles, a young lad has brought a picnic basket with five barley loaves and two small fish.  And after these have been blessed by Jesus, the five thousand are fed, with food to spare.  Matthew and Mark are sufficiently impressed with this miracle that they tell us the story twice.

And as for the crowds!  Why, Jesus is more popular than any politician who promises tax cuts and a balanced budget.  What a platform!  Free bread and free fish!  Is Israel a great country, or what?  Here is a true descendant of the leader who could find God’s manna in the wilderness.  Let’s make him King right away.

John tells the same story, but with a big difference.  This is not just God running after a bunch of thoughtless people who have forgotten their sandwiches.  John looks for a much bigger miracle, with a much deeper meaning.   Yes, Jesus has the charisma to persuade those who have food to share with those who don’t.  But more importantly, he brings spiritual food, something that will satisfy the deepest needs of the multitude: “the bread that came down from heaven” (John 6 58); “The one who eats this bread will live for ever”.   So John links the feeding of the 5000 to the communion liturgy of the early church:
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.   Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me  (John 6 56-57).

John tells us that when Jesus got back to downtown Capernaeum, he started to push this message in the synagogue.  And when the true nature of his teaching began to sink home, there were no longer convention crowds of 5000 screaming wildly for his coronation.  The front pews in the synagogue began to look pretty sparsely populated. Even his disciples were muttering under their breath.  Free bread and free fish- they didn’t need a spin doctor to understand that.  But spiritual food, and God living in them!  There wasn’t much of a market for that kind of talk.  How could Jesus be so stupid as to alienate all of the lake country, just when he was riding so high in the polls?  Putting a spiritual spin on a popular miracle was a dangerous game.  People didn’t want some young upstart messing with their religion.  If Manna in the wilderness was good enough for Moses, it was good enough for them.   Fancy saying that material things were unimportant!  Chances are, Jesus would not only lose his audience, but get himself stoned to death.

Most protestants are a little wary of this passage from John’s gospel.  We wonder about both the message and the theology.    We are happy to share a little of our food with the people living around First United, on Vancouver’s east-side.  But we would prefer a miracle that reduced our tax burden, to the greater miracle of spiritual nurture that would allow us to accept a fundamental change in our lifestyle and the elimination of world poverty.

In terms of theology, we see our gathering around the Lord’s table as a ritual of commemoration- as Luke puts it” Do this in remembrance  of me” (Luke 22 19).   But John seems to read more into the sacrament than a simple commemoration.  For him, it is an act of spiritual nurture.  And throughout the early history of the church, we find many great thinkers sharing John’s perspective.

In North Africa, Tertullian described the communion bread as “the Lord’s body”.  When interpreting the Lord’s prayer (“give us this day our daily bread”), his contemporary Cyprian insisted that Christ was our daily bread.  He even pointed the link to our lectionary passage from Ephesians, which threatened to elude me.   We need the whole armour of God to fight the structural problems of society that cause famine and hunger.  And we must be fortified not with the latest military hardware, but with the spiritual nourishment that comes from our worship service.    Prayer helped Christ to spurn a crowd of kingmakers, surrender to the will of God and turn his face steadfastly toward His passion in Jerusalem.  And in the same way, the Eucharist enacts our sacrifice and surrender to the will of God.  “Our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.”   (Eph 6 12).

Around 200 AD, Clement of Alexandria made the intriguing assertion that the Eucharistic wine was a mingling of the Logos, Logos, the creative power and energy of God, with material substance.   A century later, Eusebius of Caesarea insisted that the flesh and blood which Jesus asked his disciples to eat and drink were not physical flesh and blood, but rather his teachings.  The flesh and blood were symbols of a spiritual reality that became understood through sharing in this act of faith.

By 400 AD, Evagrius Ponticus wrote that in partaking of communion, we became the incarnation of the Logos and of Christ’s wisdom.  The idea of conversion into actual flesh and blood stems from Athanasus.  He wrote “You will see the Levites bringing loaves and a cup of wine and placing them on the table.  So long as the prayers and invocations have not yet been made, it is mere bread and a mere cup.  But when the great and wondrous prayers have been recited, then the bread becomes the body, and the cup the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ”.  Cyril of Jerusalem supported this idea, suggesting that since Christ could turn water into wine, he could just as easily change the wine into his blood.

The debate continues to this day.  The Catholic church still argues that amid all the bells, prayers and incense, the miracle of transubstantiation occurs, Christ is present as the bread turns to his flesh, and the wine to His blood.  The United Church lies at the opposite pole of the ecclesiastical spectrum.  Bread remains bread, and wine remains wine, or more often turns into Welch’s grape juice.  We are more concerned with the social gospel than with rarefied issues of liturgical theology.   We share the practical attitudes of Matthew, Mark and Luke, rather than the mysticism of John.  We look at the breadless multitudes in the deserts of Africa.   Sometimes we say “Let them eat cake?”   More often, we are concerned, but like the disciples we ask “Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread and give it to them to eat?” (Mark 6 37).   We look for the quick fix of a small and material miracle- a whip round that will raise a few thousand dollars.

There are many wonderful, generous and caring people, here in Squamish and in the United Church across Canada- look at the money that was raised when the African Children’s Choir came to town last winter.  But such fund raising does not solve the structural problems of a global economy.  It feeds the people of Ethiopia for a few seconds of a single day, it buys a few cattle for the millions of flood victims in Mozambique, and it treats a few dozen of the millions of victims of AIDS in third world countries.   But at best, such efforts are Band-Aid solutions.  Gross inequities persist and human tragedies multiply.

Are other belief systems more effective?  I liked what Raj Kahlon told the men’s group about the Sikh religion a few months back.  For his people, the sharing of bread with the hungry was not generosity or an act of charity; they recognized that all food was a gift from God.   The best of our indigenous peoples have a similar philosophy.  In the days of the cold war, a young woman living in Prague told me that communism was the perfect solution, provided that people were angels.  Unfortunately, in Prague, there were few angels.  The early church experimented with a form of communism.  But it hit the same snag- some of the church members were decidedly piggy.  Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5 1) decided to keep some of their money in an off-shore account, just in case the sharing of property didn’t quite work out.  And in Corinth, there was the agape (Agape), a pot-lache of a love-feast that turned into a drunken orgy; some church members grabbed all the food before those who were doing the work to pay for it had even arrived
(I Cor 11 21).  Finally, an exasperated Paul said “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat” (2 Thess 3 10).   And even in the new world of Animal Farm, the brave hopes of the revolution faded, as the beasts of England found that Napoléon and his friends could be just as piggy as the worst of humans.

The problem in our world today is not a shortage of food- we face the larger difficulty of human nature, the greed that leads to an inequitable sharing of God’s gifts.  We can see the problem when a hockey player signs a six-year contract for $86 million U.S., when a thirteen thousand square foot indoor skating rink is needed in a home at Whistler, and when homes with a floor area of 48,000 square feet are planned in Toronto.  As average Canadian church members, we can be wonderfully warm and generous.  But we also enjoy 200 times the income of families in the poor countries of Africa.  And the Overseas Aid given by either our Canadian government or our own Mission and Service Fund is at best the equivalent of one miraculous feeding- one sunny day in a lifetime of misery.

If we take a long-term view, then the distribution of wealth throughout the world might well increase our Canadian standard of living.  But in our lifetime, if we make even a reasonable attempt to create a just society, we will be a lot poorer.   We will need to make a drastic reduction in our own consumption of material things.  As humans, we do not accept such changes easily.  Communism failed.  The early church failed.   And our modern church has done little better.

This may seem a rather dark message for a brief summer service.  But the Good News of the Gospel is that our worship can become more than a cozy ceremony of remembrance for comfortable middle-class people.  It can become a rite of sacrifice, where we surrender our wills to the ways of Christ, allowing our bodies and our minds to be filled with the Logos, the creative, transforming energy of God’s spirit.    And if we allow this to happen, our all too human nature can change, so that the sharing of the loaves and fishes becomes more than a one day miracle.

May this process begin in our hearts today!