All Saints’, Dorval
August 22, 2021
“Communion symbols with vine and wheat,” carving from St. Aloysius School chapel, Glasgow
August 1 was my three-year anniversary at All Saints’. On that date I was, of course, on vacation, so today is officially the first occasion on which I’m preaching on a set of lectionary texts that I’ve already preached on here.
Today is the last of five straight weeks in which the gospel reading is from the sixth chapter of John, an extended discourse on Jesus as the Bread of Life after he feeds the five thousand in the desert. It was a great way to begin here, actually: we dove straight into the heart of our liturgy and tradition and it was a solid foundation to build on.
Of course, in August of 2018, nobody dreamed that as we approached this milestone we would have lived through a year and a half in which we almost totally abstained from the Bread of Life. It has certainly given us a different perspective.
I don’t know what the preachers over the past four weeks said about bread, but the sentence that jumped out at me as I read this final portion of John 6 was verse 63: “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”
This seems like an odd thing for Jesus to say after he has spent the 60 prior verses insisting that his followers must eat his flesh and drink his blood, and refusing to back down on that flat assertion in the face of the horror and confusion of his hearers. I kind of wish I were in that crowd and could barge up to him and say, “Which is it, Jesus?”
I suspect, though, as with so many other conundrums in scripture, that the answer is actually “both”. Perhaps, in context, Jesus was simply reassuring his listeners that yes, he still does believe in the importance of spiritual things; he is not just advocating a bizarre ritual that sounds like cannibalism. Perhaps he understands the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood to be a mere fleshly vehicle whereby the much more important spirit is conveyed to those who partake.
But you can’t really get around the insistence throughout the chapter that the eating and drinking will be real, literal, physical; even if this is the bread that came down from heaven, it is actually bread, which can be tasted and swallowed and digested. And given how the last couple of millennia of Christian history have gone, I would say we have overall erred badly on the side of over-spiritualizing things, and are due for a reset in which we reclaim the incarnational nature of our faith.
(You all know what “incarnation” means, right? It’s a fancy theological term that we use to talk about God coming to earth, but the Latin root literally means “enfleshed,” “made into meat”; it’s the same word as “carnivore” and “chili con carne”. No wonder Jesus’ listeners were horrified when he talked about them eating him.)
But even if we decide that the spirit/flesh dichotomy is too simplistic, it’s worthwhile to think about how both spirit and flesh are valuable in the life of faith, and where those images are playing out in our scriptures.
Take the Epistle, for example, a portion of the letter to the Ephesians. There it is again, the opposition of flesh and spirit: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Interestingly, for Paul here, the flesh is not so much “useless”, the word Jesus uses, but irrelevant: the struggle he is describing is a purely spiritual one. Which is an interesting contrast to many other passages of Paul’s writings, where he treats the flesh and its desires as something to be resisted in favour of the spirit.
Here, though, Paul describes a defensive action using metaphorical armour to stand firm against the evil that threatens a believer in Jesus. He is, after all, a prisoner in chains, so this is the only kind of battle he’s capable of fighting right now, and he invites his fellow Christians to join him in resisting the forces that would try to rob them of their faith and their hope of resurrection.
But it’s good that Paul has made clear that the enemies he is talking about are not actual armies with physical soldiers. The metaphor of the armour and the duel is a powerful one, but it should not be taken to imply that actual, physical holy war is somehow a positive thing or a goal that we should be aiming for.
We are seeing a lot of the cosmic powers and the spiritual forces of evil these days. In the COVID pandemic, in the situation in Afghanistan, in the floods and fires ravaging the globe, we are seeing what happens when unfettered greed, cowardice, blood thirst, racism and other forms of oppression, and total lack of concern for the well-being of other humans and for the ecosystems that give us life, are let loose in the world.
These are indeed diseases of the spirit, but they have very real consequences in the flesh. And it is essential that we fight them with everything we have – and equally essential that we remember that even the most depraved and harmful beliefs are still held by human beings who are made in the image of God, however besmirched they have allowed that image to become by their actions. As one of my wise colleagues put it when we were discussing this passage on social media as we all prepared our sermons, “Fight evil, not humans.”
I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon that we have almost entirely abstained, as a congregation, from the Bread of Life in physical form since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic a year and a half ago. We have been relying on the spirit, on nonmaterial things such as words and love and prayers, and connections that move invisibly through the air, in order to sustain our faith and our community. And this has revealed to us not only the unexpected strength of those spiritual ties, but also how they can only do so much without the flesh, without the physical presence of our bodies and our voices in the same room, without the bread and wine on the tongue, without water and oil and flowers, without the sharing of real meals around real tables.
Both the spirit and the flesh are essential. God is revealed through both. Discerning which is more important, in any given situation, is also essential; as is remembering that all human beings are beloved of God, and our spiritual battles are against the forces of evil, not the bodies and selves of our siblings in Christ.
God willing, we will once again be able to share in the Bread of Life in three short weeks when we return (again) to worshiping together in the church building. May both the spirit and the flesh reveal to us the reality of God, and help us to draw closer to God’s love and power.
Amen.
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