The Sacrificial Sacrament

John 6:51-58

For a number of years, Pam and I directed a junior high church camp. Giving up a week each summer at Camp Galilee, we would lead our counselors in working with about 80 youth from our conference churches. We were responsible for seeing that they ate, and washed, and slept, and were safe. And after covering that basic level of care, we tried to share with them the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Pam’s role was to ensure that basic level of care as the mother of the camp. My role, as the writer of the curriculum, was to make as much of the day as possible work towards sharing the gospel. The music, the games, the crafts, the reflection times, the Bible studies, and the worship times all had the same focus for a given day. If there was a detail that I could use to help them learn the same message in a different way, I tried to use it. I even tried to have the blessing before each meal point to the theme.

To help the campers share the theme in prayer, I had them sing their blessings. Singing the prayer made it more memorable, and it also made it easier for a cabin group to do it together while leading the camp. These prayers often had a more general theme than the specific theme of the day; and as such, there were a few that got used over and over again. One of the favorites was this one:

“For health and strength/ and daily food/ we give you thanks/ O Lord.” We would sing it twice through, and then as a round. The cabin group in charge was responsible for both leading the singing, and dividing the campers into four groups for the round. Shall we try it? (TRYING IT!)

This sung prayer served two purposes, both of which helped to share the gospel. One, it gave them a very basic list of things to be thankful for – health, and strength, and daily food, which were all things our junior high campers had in abundance. That is an important list to call upon when you are homesick, or in the midst of an adolescent identity crisis where it seems the world just doesn’t understand who you are. So when they had trouble making friends, or when their friends were at odds with each other, or even when they were simply tired and grumpy, this tune could pop into their head. For health and strength and daily food, we give you thanks, O Lord. They would be connected to God again, and know they were indeed blessed, and the crisis would pass.

The second purpose was a metamessage, kind of like our children’s sermons each week. During our children’s sermon, there are always two things that going on which affect what the children are learning. First, there is the obvious sharing of a lesson that we talk about. And second, there is the metamessage, the lesson they experience.

Even when the children seem distracted, or when the lesson seems over their head, the children are learning that they are important to God, and to us. They experience this by having a special time just for them during the service, when they can talk and share and squirm and be accepted just as they are. We don’t have to tell them they are important, because they get to be important.

The metamessage for singing a prayer as a round is also an experience. We experience that if we are all working together, and if we all have the same focus, even if it sounds or looks chaotic, if we trust each one to do their part, it can all work out in a very satisfying way. That is a hard lesson for anyone to learn, if we only talk about it. We generally have to experience it before we will believe it.

This is often how we learn to become disciples of Jesus Christ. Our faith generally has to be experienced – the forgiveness, the assurance, the mercy, the grace, the love, and the community – for us to believe it and to live into it. And generally, it has to be more than a one-time experience. We want to experience it over and over again, to reinforce our learning.

There is a metamessage in the lectionary. This is our fourth week in a row where the lectionary wants us to know that Jesus is the Bread of Life. It will be our focus next week, as well. When we repeat a lesson over and over again, the metamessage is that this is something important for us to know.

Over these four weeks, these readings have been like our camp meal blessing: For health and strength and daily food, we give you thanks, O Lord. The Bread of Life satisfies us for eternity – it gives us eternal health. The Bread of Life invites us to be part of God’s family – it gives us holy strength. The Bread of Life is a gift from God – the one to whom we give thanks. And today, the Bread of Life abides with us and in us – our daily food.

Bruce Rahtjen was one of my seminary professors. He was also one of the translators for the “Good News Bible” since he was an expert in biblical languages. He once did a word study on the Lord’s Prayer, as part of his doctoral work, and he discovered that there are two meanings to be found in one of the petitions.

When Jesus first taught the disciples this prayer, the petition for daily bread likely meant the disciples were to ask God to provide for their basic needs to live. That makes sense, since God is the provider of all that is good which we need. Praying for our daily bread connects us to God, and makes us thankful.

As this prayer was taught after the resurrection, however, it is likely that new disciples understood the petition to “give us this day our daily bread” as being less about the barley bread that was baked each day, and more about the Living Bread, the Bread from Heaven, Jesus Christ.

We remember that the eyes of the two on the road to Emmaus were opened to the presence of Jesus in the breaking of the bread. The story of the Last Supper, when Jesus commanded the disciples to remember him when they ate the bread, when joined with the good news of the resurrection, would have changed how they interpreted Jesus saying that he is the Bread of Life. Put together, we have the early understanding of the sacrificial sacrament of communion.

This changed the meaning of the petition for those new disciples to, “Give us this day, and every day, Jesus.” They still needed daily bread for sustenance, of course, but more than that, they needed Jesus. Jesus was not just the person who died for them on the cross, and who was raised for their new life, but a present reality in their day-to-day living.

Jesus was, and is, the Living Bread who appeared to the women at the tomb, and to the disciples behind the closed doors. Jesus was, and is, the Living Bread who continued to make appearances to as many as 500 people until the ascension. Jesus was, and is, the Living Bread who feeds us so that we may have “eternal health and holy strength and thankful lives, O Lord.”

The shift in seeing how Jesus is the Living Bread can be accounted for by the passage of time and events. Before the resurrection, a reference to Living Bread would mean Jesus in the flesh. After the Last Supper and the resurrection, a reference to Living Bread came to mean Jesus in the sacrificial sacrament of communion. That is easy enough for us to see today, with our scriptures and tradition giving us “the rest of the story.”

But those persons in our reading didn’t have the benefit of the Last Supper, or Easter, or the Ascension, or Pentecost, or our sacramental tradition of communion. The original hearers would have understood the “Bread of Life” as a metaphor for Jesus. They might disagree with whether he was indeed the Bread of Life, but they would understand the concept. This was something they could grapple with in their rabbinic tradition.

But they would have had a really hard time with Jesus saying that they must eat his flesh. There are strong prohibitions against cannibalism in just about every culture, but it was particularly strong in Jewish law. One of the reasons the Romans persecuted the Christians, but not the Jews, was that they were distinguished from the Jews by their claim that they ate the flesh and drank the blood of their crucified leader.

Eating flesh was such a strong prohibition that it would have been hard for someone to even listen to a suggestion of eating flesh, much less consider doing it. For that reason, we can forgive them for forgetting about the lesson of Ezekiel eating the scrolls, that “eating” can be a metaphor for making something part of us.

When Jesus said that we must eat his flesh, he was saying that he has to be part of our lives every day. Being a disciple has to be more than what we think about the verses of the Bible, as important as the Bible is for our faith. Being a disciple has to be more than how we approach the issues in our society, as important as speaking a word from God is for our faith. Being a disciple has to be more than what we do on Sunday morning, as important as this is for our faith.

When Jesus said that we must eat his flesh, it means that we need Jesus to feed our spirit every day. It means that he has to become a part of us, as we take him into our heart and life. There are a lot of ways that Jesus feeds us. There are lots of ways we can be conformed to Christ. There are a lot of ways Jesus comes to abide in us and with us.

We have Sunday worship and the sacrament of communion. We have daily opportunities to pray, and read our Bible, and serve those in need. We have personal disciplines like fasting, when we set apart everything that is not God. We have small groups we can meet with to hold us accountable in love. We can give to support the ministries which incarnate God’s love and care. These are all means of grace through which Jesus can feed us, and he can become part of us.

But doing these things won’t save us if we are doing them just to be doing them. We need Jesus to become the Living Bread, to be our daily bread, to be the Bread from Heaven. We need Jesus to become part of us, so that Jesus may work through us. This is the true communion, when we become the sacrificial sacrament in the world.

Our next hymn is a prayer for Jesus to become for us the Living Bread. May we sing together this prayer, so that we might indeed become thankful for health and strength and daily food!

UMH 630 “Become to Us the Living Bread”