I used to lead worship.
What I mean by that is I used to be responsible for the music portion of the service or bible study or event at church. For years, I carefully curated (and sometimes crafted) songs to help people praise and worship God.
I don’t know how exactly to describe what worship is without using church language. Church language is kind of embedded in the Christian idea of worship. The closest I can come is when you’re talking about a really good cheeseburger. When you rave about it, think about it, tell other people about it, describe it, want to eat it again… all of these things are part of worship. We came together to sing and dwell on thoughts of God, tell how good God is, expand our vision of who God is through description of God and God’s deeds, express our longing to experience a closeness with God again… this was worship.
It was singing theology mixed in with emotional evocation. It was praying mixed with rejoicing. It was the story of God mixed with rock’ n’ roll.
Honestly, I miss it.
I miss singing and playing guitar hard and leaving it all on the floor, not holding anything back. I miss putting together the music to tell a story of who God is, what God has done, and our place in those works of God. I miss writing songs about God, about us, about theology. And, above all, I miss leading people to the table.
Even as an evangelical, I placed a huge emphasis on the communion table. It was important to me. I believed (and still do) that we should take, share, and experience the table as often as we come together to worship. As I curated songs, readings, and prayers, I did them with a movement in mind, and that movement always culminated at the table. It always led to an invitation to come “get you some Jesus” as one pastor I worked with said. That table was the culmination of our worship together. It was where we came to experience Jesus, to taste and see that the Lord we had just been singing about and to was indeed good.
My theology about the table has grown over the years. It has come from seeing communion as a memorial of the death of Jesus to participation in the life of Jesus to accepting the real presence of Jesus to being transformed into the body and blood of Jesus for the sake of the world, and all sorts of variations in between. My beliefs and thoughts about what happens at the table may have shifted, but each shift has only deepened my conviction that the table is for everyone, and it should be set often and with great bounty, after all, it is the invitation of Christ to come and experience Christ even as we ingest Christ.
Even now, my old evangelical ears perk up and feel… disconcerted at the thought if ingesting Christ.
I imagine my evangelical problems with the idea are much like the original crowd’s problems as well.
The original hearers were disciples, people that had committed to learning and following the teachings of Jesus. But when they heard this Jesus say, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” (John 6.56) and all Jesus had to say about being the true bread of heaven, they murmur among themselves, “This is a hard teaching; who can accept it?”
That’s how the evangelical part of my church history feels. How can I say I am eating the flesh, drinking the blood as anything other than a metaphor? To make it literal in any way, anything more than symbolic, is too hard. It is a teaching that seems impossible to follow. Surly Jesus wasn’t actually, literally saying to ingest him, right?
But Jesus is a bit insistent here. He emphatically says we must PARTAKE OF HIM in order to find eternal life.
This whole passage (John 6.22-71) is taking us back to the wilderness wanderings of Israel. It’s bringing us back to the time that the Children of God wandered around in the wild lands without any nation, rulers, or powers to provide for them. They were a nation coming out of exile, a nation newly formed, a nation that God had just set free from the bods of slavery.
And they were complaining. They murmured about being brought into the wild land to starve and die. “In Egypt we might have been slaves, but at least we were fed. There we had flesh and bread!”
God answers the Israelites with bread and flesh. In the morning when the dew on the ground evaporated, there was manna left, a wafer like bread that they ate their fill of. And every evening, quails would come to the camp for the people to catch and eat. God gave them what they asked for and what they needed: bread and flesh.
Now. here comes Jesus saying that all that provision, that bread and flesh, is actually him. Jesus says he is the true provision sent from God to give eternal life, true life.
The crowds start murmuring, “who is he to say something like this? Isn’t this the son of Joseph and Mary?” And we’re just like the crowds. “I know who Jesus is. I know where he’s from, what he’s about. This has to be a simple metaphor.”
But it’s not.
It’s not a metaphor because Jesus didn’t say it as a metaphor. Jesus wasn’t talking in poetics and imagery. He was speaking truth.
“That bread that came down from heaven? It was all about me. That flesh God gave the Israelites to sustained them? That was about my flesh you need to eat to be sustained.”
If anything, Jesus is telling us the truth and meaning of the metaphors that came before him.
All that sustenance that was sent down to the Israelites to keep them alive, all that bread was a foreshadowing of the true bread from heaven. All that flesh they were given to eat so they could live was pointing to the flesh they must now eat to live eternally.
The body of Christ is a powerful thing.
When we come to the table, we are given the body of Christ. In a very true and real way, Christ is present at the table. The real presence of Jesus at Eucharist is a powerful thing. It is one way we fulfill this command to eat this flesh and drink this blood. Coming to the table to receive the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation is receiving the body and blood of Christ into ourselves.
In some mystical way, Christ is in, under, through, and over the elements of communion. When the bread and cup are blessed, we ask the Spirit to transform these things of earth into the stuff of heaven. We believe this happens in a real way, a way we don’t understand, but a way we embrace.
This real presence of Christ is more than a theological point, though. The actual reality of Christ at—indeed laid out upon—our Eucharistic table is something that transforms us as we embrace this idea and allow the flesh and blood of Christ to pass over our lips. Just as the bread and wine are transformed, you and I are transformed as well.
In one of the forms of the liturgy of the Episcopal church, the people are invited to the table with the words, “Behold what you are. Become what you receive.” Just as the bread and wine are taken, blessed, broken and poured out, and given, the people of God—dare we even utter it, but the body of Christ—are taken, blessed, broken and poured out, and given to each other and the world.
The body of Christ laid out on the altar of Eucharist is the fulfillment of what you and I are: the body and blood of Christ.
Just as there is a real way that Jesus is present at, in, and through the Eucharist, there is a real presence of Jesus—we might call it the Holy Ghost that haunts us—in and through the body of Christ, the ecclesia, the church. Is this the only way Christ shows up in the world? No, of course not. After all, like Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, Christ plays in ten-thousand places. But, there is a special way Christ plays in the faces of the people who identify as the church.
My immediate response is to look at the church, what we are, how we act, who we love, and murmur against Jesus, “this is a hard teaching; who can accept it?” See, the church in the U.S. doesn’t often remind me of the broken body and poured out blood of Christ. We are bigoted, privileged, selective with our love, and over all leave a bad taste in most people’s mouths. We are not the bread of life that we receive at communion, the bread we are told we are and that we are to become. We are the shadow of the valley of death for many people.
You might think I’m exaggerating, that I’m drumming up some controversy for the sake of shock value. I wish what I see wasn’t the truth. The majority of people in the last three generations that have grown up in church are now religiously traumatized and left bleeding out. People in the pews lament the loss of people, saying things like, “they’re just choosing a life of sin” and “they’re backsliding away from the truth.” The truth is they have been hurt in the name of Jesus and can’t live under that oppressive regime any more.
Church and Christianity as a whole have become a trauma response trigger. Simply by vocally existing in a space, Christians pose a possible—maybe probable—threat to people who have experienced a breaking of their own.
This isn’t even mentioning the specific, horrendous trauma Christinas inflict on queer people, people of color, immigrants undocumented or otherwise. Muslims, Hindus, Siek, Atheists, agnostics, Wiccans… the list goes on of people we condemn, threaten, and despise for practicing a spirituality different from our own.
Church, we are the Roman empire persecuting Christ, breathing out murder against any and all who don’t look close enough to us to make us feel comfortable and secure in our seats of power.
This isn’t what it means to be the body of Christ.
Soma is the Greek word for body used here in John 6. It means the entirety of the stuff of a living creature. Christ lives, the resurrection tells us that. Eucharist tells us that. We are supposed to be the entirety of the stuff of Jesus… and we aren’t.
Let’s change that, together. We need to repent, to give up our way of living and turn to Jesus’ way of loving. We truly need to lay eyes on the bread and the wine and behold what we are. We need to receive the broken body and spilt blood of Jesus and become what we receive.
We get out of this together. Love is the way. Let us partake of love incarnate and be transformed to the point that people come to us for life, because we have the stuff of eternity waiting to be freely give to all who will receive.
This is our spiritual act of worship. This is being transformed by the renewing of our minds, not conforming to the powers and principalities of the world around us, the world that doesn’t have the words of eternal life. Let us sing our lives like a love song to both God and our neighbor. Let us sing hard, loud, and well. Let the real presence of Christ be in our midst and his words of eternal life call up back again and again to worship at the table where everyone is welcome, wanted, and has a place.
Are you hungry? Come and eat, it is free.
Are you thirsty? Come and drink, it’s free.
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