Proper 15 (August 14-20)
Texts: John 6:51-58;
Prov 9:1-6; Eph 5:15-20
YouTube: https://youtu.be/QSVEYPPPB1s
YEASTY BREAD AND WINE FOR OUR TRANSFORMATION
[Note: Different from the usual place of preaching, I preached this sermon behind the Eucharistic table with the elements before me, available for me to lift up at appropriate moments. I also had packets of yeast as ‘objects’ for the lesson.]
I made a quick trip to the grocery store yesterday to purchase something I don’t think I’ve ever bought before. It’s not too exotic. It’s just something we’ve never used before at our house because, with all the things we do cook and bake, we’ve never gotten into making our own bread. What I bought yesterday is an important ingredient in making most breads. As it happens it’s also an ingredient to making the other thing we consume together on Sunday mornings, namely, wine. Bread and wine on our table here again today. And what’s the important ingredient that they have in common? Yeast. This is what I went to get at the grocery store yesterday. Because I want us to think in terms of yeast today.
Yeast is an agent of fermentation, which is a process of transformation. Turning something into something else. Yeast, together with flour and water, combines to transform dough into a rising bread. Yeast, combined with the sugars in grape juice, ferments into alcohol, transforming the juice into wine. Jesus compares the reign of God to yeast (Matt 13:33). And he also warns his disciples of the yeast of the teaching of their leaders, corrupted by human reigns (Matt 16:6-12, Mark 8:15-21, Luke 12:1). Two different reigns with two different transformations.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus says that we must eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, in order to gain the abundant life of God’s coming reign. He gets downright gross about it, switching the word he uses for “eat” to “feed upon,” a word often used for animals eating. It is almost cannibalistic. What is he doing? Next week, we’ll read that this language is so offensive that almost everyone in the crowd leaves. Here’s what I think Jesus is doing. He’s using the language of the Eucharist, the meal he will later give to his disciples and to all his followers, to talk about his basic mission, namely, nothing less than to transform our humanity. And he brings yeast, wisdom, for the transformation.
Next, the “Son of Man” thing. Jesus didn’t call himself Messiah, though he gave permission for others to do so. He didn’t call himself “Son of God.” That came later. He called himself “Son of Man,” signaling to us that he comes to bring a new generation of being human. This is a key to why I talk a lot about Jesus not coming to start a new religion. I think we’ve gotten that horribly wrong. He doesn’t come to start something called “Christianity.” No, he comes to offer us nothing less than a new, better way of being human. All religions, in fact, have become infected with the sinful ways of being human, the ways that divide us and prevent us from being one human family working together to care for creation. Religions became one of the central means of dividing the human family and so have become more a part of the problem than of the solution. That’s why I’ve been warning us of the yeast of many of our human leaders, whose yeast of transformation is more of the same violent variety that divides us. Their so-called “Christian Nationalism” (an oxymoron) is more of the same ol’, same ol’. Just like the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time whose teachings and leadership worked more on the side of division rather than the unity. On the side of fighting rather than on the side of absorbing the violence.
The yeast of Jesus’ wisdom becomes clear on Good Friday. Standing before his human judge, Pontius Pilate, Jesus says that if his way of reigning was of the yeast of this world, his followers would be fighting. Instead, his power, his yeast of transformation from God, would empower him to lay down his life for the sake of the world. That’s the difference in a nutshell. One power seeks to unite through force, which always ends up in dividing us. It’s the power of human empires. The other power from God seeks to unite us through a compassion that even extends to enemies, to those who continue to divide. It is the only power which will truly bring peace.
Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man” according the vision of Daniel 7, where the empires arise out of the sea in beastly form to meet the unarmed Son of Man, who comes to bring the only reign that leads to peace. It is the wisdom of that reign that must be the yeast that transforms us into the new and better way to be human. Where we work together as family to care the world. This is the kind of humanity which we need to embrace to face the many crises that currently threaten to engulf us, right? We don’t need another religion to work on dividing us. Our religions need the yeast from God, too. We need a new way of being human in which our various religions are transformed to help us to work together. The choice between the yeast of compassion from God which transforms our humanity and the yeast of movements like Christian Nationalism is at the very heart of the choices before us over the next 80 days or so. One yeast brings further division and violence — the same ol’ same ol’ — and the other yeast offers a true alternative for the next generation of being human. We find of ways of working together to solve the many crises that face us.
It can begin with small things like a tiny congregation using some of it funds to offset the cost of higher education for a number of its young people. [The congregation was giving out eight scholarships that morning.] Or establishing a free shop for clothes. [One of the main outreach ministries of the congregation is a free clothing store.] But do you see how in a democracy we can also choose together to find ways of making college education more sustainable for all our young people?
So there’s one further kernel of wisdom to glean from this morning’s readings, especially the Gospel. The difference between the ways of being human is represented in this meal we share every Sunday, when we share these elements both transformed by yeast, bread and wine. What is the main ritual which it replaced? The answer: blood sacrifice. Including things like cannibalism. The central ritual of untransformed religion, the religions which divide us, is to kill an animal or human being on an altar of sacrifice.
This is even true of the Christianity behind Christian Nationalism, since its teaching about the meaning of the cross sees it in terms of a sacrifice — a teaching which many of us grew up with, too. It interprets the cross like this: God demands a sacrifice to pay for our sins and Jesus steps in on the cross to pay that price. But if that’s the case, then we should have kept up the rituals of blood sacrifice! Jesus instead gave us this meal around a table, where we remember not him being sacrificed as payment for our sins to a wrathful God. But instead, what? We remember a God of love (John 3:16) who sent Jesus to save us from our sacrificial ways of accepting violence on an altar as the way to salvation. Instead, this is all about God’s love being able to transform our violent ways! God isn’t a wrathful God demanding sacrifice. We need to wake up to the anthropological fact that we are the ones who demand sacrifice. The divisive, violent ways of empire don’t represent the true God. Rather, they represent us! That’s our way of doing things. The cross itself represents one of those human rituals of sacrifice. We execute our enemies. We go to war against them. The old rituals of blood sacrifice perfectly represent our human way of reigning, even to this very day in politics such as Christian Nationalism. So it’s not surprising that Christian Nationalism continues to get the cross all wrong by insisting to interpret it terms of ritual blood sacrifice as one of its chief doctrines. “If you don’t believe this, you’re not Christian. . . .”
In today’s Gospel Reading, I believe Jesus is intentionally being cannibalistic in order to throw the wrongness of humanity’s central ritual before it. His Jewish audience no longer practiced cannibalism, but they needed to see that their way of life was descended from cannibalism and still horrific in its lust for human blood in order to maintain order. The Roman Empire and its Jewish collaborators would in fact consume Jesus on the cross and see its horrific display of violence as necessary to maintaining order. So, too, must we come to see any positions like Christian Nationalism and their acceptance of violence as necessary for order as horrific — updated forms of cannibalism, where instead of directly ingesting flesh and blood we instead consume human flesh and blood by means of bullets from our huge stockpiles of military rifles and by means of fiery bombs from our cannons and missiles. We need to see these things as no less horrific than cannibalism. American novelist Flannery O’Connor, whose life is portrayed in the recent movie Wildcat, once said of her own work, “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.” This is what I think Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel. Using the grotesqueness of cannibalism in order to get us to see and hear how horrific our continued faith in violence continues to be.
At the same time, he offers us a true alternative. The cross will not be about Jesus being a victim of God’s sacrificial demands. The cross will be about laying down his life in order for us to see the horror of our political violence for what it is. We must see this and hear this! That the cross is not about God’s demands for violence. The cross is about God’s love sending the Son into the world to offer us the only alternative to our violence. The yeast of love. The yeast of a compassion that is even willing to let itself be consumed by our human violence in order to begin to transform it into something else.
Something else represented here by these elements transformed by yeast, bread and wine. We gather not before an altar of blood sacrifice but rather around a table of human fellowship, where we are united into one family for the sake of the world. May we once again let these yeasty elements transform us into a new generation of humanity that represents a seeking of the harmony we need to address all the challenges that face us. May we be transformed by the compassion of the one who let his body be broken by us for us, who let his blood be poured out by us for us. This is the bread of abundant life. This is the wine of our salvation. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 18, 2024
YouTube: https://youtu.be/QSVEYPPPB1s
