This summer, this season after Pentecost, we’ve been hearing the story of the rise and rule of King David. As a preacher, I’m never quite sure how much attention people in the pews pay to the weekly lectionary. Given the reality of summer attendance, vacations and all, and the probability that at various points this summer preachers have chosen other Hebrew Bible texts, I’m not sure whether you have been able to follow the thread of the story.

We heard of David’s killing of Goliath, of his anointing by Samuel and the tension between him and Saul. We also heard of the love between David and Jonathan, Saul’s son. Eventually, after being brought to the royal court by Saul, David was driven away by Saul’s jealousy, and began something of a insurgent campaign against Saul’s rule. After Saul and Jonathan were killed by the Philistines, David seized the throne, gaining legitimacy by marrying Michal, Saul’s daughter.

The story is written long after David’s reign but it probably draws on sources that date from the reigns of David and Solomon. The authors of the story were concerned to present David’s rule in the best possible light. In order to do that, they found ways to de-legitimize Saul’s rule and to depict David as chosen by God. But tensions in the story remain. There was, for example, the story of Bathsheba, the woman whom David desired although he was already married. He had her husband killed so he could marry her—bring her into his harem, as it were. And eventually she would give birth to Solomon whose ascent to the throne we heard about today.

In fact, the succession to David was disputed, something we heard about last week in the story of Absalom’s death. Absalom had sought to succeed his father David and took up arms when David seemed weak. Like the stories of politicians with which we have become familiar over the years, the succession narrative also has its sordid details. They are kept out of the lectionary, but they’ve not been expunged from the bible.

Eventually by trickery and raw power, Solomon became king. In today’s lesson, we encounter the perfectly idealized portrait of Solomon as a young, powerful, and wise ruler. The authors of the text take great care to depict Solomon’s early reign as ideal. It is an image that will contain to dominate Israel’s imagination down through the centuries, long after the fall of the monarchy. Solomon would go down in Israelite history as the wisest of all kings. His kingdom would is famous for the extent of its power and for its wealth. Indeed it continues to have influence among conservatives in Israel and many Evangelical Christians in our own country.

The seductive appeal of an idealized past is not just something for the writers of I Kings. It is a very human, natural sentiment. We know it in a number of ways—for example, in nostalgia for a simpler past—grandma’s kitchen table, perhaps or for our childhood when the world seemed less complex. Of course, such nostalgia glosses over reality. Americans who are drawn to the 1950s rarely include in their nostalgia racial segregation, Jim Crow laws, or the rigid gender roles that left many women unfulfilled. Similarly, the authors of I Kings only occasionally hint at the military and economic repression that made Solomon’s kingdom possible.

The same thing is true in churches. In fact, there is a powerful narrative in contemporary culture that looks back to some time in the past when everyone was a church-goer and shared the morality and values of Christianity. Scratch the surface of that narrative and a very different set of facts emerges. There was conflict between denominations, anti-catholicism for example, and much of the power of the churches lay in the guilt imposed on members. But that same narrative plays in individual churches like Grace. I can’t tell you how often a conversation about some aspect of Grace, whether it be a program or ministry or even some element in the liturgy often quickly gets sidetracked into a story of the historical origins, often going back not five or ten years, but five or ten decades.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a historian by training and no one needs tell me about the importance of history for explaining a current situation. Learning the stories of Grace Church, the stories told by all of you who have been a part of Grace is an important part of my ministry here. Learning your stories, your individual stories is also important. But we are living a story. We are writing a new chapter that began with my arrival on August 1. We are writing it together and we cannot allow whatever happened in the past to limit what might happen in the future. It may be that the story of David and Solomon has had negative consequences for the ongoing life of Judaism, and of the State of Israel for that matter.

We see something of the same tension in today’s gospel reading. In last week’s gospel, Jesus contrasted himself as the bread of life with the manna given by God to the Hebrews in the wilderness. He does the same thing in today’s selection: “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” Jesus challenges his opponents to look at the present, at him, instead of looking backwards, to their history. But they have already been so focused on the past that they don’t understand who he is.

Jesus has told them that he is the bread of life. In response, his opponents asked one another what he could mean, and by what authority he could say what he was saying. After all they knew him as the son of Joseph. They knew his parents, they knew where he came from and who he was. They knew his story, and that knowledge made it more difficult for them to hear what Jesus had to say and accept the message he had to offer.

But Jesus was telling a very different story than the one favored by his opponents. It was a story in which what mattered was not who your ancestors were, where you came from, what schools you had attended, but rather your encounter with the message of Christ. It was a radical message. Here, in this gospel passage, it is hard for us, so used to the language of the Eucharist, to recapture the offense that Jesus must have been making; “, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

We hear that language and immediately think of the Eucharist. In the first and second century, blood sacrifice was everywhere. The Romans did it, the Greeks did it, Jews, up until the destruction of the temple in 70, did it as well. So prevalent was sacrifice that when non-Christians heard such language used by Christians, they often assumed Christians were cannibals. It was one of the common, sensational charges leveled against Christians

Of course, this language was not meant literally by those who wrote it and believed it. It was metaphorical language, used to describe what they thought happened in the Eucharist and in the life of faith. The encounter with the Risen Christ that led these early Christians to faith transformed their lives utterly. It also transformed the way they looked at the world. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life, and whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Later in the passage, he also says, “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”

This language and imagery, bread and wine, flesh and blood, are of course about the Eucharist. They attempt to describe what happens when we come together in the Eucharistic feast. But they are also about more than that. They are also describing our life in Christ. For the gospel of John, for the fourth gospel, language is always multi-valent, it has multiple meanings. Flesh and blood, bread and wine, abundant life. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. Whoever eats this bread abides in me and I in them. What Jesus is talking about is not just flesh and blood, bread and wine, eternal life, although that’s a great deal. Jesus is also talking about the new kind of life we live when we open ourselves up to an encounter with him.
But even to use that word is to risk falling back into the conventional, into stories we’ve heard, and perhaps rejected. I’m not talking about conversion, although that’s a word that’s often used to describe this new life in Christ. I’m talking about being open to the possibility of transformation, to the possibility of experiencing something completely new, utterly strange. Jesus says that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood abides in him and he in them.

That language, so familiar and yet so strange, beckons us to rethink everything, to rethink our assumptions, our categories, our lives. To accept Christ’s invitation to this new life, opens us up to a world of possibility, a world of new life. We bring our old stories with us, but we see them for what they are, a part of us, a part of Grace Church. But at the same time, as we move forward into this new story, abiding together in Christ, we, all of us and Grace too, will become something quite new, something spectacular.