I remember very well the first assignment I was given when I began my M.Div program many years ago. I remember it so well because it was such an eye-opener. We were told to do a “parish study,” to pick a local congregation, do a little research, interview the pastor and a few parishioners, and, most importantly for me, to look at its environment, its neighborhood, and the congregation’s relationship to its neighborhood.

That was the eye-opener for me. I had never thought of a congregation in connection with its geographical surroundings. Why should I have? I grew up in a church that, quite literally, was surrounded by cornfields. Not much ministry to be done in that context, is there? But in that assignment those many years ago, I learned something very important, that congregations, like it or not, or linked to their communities, even if, as is often the case these days, most of a congregation’s members do not come from the immediate vicinity.

That assignment has come back to me since I’ve arrived in Madison. Living downtown, walking to work everyday, being the rector of Grace Church is very much being a part of the community. I can’t think of my ministry in this place only as ministry among you, the members of Grace. I have other responsibilities, other tasks, among them being present as a priest and pastor in the heart of the Capitol Square. That I am here, that Grace is here on Capitol Square, has an enormous impact on what it means for us to be the people of God, the body of Christ in this place.

Geography is important. Last week, I pointed out the significance for Mark of the two miracles Jesus worked. Both were in Gentile territory; both were done for Gentiles. In today’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are near Caesarea Philippi. They are “on the way,” Caesarea Philippi was a place of great symbolic and political importance. It had been given to Herod by the Emperor in 20 bc, and built as a city to represent the connection between the two rulers. Herod built a temple dedicated to Caesar Augustus, his patron. In Jesus’ day, it was the capital of Herod’s successor, Philip’s kingdom. So it was a center of the political power of Rome and its local henchmen, the power of Rome, and the willingness of local figures to suck up to it. It is in this geographical political context that Jesus asks his disciples a question of enormous significance.

What makes this particular story so important for the Gospel of Mark is that for one thing, this is the first time that any of Jesus’ disciples call him the Messiah. Jesus asks his friends what people think of him, and they give him all sorts of answers–Elijah, John the Baptist, a prophet. Clearly, Jesus is seen to be a remarkable individual, perhaps even super-human, a reincarnation of a great religious leader. But it is Peter who responds quickly and confidently to Jesus’ second question, “Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Messiah,” Peter replies.

We tend to stop there, with Peter’s great confession, and focus on the meaning of the question, and of Peter’s response. But Mark doesn’t stop there. He tells us more, and as the story continues, we learn precisely what it means, both for Jesus, and for his disciples, to confess that Jesus is the Messiah.

That’s crucial for Mark’s gospel. It’s the first time a human being has confessed Jesus to be the Messiah. But he doesn’t stop there. He makes two additional points that are of great significance. First, he follows Peter’s confession with Jesus’ prediction that he will go to Jerusalem, be arrested, and be crucified. Second, he begins to tell his disciples what they’ve signed up for: “If you would be my disciple, take up your cross and follow me.”

Both of those points are challenged by the disciples in the coming chapters. First, Peter contradicts Jesus. No, he says, that’s not going to happen. In the coming chapters, we will see the disciples not understanding what Jesus has to say about his death and about what it means to follow him.

What was it that so bothered Peter? That Jesus predicted the Messiah would undergo suffering and death.  For Peter and his contemporaries were waiting for a Messiah to deliver the Jewish people from the occupying Roman empire. Apparently, when Peter identified Jesus as the Messiah, he hoped Jesus would be that deliverer. But for Jesus, messiah-ship meant something quite different.

But it is not just the notion of the Messiah that Jesus radically reinterprets. He also turns upside-down the expectations of what it meant to follow him. For if the Messiah was going to be a revolutionary, a political deliverer, then his followers would also be revolutionaries, fighting against the Roman occupation. But Jesus understands discipleship in very different terms.

For Jesus, to be a disciple means to share in his suffering and death.  Jesus put it quite clearly, “If you want to follow me, take up your cross and follow me.” Following Jesus means following him to the bitter end, expecting the same fate that Jesus knew was awaiting him in Jerusalem.

To follow the Messiah, to follow Jesus, did not mean sharing in his glorious victory over the forces of Rome. It meant just the opposite, to share in his suffering and death.

Those are hard words for us to hear. They seem far distant from our religious experience and from our daily lives. But, just as Jesus challenged Peter and the disciples in today’s Gospel, so too does this gospel challenge the way we think about ourselves and about Jesus. Jesus confronts our assumptions about him, he confronts our complacency, our everyday world and tells us, “Friends, that’s not what it means to follow me.”

Jesus stands in front of us, asking us, like he asked Peter and the other disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” But confession is not enough, empty words, no matter how profound, don’t matter. In the South, it’s something of a marketing ploy to identify oneself as Christian. Small businesses will put the sign of the fish in their Yellow Pages ad, or will put their faith up on their marquee. One of my favorites appeared just after 9/11. A bar I used to pass on my way to work advertised. God Bless America! Draft beer $1.50. Indeed. I’m sure one sees much the same in rural Wisconsin as well.

Peter’s words were easy, because he hadn’t gotten Jesus’ point about what he was about. Okay, Jesus said, you think I’m the Messiah? Well, here’s what that means. And when Jesus made clear what messiah-ship was, Peter turned around and said that he didn’t sign up for suffering and death.

Like Jesus and his disciples, we are “on the way. We come from all over the area, to this place to worship. Most of us do it for very personal reasons—because we have family or friends here, because we like the worship, or the preaching, the atmosphere, the programs. We may travel a few blocks, a few miles or many more. And I wager few of us really think about the connection between our lives of discipleship and this particular place. But we have followed Jesus here, and that matters.

Last week, I preached about the baptismal covenant, that it served as something of a job description for Jesus’ disciples. It’s easy for us to think of our selves as Episcopalians—for many of us, to call ourselves Christians is more of a stretch. We don’t want to identify ourselves, or be identified with the religious right. Even difficult is to think of ourselves as disciples. You will hear that term a great deal in the coming weeks, because for the next two or three chapters of Mark, we will be hearing again and again about what it means to be a disciple, to follow Jesus.

I can’t tell you how precisely to respond to Jesus’ demand to follow him. That is up to you. I can give you some suggestions, some guidelines perhaps. Discipleship is about responding to that call with concrete actions and with a desire to deepen your relationship with Jesus Christ.

There are many ways in which you might become more involved in Grace Church and in our outreach into the community. I encourage you to take advantage of those opportunities—serving in some capacity on Sunday morning, or volunteering in the Food Pantry. It is also important to continue learning about our faith and asking the hard questions. I hope many of you will participate in the Gift program with its in-depth examination of our relationship with food—questions of sustainability, hunger, and the like. We are also beginning our fall stewardship campaign and as you think about your commitment to Jesus Christ, your commitment to Grace Church, it is also appropriate to consider how that commitment might be reflected financially.

Yes, it is a hard road that Jesus walked, the road from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem. His disciples didn’t know what they were getting into. We know what lay at the end of that journey, and for most of us, such a fate is incomprehensible. Yet, for all that difficulty, we should think of ourselves as disciples, sharing the journey Jesus walked. It won’t look the same. The circumstances are radically different. But for the most part, the questions, the challenges are the same.

What does it mean to follow Jesus, to have followed Jesus to this place this morning? To confess Jesus is Lord, to confess with Peter that Jesus is the Messiah, is quite easy. To do what Jesus asks of his disciples, to take up a cross, and follow him to Jerusalem, is something quite different.

We have followed Jesus to this place, to Grace Church, this morning. It is our responsibility as his disciples, to reach out, as he did “on the way to Jerusalem.” To reach out to others, to those in the pews around us, to those in this community, to offer them healing, and hope, and bread for the journey.

How many of you know what the Five Second Rule is? There’s a bit of folk wisdom, well, really, kids’ wisdom, that says it’s ok to eat a piece of food that’s fallen on the floor if it’s been there less than five seconds. I’ll confess, I’d never heard of it when I was growing up. When I was a kid, if food hit the ground, it was contaminated; it was dirty. If you were caught picking something off the floor to eat, you were ridiculed. I suppose the five-second rule entered my consciousness some time in the late 90s. The curious thing is how widespread the idea is now, and how well studied it has been by scientists. Although there continues to be debate, it’s probably the case that food that has been on the floor for more than five seconds is full of bacteria.

You all know what I’m talking about even if you’ve never heard of the “five second rule.” There are certain things we simply don’t do in our culture—things we don’t or most of us don’t eat, things we don’t touch. There’s often very little logical explanation for such don’ts, but if we transgress those rules, we run the risk of looking foolish or worse.

What’s really at stake here is not the scientific merits of a behavior or taboo, but something else—our cultural values concerning dirt and contamination. A chocolate chip cookie that’s been on the floor for four seconds is OK to pick up and eat. Anthropologists tell us that every culture has its taboos, clear lines between what is clean and what is dirty, and rules, either stated or understood, over how something that is clean becomes dirty. Such taboos help us understand many underlying cultural values.

Cultures do it, but often, usually, such taboos also have religious sanction. Most religions have elaborate rules about pure and impure, clean and unclean, and rituals to purify that which has been defiled. In our culture, instead of putting religious sanction behind our taboos, we emphasize dirt and cleanliness. Nonetheless, our cultural aversions are often more based in deeply entrenched values, rather than science or medicine.

This makes it hard for us to understand the cultural and religious values of the Bible. The elaborate purity code in the Hebrew Bible, with its rules about what to eat and what not to eat, what to do if you came in contact with something unclean, are very foreign to us. The reason for that can be found in texts like today’s Gospel, where Jesus and the Pharisees come into conflict over rules related to purity. It’s very easy for us to miss the heart of the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, because we live long after the conflict was settled, and all of those who wanted to keep the Jewish purity laws but recognize Jesus as the Messiah were marginalized and ultimately forced out of Christianity. That was a long conflict that boiled over in the early decades of Christianity before Paul’s view of things won out.

The conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was emphatically not a conflict between Christianity and Judaism. It was not a conflict between two different religions. Rather, it was a conflict within Judaism, a conflict that had its roots in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. By Jesus’ day, the issue was not that the law was too hard to keep. That’s a modern Protestant misinterpretation of Judaism. In fact, the movement led by the Pharisees sought to expand the law’s coverage, especially the laws about purity.

Their concern was, as the rabbis said, “to build a wall around Torah.” In other words, they sought to develop an interpretation of the law that made it possible for all Jews to keep it. Their goal was to provide ordinary people with a set of guidelines that would help them know how to keep the individual laws. In the case of the purity regulations, they sought to expand its application beyond the priests, for whom it was meant in Leviticus and Exodus, to all the people.

It’s important to understand just what the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was about—interpretation of the law, and especially interpretation of the purity laws. It was not a conflict between external religious practice and inward piety. That’s the way Christians have often understood the conflict and thus they see Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees as an attack on external practice. When Jesus tells the Pharisees that impurity does not come from the outside, but rather an impure heart leads to sins, he is redefining purity and holiness. Sin, Jesus is saying, comes from within. Evil intentions lead to evil acts.

The lesson from the Letter of James makes the same point in a slightly different way, “Be ye hearers of the word also, and not just doers.” This letter, well it’s not really a letter, more like a collection of ethical advice, emphasizes moral action. Throughout, the author of the letter emphasizes the importance of faith expressing itself by doing good toward others.

We don’t think in terms of purity much these days, we don’t even use the term holiness very much. They seem old-fashioned, irrelevant in the contemporary world, not even terribly important in our lives of faith. But to ignore such important categories is to miss something that was crucial in Jesus’ message in the first century, and should remain of central significance to those who would follow him in the twenty-first century.

Holiness has meant different things over the centuries. In the biblical tradition, of course, holiness was above all something denoted of God. But the real connotation of the term, both in the Hebrew, and later in the form we are also familiar with it—sacred, both terms mean essentially being set apart. That which is sacred, or holy is different from, that which is not. In a sense, what is holy or sacred is God’s, and that’s why when the people of Israel came to think of themselves as God’s chosen people, they use rules of purity to set themselves apart from other peoples. Over time, those purity rules became more important as they came to define the differences between the people of God and others. So in Leviticus, when the Israelites received the laws of purity, the holiness code, it found its meaning with God’s statement “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

The question of course, is what all this means. We are called to be a holy people, yet if you’re like me, you probably bristle at the notion. Some of us have good reason to do so. There was a time in the Episcopal Church, maybe some of you can remember it, when if you were divorced, you couldn’t receive communion. I don’t know if that was the practice here at Grace before rules were liberalized in the 70s; I know it was true in churches in South Carolina.

For the Judaism of Jesus’ day, such purity rules were all about preserving the community over against a dominant and domineering culture. Over the centuries such rules, laws, had become more important, especially as the Jewish community had to struggle to survive as a subject of mighty empires.

But Jesus challenged that view of things. Such purity rules, as helpful as they were and are in preserving community, went against something even more important to Jesus—the full inclusion of all people among his followers. We will see this more clearly in the coming weeks, but it is no accident that Mark puts this dispute about Jesus’ disciples keeping the purity code right after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. For there was no more perilous moment for someone who kept purity laws than eating. And since they were somewhere out in the wilderness, as Mark makes clear, there would have been no way to keep the purity laws concerning the washing of hands, or, of food.

That’s precisely what Jesus was advocating and living, a move away from a notion of holiness that divides and excludes, toward one that is inclusive—a holiness of the heart, rather than a holiness of rules. What that means for us in the twenty-first century may not be exactly clear. What is clear is that we still have our purity codes that tend to divide us. In a way, the debates over sexuality in the Episcopal Church are just that–a conflict over a purity code driven by fear of contamination.
Jesus’ words challenge us to rethink our deepest cultural values and some of our deepest aversions. To be the inclusive, welcoming community that Jesus has called us to be means not only eliminating the barriers and rules that divide us but to embrace one another in a spirit of love and forgiveness and above all, to transform the love we experience in our acceptance by God, to the love of others. Or to use the words of the Letter of James, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

One of the things that attracted me to Grace Church was the beauty of the building. It is both an enormous resource and an enormous challenge. It stands as a beacon on Capitol Square, the legacy of generations of those who have gone before us. The energy and money they expended to build it, beautify it, and preserve it over the decades is a legacy to us. As a landmark, it is immediately recognizable to everyone who works, lives, or visits downtown. Throughout the community and beyond, saying that I am involved at Grace is a way of giving those to whom I am speaking an immediate context within which to place me. That recognizability comes with a price, of course, but unlike many churches that have a lower profile in the community, people know Grace.

Of course, the building that surrounds us now often seems more like a burden than a resource. Some of us spend much of our time worrying about its upkeep and maintenance. This week alone, we had roofers working here; we replaced a boiler, and there was a sewage backup. All of that requires large sums of money and equally important, a great deal of energy, time, and expertise. The building often seems to come between us and our desire to do God’s work in the world.

Today’s reading from I Kings is an excerpt from one of the high points, perhaps the high point, of Solomon’s reign. It is part of the prayer he offered during the dedication of the Temple. As you probably recall, David wanted to build a temple in Jerusalem, but an oracle from God discouraged him and it was left to his son. The preceding chapters of this morning’s reading detail the design and construction of the temple, which is described in great detail as a beautiful and expensive building. Solomon brought builders from Lebanon, outside his realm, to do the construction, because no one in his kingdom had the expertise.

The Jerusalem temple is described by the authors as magnificent, full of gold and other precious metals, built of cedar and ivory. While most scholars see in the description provided in I Kings an edifice quite similar to temples of Israel’s neighbors discovered by archaeologists, there is one significant difference. Solomon’s temple did not contain an image of the deity. Instead, as the prayer we heard states, “Even heaven and the highest earth cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.”

The Psalm expands on the theme of the temple. It is a pilgrimage psalm, sung by worshipers as they make their way to the temple for a festival. The psalm describes the temple as a place of sanctuary for all of creation and halfway through moves from presence the temple as God’s dwelling place, to praising God. I cannot hear those first two verses without thinking of Brahms’ setting of them in the German Requiem.

There are two deep tensions in biblical tradition about the temple. One is whether it is an adequate place to worship God, whether it is adequate to conceive of it as God’s dwelling place. The prayer of Solomon makes clear that the temple does not contain God, but rather that it symbolizes God’s presence on earth. One particularly powerful image of this absence of God in the temple is Isaiah’s famous vision found in Isaiah 6. The prophet writes, I saw the Lord, lofty and uplifted, the hem of his garment filled the temple.”  In this case God’s size dwarfs the magnificence and size of the temple.

God transcends the temple in another way, and this too is suggested in Solomon’s prayer. Solomon says that “when a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you.” That trend toward universalism is most clear in the visions of exilic and post-exilic Judaism; as Isaiah 65 says, “My house shall be a house of prayer for all people.”

In the coming months, I will be working with the staff, lay leadership, and the whole congregation of Grace Church to begin thinking systematically about what it means to be the Body of Christ in this particular place, here in Grace Church on Capitol Square. I know that many of you have ideas about that. I know that many of you have come to Grace because of the building, because of its location and everything that it offers. But that’s not enough. We need to articulate a vision for the future, a vision of what it means to be Grace in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

The old models of being church don’t work any more. We have lost what I like to call the “given-ness” of religion. For most people, a spiritual journey, or a religious life, call it what you will, for most people, that’s an add-on, something one does in one’s spare time. For many people it’s a quest that can take place in a lot of different ways and a lot of different venues and churches are not necessarily the most obvious or natural.

But we are stuck. We have this building, this place, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t abandon it; we probably wouldn’t be allowed to, either by the city or by the diocese. The building limits us—we can’t offer the kind of worship experience that people get at mega-churches, what I call big-box churches. We don’t have the av system, we don’t have stadium seating, where would we put the screens or the praise band?

My house will be a house of prayer for all people. What will it mean for Grace to accept the challenge presented us by the future? We have been through a great deal as a congregation, we have faced considerable challenges, some of them unlike anything any other parish in the Episcopal Church has faced. Yet we have survived them. Thanks to hard work, prayer, and wise leadership by our vestry and Interim Rector, we have been given an opportunity to imagine and bring into being a vision for the future.

As I said, you will be hearing a great deal about this in the coming months. Right now, I am focused on several things. First, among the issues unresolved during the interim period was the full integration of the 12:00 congregation into the life, ministry, and structure of Grace Church. Corrie and I attended that service last week, even though neither of us have any facility in Spanish. What impressed most were the authenticity and vitality of the worship, and the deep faith and love of God expressed by those participating. I will be working hard with the leadership of that group, with staff and lay leadership to develop stronger bonds among us and to reach out into the wider community.

The second area of mission on which I am focused is Grace’s role in the community. The building is an enormous resource. Yes, it’s a burden, but it is also our greatest asset. How can we make our building more inviting, accessible, and appealing to our neighbors? How can we use it to reach others? I will give a single example. I think it’s a disgrace that more people are not able to enjoy the beauty of this space, of this sanctuary on a daily basis. We use it on Sunday morning, and at Wednesday noon, but the rest of the time it is locked up. How might we go about beginning to make this place a “house of prayer” for all those who walk by?

There is deep yearning in our culture for authenticity, for making spiritual connections. One way to do that is through the beauty of our space. But another way is to find ways of being accessible to those who are unlikely to attend church on Sunday morning. Are there ways of developing worship offerings that might attract passers-by on Friday or Saturday nights, for example?

Our ancestors built this building. They had a vision for a church on the square that would be a beacon to the community. Over the centuries we have taken care of that responsibility, sometimes more completely than at other times. Over the decades, people have put hard work into the preservation of this place, and donated considerable amounts of money to see to its survival.

In the gospel, we have finally come to the end of Jesus’ lengthy discourse on bread. It ends on a surprising note, with Jesus’ teaching that he is the bread of life and that whoever eats this bread will live forever being rejected not only by his opponents but also by some of his disciples. These words remind us that following Jesus is not necessarily an easy thing, a lesson we will hear repeatedly in the coming weeks as we return to the gospel of Mark. But like Peter, we need to be ready to confess that Jesus has the words of eternal life, that his message makes a difference. As we imagine together the future of Grace Church, our future in this community, let us always keep in mind that our most important task is to offer those words of life to the world.

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.

Corrie and I have been overwhelmed by the welcome members of Grace have extended to us since our arrival in Madison last week. There was a huge basket on the kitchen counter when we opened the door of our new home. It was filled with lots of information about Grace Church and Madison. More importantly, it was filled with lots of goodies—coffee and chocolate, crackers and cheese, wine. Some of those goodies we ate for our evening meal that Wednesday night; some of them we are still nibbling on. Even the cats were included in Grace’s hospitality. They are still enjoying the catnip treats they received.

In the days since our arrival, there has been a common theme. Almost everyone I meet from Grace says something about being excited at my arrival. But it’s not just Grace. I was at a meeting with the bishop, clergy, and parishioners from the Madison area on Tuesday night, and members of other Episcopal churches came up to me and said the same thing, that they were excited.

Frankly, it’s a bit scary, and just a little bit weird, too. But at the same time, I’ll confess, I’m excited, too. I’m excited about the call to be your rector; I’m excited about the future, about the great things that God has in store for us in our shared ministry, and I’m also excited about living in Madison.

That having been said, today’s gospel brings us back to the reality of what we are about here in this place. We heard again from the sixth chapter of John’s gospel; it’s the third week in a row for a reading from that chapter, and after today, there will be two more weeks. We have entered what I call the “bread zone” and preachers dread it because it always falls in the summer when attentions are low and attendances tend to be to. We dread it because the effort to say something different five weeks in a row about essentially the same biblical text forces us into all sorts of contortions. Thankfully, I’m appearing mid-way through the series, so I have to worry only about three weeks, not five.

This five-week long digression into the gospel of John interrupts our reading of the gospel of Mark in this year of the three-year lectionary cycle. Mark is the shortest of the four gospels, so in order to make it last for the whole year, the editors of the lectionary intersperse readings of the Gospel of John at various points. We are in John now because we are at that point of the story in the Gospel of Mark where we heard the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. That miracle is unique, because it is the only one of Jesus’ miracles to be clearly mentioned in all four gospels.

John as you may know tells a very different story about Jesus than Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptic gospels. Among the most striking differences among them is John’s recounting of Jesus’ miracles. There is almost no overlap between John and the synoptics’ miracles, none except this story, the feeding of the five thousand. The presence of that story in all four gospels marks its significance for the Christian communities that were writing the gospels. They linked Jesus’ miraculous gift of food to this crowd, to the Eucharist. In the synoptic telling of the miracle, Jesus is described with exactly the same words that are used when describing his actions at the last supper, words we continue to use at each celebration of the Eucharist.

It’s clear that we are headed toward a discussion of the Eucharist in this text, but this week, there is something else at stake. The passage begins with one of Jesus’ most familiar sayings, “I am the bread of life, Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

In the gospel of John no matter how powerful or spectacular the miracle, there is always a deeper meaning that needs to be explicated. It’s easy for readers of the Gospel, for contemporary Christians to be distracted by the miracle stories. They raise all sorts of questions for us. Those of us with a more skeptical mind, a scientific background, are going to query the text—could that really happen? Did it really happen? Others, more credulous perhaps, don’t doubt the miracle, in fact think the miracle is the point, it proves Jesus is God’s Son.

But in the gospel of John, miracles are not about the miraculous. Miracles point to something deeper, more profound, and the temptation for the readers of the gospel, just as the gospel writer suggested those who saw the miracles were also tempted, the temptation is for us to stay with the miracle, to focus on it, rather than on its deeper meaning.

Jesus teases out the deeper meaning of this particular miracle in a lengthy discourse. “I am the bread of life” he says, but lest we too quickly assume he is alluding to the Eucharist, he says more, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry, whoever believes in me will never thirst. Jesus is not talking about physical hunger or thirst, physical eating and drinking, not even the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Rather, he is referring to something else. Just as in his encounter with the Samaritan woman in chapter 4 of the gospel, when he tells her if you drink from the water I give you, you will live forever, here food and drink refer to him, they refer to his message and his gift of life.

Later in this passage, Jesus will chide his opponents with reference to the miracle of manna given to the Hebrews in the wilderness. Unlike manna, which lasted for a single day, Jesus is the bread that comes down from heaven and whoever eats from it will live forever. There is another allusion here, pointing to a verse in Deuteronomy, where Moses tells the Israelites “Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

This language of food and drink, hunger and thirst, is so powerful for us because food and drink are necessities for existence. Like the woman at the well who asked Jesus where she might get the water that would quench her thirst forever, our lives can be consumed by the quest for food and drink. One of the powerful images that confronts me each day as I come to work at Grace Church is the scene of people who come to this place looking for food from the Pantry or a bed for the night. That search can be an all-consuming one for people in their situation. They have no time, energy, or inclination to look for anything deeper.

For most of us who live with adequate financial means, the search for food and drink can become a hobby, or a different kind of obsession—a quest for the perfect meal, or ingredients, or some new taste sensation. But for all of us, as creatures of appetites, we yearn to fill those holes in our stomachs, or in our hearts. We have come to this place, not quite like those who come to the food pantry or to the shelter, but we come in search of something. Sometimes our search is for something we can’t even describe or name, sometimes our search is quite clear—we seek healing or help, or wholeness. For some of us, though our appetites for food and drink, for the things of this world, become something a diversion, a way of avoiding the deeper questions, deeper longings, deeper appetites that lurk in our souls. We gorge ourselves at the table or department store or wherever, because our real, deep needs aren’t being met.

Bread can be utterly ordinary, or it can be spectacular. It is something we eat everyday. There is bread that has no texture, no substance, bread known familiarly, ironically, as wonder bread. There is also truly miraculous bread—freshly baked by someone who has tended the starter, kneaded it by hand, sweated while it baked in a fiery hot oven—crusty, chewy, delicious. It is a miracle. That bread brings us in the presence of the divine; it reminds us of Jesus’ words here and in the sacrament, “take, eat.” The one kind of bread is designed for mass appeal, the other for a dinner for friends or loved ones.

Have we come to Grace Church this morning in search of bread to fill our souls? Have we come to satisfy our curiosity, or just because of habit? Perhaps you’ve come, like all those who have expressed their excitement about my arrival here at Grace. You are full of hope, but perhaps a little apprehensive about what the future may hold. You may even want to see me work a miracle or two. Well, if you’re hoping for the latter, I’m probably going to disappoint you. I can promise you a lot of excitement, but I don’t know that I’ve ever worked a miracle.
Jesus offered the crowds bread, and then he offered them the bread of life. We come here to receive that bread, in the proclamation of the Word, and at the Eucharistic feast, but as we come together around the altar, we need to remember that it’s not about you, or me. It’s about Jesus Christ, the bread of life he offers everyone. Nourished by that bread, nourished by the Eucharist, let us go forth to offer that bread to all.