Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them, take our minds and think with them, take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen.

In his book Real Live Preacher.Com, Gordon Atkinson an ordained Baptist minister tells the story of the day he stopped believing in God…the day he turned his back on God and walked away.  He was a young minister.  He had recently finished seminary and was serving as a hospital chaplain.  In the course of his work he met a patient in the hospital named Jenny.  Jenny was thirty something and cute.  She was a wife, a new mother of two little children…and she had Breast cancer that was found too late.  It was all over her body.  The doctors said she was going to die. 

Jenny had only one request.  She said to the young hospital chaplain, “I know I am going to die, chaplain.  I need time to finish this.  It’s for my kids.  Pray with me that God will give me the strength to finish it.”  She then showed the young minister a needlepoint pillow that she was making for her children.  Jenny knew that she would not be there for them in this world much longer.  Would not drop them off at kindergarten, would not see baseball games, would not help her daughter pick out her first bra.  No weddings, no grandkids.  Nothing.  So she had this idea that the needlepoint pillow would be a thing her children would cherish—sleep with, snuggle with—she wanted it to be a reminder that some part of her would always be there with them.  So they prayed.  They believed.  This, after all, was the kind of prayer you could believe in. 

A couple of days later the minister went to see her only to find the room full of doctors and nurses.  Jenny was having violent convulsions and terrible pain.  The young chaplain said, “I watched her while she died hard.  Real hard.”  As the young minister shut the door, the last thing he saw was the needlepoint pillow lying on the floor unfinished.  He went on to say, “It’s funny, when your faith finally caves, it goes all at once.  You realize you were just a shell held together with hackneyed rituals and desperate hopes.  You are not strong.  You do not have answers.”  He continued, “I looked in the restroom mirror and said, ‘I do not believe in God.’  I knew this was the truth and felt the need to say it out loud.”  He concluded, “[Jenny’s death and the shattering of my faith] broke my heart.  I grieved in joint and marrow.  My reptilian brain cried.  I was sad all the way to the bottom.”

In the teaching that Jesus concludes in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus’ followers are faced with a hard truth—perhaps a truth to hard even to believe.  And here it is.  Jesus is teaching his follower that even in the face of a world that is full of suffering, pain, and death—the world that Jenny lived and died in—the world that at one time or another will crush us all, there is life to be discovered.  That life which is both abundant and eternal is found in the moment we choose to feed on Jesus in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.  There is life to be discovered when we feed on Jesus in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.  Is this easy for you to believe?  Are you able to stake all that you are and all that you have on Jesus?  Do you believe that there is life to be discovered in Jesus’ name?

According to John’s Gospel, Jesus’ teaching is so hard to believe that many of his followers don’t.  Like the young hospital chaplain who prayed with Jenny, they no longer believe what Jesus is saying to them so they walk away.  John writes, “[The disciples] said, ‘This is difficult teaching; who can accept it?’  And further along in the passage John says, “because of [Jesus’ teachings] many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.”

I believe that Jesus’ teaching is difficult to understand and hard to believe for, at least, two reasons.  First, Jesus’ followers can’t get their minds around Jesus’ claim that he is the bread of life.  In the verses proceeding today’s passage, Jesus has made what must have seemed to his first century hearers to be some outlandish comments to say the least.  Things like, “Very truly I tell you, 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 blood is true drink.”  What could this mean?  Was Jesus speaking of some sort of ritualistic cannibalism?  Eating flesh and drinking blood sounds both brutal and sadistic.  In fact, in the first three centuries of Christianity, Roman authorities desiring to persecute Christians claimed that Jesus’ followers were, in fact, eating the flesh and drinking the blood of infants that were sacrificed when they gathered for Holy Communion.

Fortunately, Jesus perceives that the disciples are getting hung up on this whole eating flesh and drinking blood metaphor, so he says, “Does this offend you?  It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.  The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”  In other words, it is the Spirit of the living God that comes into our lives through faith in Jesus that offers eternal life, not literally his physical flesh.  When you and I come forward to receive the most precious body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the bread and wine of our Eucharistic feast, it is not material bread and wine or physical flesh and blood that nourishes our souls and fills our hearts.  It is God’s Holy Spirit that fills us.  And that same Spirit is present in bread and wine not because of a priest’s ordination, nor because of some magical formula of words uttered by the priest over the bread and wine but, instead, because we—you, me, all of us—gather in this place in Jesus’ name and receive our spiritual nourishment by faith with thanksgiving.  And that spiritual nourishment is good indeed.  It is what gives us the energy to be fully alive—and the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

The second reality that makes Jesus’ teaching difficult and even hard to believe for his followers including us today is precisely the young hospital chaplain’s experience with Jenny’s death.  It is the experience of unfairly losing something or someone we don’t believe we can live without.  It is the experience we have when we face the seemingly unsolvable problems of hate and poverty in our world.  It is the experience of honestly facing our own moral depravity which often feels like we no power to change in ourselves.  It is the experience of having an unselfish prayer go unanswered.  Jesus’ promise of abundant and eternal life simply seems too good to be true.  It is a promise that runs contrary to the world in which we live and in which our experience is firmly rooted.  If God is so good then why is life not so good so much of the time?  Therefore, many of Jesus’ followers in his own day and many more in our own, like the young hospital chaplain, simply walk away. 

As Jesus watches many of his followers whom he loves with his whole heart turn their backs on him, he faces the twelve with whom he is closest and asks, “Do you also wish to go away?”  “Do you also wish to go away?”  I suppose if we are to take our relationship with God in Christ seriously we must hear this question asked of ourselves.  And we must come to our own conclusion, “Do you also wish to go away?”  I like Peter in this passage propose that there is no where else to go.  You see we can either believe that the suffering of this world is the unavoidable end for all things.  That’s one option.  But you know there is another.  We can instead choose to believe that there is more to life than flesh and blood, suffering and death—we can choose to believe that by faithfully following Christ and not walking away there is life to be had.  And that life is both full and rich with meaning in the now and that life will last forever—even beyond the end of time.  You can choose to believe in Jesus.  You can choose to believe in life.

I am glad to say that the young hospital chaplain’s story continues.  Even with a broken heart caused by the loss of both of Jenny and his faith, the young chaplain is eventually able to believe in God again to choose to faithfully follow Jesus once more.  In fact, today his faithful words both in his book and on the internet encourage thousands of people along there own faith journey—in times of both belief and disbelief.  He writes, “I learned some things.  I found my way.  I prayed the most honest prayer of my life.  God, I don’t have great faith, but I can be faithful.  My belief in you may be seasonal, but my faithfulness will not.  I will follow in the way of Christ.  I will act as though my life and the lives of others matter.  I will love.  I have no greater gift to offer than my life.  Take it.”  He says further, “That’s it.  I pushed all my chips across the table.  [I] bet it all.  Why?  Because the idea that there is a God who cares for us bursts my heart wide open.  Because I pushed reason as far as it can go but I wanted to go farther still.  Because I wanted to, and…well…I just wanted to.” 

What do you want to do?  Do you want to faithfully follow in the way of Christ?  Do you want to choose to believe that God offers us life in Jesus’ name?  Do you want to find spiritual nourishment in the bread and wine of our Eucharistic feast?  If the answer is yes, which I sincerely hope it is, then the abundant and eternal life you seek is already yours.  Amen.       

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