Preached on Sunday, August 23, 2009

Looking at bodies of water is one of my favorite things to do. Seeing how the light reflects on the surface of the water, how the waves, whether small or large, change that reflection.  Seeing how the water changes color as the sun moves across the sky. Seeing the reflection of the sky or the distant shoreline distorted in the water, changing not only how the water looks but how we look at, see, those things reflected on the surface. And sometimes that is sufficient, that level of understanding of what I am seeing. But there is more to those bodies of water than just the beauty of the play of light on the surface.  Underneath that surface beauty there is a seeming darkness and cold, there are deep secrets; there is the reality that as humans we cannot survive under that surface without aid. Yet there is also beauty and life and strangeness and richness and diversity and great surprises hiding under those waves and refracted light we see on the surface of those bodies of water.

I wonder if those many disciples who turn away from Jesus, who leave Jesus' side today, began to see under the surface of the shiny-bright-beautiful Jesus to see the more complex, dense richness that Jesus' message and life really represents.  We have the last of our bread of life Gospels from John today. We hear at the beginning of today's Gospel Jesus' statement: Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.  At the very beginning of John's Gospel, in that great Prologue that shouts the triumphant news of God among us, we hear the verse: And the Word became flesh and lived among us. The Word, God, became flesh, human, and walked the earth with us, lived with us, was one of us. From the very beginning of this Gospel we have this idea of God being flesh, of the Word being flesh. So Jesus' instruction, eat my flesh, can be taken to mean eat....become this Word. Take these lessons that Jesus is teaching and make them apart of us, letting them abide in us. Webster's Dictionary defines the word abide as: 1) to remain, continue, stay; 2) to continue in a particular attitude, condition, relationship, to last; 3) to dwell, to live.  So Jesus' instruction to eat my flesh so that he can abide in us is saying that we are taking his lessons, his life, this Word and letting it remain within us, continue with us, stay with us.  We are allowing this Word to continue with us as a particular attitude, condition, relationship, to last with us throughout our life. We are allowing this Word to dwell in us, to live in us and thereby change that part of us that is hidden under our shiny-bright-beautiful exteriors. Allowing this Word to dwell in us allows this strange and rich and surprisingly beautiful life of Christ to enrich our understanding of the world and change who we are.

So many of Jesus' disciples leave him because they say his about his teaching: (are) is difficult; who can accept it? Jesus turns to "the twelve", and asks Do you also wish to go away? I do not know if Jesus is sad here, or annoyed, or challenging, or contemptuous in this statement: we are not given any hint of his state of mind. But Peter's response, no matter what Jesus' attitude in his questioning was, must have brought relief, or pride, or perhaps simple contentment to Jesus that at least someone was willing to try and wrestle with the deep mysteries lying underneath the shiny-bright-beautiful miracle producing surface that so many people did not want to see beyond.

Peter responds to Jesus by saying to whom can we go?.....We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. Peter's world has changed, he can think of nowhere else to go, no one else with whom he wants to share his life. And Peter tells us something important: as he starts to glimpse under the shiny-bright-beautiful surface Jesus, and he sees mysterious things, sees a richness and diversity in life that he had not known before, he says we have come to believe and know.....come to believe and know. This was not instantaneous awareness by Peter, but a gradual growth in understanding and belief as he and the other eleven dwelt with the Word become flesh. This is not perfect understanding on Peter's part, or on the part of the other eleven. We are being shown a developing understanding, a growth in insight as to who Jesus is and how God operates in the world. We know about Peter, how his understanding develops and changes over time. We also know that Peter abandons Jesus and then finds his way back.

Faith grows and changes as we grow and change. Faith grows and changes as our world changes around us. Asking questions, exploring what these texts mean and how they impact our faith, our belief in God, our understanding of what participating in the Eucharist means, our decision to be a member of this community that is the Body of Christ in the world, all of these are developing, changing, growing, morphing into something different as we grow and change. Definitive answers are, very often, difficult to come by, and anyone who promises to give you that short and easy answer is not telling you the truth.

Exploring our spiritual life, trying to understand how God interacts with us, will always lead us to mystery. Because, after all, we are talking about God here, and God is beyond our understanding. All of us do this at some time or other, trying to put walls around God, define God as "this" or "that".  By putting those parameters around God, we are putting human limits on what is possible and what is not possible. We are trying to simplify something that is beyond complex.

Certainly, Jesus was human, fully human, and yet (and here is the mystery part), fully divine, fully God here on earth for a short span of time. Here with us, living, loving, touching, feeling, eating, crying, laughing, getting angry, being sad. All those emotions that we run the gamut of on any given day, Jesus experienced while he was here, which means God knows exactly how we feel when we are going through the joys and pains of our lives. When we are looking under our own shiny-surfaces and seeing the hidden world that resides in each of us, when we think we are the only ones who could possibly be going through whatever trauma we are surviving and living through, we can and should have confidence that we are not alone in that experience. God is right there with us.

This is not an easy thing to accept or to acknowledge.  This is one of those beliefs that, like Peter and the other eleven, we can come to believe and know about God. This is not something that will be able to be scientifically proved, this presence of God. This is something that comes through the mystery of our faith, the mystery of how our spiritual lives deepen and perpetuate a less muddy understanding of how God operates in our world.

There are times when we want certainty, when we want clarity, when we want to take life's complexities and simplify them. The same is true in our spiritual life. At those times we need to think of the miracles Jesus performed whilst he walked this earth, fully human and fully divine. At those times we need to think about the shiny-bright-beautiful Jesus. We need to think about those lights reflecting off the surface waves on a body of water. And there is nothing wrong on occasion with having that surface understanding and vision. But at the same time, we know, perhaps in an unconscious part of our brain, our heart, our soul, that there is something much deeper living right below that surface: something that we cannot live in, live with, or live into without some outside assistance. That deeper, richer life living right below the surface enriches our understanding of the surface beauty, even if we don't want to readily admit that it is there. But that deepness is there, waiting for us to poke our heads under the surface and trust. Trust in God's love for us. Trust in an ever growing understanding, an ever changing development of our spiritual lives, an ever deepening awareness of God's deep and abiding love for us. Trust that God's son, the Word become flesh, abides within us. That Word we take into ourselves by participating in this Eucharistic meal can give us the strength and support to peer underneath the shiny-bright-beautiful surface and begin to behold the majesty and complexity of God.