Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost – August 18, 2024

by Jeffrey Spencer | Aug 21, 2024 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a worship video for August 18

Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost – August 18, 2024

Proverbs 9:1-6, Ephesians 5:15-20, John 6:51-58

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today we hear what might just be the most shocking thing Jesus ever said: “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.” There is the graphic language of eating flesh and drinking blood, which, on the face of it, sounds more like something you’d hear in a zombie movie than a worship service. Then there is the exclusivity of Jesus’ statement and his total lack of equivocation: Unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood, Jesus says, you have no life in you. Life is found in him alone! And just in case anyone was to think that maybe Jesus just phrased things poorly, in his very next breath Jesus repeats all of this by saying that his flesh is true food and his blood is true drink, and those who eat and drink of it have eternal life. He really means all of this!

But what, exactly, does he mean?

There are different ways of interpreting Jesus’ words here. Even within Lutheran Christianity there are different interpretations. Some, including Martin Luther himself, have argued that what Jesus is saying here is all about the cross. With this shocking language, Jesus is pointing ahead to the sacrifice he would make for us on the cross. He is the one whose flesh would soon be given and whose blood would soon be poured out in order to make atonement, in order to make things right between sinful humanity and a holy God. This was all foreshadowed in the Levitical system, the sacrificial system we read about in the Old Testament – only now, instead of it being a bull or a lamb or a turtledove, it would be the Son of Man giving himself as the final sacrifice. By eating and drinking this in, by consuming this gift, by taking it in through faith and inwardly digesting it (as we talked about last week) we receive eternal life.

Other Lutheran theologians argue that this passage is all about the Lord’s Supper. They point out that John doesn’t include an account of the Last Supper and the institution of the Lord’s Supper in his gospel – probably because he knows it has already been covered three times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke – and so instead John is sure to document these words of Jesus to help us understand what is happening when we share the Lord’s Supper, to help us understand that we are indeed eating and drinking the true body and the true blood of our Lord Jesus, who gives us eternal life.

There are important reasons for both interpretations, and I don’t want to gloss over them, but I also think both can be true at the same time. This shocking language from Jesus is primarily about the cross. Jesus is no doubt pointing ahead to the sacrifice he would soon make. But it is also true that in the Lord’s Supper we are connected in a powerful way to what happened on the cross. It is in the Lord’s Supper that we receive the body and blood which were given on the cross for our salvation. As St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthains: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” Jesus is no doubt pointing ahead to this too.

Speaking of the Last Supper, you may have heard about the controversy at the Olympics opening ceremonies in Paris a few weeks ago. As part of the performance art there was a depiction of a banquet which bore an uncanny resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” only instead of Jesus and the apostles there were drag queens striking similar poses. There is some question as to whether the resemblance was intended or not, but even if it wasn’t, the artist’s explanation wasn’t much better. He insisted that what he was really depicting was the feast of Dionysus. To be fair, because the Olympics originated in Greece, it does make some sense to give a nod to Greek mythology, but Dionysus is an interesting choice. Dionysus doesn’t represent strength or speed or victory. Dionysus represents revelry, drunkenness, promiscuity, and pleasure seeking. The Roman name for Dionysus was Bacchus, which is etymologically related to the word debauchery. The Bacchanal feasts of ancient Rome and the Dionysian feasts of ancient Greece were notorious for intoxication and gender bending and orgiastic indulgences – all of which were depicted in not-so-subtle ways in this performance art. This Dionysus-inspired display perfectly represented what St. Paul is referring to in our second reading from Ephesians when he warns against evil days and foolish people, and saying, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery.” This is exactly what the Ephesians had left behind when they became Christians.

This part of the opening ceremony represented less than two minutes of the otherwise spectacular four-hour event celebrating French history and culture, but the specific Greek mythology this artist chose to depict is telling. The motto or mantra of these worshippers of Dionysus was: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Even if the artist didn’t intend to mock the Last Supper (which I find very difficult to believe), this is the ethos he was promoting, and this is the ethos that is increasingly gaining a foothold not only in France but in all of Western civilization. We are seeing a resurgent Dionysian paganism where nothing is true and everything is permitted, and those who worship at this table are in grave spiritual danger.

A couple of Sundays ago I was at my Doxology conference in Kansas City, and in the Sunday morning sermon, which was on the Bread of Life just as it was here that week, the preacher said something which stuck with me. He said, “False gods always consume their worshipers. Only the Lord Jesus gives himself to be consumed.” This just rings so true! The idols people turn to for comfort or peace or pleasure always end up devouring them. Those Dionysian false gods have a way of consuming their worshippers. We see this in how promiscuity so often leads to depression or disease. We see this in how drug and alcohol abuse destroys people from the inside out, making them a shell of their former selves. I’ve personally watched this happen, and I know many of you have too. We see this in how people spend their lives chasing one pleasure after another, and when that inevitably leaves them feeling empty, they fall into despair. The celebrity chef and food journalist Anthony Bourdain seems to be an example of this. He was wealthy and famous.  He went all around the world eating all the best foods.  As an atheist, he believed this was what life was for – to eat, drink, and be merry. He ended up taking his own life – in Paris of all places, the culinary center of the world. Dionysus consumed him. It’s awful. He was a charming and insightful and wonderful man. This is the danger. False gods always consume their worshippers. Only Christ gives himself to be consumed.

This, my friends, is what this shocking-sounding gospel reading is all about. When you get right down to it, what Jesus is saying here is more than an abstract theological claim about the cross or an abstract theological claim about the Lord’s Supper. Instead, it is a powerful proclamation of the kind of God Jesus is. Jesus is the kind of God who, instead of consuming us, gives himself to us to be consumed. Jesus gives himself for us on the cross, and he gives himself to us in the Lord’s Supper. He is the only God like this, and so he is the only God who can truly give us life.

In a world that wants to eat you up and spit you out, the Lord Jesus comes as one who gives you his own body and blood to eat and drink. This isn’t cannibalism, which is what the early Christians were accused of by their pagan neighbors. This is the promise of Christ dwelling in us as we receive his gifts, given in Word and bread and wine. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus says.

In a world that wants to eat you up and spit you out, the Lord Jesus gives you himself to eat and drink, that you would have life. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever,” Jesus promises. “Whoever eats me will live because of me,” he says. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the early church fathers – so early that he knew the apostles personally – wrote that the Lord’s Supper is “the medicine of immortality, because there in the eating and drinking we receive the Lord’s true Body and Blood just as He had taught in Capernaum.”

In a world that increasingly believes that nothing is true and everything is permitted, Jesus comes to us as the way, the truth, and the life.

Christ comes to us with his cross, where we find forgiveness for all the times we may have sat at the table of Dionysus. He comes to us with his Word, which guides us in the way, teaching us to lay aside immaturity and walk in the way of insight, as it says in our first reading, teaching us to be careful in how we live, not as unwise people but as wise, as it says in our second reading. Christ comes to us summon us to his table, which is set with his true Body and Blood. He comes to feed us with true food and true drink – the medicine of immortality. Jesus comes to be consumed by those who worship him, that we would have life in him.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost – August 11, 2024

by Jeffrey Spencer | Aug 16, 2024 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a worship video for August 11

Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost – August 11, 2024

John 6:35, 41-51

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

To begin this morning, I ask you to pray with me an ancient Christian collect, or prayer. Let us pray:

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

In this prayer which has been prayed by the Christian church for many hundreds of years, we ask God to help us inwardly digest the holy Scriptures. This is the language of eating. It is the language of receiving something, taking it in so that it becomes part of us. We pray that we would inwardly digest the Word so that we would receive life from it, a life that is everlasting.

Today we once again hear our Lord Jesus say, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” As Pastor Laurie concluded her sermon last week by saying, “to be continued,” we pick up right where we left off in John chapter 6, with this verse being our point of overlap. And as we continue to explore this chapter today, we hear Jesus inviting his hearers to inwardly digest who he is and what he has come to do, so that they would have life in him.

Next week we will hear Jesus get more explicit about how people are to literally eat his body and drink his blood, and so next week we’ll make some more specific connections to the literal eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper, but for our passage this week Jesus is speaking more figuratively.

As odd as it might sound, there are many examples in the Old Testament which speak of eating the Word of God. Ezekiel was told to feed his belly with the scroll God gave him, filling his stomach with it (Ezekiel 3:3). Jeremiah was told to eat the Word of God, which became a joy and a delight to his heart (Jeremiah 15:16). The psalmist describes God’s Word as sweet to taste, sweeter than honey on the tongue (Psalm 119:103).

And so when Jesus says he is the bread of life, he is drawing, in part, on this language. When he calls people to come to him that they would never be hungry and to believe in him that they would never be thirsty, he is drawing on this language of consuming God’s Word, taking it in and inwardly digesting it, so as to be filled, so as to be strengthened, so as to be given life.

This was too much to swallow for some. (Pun intended.) As John tells us, some people complained that he said he was the bread of life which had come down from heaven. This claim was distasteful to them. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son,” they grumbled, “whose father and mother we know? How can he now say he came down from heaven?”

They were skeptical of his claims. They were just sure that they knew him, that they knew where he came from. Jesus might be the toast of the town, but they couldn’t believe he was the bread of life. To them he was just Joe and Mary’s kid. They knew where he came from – and it was Nazareth, not heaven.

But Jesus kept pushing. He kept proclaiming. He kept promising. He told them not to complain. He told them no one can come to him unless they are drawn by the Father – and then Jesus put the scent of that bread under their noses so that they would be drawn by the Father, so that they would come to him. He put his wonderful promises in their ears so that perhaps they would eat them, so that perhaps they would begin to inwardly digest them.

Jesus tells them that whoever believes has eternal life. Note well the present tense here. Whoever believes HAS eternal life. This is not only a future promise – it is a present reality. It is something happening now. Whoever believes has eternal life. Whoever trusts God’s Word has the eternal God in their life now. Whoever comes to Jesus is no longer hungry for God. Whoever believes in him is no longer thirsty for God. God has come to them in Jesus to fill that hunger and quench that thirst here and now!

Jesus then goes on to make a future promise: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” And so this bread, this Word, this promise, is indeed a future hope as well. This bread is a living bread. It doesn’t just fill you up for a day, or a week – it continues to give life perpetually. It gives life everlasting.

As we hear this Word today, I wonder how many of us find these promises to be too much to swallow. I wonder how many a have a hard time believing it, at least at times. I wonder how many have truly inwardly digested the meaning of all of this, taking it in deeply, letting it nourish and strengthen us, letting it give us life.

Perhaps at times we are like the skeptics in our gospel reading. We think we know Jesus. In fact we’ve known of him for a long time – but we have yet to comprehend the fullness of who he really is for us.

Maybe this is silly, but perhaps we have grown cynical after all the conflicting information we’ve received over the years about which foods are good for us, which foods really give life. Margerine is healthier than butter. Oops! No, it really, really isn’t. Eggs are bad. Oops, no, just the yellow part is bad. Oops, no, actually the whole thing is good. Red wine is good for your heart. Oops! No, actually you’d need to drink 100 glasses a day to get enough of that particular antioxidant, and in the meantime all your other organs would be poisoned. Sorry! Perhaps this dietary confusion has spilled into our spiritual life. Who can we trust? What is true? What can we believe?

Perhaps we have just seen too much death to believe that it could ever be overcome by eating anything, even something called the bread of life.

In our confusion and our unbelief we find ourselves hungry and thirsty. We find ourselves increasingly shaky and weak. We find that we need nourishment and strength that comes from outside of ourselves. We need living bread from heaven.

Jesus is this bread. He is the bread we need. Jesus is the living bread from heaven. Jesus comes to us today, putting the aroma of this bread into our nostrils as the Word goes into our ears.  He promises us that when we come to him we will never be hungry. He promises that when we believe in him we will never be thirsty. We will never lack God’s presence.

Jesus promises that whoever believes in him has eternal life here and now. He promises that whoever eats of the bread that is him will live forever.

We come to him not because we are good or smart or worthy. Coming to him is not a spiritual achievement or a decision we make. We come to him because we have been drawn to him by the Father. “Anyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me,” Jesus says.

That’s you. That’s what is happening right now! We are drawn by the Father to the Son through the Word he delivers to us through the Spirit. Our hearts simply follow the aroma of those promises like one follows the alluring smell of fresh bread into the kitchen.

In a sermon on this passage the early church father St. Augustine wrote: “Believe, and you have eaten already.”

So believe. Believe the good news you hear today. His promises are trustworthy and true, so believe them. Believe that the eternal God has entered into your life here and now so that you can be filled, strengthened, nourished. Believe that whoever eats of the bread that is Jesus will live forever.  Believe, and you have eaten already.

Once again, let us pray this ancient collect:

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost – July 28, 2024

by Jeffrey Spencer | Aug 16, 2024 | Sermons

CLICK HERE for a worship video for July 28

Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost – July 28, 2024

2 Kings 4:42-44, John 6:1-21

Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

It has often been said that a crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it.

We have two crises in our gospel reading today, and this saying very much applies to both of them. These crises reveal to us who Christ is. They reveal to us his character, his identity. These crises reveal to us who Jesus is and why he has come.

The first crisis isn’t necessarily a life-or-death situation, but it does involve a large crowd out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat. They aren’t necessarily going to starve to death, but if you’ve ever been out in the woods with a few hangry kids, you know how dire this situation is. Things can go south in a hurry!

But before we even get to the crisis itself, Saint John (the gospel writer) prefaces the story by telling us what time of year this is happening: “Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.” It is important to understand that there are no insignificant details in John’s gospel. John mentioning that the Passover was near means something. John is intentionally framing this story in the context of this festival.

The Passover is the central festival for the Jewish people. It celebrates God’s saving help. It celebrates God’s deliverance of his people out of their captivity in Egypt. God fed them with the Passover Lamb, filling them with protein just before they began their long march towards the Promised Land. And then, along the way, when they were out in the wilderness without any food, God fed them again with miraculous manna from heaven.

Now it just so happens that there are a bunch of Jews once again living in bondage to foreign powers. Now God’s people are again out in the wilderness without anything to eat. What do you think is going to happen?

I love how Jesus toyed with Philip here, pretending to be concerned, pretending that he didn’t already know exactly how this was all going to play out. “Just look at all these people here, Philip,” Jesus said. “How are we ever going to buy bread for them all to eat?” John tells us Jesus knew what he was going to do all along, of course. Jesus was testing Philip.

We could think of this testing as a Sunday school quiz for Philip. “Do you remember the story about the manna in the wilderness, Philip? Do you remember what God did?” This was a quiz that both Philip and Andrew failed. Even though Passover was right around the corner, they weren’t making the connection at all. They looked to the meager amount of cash they had on hand. Andrew pointed to the one person who seems to have come prepared – a boy with five barley loaves and two fish – but noted that this wasn’t nearly enough to feed this crowd. “What are we going to do?” they asked.

And then Jesus did what he already knew he was going to do. He took the boy’s five loaves and two fish and he miraculously multiplied them, distributing them to everyone there, until all were satisfied. There were even leftovers!

The people who ate this miraculous meal in the wilderness knew they had experienced more than an impromptu picnic. They knew that they had received more than a fish sandwich. They knew that they had seen a sign. They knew that this meal pointed to something important about who Jesus was. They began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who has come into the world!”

We heard in our first reading for today the story of the prophet Elisha feeding a crowd. This story features some striking parallels to what these people experienced. An anonymous donor provided some barley loaves. There was more crowd than food, and yet, all ate and were satisfied. There were even leftovers! Sound familiar? You can understand why they would think Jesus was the prophet! The same thing was happening again!

They tried to make Jesus their king, but Jesus refused and withdrew from them – he wouldn’t be a king on their terms. He wouldn’t be coopted by their agendas or their felt needs. He had bigger things in mind, bigger things to accomplish – bigger fish to fry, we might say.

They were on the right track, in a way. Jesus was a prophet, insofar as he brought a word from God. He had come to be a king of sorts, although he would be a king unlike any they could imagine, with a kingdom not of this world.

But what this crisis reveals more than anything else is that Jesus had come to usher in a new Passover, a new saving event. What this crisis of not having enough food in the wilderness reveals is God had now come to them in person through his Son. God had come to feed them in the wilderness on his way to leading them to a new Promised Land.

A crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it, and here it reveals Jesus to be the saving God who has come in the flesh to do more saving, this time from even greater powers. It reveals Jesus to be the one who fills every hunger through the miracle of his abundant grace.

The next crisis is told much more briefly, but it reveals much the same about Jesus. The disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee at night when a storm kicked up. They were three or four miles from the shore. Boats like theirs went under in those kinds of conditions all the time, so this really was a life-threatening crisis. It was dark and chaotic and topsy-turvy. The waves heaved up and down while the disciples heaved those fish sandwiches over the siderails. Just then Jesus came walking out to them on the sea. Walking on the water was a cool trick, but it was what Jesus said that reveals the most about him: “It is I,” Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid.”  I really wish Bibles would translate this better, because as it is here Jesus sounds a little bit like Mighty Mouse. “It is I! Here I come to save the day!” He has come to save the day, to be sure, but so much more is going on here with these words! This is ego ami in Greek, which literally translates as “I AM.” In Hebrew it is pronounced Yahweh.

So now it is time for you to have a little Sunday school quiz. Do you know what God said to Moses when Moses asked for God’s name? God said, Yahweh, “I AM.”  And so this crisis reveals something about Jesus’ character, his identity. In the fear and chaos of that storm in the dark of night, Jesus revealed himself as Yahweh, as the Lord God, who had come close to them in their time of need. “I AM,” he said to them, “So do not be afraid.”

A crisis doesn’t build character, it reveals it. Through the Word we hear this morning God is revealing to us the truth about his Son. God is revealing to us who Jesus is, and why he has come. God is showing us that Jesus has come to be our savior, that he has come to be our Lord, that he is the Son of God who has come to be with us in the midst of the crises we experience.

Some of these crises are on a smaller scale. They are more personal. They have to do with the struggles and anxieties of daily life: “Where am I going to get the resources I need to survive?” “How am I going to make it through this day?” “How am I going to find nourishment and strength as I travel in this wilderness? What is going to sustain me?”

Other crises are on a much bigger scale. There has been election year chaos on a level we haven’t seen in this country since 1968, and we aren’t even to October yet. There is ongoing international violence, including the 12 children killed on a soccer field this weekend in a rocket attack in Israel. God is openly mocked on a global stage. Yes, you could say that life in this world has felt topsy-turvy and unstable and slightly nauseating.

These various crises, both big and small, reveal something about us. They reveal the wilderness we live in as we make our way through this world. They reveal the darkness and the chaos that kicks up and engulfs us from time to time. They reveal that we need a savior. They reveal that we need a Lord who can give us the strength and the peace and the hope that the world so clearly cannot give us.

The crises we hear about in our gospel reading, however, also reveal Christ to us. They assure us that he is the one who has come to feed our deepest hungers. They assure us that he is Lord of all creation, who ultimately has power over even the darkest, fiercest storms. They point us to the great truth that he comes to us with sacramental food and a holy Word.

Through his Holy Supper, he feeds us with miraculous food to nourish and sustain our souls. He meets us in our wilderness and strengthens us with the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation. (We’re going to be hearing a LOT more about this in the weeks ahead as the lectionary takes us on a deep dive into this chapter of John’s gospel.) In this meal he reveals himself to be our savior. In receiving the bread and the wine that are his Body and Blood we participate in the new Passover. We participate in the saving event of his death and resurrection.

Jesus comes to us with a Word to give us peace and calm in the midst of every storm. Whatever particular crises you might be enduring, whatever storms you might be facing, today Christ Jesus reveals himself to you through Word and Sacrament to assure you that he is God, and he is near. “It is I,” he says to you. “Do not be afraid.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer

Oak Harbor Lutheran Church