It’s all a bit much
This Sunday (25 August - XIV Pentecost) was the last of our sojourn in John's gospel and its images of a profligate meal - bread, living bread, heavenly things... - constantly being offered in our midst.
Some of those following Jesus around - listening to him as a teacher - get caught up in the terms of the metaphor - eat your flesh!? what?! - and need to leave the conversation. It's a bit much, as most literalism ends up being, tipping in on itself and collapsing into the small world of literal things.
What if God who is Love *is* constantly giving this 'self' away. Profligately. Learn to eat this meal, this gift, every day. This meal that cannot run out of food.
It's all a bit much.
The 'stuff' of religion - any religion, even austere expressions like the Society of Friends or our Zen neighbors or a Carthusian monastery - ... the things of religion can all be a bit much. Too much an accretion of time, of practices, of things themselves once life-giving long since grown into idols demanding strange worship. Certainly a historically-informed tradition like the Episcopal Church has many idols.
But, to keep to the path of encounter, of seeking the living God?
As Peter asks Jesus in today's story: where else would we go? This is still the path of seeking the things eternal. Seeking to live in the things that cannot be taken away from us -- not by death (thus eternal), or by over-identification with specific peoples or traditions. A seeking of the living god is a constant refusal of idolatry.
We read - in a paired reading - from Joshua, who has gathered the peoples together before they are to begin again to form a new society based on this seeking the living God's will. (How's that for reinhabiting the metaphor of 'the promised land'?) He asks them to forsake the idolatries they have picked up along the way, over the centuries and through their lives. This can be encountered as a tribal expression of identity - which 'god' will you serve? But, it is more usefully encountered by us today as a reorientation toward the living God, who is not a tribal possession.
Look, the constant refusal of idolatry is hard in our image-laden late-capitalist world. I think it may always have been hard -- witness the textual tradition we read!
Is this only a stance of constant refusal to which we are called, though? Of some things, yes: wrangling, violence, mendacity, duplicity, exploitation. Then, as now, these are real traps.
What are we called to embrace, though? Paul uses the metaphor of putting on armor - paradoxically (we think of the metaphor of armor as somethinng that both protects and also keeps us from...). But, he calls us to be in a stance of embrace... of righteousness, of truth, of peacemaking, of faith. The point in this metaphor is not the 'armor' stance toward the world, but to ask what it might mean to strap peacemaking to your feet like you would a pair of sandals. To wear a sense of 'salvation'/healing on your head like a baseball cap. To be thus constantly reoriented toward seeking the living God, present in these things in the world, giving power to you, to us together, to bring the good news (the gospel) of peace to the world. This seeking is all the protection we need, ultimately, as these 'things' (which are not 'things') can ont be taken from us even in death.
As Paul writes elsewhere: against these things there is no law. And, the storehouse of these things can never be exhausted.
So, when Jesus says: feed on these things here present in me, our tradition hears this as him saying: you who seek peace, who seek righteousness, who seek renewal... here I am, giving myself away, constantly.
Bring your whole self to the meal.