John 6. 51-58

I forget. It is as simple as that. I forget. Maybe you do to. I forget names, events, appointments. I forget. I also forget God, which is a terrible mistake to make. After all, we Christians make a public declaration with our baptisms. We say very clearly to the world who we are and what we do. We renounce Satan, we accept Jesus, and we declare to follow him as our savior and Lord. Except when we forget. Which is easy to do. I forget and when I am reminded, it hurts to know how much I forgot.

The Christian life is just that, a life. When we embark on the journey we accept a few fundamental propositions about the life we are to lead. For me, growing up in Waco, Texas these propositions were more about the rules and the rules revolved around St.Paul and his words in Galatians 5.19-21.

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Ouch. I forgot to not do these things often. It is a part of the living to forget. And it is a part of the living to be reminded.

Of the things in Paul’s list of “do nots” my personal favorite is the phrase, “things like these.” To say, “things like these” is as if Paul ran out of adjectives and went for the short hand. “Things like these” leaves the imagination wide open for all of the things that these could be, these works of the flesh. Things like these might be J-walking, parking spot stealing, sacristy bread eating, choir music plagiarism, new car envy, office cleaning product pilfering, things like these. You can hear Maria’s voice, “These are a few of my favorite things,” these.

The list that Paul makes, these works of the flesh, are actually a few of our favorite things. They are things we love to do. If we didn’t like doing them we wouldn’t do them. Some of them are fun. Ouji boards are fun. Who doesn’t want to know the future? Who cares if it is sorcery? Envy is fun. Who doesn’t look around at what other people are doing and want to do the same? If not more? I caution us to not go holier than thou, because envy is fun, come on admit it. I am not trying to tell you it is necessarily good, but being envious is fun. If it wasn’t fun we wouldn’t do it. Getting shots in your arm is not fun, we avoid doing that. Chores are not fun, we put them off. Walking through poison ivy is not fun. We do not ask to do that everyday. Oh, but envy, and quarrels, for some people envy and quarrels are like breathing. Some people would rather have envy and quarrels than eat. People love a good fight. We do. Fighting is fun. Especially the game where we “watch you and him fight”. Setting up a situation where we can get others to fight so we can watch, we love that. We relish it. We talk about it. The baseball game was boring until the benches cleared. Did you see that? Those grown men acting like boys. I am going to write a letter and demand they do not do that again until next time. I wish I got paid millions of dollars to do that. Oops, there I go again being envious.

And by now you are well aware of the word that I am avoiding. Church is not the place for that kind of conversation. It is easy to talk about how much we love a good fight or how much fun we have being envious or the enjoyment we took being over served with margaritas at Chili’s last night. But we all heard the word when I read the list, and we are all waiting to see if I will address it, say it out loud, go into it at church so you can write the Bishop and start a good church fight. Well here it is, and I am not afraid to say it, I am, get ready, here it is, the big word of the Sunday, your ears will melt.

Impurity.

Oh, I hate to disappoint you and not go into a length discourse about fornication. I think we all know that one, and its brother pornography. They are so obvious. We like them too. Otherwise we would not spend billions of dollars on them. We do.

No fornication is not the word, impurity is the word. We love to be impure the most. It is the one we are the most comfortable with because as long as we stay impure we can use it as an excuse to act anyway we want to behave. We just blame it on our impurity. We love the actions on Paul’s list. If we didn’t he wouldn’t have needed to make the list. And if we didn’t the list would not still resonate with us two thousand years after Paul wrote it. We are human beings, and a part of us loves fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing… and things like these. We do.

The list is jarring, and it is meant to be. So are the words in the Gospel of John,

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 my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 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.

They are jarring, shocking, demanding. Eat Jesus? Cannibalism? Is this a metaphor? A symbol? Those who heard these words in that synagogue in Capernaum were confused. Rightfully so. What is this Jesus teaching? Who can understand it? Who can do it? Maybe it means the bread and wine of Eucharist. I do not know.

We forget. We need to be reminded. We need to be jarred from our complacency and be set back in our right minds. The works of our flesh, our flesh, is easy to spot. The works of Jesus’ flesh are being revealed. Our flesh and Jesus’ flesh are two different natures. Our flesh leads us to those things we love. And when we overdose on them we destroy ourselves and we destroy those around us. We electrocute the church we love with fighting. We get drunk with envy and fornicate with anger and steal souls with reckless abandon. We yell and scream and gossip and hate and atrophy our hearts because we love to. We stay impure because it is comfortable to our human selves.

Jesus flesh is the opposite. And in a very shocking statement Jesus says we have to eat and drink him. We need to ingest him. To receive eternal life we must consume him. We are to take Jesus completely into ourselves otherwise we will die. And we will, we have, we are, everyday we forget ourselves and get lost in the love of impurity. We forget, it is our weakness, our flesh, we forget, and we need to be reminded. Paul reminds us when he writes
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.

The hard work for us is to go against ourselves, the core of us, and reorient ourselves to a new way of living. We fully consume Jesus and in doing so we fully rework who we are and what we are about in this world. Fully consuming the Son of God into our lives infuses us with a new love, a new joy, a new peace, a new patience, a new kindness, a new generosity, a new faithfulness, a new gentleness, and a new self control, and new things like these. When we do this consuming of Jesus we are no longer forgetting, but we are now living past our human frailties and into a new purity. We break with our human self and unite with the divine through the body of Christ. Now we are guided by the Holy Spirit, who does not let us forget whose we are, and what we are called to do. We become reminded. Paul’s word for that was Metanoia, other minded. We take on the fruits of the spirit of God, reminding ourselves of our baptismal self, and we act on them, and things like these. Amen