Spiritual Growth :: Sermons

Sunday, August 9, 2009.
Proper 14B- RCL. The Rev. Kate Ekrem

The Rev. Kate Ekrem Church of Our Redeemer, Lexington MA Proper 14B Aug 9 2009 John 6:35, 41-51

“Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life.”

I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but the other night I actually rented the movie Twilight, the teen vampire movie. Have you seen it? It was actually pretty good as teen movies go, about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. And the big question in the movie is, is he going to make her into a vampire, too, so that she can share his immortality? When I was a teenager the big movie was Interview with a Vampire with Tom Cruise, which has a very similar theme. It made me think that maybe vampires are popular with teens because those are the years when we first realize we won’t live forever. Unlike vampires, we’re not immortal. When we’re not kids anymore, we realize these things, it’s kind of scary, so the idea of immortality, living for hundreds of years as vampires do in all these movies, is kind of attractive. On the other hand, as we get on in years, and our bodies start to go a bit, immortality begins to lose its luster.

So I want to contrast this concept of immortality that we see in the movies with the eternal life that we read about in scripture. They’re not the same thing, and that’s a good thing because -- our current life going on forever, like those vampires -- is really not a very attractive. Even the vampires get pretty bored with it.

In scripture, eternal life is always referred to as something that’s already present, like an extra quality of our life right now. Those who believe HAVE eternal life – not will have, but have now. And, in addition to that eternal life they have now, Jesus says, I will also raise them up on the last day. Eternal life is what makes life special right now, and there’s also more to come. Eternal life is an experience of a heavenly reality in our earthly lives.

So, that means, we don’t have to wait to get what Jesus is offering us. Or in other words, it’s not about hanging in there until things are better. I know, that’s a crazy thing to say, right? Aren’t we always telling each other, hang in there, this too shall pass? We work so hard – planning for retirement, paying off the mortgage -- to make sure things will be better later on. But when does later on ever come?

Do we live in anticipation all the time, that we’re preparing for something else that’s greater, that’s more real? Or do we live here and now, living this minute and this day to the full? (Etty Hillesum). Because that’s where the joy is. In knowing God is with us right now. Jesus is telling us that when we receive him, when we share in his bread, we share God’s life, we can live “the timelessness of eternal life now.”

It’s a real problem in life today, one that I struggle with, how we are never really in the present moment, never really giving our full attention to what is right in front of us. We’ve perfected the art of always thinking about what happened an hour ago - - as in “can you believe she said that to me?” or what is going to happen an hour from now – as in “how am I going to get all this done?” But not being here right now.

This realization brought me up short once last year, on Maundy Thursday, when I locked my keys in my car. I was on the way from a nursing home service on the way to bring communion to someone who is homebound, and I was thinking about all the sermons I had to prepare for the week, and I stopped at CVS to buy a baby card for someone who had a baby weeks earlier so I was feeling behind on getting a card out -- and I locked my keys in my car. My first reaction was, I do not have time for this! Then, I thought, I can solve this problem. I’ve got a cell phone. Pull out the cell phone – no batteries. Of course the very nice people at CVS let me use their phone to call a locksmith, and the locksmith says, it will be about an hour. An hour! I don’t have an hour! It’s Holy Week! So, I can fill this time with something, it’s a good thing I have a book with me, right? Nope – book is locked in the car. As is my knitting, my other way of dealing with stress. Well, if you can’t read or knit, there’s always diet Coke. Caffeine makes everything better. My wallet, is, of course, in the car, but I have just enough change in my pocket to buy a Coke. I go into CVS, and they are completely out of diet Coke. Now I know, I just know, God is laughing at me.

So I sit down on the steps and say to God, you have taken away all my distractions, all my ways of not being in the present moment, all my ways of avoiding your presence. How hard did God have to work to get me to spend a few quiet moments just “being” during Holy Week? If you’ve never done absolutely nothing for an hour, you should try it, because there is a lot more God out there than we usually notice.

We do fight it sometimes, but we need to be right here right now because that’s where God is. That’s where eternal life is. The bread of life that Jesus offers us is Jesus’ teaching, his words and his actions and his life, that show us the reality of God, here and now. The bread of life doesn’t mean we’ll always be happy or that all our moments will be good ones, but it does mean that we’ll be satisfied, both now in the present, and in the future, in the next world.

Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, says Jesus, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Jesus is pointing to his own death here, body broken for us, to show that death is not the end -- it wasn’t the end for him and won’t be for us either – but it is, as Barbara Crafton* has written, a moment, a moment in the middle of a much larger life. “Eternal life consists of grasping this fact and living in it, living as if we were already there, in heaven itself at the moment we take the bread. . . . [allowing] your eternal life to transform this life, so that the two are one thing, a seamless garment.”

We don’t need the immortality of the undead, when we have eternal life, when we can find everything we need in this one holy moment.

____________ *Barbara Crafton on theology http://theolog.org/2009/08/blogging-toward-sunday-nothing-is.html