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Boy Scout Tr #240

Scripture: Joshua 10: 40 – 42; Ephesians 5: 22 – 27 & John 6: 52 - 61

No one gets left out today. Today’s scripture readings have something to offend everyone. First, there is Joshua, hero of the book of wars. In the book of Joshua, God served as military commander of Israel’s invincible army. By God’s command, Joshua and his soldiers destroyed every major city in the Promised Land so that the Israelites would have room to move in. From the air, you could follow their progress by connecting the dots of smoking ruins, from Jericho to Ai to Eglon to Hebron. By God’s command, Joshua and his troops wiped out the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites, killing every last man, woman and child.

God helped out by dumping a sky full of killer hailstones on the Amorites and by making the sun hold still in the sky so that Joshua had all the daylight he needed to make sure he had not missed anyone. The finale to this killing spree can be found in Joshua 10:40: “So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings, he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” Is this really the Word of the Lord?

And if that does not offend you, then let us move on to the letter to the Ephesians. “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior.” One could read this as: Husbands are the saviors of their wives. And wives who disobey their husbands commit marital sin. Of course Paul also exhorts husbands to love their wives as much as they love their own bodies and to give themselves up for their wives as willingly as Christ gave himself up for the Church.

In the first century this was shocking stuff. Under Judaic law, a man’s wife and children were his property. He could put his daughter to death for bringing dishonor to his name. So for Paul to say that a man should treat his wife as carefully as he treated his own body was a real eyebrow-raiser for men who had been taught they could treat her however they wished. This passage was offensive then for different reasons than it is offensive now. It is far from being a crowd pleaser, anytime.

And then there is today’s gospel. The sixth chapter of John is full of statements that were offensive to those who heard them. First Jesus suggested that he was God’s own manna that came down from heaven to give life to the world. We are used to hearing that sort of thing from him now, but imagine hearing it for the first time – from a human being who did not look all that different from you – “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”

These words are similar to the words of Holy Communion: “This is my body, this is my blood.” These are really very gory words in the literal sense. Add to the fact that the Hebrew scriptures clearly forbid the drinking of blood, then we can begin understanding why Jesus’ followers began to pull away from him. “This teaching is difficult,” they said. “Who can accept it?”

Instead of making it easier for them to understand, Jesus made it even harder. “Does this offend you?” he said to his disciples. “Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” What if I were to float up into the sky right now and leave you with nothing but cricks in your necks? Jesus simply would not let up on them. If they were going to follow him all the way, then they were going to have to give up their need to understand, agree, or approve of everything he said or did. They were going to have to believe him, even when what he said offended them. They were going to have to trust him, even when what he did went against everything they had been taught, everything they had grown up with.

You can almost hear their minds slam shut. They had hoped he was going to explain things to them so they could make reasonable decisions about how best to follow him. Instead he let them know that nothing, not even their belonging to him, was theirs to decide. “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father,” he said. In other words, if you don’t get it, don’t blame me. God must not have chosen you.

There must have been a terrible look on his face when he said that, a terrible sound to his voice, because plenty of his followers turned around and left the room right then. For all we know, one or two of them spat on the floor as they left, while others simply shook their heads and walked out the door. At least twelve stayed, because according to John, Jesus asked them, “Do you also wish to go away?” As if he was expecting them to go. After all they were free to go, but Peter answered for them all. “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I hear such pathos in those words. Peter was as offended as anyone else by what Jesus said. Of all the disciples, he was the one who stood up for traditional faith. He kept the dietary laws. He never ate forbidden things, including any kind of meat with the blood still in it. The idea of eating flesh and drinking blood turned his stomach as much as it did anyone else, but where was he to go? As confusing as Jesus was, Peter had a glimpse of something in Jesus that he could not turn away from. He had a glimpse of God, and if trusting that meant struggling with a whole lot of distasteful things that went with it, then Peter would consent to the struggle. He would not give up the truth he had found, even if it came tucked in a box full of things he found offensive. He would not go away from the life he had been led to, even if it was miles from the life he thought he wanted.

His words have added meaning today when so many people are wary of associating with imperfect communities of faith. I’ve heard it before; sometimes it went like this, “If my church votes to paint the trim of the church blue, I’m not coming back.” Or, “I can’t go to a church that is in the paper all the time because of the controversy of ordaining gays and lesbians..” Or, “I’m not sure I’m going to come to church if we get a woman pastor.” Or, “I don’t go to church any more. I couldn’t take the hypocrisy, the liberals, the conservatives, the preacher, or you fill in the blank.”

Now, I do believe there are good reasons to leave a church. There are probably even some good reasons to leave the church altogether, but when the main reason is that you cannot find a community of faith that agrees with you on everything from what kind of music we should sing to where we should stand on capital punishment, then you have the perfect excuse never to belong to a church with more than one member – you.

There is no perfect church, any more than there is a perfect God – if perfect means that I understand, agree, or approve of everything that goes on. If you become a Christian you get a Bible that says God helped Joshua exterminate whole tribes of people. You get a household code that makes wives subject to their husbands and tells husbands to sacrifice themselves for their wives. You also get the parable of the prodigal son and the twenty-third psalm.

If you become Untied Methodist, you get a national church heavy with all the usual bureaucracy. You get bishops who still would prefer not to ordain women and bishops who would prefer that the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church, the group that is primarily responsible for the mission work of the Church, be under their tight control, which, thank God, they are not and never have been. You also get a church that thrives on differences, that opens it doors and hearts to everyone, that opens the communion table to anyone who wants to come, that believes that grace is the first thing God give us before we have done anything.

Wherever people are human, there will always be things that offend. Some of them are things we should pursue until we get some agreement on them and others we should probably leave alone – so that they can go on reminding us that there are other people in this world, just as sincere as we are, who do not see things our way. We need each other, to save us from self-righteousness. We also need each other to help keep us in shape for God. Because wherever God is God, there will always be things that offend. Like Jesus. Like bread and grape juice symbolizing the body and blood of Christ. Like this church that we call Christ’s body, in which we are grafted to each other as surely as we are grafted to Christ.

Do some of us wish to go away sometimes? Of course. We all do. But where else would we go? This is where we have heard the words of eternal life. This is where we have come to believe and know the Holy One of God. With treasures like these at our fingertips, what offense can we not bear?

Amen.