Below is a Video of a sermon I preached with a much less sensational title than this article. It begins with Shahila Christian reading one of the most stunning passages in the Bible—John 6:53-69. Here Jesus says not once, not twice, but three times that you have no life in you unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood. “This is a hard teaching,” say many of his followers, and from that time onward many turn away. The passage ends with another stunning phrase: Peter’s answer to Jesus’ question, Will you also go away? “Lord, to whom shall we go?” he says. “You have the words of eternal life.”
Early in Christianity’s rise this passage was used to accuse Christians of promoting cannibalism! More important, it set off a debate about whether Jesus was being literal or “merely” symbolic, and this later led to one of the great divides between Catholics and Protestants—the former believing Jesus was being literal, the latter leaning towards the symbolic. I give a short history of Protestant versions of what happens during Holy Communion, versions which seek to overturn the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, which holds—in its strictest version (there are several)—that during Communion the elements of bread and wine actually turn into the body and blood of Christ. Martin Luther (1483-1546), Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), and John Calvin (1509-1564) all had influential ideas of what happens symbolically. I should have mentioned that I believe, as other scholars do, that all these doctrines finally were trying to counter the gnostic idea that Jesus didn’t have a real body, but only an apparently real one. Yes he did—that’s what all these versions of what happens during Communion are really saying.
The core of my sermon goes in a different direction. The title of it was “The Power of Story and Symbol.” It starts from the idea that saying something is “merely” or “only” symbolic doesn’t make something less real. Symbols and stories are often more real, and usually more powerful, than the facts of any case. We usually don’t see facts directly. We see them through symbols and stories. And we spend lots of time trying to adjust the relationships we see between stories, symbols, and facts. We ask, especially, am I reacting with proper intensity, vitality, or motive to this story or this symbol and the facts they are relating to.
To illustrate this I use two pieces of writing I often used in my teaching of writing and literature. The first is Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” probably the most misinterpreted poem of all time. A traveler comes to a fork in the road and wonders which road to take. The operative line comes in the last stanza: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” He tells himself he has taken the road less traveled. That’s his story, but the poet is at pains to make sure—if we’re reading the poem with any close attention at all—that, in fact, the two roads were pretty much the same. One was not less traveled than the other.
The other piece of writing I used was the short essay “Germs” from Lewis Thomas’ book Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. Turns out that reacting to symbols properly isn’t just a problem at the human level but at the cellular level, too. Much of the time when we get sick, it’s because our bodies simply over react to the presence of “germs” that aren’t particularly toxic. To our immune systems, however, they symbolize something really dangerous and all sorts of defenses get turned on that destroy things that don’t need destroying. That process makes us sick.
My challenge to the congregation was to examine our reaction to the symbols of Holy Communion. Because we Protestants treat them as symbols we tend to under react to them. But we don’t have to believe in Transubstantiation to react to them with the intensity and vitality they deserve. We need to understand how really powerful stories and symbols are. We need to let their power energize and change us because they can bring a distant, powerful event into our lives with the shock of something that happened just yesterday, or is happening right now, this minute.
♦ Go HERE for a complete list of sermons, like “Pentecost Means No ‘Supremacies,’” “Sacred Doing,” and “Theology and Race.”
