August 20, 2000

Pastor David G. Mullen

John 6:51-58

My wife, Sue, came home from work the other day with an anecdote from one of her co-workers. The young woman has a 17 month old boy, Elias. Driving by a strip mall the other day, the little tyke pointed out the window to the Golden Arches on the corner and said, "Fries!" 17 months old, and already Elias knows what those Golden Arches mean: food! Cute, yes perhaps even precocious but in way scary as well, if we actually stop and think about it. The power of advertising works effectively, even for a for a 17 month old.

It’s not just that a 17 month old can point to the Golden Arches and shout, "Fries!"; it’s even more that the words, moods, and actions of parents and media messages shape the lives and self-images of children for good or for ill, and too often it’s for ill. So let the Golden Arches stand for the whole world of influence, starting in the home, but extending out to TV set, the computer, the school playground, that warps and oftentimes breaks, the human spirit. We recognize our lives and our shadows in the advertising images and jingles, and in the novels, short stories, movies, soap operas, and songs we pay good money to read, see, or listen to. And often our own personal mythologies, ruin us. There’s trouble under the Golden Arches.

Is there any alternative to all this? Yes! A theologian of the church shares this analogy, the story of Harriet and the Chemistry Class: At sixteen, his daughter entered a high school classroom. Odd, there are nozzles sticking up out of the desks. Someone plays with a nozzle while the teacher calls rolls. The teachers shouts, "Don’t touch that! You want to blow us all up?" Harriet had never heard of a classroom where one could be hurt just by the stuff in the room!

Then the teacher begins to teach "Safety Rules." All week is spent on safety rules. You thought you knew how to pour liquid from one beaker to the next? No, there’s a way we do it, the right way. During the first week someone behind Harriet asks the teacher, "What is that chart up on the wall? What do those strange numbers and words mean?" "You’re not ready for that," says the teacher. "Those are sacred signs and symbols of our faith. You must wait for that."

At the end of the week there is an exam on the Safety Rules. If passed, each student receives a blue-gray robe, the liturgical garment of the faith, and goggles. "Now," says the teacher with a sense of expectancy, "Now you are ready to enter the world of chemistry." And then comes the months of learning about the symbols on the chart, that periodic table of the elements. There are things to be memorized, and there are heroes of the chemistry world who braved ignorance and taught us how to pasteurize milk and make new things out of old things. Saints!

Then comes the day around the first of December when Harriet helped carry a bag of groceries to the house, and typical teen, the first thing she did was snoop around to see what was in it. She found a package and examined it. "Heat-activated deodorant" he hears Harriet say. She instinctively flipped the box over, saying to herself, "I wonder what’s in this. Something that reacts at about 98 degrees, I guess." And she read the list of chemicals in the deodorant.

And the preacher writes, "As someone who is supposed to be in the conversion business, in getting the practices of an alien faith inside people, I stood in awe of that moment. Here was a miraculous transformation in the life of my daughter which had been worked in less than four months. Now, when Harriet looks out the window in the morning, she no longer sees the same old world she saw four months ago. She has been adopted into a household called, chemistry."

By Baptism, we’ve been adopted into a household called faith, and entered the school of life in the Lord. And in this school we encounter some things that may seem shocking and upsetting to outsiders and initiates at first, but with learning the ways of this household called the Church, we begin to see the old Golden Arches world differently. And nothing is ever the same again.

Take for example the words we heard from our Lord this morning. "I tell you for certain that you won’t live unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood." John 6:52

That one sentence has shocked at lot of people. But for those us in this school of faith, we know that Jesus is not some sicko pleading for cannibalism! (The early church was accused of that, you know, based on just such seemingly difficult words). No, in this school of faith, we learn, as one commentator has written:

In other words, we are in the business as Christians of trying to take in as much of Jesus as we can, in order that Jesus is multiplied by the millions of time over in the world through our ordinary human lives. The Christian faith means trying to become like more and more like Jesus. In a Golden Arches world of consumerism and self-centered entertainment, the self-sacrificing story of Jesus is meant to become the story of our lives, giving us a different view of the world and shaping all we say and do.

For that too happen, we need to make our faith the center of our daily lives, not just our Sunday morning lives. We certainly don’t starve ourselves all week long when it comes to food! Then let us not starve ourselves and our children spiritually. Not only on Sundays, all week long we need to eat the Bread of Life by daily immersion in scripture and prayer.

Living in a world filled with all kinds of destructive scripts and stories powerful media influence, little 17 month old Elias and God’s children of all ages need to learn about more than the Golden Arches. They need to be able to recognize the sign of the elemental Cross and see there a golden promise, not of fries, but of forgiveness and everlasting life with God.

In the school of faith called the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church we all need to learn what Jesus teaches about radical love of enemies, and follow him in the ways of the cross, and learn how to let the Holy Spirit gather us consciously into the joyous Easter communities of compassion, welcome, truth, and justice.

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life. Come, let us eat and do whatever it takes to let Jesus’ story become the story of our lives. Amen.