August 20th, 2006 - Sunday Service apart from David Lee's Liturgy

There is an entry this Sunday about David's liturgy but more happened in this Sunday's service than its liturgy. We heard an incredible sermon from Pastor Dayle on the gospel passage John 6:1-58 and gathering strength in worship for our spiritual journey.

Pastor Dayle starts with her first reaction to the gospel passage when Jesus says, “unless you eat the flesh of the son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” She admitted it “creeps her out” and the rest of the sermon delves into the meaning of the verses.

This speaks to something central in my faith journey right now. Currently I walk on a tightrope between reading God’s word as metaphor or as events that could be recorded on a video camera if it were there. I am constantly falling and trusting God and Jesus to catch me and help me find the truth.

Notice here I use the word tightrope because it rings true as a description about what I am going through spiritually. I know it is a metaphor and I use it without concern. If someone pointed out that I am not, after all, walking a real tightrope I would admit they were correct. To say I was lying, however, would call into question any use of metaphor and that I would have to protest.

As a writer I am comfortable with metaphor. I trust stories, myths and metaphors can reveal deeper truths. I feel comfortable with the words Pastor Dayle uses to describe the communion meal – we know “when we eat and drink the bread and wine Christ’s presence is real and in some mysterious way, Jesus is taken into us and becomes a part of us.” Jesus calling himself the bread of life makes sense to me metaphorically.

What gives “the creeps”, to my mind, is trying to move this to the everyday language we use to describe the physical world. It doesn’t fit. Yet Christianity also revolves around a historical figure. The further it moves away from the historical there is a danger of it becoming “pie in the sky”. Of course, there is also a danger moving away thinking of the language metaphorically as well. It makes what is being said somewhat ridiculous. What is “living bread”, (that was mentioned in the sermon) if it is not understood as metaphor?

The meaning of communion is a mystery. I can move from a deeply emotional understanding to a purely physical action (hard to admit but sometimes I'm distracted). I understand others might feel differently on the issue, but the more insistence on the details of transubstantiation the more I mentally detach, the more I am "creeped out".

I have read scholars who do not like bible passages considered as metaphor or symbolic language. Their concerns come down to "what is being described did not really happen".

There is a phrase that has haunted me from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s nest. The narrator swears his story is true “even if it didn’t happen.” Here is where I feel the swing of the tightrope. In literature metaphor and symbolic language is the primary way to receive truth. Is it the same way with religion?

A beautiful piece of the sermon gives some answers to my mind:

We come to communion, the table of new life to receive this living bread, and we are given a piece of bread that is torn from the loaf. A piece of bread that isn’t perfect, it’s pulled apart and the edges are stringy or crumbling. And we hear the words, the body of Christ broken for you. In our world that’s preoccupied with perfection, we realize the body of Christ is broken. The church is broken.

This is the heart of the matter. Christianity is messy. Everything is broken and needs to constantly be reviewed. The last is first, the first last. As soon as you feel you are humble, you are no longer humble. Ultimately there is no final answer to the history / metaphor (or story) debate. The truth is felt moment by moment and it is not clean. Sometimes it feels crummy that there are no pat answers.

So, frustrating as well as fruitful, the journey continues.