Disciple Bible Study 18, Gospel of John Part III

How can people check me?

Is this story more symbolical or metaphorical or then factual?

Yeah, we don't really know how factual things are, but uh there is actually a pretty good explanation for how this would work.

Um and um curiously enough, you probably probably have heard about these amphitheaters that exist, in fact, we're going to several of them in Jordan.

Um the acoustic engineering is such that they're even marked with a spot, literally a spot, and at that spot, if you stand, up to 5,000 people can hear your speaking voice without you shouting.

All of them can hear it.

Curiously, in these amphitheaters, you know, they're they're sort of shaped like a like a they're not really a semicircle, they're less than that, but they're close to it.

I mean, let's say that they're 145 degrees of a circle.

Um, and then you have a stage, and there's a there's a there's sort of a ring and there's a pit, and in the pit are these little holes that the chorus speaks into, and when you speak into the hole, it's like an additional microphone that comes out.

This is very interesting, maybe counterintuitive, but you talk into the hole and your voice is heard by 5,000 people without any kind of wiring or projection.

It's there's just natural acoustics.

So Jesus is not at one of these amphitheaters.

There's no no no insinuation in that.

However, um, if you go uh to one of these mountains, the way it would work is the people are going up the mountain seated, and Jesus is at the bottom, so his voice carries up.

I mean it's an explanation.

I think again, the thing not to get bogged down with is were there 5,000 exact people there?

I just think it's a silly question.

Who cares?

Um, could that many people have heard what he was saying?

Maybe.

You know, like there's there's there's probable cause for that.

Um if you've seen The Life of Brian by Monty Python, you'll see sort of what happens.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Um sounds a lot like peacemakers.

Uh so um maybe that too.

I know, I uh but I think I think there is some real probability about voice casting, you know, and it would have been even better at one of these amphitheaters.

Uh, really would have.

Uh we'll go to one of the finest preserved ones in the world in Jordan.

Uh actually we'll go to about three of them.

Um, but this this one in Jarash seats 5,000 people, and they do concerts, and you don't have to have a microphone depending where you stand.

It's it's pretty amazing.

Um, okay, what else questions, comments, or what did this reading do for you?

It's it's you know, just a reminder, we're taking really small bites of John, and I hope that's relieving, you know.

Um, but but what did the reading do for you this week?

Well, it kind of raised a question for me.

Um in Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus speaks in parables, here he does not.

He speaks in the parables.

Yeah, there's a there's there's a a play about good and evil, light and dark.

And the church is often referred to as a donine church.

I don't know what that means.

Sure.

So what uh we think is that um there was not a uniform Christianity, hardly at any point.

This is helpful to know.

There's not one now.

You know, there's the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and there's the Missouri Synod, and if you thought they were conservative, go to the Wisconsin Senate.

Um, there's more than a hundred Baptist ordinate uh denominations that are mainline.

I mean, I'm not even talking about like splinter groups.

So what we're figuring, and you can read this in the letters of Paul, um, particularly, Paul is really distressed that people are saying, Well, I was baptized by Peter, and I was baptized by John, and I was baptized by Paul, and I was baptized by Jesus.

That's a hint that there's at least four competing folks who say our traditions and practice are different from yours and ours are right.

And so we think, uh, scholars think that there definitely is a community anchored in John, and then there's a community anchored in Paul, and probably one of the other strongest competitors would be the Petrine community.

And one that you don't hear much about would be James.

So James, the brother of Jesus, not the apostle, um, is the head of the Jerusalem church, the one that worships at the temple.

He's called old camel knees because of how much time he spends kneeling in prayer.

His knees are just calloused and thick and kind of gross, like the camels are.

Um, so again, we we often think like, oh, there was one church, and the truth is there's not.

The Jerusalem church was very Jewish, went to the temple to pray, observed Kashrut or Kosher, and then Paul's communities didn't, and there's conflict about what you have to do.

You'll read all about that in the Acts of the Apostles, and then John is just another another group.

You you do notice that the literature, I mean, you've pointed this out very, very succinctly.

John does not rely on parables.

You know, the way John works is Jesus does something and then he talks about it forever.

He does these discourses, and what a lot of people say, you know, again, this is why John is symbolized by the eagle.

He's got the bird's eye view.

Um I mean, John really is a little more uh sophisticated philosophically because Jesus has tractates and discourses, and the other he's much pithier.

Yeah, so so that tells you there's a different interest in the community uh for interpreting and how this sort of means we've lost that variety.

Why I grew up was there's four gospels, but they all really say the same thing, which is silly.

We didn't even read them if we thought that.

You know, when when um when Jesus says uh you know, blessed are the poor, and in Matthew says, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Well, I learned he's just saying the same thing because that they can't contradict one another.

Instead of, no, no, listen, it's all about, and any good storyteller knows, you've got to know your audience and you've got to communicate to them.

And I would never do what I do on Sunday morning as I do with chapel.

I mean, actually, maybe I should, I don't know the answer to that, but um, you know, again, there's just knowing, there's knowing your audience.

And and it's not changing the story, it's being a good communicator.

But I will tell you, of course, and and we'll we would notice this if we did a side-by-side, which we could choose to do down the road.

Um even the Matthew and Luke and Mark have some very similar stories, it's it's the subtle details that make all the difference.

Not only are they communicating to different people, they're communicating different things about who Jesus was and what he did meant.

They changed the order again.

John has him flip the money changers' tables right out the gate, but he doesn't do that in the other gospels until Holy Week.

I have a Bible that has it's kind of interesting.

It has all four of the stories on on one page.

And so it's kind of interesting to see them right next to each other.

You can see what the differences are.

And there's very little, very few times where where all four have the same story.

Very few.

I mean, John even changes the day of the week Jesus is killed on.

It's totally different.

Because he's trying to tell you something about Jesus.

Again, this is important.

The gospel writers are not concerned.

This is gonna sound crazy when I say it, so just you know, just take a deep breath.

They're not concerned with objective history.

They're trying, and they tell you that.

These things are written so you can believe, not so you can have a detailed historical account.

History, as we now understand, is a relatively modern concept.

We've only been doing it this way for about 150 years.

People didn't care about factuality, they cared about meaning.

And we've confused the two.

Honestly, we think the facts are more important than the meaning.

And in some ways, they're different things.

But you read any life of the saints, and again, it's just trying to tell you who saints are and what they meant, not exactly what they did.

I hope that makes sense, what I'm saying.

I I don't mean that they're not true.

I mean the writer was not concerned with getting the fact pattern exactly right.

They were very concerned with communicating the meaning of the events.

And we you notice in John that people make that mistake all the time.

I'm the bread of life, eat my flesh.

Oh, that's cannibalism.

It is, and that's not what Jesus is saying at all.

What's amazing is we've got this history of Christianity where we're really concerned, are we actually eating the body of Jesus or not?

And again, that's just a gross misunderstanding of what John's trying to get us to do.

He's not talking about factuality.

This is all figurative, analogic, metaphoric speech so that we can get insight into what it means to believe and follow into God.

Now, listen, you could choose to believe the Eucharist is the literal flesh of Jesus.

I just don't think that's what John has in mind, and whether you do or not, that's not the point of it anyway.

The point of it is what we're going to talk about today.

I think that that's clearest in John, actually.

The metaphorical.

It could be.

But again, if you've grown up like I have, he's not figurative at all.

He's just telling you these things, and so eat his flesh.

We didn't think that in the church I grew up in.

We we thought it was symbolic.

But we, you know, it's it's an interesting thing how we'll hear symbols one way and then we'll fix on details in another.

It's like extremely um what do I would have say?

Like um.

It's not coherent how we read meanings in the text.

We it's not like somehow the way I've grown up, and I think the way that in general uh church wisdom has been passed on is oh yeah, that part's figure, but that part's extremely literal, and um there's there's no rhyme or reason to when you read it which way, except convenience.

This is what is what I think.

The other thing I think is I'm always ever so often it strikes me, the Bible is written so that a whole bunch of different people will still be reached by it.

You know, it it doesn't speak in one voice because it wants to bring everybody in, and somehow through the ages they manage to do that.

I I mean I I I think that's a mature perspective.

I do.

What what what else did this do for you this week?

Well it um the imposition about Jesus being very offering or seeking a very uh personal relationship between Jesus, each other.

In other words, it's not just something that we know about in our minds, but it's something that we need to be touched on.

In other words, what I think that what Jesus and God really want from us is to have a love relationship with us just as much as you know humans love one another.

In other words, it's not something you just think about when you go to church on Sunday.

It's something you live that we live through today uh in other words of God is about a divine entity of three persons.

It's it's uh I don't think I'm saying this the right way, but um it's um a story, it's a it's a story for those who want to step up and really be serious about their relationship with God.

In other words, God needs to be as present to us during the day as we are people we like and care about and love.

You know, and some days you know you're just gonna be full of affection and attention and so forth, and then there are other days that they can hardly take out you.

You know, it really needs to be a personal thing that we see.

That's what I feel that God really created us for, and that's what also I've learned coming up to the decades past.

And uh it's uh so it's not just something that we know about, it's something that we live just as much as I live friendship with Jane or live in a relationship with you, uh Mike, um Diana is not something that we thought about once we cut on the show.

I think on page 151 at the bottom.

I underwind that Jesus taught us to judge by what is right.

All these examples judgment by what's right.

You have to circumcise on the change what's right.

I guess I guess that's what you're such a relationship with you like change.

In other words, you cannot be close to God in love with God, and you have interpand with God besides without God responding to us.

It's it's just I mean it's not a one-way street.

It has a relationship and that you think about this is when we feel loved by a human being that lives us, and in some ways it changes us, or the same thing happens with the relationship with Jesus.

When you mean terribles, you don't care as much on the story.

When you mean you understand the story and uh bring it it brings it a lot more because I understand it.

And it says you want to make the wrong page one gospel makes clear that obedience is essential for faith.

And and I think that's true.

I also read the reading uh the gospel.

Um we are the other thing is seven minutes ago when we were talking about the personal turn you said they had the tradition and structure and reason.

Um which I think is good.

Well, maybe it's helpful, maybe it's not, maybe it's hurtful.

I'm just gonna try this because we've talked about this a few ways to think about maybe what's happening linguistically here, and part of the difference is in parables.

So, you know, I think we learned this probably in in high school, maybe in the tenth grade.

Um see see what you remember.

What a simile does.

Do you remember?

A simile is it's a comparison and it's got rules around it.

It uses usually two words.

Like and as.

It uses like or as, right?

Like he ran like the wind.

What did you learn about a metaphor?

Do you remember?

Well, I learned that it's a comparison without like a rats.

So I learned in high school that really both of these are just kinds of analogies.

One uses like a rats and one doesn't.

Um, well, that's kind of a waste of words, isn't it?

You know, I mean, really, just an en white even have categories.

So, but think about what an analogy does.

An analogy, and this is mathematical, if I have a set that has three elements in it, and I know that, and I don't know this other set, what it does is it is mathematically this is called mapping.

And it says, look, the thing you know is actually like the thing you don't know.

So at the end, you you get both of them.

You know, this allows you to understand what you don't know.

That's pretty easy, right?

Life is like a box of chocolates.

You never know what you're going to get.

I mean, unless you read the map.

So, like there's because usually there is a map.

Not in C's candy, I'll have you know.

For this guy must have been eating the C's candy because it doesn't tell you what's in there, and in that sense, he might be might be correct.

Um but in Ruth Hunt, I'll have you know, or in um, you know, the what is that?

Wrigman's whatever, those other samplers they tell you exactly what you're going to get.

So you should not be surprised.

Um, but that's all fine.

I understand something, and that helps me understand something I didn't.

But I do want to suggest to you that these highfalutin literary types actually say that metaphor theory is very different from that.

This is simile and it's analogy.

Metaphor theory, according to this sort of uh different view, is when I have something that I know and I compare it to something that I don't know, and in the end, I'm confused about both things.

Uh that would mean metaphor is really like something like irony.

Now, now now this is a little bit weird, but let me let me see if we can operate it.

Jesus says, I'm the bread of life.

We have lots of understandings about bread.

We have few understandings about God.

So we make these analogies.

So comparing bread and God could do this, but um it also could do this.

It could make us say, wait a minute, how is God like bread?

So let me back up and do the parable for you.

Jesus says that faith is like a mustard seed that you plant in your garden and it grows to be the biggest of shrubs and all the birds in the air.

Come and sit on it.

As an analogy, faith is really small and it grows into a shrub.

It grows big and it supports things.

That's nice.

Except it is against Jewish law to plant mustard seeds in your garden.

Shrubs in your garden are big and they create shade, and so your vegetables don't get sunlight.

The last thing you want in your garden, I'm sorry, are birds.

So how on earth is the kingdom of God like a weed that's against the law that harbors your natural predators that you intentionally sow in your garden?

Is the parable an analogy or is it a metaphor?

It could be both.

John uses something different from parables.

He uses these statements like I am the bread of life.

Oh look, it's a comparison without like or as.

It's a metaphor.

It could be.

Or as we contemplate Jesus and bread.

I mean, how is Jesus like bread?

Because life-giving.

Life-giving sustains this, but we all know that carbs are bad for us.

You know, the way to get fit and be healthy is to stop eating those carbs.

Jesus should be the well, what should he be?

Like the the avocado with Sriracha.

You know, he should be that.

No, I'm kidding a little bit about that.

But then, so the question is, if Jesus is like bread, does that mean we're meant to consume him?

I think it could be, and that's what I'm trying to push this toward.

I think analogically I would ask you, what's your relationship with food?

Is food nourishing or is it to be consumed?

Those are different things.

Is Jesus to nourish us or is he to be consumed?

Does he say anything to you?

No, I don't think so.

I mean maybe, but I don't think so.

But I just that was just a straight thought.

Yeah, because yeast is a funny thing, right?

I mean it's not unclean, but during Passover you don't eat it.

So it's there's this strange relationship with yeast in the Bible.

It's not bad, it's just ordinary.

Um, you know, there's this other uh sort of sort of um weird thing, right?

Is that the people want bread.

And Jesus basically says people don't live by bread alone.

Which is like, wait, I thought I got the analogy, but now you're telling me I didn't get the analogy.

So what I'm trying to say in a clunky way is I I think these statements are probably more than just simple comparisons.

And if we just do the simple comparison, uh, I think we might be missing, might be missing.

And again, you know, look at what happened last week where Jesus, Nicodemus says, like, what do you mean you've got to be born again?

I thought I understood being born, and now I've got to be born again, and how can I do that?

The analogic reasoning actually doesn't work.

Jesus is really trying to say, like, you've got to fundamentally start over.

You need new wineskins.

That's how he says it in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

And John, he says you've got to be born again.

I I think he's probably saying something similar in different words, but again, that's the stuff of metaphor, not analogy.

With regard to the question of added anything, uh, do we consume him, yeah.

I from my perspective, I think that what Jesus died.

And the more we participate in that life, the more the more that we become one of how we are how we consume.

I think you could be right, except I think I've grown up in churches in which we consumed him.

And what I what I'm what I mean, and maybe I'm gonna push this a little bit harder, is Jesus was just another commodity for us to enhance the lives we wanted.

So he was fit for consumption.

There was not a nourishing relationship that was in any way mutual.

It was really about commoditization of the gospel, which is like pouring new wine into old wineskins, to come back to that.

It's like not being born again, it's like getting a shot of HGH.

Which will like push me through, but it won't change my structures.

Now, you're looking at me a little bit weird, and I don't want to make this weird for its own sake, but I really do invite you to think about your relationship with food.

And and I'll tell you, uh, because I've had in my life some very unhealthy relationships with food, and uh, I still do a little bit, quite honestly.

Whatever's on my plate, I'm going to eat that, pretty much.

And if I got full a minute ago and there's more on my plate, I'm going to finish what's on my plate.

Because there's something really strange in me about waste.

And of course, it's much more wasteful for me to eat food my body doesn't need than for me to throw it in the trash.

It is much more wasteful to eat it.

It actually impairs my body.

Um, I grew up with a very low physical self-esteem, and so you know, you needed food, I liked taste, but food was like this poison I had to drink because it made me look the way I didn't want to look.

And uh I played a sport that uh focused on weight.

I was a wrestler, and of course, uh the way we lost weight was not always healthy, and that was extremely related to food.

Now, I wasn't an anorexic or a bulimic, but I had probably a low-grade eating disorder.

And um, I still know many, many adults who have what I would call exercise bulimia.

It goes like this I ate that cheesecake, I'm gonna run extra now.

Because I've consumed tit for tat.

Instead of I have a relationship in which I can enjoy and be nourished and take time.

And I did read this book very interestingly uh a couple of years ago that sort of says, it's interesting, what do you do when you eat by yourself?

Do you read, do you watch television, or are you attentive to your body and the food?

Well, I just can't wait attentive, like you actually think about it.

Because you know it takes you 15 minutes to process whether you're full or not.

This was an interesting book because it said, listen, if you really, it wasn't about losing weight, if you want to be healthy, you will not do anything else while you eat, but pay attention to your body and your food.

Now I cannot make myself do that because I'm wasting time, I'm not being productive.

Why am I saying all this?

Because if Jesus is the bread of life and we consume him, we might be missing the invitation here.

Our relationship with food is really going to process our relationship with Jesus as bread and how we understand that.

I didn't think I'm stretching this too far.

You weren't.

Because bread was the most important commodity, even in France, the baguette is cost control.

So it is the main stack of life.

Because they didn't eat a lot of meat.

These people didn't either, and it's very helpful to know that archaeological evidence suggests that the Galilee actually had fish.

So people had an additional staple in their diet, but for your average Israelite, 90% of your daily nutrition was a two-pound loaf of bread.

That was your daily bread.

The other 10% came from really bad wine.

Really bad.

And also maybe some olive oil, maybe some pomegranates and figs, but those were pretty much luxury goods.

You got meat a few times a year.

And this is what you did, and this is where the word daily grind comes from.

It's not about coffee.

It took women in general five and a half hours to prepare the two-pound daily bread loaf that you ate.

So it's interesting to think I'm the bread of life, I'm 90% of your nutritional needs.

That's an that's an interesting reorientation about bread is something we put on the side of our plate versus the plate.

And I again I just I I'm I hope I'm not annoying you here.

I'm just trying to push what the language could mean.

Of course, what we decided, and what we still are embroiled in as a church, and this is really interesting, if you have an ecumenical gathering, you know, ecumenical means Christians of all different kinds of tribes get together, which you will never do together.

There's one thing you can never do, and that's have the Eucharist.

You can never do it.

Because it means different things to all of us.

And of course, what we what we do, and I think this comes back to the bread of life bit, right, is there's this very early word, and this this is like comes from your European European history textbook, transubstantiation, right?

Change in substance.

Because our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters believe that it becomes the literal body and blood of Jesus.

And you may say, how can they believe that?

It doesn't taste like blood or like flesh.

Well, the way they do this is by Aristotle.

He says all things have have two different realities to them.

They have their accidents, that is the ways we sense them, and they have their essence.

So the belief in transubstantiation is that the chemical formula of the bread and the wine change to become the body and blood of Jesus literally, but they the accidents don't change.

So they taste like bread and wine, they always will, but their molecular formula changed.

That's kind of it.

Their substance changed.

And if you think through this, this is why in the Mass the language is about altar and sacrifice, because you're doing the sacrifice of Jesus again in his body and consuming the sacrifice of body, which is flesh and blood.

Sacrifice.

Every time you do the mass, it's not there's just the memorial.

That's the Episcopalian language.

This is a memorial of our redemption.

The Catholic language is this is the sacrifice of Jesus.

Again, we will do it every Sunday, and sometimes every weekday.

Luther said no, no, to this in a funny way.

He said, that doesn't happen.

It's not this Aristotelian thing, but it does have the real presence of Jesus.

I'm gonna be honest with you, it's kind of saying the same thing.

When you say the real presence is now in the bread, you're saying, no, the accidents didn't change, but the essence changed.

Before the Eucharistic prayer, it was bread and wine, and now it is not.

It's somehow Jesus is really present in the bread and wine mysteriously.

That's the same thing.

Almost.

But when you say Jesus is present in the bread, here's really how it's kind of changed for us.

He's present in the bread in a mysterious way, and that's what opens the gate for the Anglicans, not the Scots.

The Scots believe in these phrases, altar sacrifice.

The Anglicans believe in table and nourishment.

Yeah, and let me see if I can do this.

Sacrifice is about killing Jesus again on an altar.

The Lord's table is where elements that nourish only our body now nourish our spirit.

I hope that's helpful what I'm saying.

It's not better in some ways.

Listen, you can't have a table without some sacrifice of time or food or whatever.

In some ways they're related.

The question is, what do we emphasize?

Is it remission of sin or is it strength for the journey?

Is it only those worthy of the king's precious gifts, or is it all are invited?

I hope you see what I'm what I'm getting here, uh, even though initially the essence has changed.

The essence is changed.

Then there's the Zwingli perspective, and this is also Southern Baptist, which is no, the essence doesn't change, it's just a really strong symbol.

Now, just a strong symbol is a funny word because a symbol points to a reality deeper than itself.

I would tell you probably, Episcopalians are all over the map here.

What they actually believe.

But you know what we practice is.

If we say this is guiding us into a reality of God, and we make that up, and God doesn't change the essence, we still have to treat it like it's a holy thing, not like a regular thing.

In any of these things, right, we don't treat the wine and the bread like we would regular wine and bread that we're done with.

And here's the proof and the pudding.

In the sacristy, we have two sinks.

One goes into the sewer and the other goes into the ground.

We pour leftover wine into the ground.

Actually, I drink it because I was formed in a place somewhere in between these, and that's what the priest did.

I've had somebody tell me I am setting a bad example about alcohol abuse.

I disagree with them, um, but I understand their point.

Um to me, it's it's an act of my own piety.

That's how I was formed.

There's not that much line there's anything.

And if there is, I don't drink it all, let me tell you what.

Um passes it around.

We pass, but there's usually not very much.

Um the little sink is called a piscina, and that's what goes into the ground.

The bread we never throw away.

We don't eat it either.

We throw it outside and have the animals get it.

In my home, I give it to the chickens, actually.

So maybe I don't treat it different than I would at home, except most of us throw scraps away that we don't want.

So we try to treat this a little different.

The bread, actually, if it's wafers, they go in the tabernacle because we can use those again.

The actual bread gets really gross within a couple of days.

That's what we throw out to the squirrels.

So we treat it different, even if it was just a symbol.

And and that is what I want to say is consistent with wherever you are, is we we we treat this stuff different.

And and all of that was really a long way of saying if Jesus is the bread of life, we have to think about how to treat that differently from I just need calories so I can exercise.

Again, I think we have a very um superficial relationship with food.

I know I'm threatened by my own, and I think that that plays at what we do with this story.

The tabernacle is the box in which we put the reserve sacrament.

Reserved sacrament really just means leftovers.

Um of course I had no idea, and so I wonder what it was.

It's not a box.

In our church, it's behind the ambo or the lectern.

It's a little brass box that goes into the wall, and that's where the consecrated wine that did not go into a chalice.

Listen, if it goes in the chalice, it gets consumed or poured out.

But we sometimes consecrate more wine than we need.

We put it in a bottle in there.

When do we use that?

Well, when it gets full, I insist we use it on Sunday morning, but we use it when we do uh visits to people who are homebound because lay people can't consecrate wine.

And honestly, I don't do the Eucharistic prayer in a home visit, I just take some wine out of there.

And then the bread goes into a thing, and the only other thing that really is in there is oil for anointing the sick or and chrism.

Those are the two different oils.

Let me ask you the when we take the bread here.

I think church uses unleavened bread.

Uh is a particular reason for the leaven.

Unleavened bread.

Yeah, well, um, and this comes back to Sandra's question just a little bit, and we got to read the story about the unleavened bread.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters eat unleavened bread only one week out of the year.

There's nothing wrong with yeast, and this is a good reminder.

Back then in Egypt, there was no Fleischmanns or Red Star.

There were no yeast packets.

Where did you get yeast from?

Sourdough starter or from the air itself?

Like if you live in San Francisco, you can knead some dough and leave it out for a while, and the yeast in the air will get into the dough and it will rise a bit.

They didn't have time for the bread to rise because they were leaving in the middle of the night.

That's the bottom line.

The ladies did the daily grind, they had the dough, and instead of cooking it at say seven in the morning, they cooked it at midnight.

So it just didn't have time to rise.

And the reason then in Passover you avoid the yeast is so that you relive the story yourself.

Yeast is not sinful, although, interestingly enough, because it's the unleavened bread gets identified with the holiest festival of the year, you start to think yeast may not be so good.

So actually, yeast goes either way.

Like when you hear Jesus say, the kingdom of God is like yeast, that a lady kneads into some bread, you may say, Ah, faith is small and it penetrates the whole thing.

And that could be true, but yeast does start to become a cipher from less than ideal, as are women.

So it's another one of those things.

Is it an analogy or is it a metaphor that the kingdom of God is like ordinary stuff that, like a lady, that means she's unclean one quarter of the year, needs through all your dough.

How on earth is the kingdom of God like ordinary stuff that unclean people touch?

How is it, but it is?

Well, I think, and this is what's really helpful, there's a j only Jesuits do this.

I want you to know.

I really like Jesuits.

Greg Boyle, he's the founder of Humboy Industries, he's really a national name.

He says, you know, Jesus actually is never worried that we'll forget how ordinary the Eucharist is.

How extraordinary it is.

He's never worried about that.

He's worried we'll forget how ordinary it is, that it's a meal of nourishment shared among friends.

So, you know, maybe this bit about yeast and women is God's work isn't done by the holiest and pious people.

It's done by people.

Sometimes even dirty people.

Okay, I know I'm way off topic.

But bread's the topic.

Bread's the topic, right?

Bread's the topic, and how, again, how we relate to bread, I think.

Jesus tells the people, listen, they say, like, we want bread.

We want you to nourish our bodies.

And Jesus says, Listen, if you got that, you'd still die.

Your ancestors ate that magic bread and they died.

And he doesn't mean he doesn't mean they grew old and their heart stopped beating.

That certainly happened.

Remember, in John, eternal life might be as much about the way we live now as after we die.

If you know your story, the ancestors who ate the manna didn't make it into the promised land.

They didn't make it.

Because they didn't really trust the God who was giving them the bread.

They relate it to God as a commodity giver.

And I would tell you, I think most of us probably do too.

And I think maybe another way to hear this is Jesus is inviting us out of a tit for tat relationship with God where we earn heavenly merits into something different.

Of course, it is funny.

I'll tell you, as a Southern Baptist, when we were missionaries, it was very important we saved people's souls because even if they had terrible physical life, they'd go to heaven then.

So our missionary efforts, in my head at least, I didn't know if this is quite right, were focused on converting people by getting them to pray the sinner's prayer, not meeting their spiritual needs, our physical needs.

Because you can meet their physical needs and they're still going to die.

Which is one way to read this passage.

Of course, you know, in Maslow's hierarchy, if you don't have your physical needs met, you cannot contemplate your spiritual needs.

An interesting way to rethink what the bread of life is about.

Oh, you can suffer and just come to God, and then when you die, you'll go to heaven.

Surely that makes no sense reasonably.

Because someone who's starving cannot think about their spiritual needs.

That's what our best psychology tells us.

They have to have some reliable food to think about their spirituality.

So there has to be both things, right?

There has to be feeding hungry people and nourishing spirits.

Which is why food is an interesting symbol, because it might do both things.

You know, this is an interesting thought, but if you've ever been out to a really nice restaurant and you knew it was fancy and you knew it was expensive, you've probably been disappointed before.

Because, quite honestly, for me, the difference between a good meal and a great meal is the mood I'm in and the company I'm with.

It has very little to do with what actually shows up on the plate.

And maybe that's what Jesus is talking about.

Our relationship with food is embedded in our relationship with who we eat it with and how we do it.

There is no way if you've ever been by yourself for a week and you made your own meals, you enjoyed it as much as when you shared those meals with other people.

Tells us.

Tells me about my unhealthy relationship with food.

So again, if Jesus is like that kind of food, if we relate to him like that, I think we might be getting this wrong.

Which is why I think this sounds crazy, but I think Jesus might be inviting us to change our relationship with our food.

Because if we don't get the things that are right in front of us, how will we get the things that are not?

I mean, that's basically what he tells people.

If you don't understand physical realities, how can you understand the femoral ones?

Okay, I've I've probably made that case too much.

Any other thoughts on the bread of life?

You guys are really patient.

You probably are like atoning for secret sins or something by putting up with this stuff.

I do hope, and I trust, that you've had meals with people in which you left spiritually nourished as well.

And I think that's the goal of the Eucharist is to do the double nourishment.

Interesting thought is, you know, Jesus says, whenever you eat this bread and drink this wine, remember me.

And really what he's saying is, at least three times a day, remember me.

Not once a week.

So sometimes I meet Episcopals that are like, oh, we do that Eucharist every week, and that makes it, you know, it waters it down.

Jesus had in mind we would do this more than we do it.

Because once a week isn't enough.

It's this constant bit.

Just as we pay attention to the food and the nourishment in front of us, we have an opportunity to pay attention to the nourishment of our spirits and our community.

Well, you know, uh in line with uh this conversation uh on page 150, then the father says, do you want to be doing well?

And that's the story of the man who sick man by the pool.

And um one of the things that I came across, and I said in the title, was that the story of man by the pool, uh, it confirms the fact that sometimes we call our contribute to our own suffering or stand in the way of our own feeling.

I think this ties in with how we always food.

Help ourselves or do we hurt ourselves?

And it also refers to our spiritual life.

Do we help ourselves or do we hurt ourselves?

And so uh with this in the story, Jesus asks the man if he wants to get well.

Did you notice that he answered that person?

The man did not answer Jesus.

And so it said, uh, unless one has the will to be well, then the likeness of God is remaining.

So unless we really want a relationship with God, then it's not going to happen.

We think you know, God does all this stuff for us, but God wants relationship and he resolved in response.

Okay now, but uh then uh gives all kinds of excuses why he doesn't get into the water.

He says that no one is there at people, the others are faster than he is, and it's interesting that he hasn't made any connections to build.

In other words, it sounds like he's an isolated community.

And so he hasn't built any community in 38 years.

So did he get well or not?

Well, you don't ask the question.

What do you say he is?

Maybe five years before he was that day.

And also another thing that um he doesn't do is he does he does not proclaim Jesus to be a prophet.

And also our Lord, our Christ.

And he doesn't invite others to experience Jesus by himself.

So what's the message here?

What do you say the message is?

I think you should say what you think the message is.

That's what you're doing.

Well, you know, this reminds me of times of times when I was younger.

In other words, I didn't do life, you know, uh, I did, but I um there were times when I was young, but I don't like you saying that.

Because all of my life I focus actually.

But I look around me and I see people who really complain a lot and they don't do anything to help themselves, or they are have always some excuse for not accomplishing something, or for not doing what they need to to make well, or eat better, or exercise, or things like that sort of.

So it seems to me that there's a lot of uh people who call themselves Christians who fit this category.

In other words, they go to church on Sundays to get something, but during the week, they do it during the but I don't think it matches grace, because I don't think we earn grace.

I think we just have to put ourselves in the posture to receive it, and that might be what you're saying.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, but you have to make yourself a label.

You know, I um I hope it's helpful to say, and I really appreciate this.

I wish I'd known the difference when I was 10.

Brene Brown does a lot of work, work differentiating between the words shame and guilt.

So guilt means I made a bad choice.

And I regret it.

I regret it and I can fix it.

And the fact that I can make a different choice next time is predicated on the belief of my own agency and ability.

People who experience guilt tend to be strong achievers.

They do well in high school, they have uh they usually go to college, they have good professional jobs, they tend to stay pretty well away from addiction and abusive behaviors, quite honestly, because they feel like even when they make a bad choice, they can choose differently.

Shame, on the other hand, is when instead of feeling like you made a bad choice, you are inherently bad.

There is something wrong with you.

Ignore it public thing.

Well, interestingly enough, what she says about shame is that people who are shame prone, instead of saying, I can choose differently next time, say I did this bad thing because I'm bad, and I will always be bad, and there's something wrong with me, and those people tend to be addicts.

They tend to not perform well in things like school and jobs, etc.

Um hard to know if the man on the mat is ashamed or guilty.

He's ashamed of old mat.

He's been there a long time.

I think one way we could read the story is get up off your ass and get in that pool.

He might not actually be able to do that.

What if he really can't?

Well, he should have made some friends.

Um, you know, he's in a culture that judges his inherent value by his disability.

Like you're disabled, it's because you're a sinner, you should be ashamed.

Really hard for people who are shame prone to make friends with people who are guilt prone.

People who are ashamed make friendships with people who are ashamed.

I don't know if you ever noticed, there are folks who the bad apples, they tend to seek out the other bad apples.

That's because they can relate to them.

They cannot relate to well-polished apples because they just don't feel like they're worthy.

You know, it's a really hard thing, I think, to look at people who you know how to fix the behavior.

Like you know, you stop drinking, or you save that money instead of spending it, or you pay your rent first instead of buying a new car.

Those are decision points that guilt-prone people make, and they're not decision points that shame-prone people make because they don't feel like they have the agency to do anything different.

Now, they shouldn't feel that way, but they do.

I mean, this is, I think, the hard bit.

And in the story, I will tell you, um, I feel judgment because I'm a Jay guy.

But I also know there's many times in my life where, quite frankly, I don't know how to be well.

And the help people are offering is actually no help at all.

I don't know how to be well.

I think it's an interesting story about that.

Do you want to be well?

I mean, sometimes I don't even know what wellness looks like.

Sometimes I think I just want to stop hurting, but that doesn't mean I'm well.

Do you do do you know what I mean?

Sometimes I look too too low.

I had a friend several years ago whose knee got crushed in an automobile accident, and I mean absolutely crushed.

And she went to the doctor over and over and over again, and that the pain is really bad, and I bet the pain was really bad, no doubt.

And one day the doctor said, after I fix your knee, what are you gonna bitch about next?

Obviously, it's terrible bedside manner.

But it's also an interesting invitation about wellness.

I'm not excusing the doctor, but it but you know, it was a very harsh phrase.

But it's an interesting thing to think about.

Are we more concerned with being pain free or being well?

Because I think those are actually different realities.

Yeah, you want you know that plays out even with um people who shouldn't cover this another cover.

And then there are others who tried to try, but for some reason or other the tide always turned against them.

So, yeah, so this, I mean, um this story has two interpretations.

I I mean, I think there's even more than two.

I mean, I'll be honest with you.

Like, I pray a healing prayer over people who we all know are going to die.

And the prayer includes a phrase like, may God drave away from you all sickness of mind and body.

And and friends, I'd be lying to you if I told you I believed God was gonna wipe up their death diagnosis.

I'm not thinking that at all.

I I'm thinking that wellness may not be a one-to-one relationship with whether we live five more days.

Now I pray that prayer I think with integrity, but I'll tell you, I'm rarely thinking, God, I sure hope you take care of this blastoma like that.

And maybe I have weak faith, but I but I think it does invite us into this idea about what wellness is.

I I'm not telling you I don't think God.

I'm not saying God does not do miracles.

I'm not saying that.

But I am saying uh that I I think I I think I try really hard to give room for mystery.

And quite honestly, I think I grew up that if I believed strong enough, God would do exactly what I asked.

So if it doesn't happen, it's my fault.

And um, wow, that means I have to earn God's grace by being really good, and that just seems not how grace is.

That seems like earnings, not giftings.

I don't know why God does it sometimes and not others.

I have no idea.

I don't.

And that puts us in this predicament because there's lots of people like this Matt person who have migraines for 30 years, and it's not because their faith is not strong.

Like I just refuse to accept that.

Because I don't think that's life-giving.

This is something that we'd said earlier, Kathy started to say, you know, the Sabbath is really about how do we choose life.

And I would tell you, I think that's the number one criterion in why the Episcopal Church celebrates same-sex marriage as a sacrament because we've chosen life instead of tradition.

You know, people who are still their brain is why they say you can't.

Unless there's some doctor that has discovered something that can unscrew their brain or something.

Which I think is why it's so hard and so important to think about the difference between sympathy and empathy.

Because I'll tell you, I have a high pain threshold, and when I see somebody in pain, my my sympathetic response is suck it up.

That's what I would do.

Instead of making room for them really being in pain.

As if their being in pain was a challenge to who I am and what I believe in.

But that's how I perceive it.

When I come to somebody in sympathy, we're having a competition for whose reality is right, theirs or mine.

And I think we can come to these stories that way, or we could say, you know, and this I think is coming back to shame-prone people.

I see people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol, who are going to school and even doing assignments and not turning them in.

And my J brain says, turn in your damn work.

Just stop drinking.

Because the way they're living is a challenge for the way I want to live.

But why is it a challenge?

And what if I made room for a brain and a life that doesn't have clear choices like I do?

And I think the text actually doesn't invite us into those kinds of thoughts.

We can read judgmentally or we can read empathetically.

We can read when Jesus heals that paralytic on the Sabbath, he says, don't sin so that nothing worse happens to you.

We could hear Jesus saying, I just gave you a get out of jail free card, but you do something wrong again, and I'm gonna throw you into a lower circle of hell.

Or we could hear Jesus saying, Listen, you've been delivered from a circumstance that was consuming your life.

Please don't find yourself in another one of those.

Be vigilant to make sure you don't live a separation from the life God intends for you.

Whether that's an illness or an addiction.

Do you get what I'm saying about the difference?

One is God will strike you down even worse because you got forgiven and you should know better.

The other is, listen, we've given you this restoration of life.

Now live into it.

For your own sake.

And if you're filled with the spirit, like I presume that he was, that's the way you will go.

Yeah, you know, and I think that's an interesting thing that you've said there.

I think that's really, really helpful.

In my young life, I thought being filled with the spirit is like this once-in-a-life thing.

It's really interesting to think about spirit as moving air and think about how many times you have to fill your sp your body with the spirit every day to stay alive.

I mean, probably something like 30 times a minute at least.

It takes a lot of work to be full of the spirit all the time, doesn't it?

I mean, that's in some ways I think it's really helpful to say this is like not just daily bread, this is like every breath.

Not so you have a bigger workload on your back, but so that you have an opportunity to be focused in really regular things that we take for granted, like well, like breathing.

You don't think about it most of the time.

It's one of those neat things about having started to do yoga recently.

This is what yoga is about, is to pay attention to your breath, because we so rarely do it.

And a good yoga teacher doesn't say, like, okay, go from Warrior One and then put your arms back and lay over.

They say, inhale, forward fold, slowly exhale, come up.

They try to get you to do the point of the thing, which is to focus on your breathing.

What's interesting is when you do that, the time goes by really fast.

That's the strange thing.

When you focus on your breathing, it's like, what?

That was an hour?

It felt like five minutes.

When I focus on the workout, it lasts forever.

And paying attention to something we take for granted, that might be what the bread of life is all about.

One of the things that told me to think about is how can I return to a day of rest?

But how do I get that data?

How do you get that day to rest?

How do I get that day at rest?

That introduces a really important concept that we read about in the book.

It's called building a fence around the Torah.

I don't know if you remember that phrase, building a fence around the Torah.

This is really what's happening in Matthew.

So reminder, the Torah, that's Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

Those are the five most sacred books in the Bible, if you're Jewish.

More sacred than the Psalms.

Absolutely.

They tell you how to live in community with other people and with God.

And in that sense, they're God's gift.

Not an operating manual, but a sense in how you're meant to enjoy the life God has given you.

The Pharisees, you may know this, decided that what they would do is pull out bullet points.

613 of them, so that you were operating in accordance with this enjoyment God wanted you to have.

There's 365 do's.

Do this.

Honor your father and your mother, and there's 248 don'ts.

A do for every day of the soul of the year, and a don't for every bone in your body.

You don't have 248 bones.

But that's how the tradition goes.

You had to memorize these before your bar mitzvah.

Bar means son, mitzvah means commandment.

To be a son of the commandment, you knew the commandments.

Now, they extrapolated these 613 rules to make sure you protected the core.

Sometimes they went a little over and above.

I'll just give you an example of this because my brother is orthodox.

You can't have meat and dairy.

You can't.

Because of one particular verse, you can't boil a kid in its mother's milk.

That's actually probably not how it reads.

It probably means you can't boil a kid in its mother's fat, which is really about you can't kill two generations at the same time.

That's it's not sustainable.

But rabbinic tradition says it's milk.

So you can't have meat and dairy.

Now, meat, we we get this wrong.

Meat does not include birds.

Birds are not meat.

Meat are ruminants only.

Meat are deer and cattle and sheep and goats.

That's meat if you're Jewish.

Swine is not meat.

Because it's an omnivore, not a ruminant, you can't eat it.

A chicken and a turkey are not meat, they're birds.

So technically, you can combine dairy and birds.

But if you're Orthodox, you can't.

Because if you started to mix birds and dairy, that might lead you down the slippery slope of combining meat and dairy, so you don't do it.

Now you may say that's silly.

That's called building a fence around the fence around the Torah.

Jesus says, you've heard it's wrong to commit adultery.

I tell you, you look at somebody lustfully, you've already done it.

That's called a fence around a fence.

It's the fence is there to make sure you don't actually walk, you know, the balance beam because you could fall.

You stay behind the fence, you'll never get close to violating it.

That's what fences do, they keep you a safe distance away.

How many fences do you need?

One of the injunctions around the Sabbath is you build a fence around it by not working so that you don't get distracted from what you're supposed to be doing.

Now, the way that works in Israel is it's supposed to be a party.

You cook all day Friday, the day begins when you see three stars in the sky, the work's been done, now you sit, you don't wash the dishes, you have fun with each other.

You're allowed to eat, but you don't go do business.

You don't turn on light switches, and that's getting to be where you're building fences around fences around fences.

But the goal is so that you don't get distracted.

We could choose to make the Sabbath a 24-hour literal period.

We could choose to do that.

And if we did that, we'd probably be building a fence around the idea.

We'd be protecting the time.

Sometimes intrusions happen even when you do that.

Your donkey falls in a well.

It probably could sit in there for a day.

But out of consideration for the animal, you pull it out.

Or you know, hey, you keep your oxen pinned up all the time.

I mean, not only do they just poop everywhere, but you know, like they get sore.

They're just standing there.

Remember, they lived in your house in a very small pit.

You don't have barns.

Rich people have barns.

So you you trot them out for their sake.

So Jesus, in some ways, is challenging the fence.

He's not challenging the ideas of fences, he's challenging whether we live by the fence or by the kernel we're meant to protect.

I'd say the greater question for each one of us is not do you observe a Sabbath one day a week.

Do you observe a Sabbath when you can?

Reminder, the rabbis say the first thing God makes is time, night and day.

The fourth thing God makes is things to govern the night, the time, sun, moon, stars.

God rests and there's no evening and morning.

God rests in time.

The rabbis say the Sabbath is where you enjoy God's presence in time.

The question is, are we aware of God in time?

And do we enjoy that awareness?

Or is it a burden to us?

If we think that God has a naughty nice list, I guarantee you you will not enjoy an awareness of God's presence.

I guarantee you that's not enjoyable.

Which means we probably have to reimagine God.

The intent is to enjoy God's presence in time, not to choke on it.

And shame is something that does that.

It does.

There's a doctor out of California, I always forget his name, but he studies cultural beliefs and mobility.

And what he what he discovered is that even the way we talk about certain things, like uh menopause in women.

So in in South America, um they talk about menopause as like a set as like an early death, right?

Women can't produce children to no good anymore.

It's kind of like an attitude.

Whereas in places like Japan, uh it's called the second spring.

And so it's like now it's just this this renewal, this time for to enjoy yourself.

And so you see longevity of women in Japan, um, you know, it's lot they're they have longer lives.

And so it's like this cultural shame that we kind of internalize.

Yeah.

Yeah, it just affects us in many different ways.

I've done a lot of shame research and would be really excited to share about it.

But just in case you're wondering, I don't know if I'm shame prone.

If you constantly break eye contact with other people, you are shame prone.

Because looking at somebody mutually becomes uncomfortable for you.

Do you know people who are forehead starers that they seem to be making eye contact, but they're not?

Shame prone.

Just so you know.

I could talk about that later.

But isn't it it is really interesting what it what it does and that separation that it creates.

And again, if you're shame prone, there's really no moment where God's presence is satisfying.

And and I think it's really interesting, uh, we're a little bit over time, but you know, um, Jesus says, My father is still working.

I thought that was interesting, too.

The statement of the United Church of Christ is God is still speaking.

God's not done speaking, God is still speaking.

I hope you hear God's voice as we read week 20.

Thanks for putting up with a lot today.