Taste and See
Pentecost 12, Proper 15 8/15/21
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Timothy C. Nunez
Jesus said, “I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” That is such a strange thing to say. How can his flesh be bread?
What does it mean to taste the bread of life?
I’ve shared a couple of stories with you from mission trips to El Hogar, a school for the orphans and the poorest children in Honduras. One day on a trip in 2015, a girl named Andrea came running up all excited. My Spanish is pretty good, so I understood what she was saying but, it didn’t make any sense. “Come! Bread is meat!” So I went with her to the kitchen where they teach the kids to cook.
Andrea, a girl named Wendy and a boy named Rene were involved with a science fair project. It was fascinating and I didn’t believe it was possible at first. The project was to extract gluten from flour, then concentrate it into a meat substitute. From that, they were going to make soup, stir fried rice and hamburgers.
It was neat to watch these kids get totally engrossed in the project. They did research on it. They studied the properties of gluten. They acquired and followed a process, taking notes and pictures at each step. It began with soaking the flour to release the gluten into the water, then drying that out to get the protein. As that dried, they had to work with it to create a solid meat substitute that looked a lot like tofu.
Then they followed recipes to season the meat substitute and prepare the dishes. Again, all documented with notes and pictures. All of that was done with intensity and passion, which drove them to be very thorough. I had a very high opinion of the work those kids had done. Then they came for me. A few of them tracked me down on the other side of their campus and literally dragged me to their kitchen.
The results were special. The soup and the stir-fried rice came out well. But you can hide a lot in a soup or in a rice dish. The real test came with the burgers. There were several of these gluten hamburgers on a plate, cut into quarters. They offered me – no, insisted – I take one. They looked like burgers. In the rack in front of you, you should find a paper with pictures of these kids and their burgers. (If you are reading this, a page of pictures is attached.) They look good, don’t they?
But even seeing isn’t quite believing. All of their study and work is valid, everything was done properly. But you really don’t know until you taste it.
If I really wanted to know if they had succeeded in making a burger out of flour, of making bread into meat, into flesh, I had to try it. And these kids were so very intent on me trying it. They have McDonald’s in Honduras – arques de oro – but they wanted an American to judge their burger. They wanted Padre Tim to try their burger.
I did. It was amazing. It tasted like a burger and, more surprisingly, its texture felt like a burger. If I had not known it wasn’t real hamburger, I would have assumed it was. I was shocked. I was impressed. They won their science fair and advanced to regionals. I don’t know how far they got, but the legend lives on.
(I’m Facebook friends with Andrea. She’s preparing to start college now and I told her I would be telling this story to you today. She is pleased.)
We have a similar issue in our faith. There’s a mystery involved. It’s one thing to sign on to Christian principles, to wrestle with the ways we are to apply them in our daily life and work. It’s another to see the value in the organization of the Church, the role we play in forming men and women, of supporting children and families and improving our community. Churches are very much the glue of this community.
It’s analogous to the ways we think about God. God is great beyond all measure in every way, infinite and beyond time. He created everything and is connected to all of it. And He is concerned with the way you’re going to spend your afternoon, the decisions you’ll make tomorrow and the ways you will comport yourself, and who you will help. We know that God is love, which demands a life-long exploration of those words and what they mean. All of that is important, critically important.
We read the stories, we learn about the process and the recipe for our salvation. It looks good. It sounds marvelous – the greatest story ever told, they say. I agree. And we are confronted with this witness that God became flesh and walked among us. There was actually, in fact, in time, in history, this guy who personally embodied all of that magnificence of God.
“Eat my flesh,” he said. “Drink my blood. And if you don’t, you have no life in you.” In other words, if we stop short of taking that leap of faith, taking the opportunity to talk to God, to pray to Jesus, to develop that relationship with him personally and among us as a community, then we haven’t bitten into the burger, we haven't ingested him, taken him in to the very core of our being such that he animates every cell in our bodies and every fiber of our being. That is what it means to have His life in you. He is the course of true wisdom, as the Proverbs note and the guide to living wisely as Paul notes.
Jesus said, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” I want that for me and I want it for you. I look at a school like El Hogar where they pull these kids out of desperate poverty and teach them, feed them, house them, clothe them and provide medical and dental care for them. All of that is a manifestation of life, the physical manifestation of Christ’s love. The life these kids are building reflects, faintly, the life Christ has for them forever. The same is true for the children we raise in our families and collectively in this church. We love them the best we can as a reflection of God’s love.
We can’t physically go out and drag people to come and try Jesus. But we should have the same joy and enthusiasm those kids had when they came and got me. Look at the joy in their faces; radiant joy. They weren’t thinking about Jesus in that moment but that moment was entirely created at his command.
El Hogar exists because American Christians responded to pleas about an orphan crisis in Tegucigalpa. La Iglesia del Buen Pastor exists today because this church planted it. Why should we care? Why should we go there? Not everyone has the same call to get involved with that, but some do and that means we do. Because we’ve taken that bite, we’ve tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and it comes with a call to share Him.
As Jeff shared earlier, there are a lot of kids right here who aren’t getting that love and guidance at all. Idols Aside Ministries is working on that very problem in our community among fatherless youths. Jeff will be back with us on Re-Connection Sunday in two weeks. Please pray as to how God is calling you to serve him. Feeling inadequate isn’t an out. It isn’t easy and can be sorely disappointing at times. But if you are called to it, Christ will use you.
Is it buying into an idea? Is it responding to a need? Or is it a nudge of the Holy Spirit on your spirit? Yes, yes and yes.
Take a bite. Taste and see that the Lord is good.
AMEN!