Messages from the Body

Here is a sampling of some of the messages that have made a special impact at CCiPH, and that have been transcribed or written in manuscript.

Most weeks in our equipping assembly, at least one man has been asked to prepare a message that will build up believers. Often, the message is taken from the liturgical Gospel reading of the day, or it is a life message that God has been working into the fabric of that man. It is included here to build you up.

Eating and Drinking Jesus: Hard Sayings

Message from Ben Gregory on August 24, 2003

In the fall of 1994 I drove from Cincinnati down to a little Church in Pendleton County Kentucky to talk with their leadership about a part-time youth ministry gig.  I was 22 years old, had hair most of the way down to my butt, a big gold hoop in my ear and hadn’t shaved for days—I didn’t know if they’d want me around down there or not.  But the nearer I got to where my directions told me that their building was, the more convinced I became that I wanted me around down there.  The scenery that I passed as I wound my way out Kentucky Route 22 was breathtaking.  It was October and the leaves were turning, and hill after rolling hill stretched out in fiery reds and oranges and yellows.   There were wide fields where cows did whatever cows do and creeks of crisp-looking water that broke up and splashed over rocks and caught the light at the shallow places.  I had never wanted to be a part of a landscape so badly in my life.  Michael Wilson says that we all want to hold beauty, and I think that’s the feeling he’s talking about, but that’s hard to do—in fact, as I drove, I thought it must be impossible—to live what I’m looking at.  It’s not, but it took a child to show me how to do it.  More on that later…

Maybe you remember that we talked about this a couple weeks ago.  About the hunger that we all feel, and about how Jesus is the bread that comes from heaven & gives life to the world.  I’d like to pursue that a little farther today.  I’ve been aware for a long time that Jesus said that he came to bring life.  That’s John 10:10, right?  “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.”  But I’ve been aware for nearly as long that I don’t see, among believers, a lot of what looks to me like life to the full.  Now that’s just my perception and I know that’s tricky, (and I think we do a pretty good job here) but I don’t recall a single conversation that I’ve had with anyone outside of Christ who mentioned having seen in the lives of Christian people anything attractive.  It seems like for years, all that we’ve had to offer people is a ticket out of hell and a meeting to go to, and I’m not sure that’s really all Jesus came to bring.  For a long time I felt about the life that Jesus seemed to be talking about, like I felt about the scenery in Kentucky--I had an idea what it looked like & I liked it, but it was something out there.  It wasn’t in the present tense that Jesus uses in verse 54 when he says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”  And I didn’t know how to experience it the way I longed to.

Part of the problem is that, to the religiously inclined, this kind of life can be offensive.  Look at our text.  Jesus has just told them that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life, implying all kinds of scandalous things about himself.  (a footnote:  It may be helpful to think of eternal life not in terms of length or duration—because we’ll all exist forever somewhere—but in terms of quality.  Eternal life is a new kind of life.)  And many of his disciples—people who had been following him, not just people out to see the show—many of his disciples can’t deal with what he’s telling them and they leave.  And at least part of what’s going on here is that the vast majority of his audience were Jewish people, and the things that Jesus was saying we’re offensive to their religion.  Then nature of the abundant life, this “life to the full” that Jesus provides does not lend itself to rigid religious demands and rules and it refuses to be bound by safe predictability.  You can live it, but you can’t tame it.

John has already shown us this once in chapter 2.  Jesus is at a wedding party and they’ve run out of wine and its about to become terribly embarrassing for the hosts, so Jesus fixes it by turning water into wine.  Ruthie and I go to a wine tasting most Friday nights—the good vendors tell good stories.  They’re there to sell their stuff, so they want to make it interesting.  This week we learned about Dynamite Wine and something called Liar’s Dice and one called Turnbull.  Apparently, several hundred years ago a man saved the king’s life by turning grabbing a charging bull by the horns and turning it and this man was rewarded with a vineyard.  I’d love to hear the story that would’ve gone with this batch of wine that Jesus makes: ”This particular wine is ten minutes old and used to be water.”  But I think it’s significant that what Jesus has them put the water in so he can make wine is their ceremonial washing jars.  So that the party can go on, and to save a married couple the embarrassment of running out of wine.  And maybe neither of those reasons sounds particularly spiritual, but the life that Jesus came to live and to leave for us won’t be defined by religion, or by our misconceptions of what’s “spiritual” and what isn’t.  And we’re used to seeing Jesus do miracles on the Sabbath whenever it suits him.  I think it’s safe to say that we’re not going to find this new kind of life in the safety of rules and religious habits.

Jesus hears them grumbling and says, “If you can’t handle this, what are you going to do when you see me ascend back to heaven through the clouds?”  And people begin to walk away, and it sounds permanent.  Look at verse 66.  “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”  And Jesus lets them go.  I’m trying to imagine what I would do if, suppose, lots of our Tuesday night people were so offended by what I was talking about that they left.  I’d probably make lots of phone calls and send lots of emails and have lots of lunches to try to get them back.  And I’d almost certainly tone down the things I say.  But that’s not what Jesus does.  He doesn’t argue, he doesn’t beg, and he doesn’t change his message to something safer to make them more comfortable.  If The Good News is going to be good news, it can’t be safe.  The artificial security of a homogenized code of behavior, whether it’s based on the Old Testament Law or on contemporary respectable middle-class standards, can’t give life to anyone.

People are leaving.  And Jesus turns to the twelve and asks them if they’re going to leave too.  And Peter (who else?) answers the way he’s seen Jesus answer so many questions—with another question.  “Where would we go?  You have the words of eternal life” And they stay.  And you get the impression that they stay, not so much because they get everything Jesus is talking about, but because they know that there’s no real life anywhere else.  And they do the only thing there is to do when you’ve seen life and beauty and you want to experience it as deeply and truly as you can…  They do what Jennifer Ramsey taught me to do.

I got that job in Pendleton County.  It turned into a full-time ministry, and Jen was in our youth group.  She was a country girl.  She grew up on a farm on the Bracken County/Pendleton County line where her family raised tobacco and dairy cows, and that’s hard work.  She was tough and she was strong and I couldn’t beat her arm-wrestling, but she had a streak of beauty in her too.  She excelled in her art classes in school—painted beautiful pictures, and she stared at hummingbirds out the kitchen window for hours.  And she taught me how to live the beauty that had taken my breath away on that first drive down into that country.

I went out to visit her and her two brothers one hot Kentucky afternoon, which is what you do when you’re “in the ministry” in that part of the world—you ride around an pester people.  I had come dressed the way she had told me too--old clothes, old shoes, and something clean to put on later.  And Jen led Doug and Matthew and me down the driveway to the road, and down the road a half a mile or so, and then off the road into the woods.  And we followed the high riverbank for a while until we came to a place where you could walk across with five steps down.  And she and her brothers walked into the river—it was just up over shoe-level.  They looked back at me and I must’ve looked confused, because Matthew and Doug came back for and each of them grabbed one of my hands, and Jen said, “Come on.”  She might’ve said, “Come, follow me.”  See, I never knew this was something you could do, just march in to a river like that and I actually had to stand there for a minute with the water soaking my feet arguing with myself about it.  “Is this something people do?  Just walk into river for no apparent reason?”  And finally I decided, “why not?”  And we started walking up upstream.  It was hot out, and the river was cool, and it felt wonderful.  The water got deep pretty quickly and the rocks were unsteady & slippery under my feet.  More than once I lost my footing, but they helped me up (I’m very buoyant) and didn’t make fun.  And the water got deeper as we went and I saw things I’d never seen in ways I’d never dreamed of.  Spiders so big they had faces and turtles sunning themselves and snakes and fish and flowers and animal tracks and rocks that the water had worn into eccentric shapes and fishing lures caught in treetops and little pools of tadpoles and shiny things that we couldn’t identify.  And we didn’t have anywhere to go.  And we weren’t looking for anything.  I’m from the city—and in the city we played with toys that did things and we played games with boundaries and rules and winners and losers.  But that day in the river, we just walked.  And when we saw a spider-web that deserved our attention, we stopped and looked at it until we were done.  And when the water was deep and it suited us, we stopped walking and swam and jumped from trees.  And when it needed to be done, we took the biggest rocks we could lift and threw them as far as we could, just to hear the splash.  And the walk wasn’t easy—especially the trip back home against the current, and it wasn’t clean—it was muddy and sweaty and people have been known to come out with their ankles covered with leaches.  But we were together.  And we weren’t spectators of beauty—we felt like participants.  And we knew we were alive.

Walking that river became one of my favorite summer things to do.  And five years later, when Ruthie and I announced that it was time for us to leave, Jen cried and I cried, and then she said to me, “They better have good creeks in heaven.”  And Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life—and have it to the full.”  And he waded chest-deep into the life that we find ourselves living here, and he said, “Come follow me.”