Text: John 6:51-68

Last fall, I received a letter from a fellow United Methodist minister in Minnesota. I've never met him. You don't know him; but you know him.

Here's an excerpt from his letter:

I've been a pastor for seven years now. It has been very hard. I was very idealistic when I came out of seminary. The reality of parish ministry was shattering. You summed up the many stumbling blocks in your book. It's helpful to know that others have been where I am. I really believed that when a congregation was loved and presented with a clear presentation of the gospel, they would fall into line. They would be saved. They would go forth.

How naïve.

So, if they don't care about their souls or the souls of their neighbors, why should I? Does the pastor of the church, does the gospel really count in this increasingly secular age? Well, that's where I've struggled the past years.

And it doesn't help to be schooled in the milieu of church growth and phenomenal evangelism, I'll tell you. As I see others' success, I feel overwhelmed with guilt. Where have I failed? What have I done wrong? Of course I know that being faithful is what counts and planting seeds is all God asks. But that's hard. So I find myself at a crossroads. I'm seriously considering leaving the parish, pursuing an MBA or a degree that will put me in a job where I can see results, be a part of bringing things at last to completion. But it's hard to think of leaving the pastorate. I still love Christ and his church. I still believe in the vitality of the gospel and every person's need to know Jesus. I still believe in the essential mission of the church. However, a life spent painfully wading along in this mire of mediocrity, this poorly defined faith and churches that are content to die is just too much to imagine.

Well, I told you that you knew him. Now there are lots of reasons to come to a national speaking conference. To relax, to see friends, to make contacts. But I want tonight, if I could, to speak to you—to come here apart for this reason, the reason this young pastor has spoken about, maybe even if you didn't know that this was the reason that you came.

Our text. "'For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.' Now many of his disciples when they heard it, they said, 'This is a hard saying. Who can listen to it?' Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples murmured at it, said, 'Do you take offense? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was before? It is the Spirit that gives life. The flesh is of no avail. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.' After this, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went around with him. Jesus said to the twelve, 'Do you also wish to go away?' Simon Peter answered, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.'"

Did the disciples speak for us all that day? Master, this is a hard saying, who can take it? It's just hard, like flint. To come up against the words of Jesus that afternoon was like coming into collision with something. Jesus' sermons, whether he was on the subject of bread and wine, flesh and blood, money and power, provoked a lot of people to say, "Oh, this is a hard saying."

Or as Raymond Brown translates this: "This sort of talk is hard to take. How can anybody pay attention to it?" No wonder that Jesus' most frequent benediction at the end of his sermons was, "Will you also go away?" It's almost like a flipping of a magnet. One side of the magnet, one pole attracts, the other repels. You see it in the text. "Master, this is a hard saying." And then, "Lord, where would we go?" These words, these weird, cannibalistic, Johannine words—they're the words of life. If you listen closely to the letter from that young pastor, you see the same dynamic of attraction-repulsion: "I find myself at a crossroads. I'm seriously considering leaving the parish ministry. But it's hard to think of leaving the pastorate. I still love Christ and his church. However, the thought of a life spent wading in the mire of mediocrity is too much to imagine."

At my first little church in Georgia, we planned a revival. We asked the visiting evangelist from South Carolina to meet with us to plan our revival. He happened to be my father-in-law, because he was the only evangelist we could afford. "What do you want out of your revival?" he asked. One of the lay people said, "We just want you to lift up Jesus."

And he said, "Well, Jesus preached away a lot more than he won. Is that the kind of revival you want?"

This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?

I know that one of the attractions of the parish ministry for me was that I like to be liked. I love to be loved. For most of my life I had good luck with this undertaking. I was president of my class for like seven years in a row. You don't get that way without being nice.

Then I served my first church in rural Georgia. Surprise. Despite my charming personality, two families left my church. They said, "We don't like the RSV version of the Bible. We don't like preachers with long hair. And we don't like Emory University."

And I said, "Well, only one of those is a good reason for leaving the church."

It's tough. It came as a great shock to me that there are some people in this world, some people in the church, that I just did not get to like. And that does something to you.

I teach a freshman seminar at Duke. And by the second or third class, I noted that in most of the class discussions only the men in the class spoke up. None of the women spoke up. I asked them about the fourth class, "How come the men are dominating all of the discussions? How come some of you women don't speak up?"

"Perhaps we didn't feel invited," one of the women replied.

"Invited?"

"Yeah, invited," she said. "'Cause so many times we have spoken up only to be ignored or automatically rejected, and after a while you just stop speaking up."

African American sociologist Shelby Steel has an essay called "The Myth of the Open Door." Speaking of the dilemma of many African American people in America today, Steel said that it was for centuries that the door of opportunity was locked shut for black people. Now that door appears to be unlocked, but there is still a door. And it takes courage to grasp that handle and walk through that now open door. There is a risk in that too—the risk of rejection, the risk of meeting yourself on the other side of the door. Be careful. It's better just to adjust to life on the other side of the door rather than to risk another painful rejection. Rejection is painful.

So here we are: men, women, white, black—we're hoping to avoid rejection. But my point in all of this is to say here we are also with these hard sayings. And what do you do in that?

Field education seminar at the divinity school, and a woman presented her case. It was a one page case study, a verbatim conversation between herself and an irate parishioner after her second sermon.

We read the case. You know, first, I said, and then she said, and then she said and I said, and then she said and I said, and that's when she walked out. Then we discussed the case in the case seminar. "Did you think of saying this to her?" we asked. "Could you maybe have said this to her at the beginning of the conversation? Are you sure that you delivered these remarks to her in the right tone of voice? And maybe you should wait to establish a proper pastoral relationship before you wade into these sorts of controversial subjects. Maybe your lack of experience, your pastoral inexperience, led you perhaps to overstep just a little."

You see, we immediately assumed that what we had here was a failure of technique. Now let's all sit down here with this case study, and let's find out what she did wrong. Was it her tone of voice? Did she use the right strategy? Was it the proper technique? And we're going to "fix" this young pastor, so this will never happen again in her ministry. Let's all go over this case study one more time and figure out what it was she did wrong. Well, did it ever occur to us that maybe what she did was right?

How long has it been since we've been through the sermon, given the altar call while the piano played "Just as I Am," and the unison congregation response was, "It's a hard saying. Who can listen to it?" I'm concerned that so many of our images of success in ministry today don't seem to have room for perfectly outrageous statements like Jesus makes here in the Gospel of John.

Jesus said, "Don't come to me unless you're ready to eat my flesh and drink my blood."

And they said, "Wow, what kind of talk is this?"

And he says, "Oh, you think that's strange? Well, then what would you say if I just ascended right now and went back up from whence I came? What would you do then?"

And they said, "Don't do this, please. This is enough. Don't pull stuff like that with us."

There was a case study that you can find in Luke 18. A young man, a rich, successful young man, rides up in his Porsche, comes up to Jesus: "Good teacher, what do I have to do to get this eternal life?"

And Jesus, who always had a short fuse for these good-looking successful types, says—sort of curt, sort of off the cuff, probably just trying to get rid of him—"Eternal life, it's simple. Don't you already know the answer? You learned it in Sabbath school. Just obey all of the commandments. Just go out and obey all the commandments. That's all you got to do to get eternal life. That ought to knock you off this success kick."

And I think the young man's response just floored Jesus. "Ah, Jesus, heck, that's simple. I've done all that since I was a kid. Never broke a commandment. Jesus, how about giving me a really tough moral assignment? I mean, something that a high achievement, success oriented person like me can sink his teeth into."

And then marvelously in one of the greatest understatements ever spoken in the entire New Testament, Jesus said, "Okay, I need you to do just one teeny-weeny little thing for me, okay? I want you to go out and sell everything you got and give it to the poor. I want you to strip down. I want you to raffle your portfolio, get rid of that Porsche, let your health club membership lapse, throw it away on the poor. Then you'll have what I've got."

And with that, Luke says, the man slumped down and got real depressed. And he walked away. And though the text does not record it—he walked away saying, "It's a hard saying."

And Jesus said, "It's tough. It is really tough to get one of these successful types into my kingdom. It's really hard."

And someone said, "Well, how hard is it, Jesus?"

"Well, it's hard. I'd say it's as hard as to get a fully loaded camel shoved through the eye of a needle."

And the disciple said, "Well, then who can be saved?"

And Jesus said, "You can't. You just can't. They just can't."

And the disciple spoke for us all, "This is a hard saying."

And as the organist played softly "Just as I Am," he drove away in his Porsche. Someone said the only evidence in Luke's Gospel that anyone ever walked away from a discipleship call, and let the Western church know that he walked away because of the money. It's a hard saying. We sugar coat it. We make it therapeutic. We wrap it in the American flag and stand up and salute it. But it's not the American way; it's the Jesus way. And it's a narrow way.

Here are healing words, but they often hurt before they can heal. Hard sayings on which we choke and gag. It's called the gospel.

I preached at the large church of a friend out on the West Coast. I'm not going to mention the church. Large church, a lot of glass. On the way in from the airport they said, "Oh, by the way, don't mention sin. We don't mention sin if we can on Sunday morning. And another thing, don't mention the cross either. Don't get into that cross and blood stuff. Don't mention any of that. People are not into that in Southern California."

When Jesus preached his first sermon in Nazareth, they gave him a cliff. Many who heard Jesus, like that rich, young man, just went away depressed, because they had a lot of stuff and didn't want see it ripped off.

And on that night, when the soldiers came for Jesus, we all forsook him and fled into the darkness. Rejection.

I guess my point in all this is that apparent rejection took so many different forms in Jesus' ministry. Why should we be surprised when it occurs in ours?

Some screamed at him: "Get out of here, Jesus of Nazareth."

And you know, I think that rejection was easier than the rejection we read about here in John—those who just sort of silently turned away and left. Silently—they just weren't there next week. I think that was the toughest.

Now, in my place of preaching, rejection rarely takes the form of dragging the preacher down out of the pulpit and trying to throw you over a cliff. After all, we're "open minded."More often rejection at my place takes the form of the polite, the sophisticated, and the urbane. "Well, my, that was very interesting. I don't know if we've ever thought that that way before. That was just so … interesting. We'll just have to think more about that. Yes. We'll just have to think about it. Not going to think about it, but we're going to think about it."

It 's enough to make you wish for the good old days when a congregation still had enough self-esteem to be able to throw a preacher over a cliff for saying a hard saying.

You've got to give these folks credit. They knew that the gospel was worth rejection. The gospel really is worth walking away from. I need to preach in such a way that I restore the dignity of disbelief. Unfortunately, my little sermons have taken all the fun out of disbelief. I've reduced the gospel in such a way that it's virtually impossible to reject. I make the gospel sound so easy, so that I make the rejection of the gospel sound stupid. No, that young man who slinked away from Jesus that day was not only rich, he was smart. He knew a hard saying when he heard one.

I was with a group of pastors, we were doing a Bible study of Acts, and we got into Acts 5. You know Acts 5, that nasty little story of a church board meeting, where there was a squabble over church property, and two of our most distinguished members of the board of stewards, Mr. Ananias, Ms. Sapphira, (whose parents founded this church), dropped dead. After the preacher told them that they could drop dead. Now that is when we really had a meeting. That was worth coming out to see what would happen on a Wednesday.

Some of the pastors said, "Now, wait a minute. What kind of thing is this? That's no way to have a church. I mean, we're compassionate. We don't treat people that way. That's some kind of old primitive thing. These people were Jews or something. What kind of pastoral care is this? Where's the grace? Where's the compassion? Two people dropped dead at a church meeting. Young men. Take one out, bury him during the meeting. Come back all sweaty, the young men, and find another one dead. Drag her out, and the meeting goes on. Then Luke says, "Oh yes, and great fear came upon the whole church."

Now, what kind of story is that? What kind of pastoral care is that? Just off the top of my head I asked that group of pastors, "Has anybody here ever had to kill anybody to have church?"

And there was silence, and then someone spoke up. He said, "I was in South Carolina. I preached the race situation. Four families left my church. Two of those families joined another church. Two of them to this day have never set foot in any church again. And my wife asked me, 'I know it's an important issue. I know it's a big thing. But is this worth it? Killing two families to preach on that issue?" It's a hard saying. Who can listen to it?

To be a pastor, to be a preacher, to be a disciple, I think is to find oneself nailed, stretched between opposing poles of a dilemma, pulled as it were between two magnetic poles. To be stretched, nailed out on a piece of wood. On the one hand, this is hard. It's a hard saying, who can listen to it? And then in the middle, the question: "Will you also go away?" Followed by "Lord, where would we go? You have the words—hard though they often are—you've got the words of eternal life. There's just nowhere else to go to get the Words of Life."

C. S. Lewis once said, speaking of the earlier story, "Now, look, all things are possible. Yeah, that's right, everything is possible. It is possible to get a camel stretched through the eye of a needle. I mean, that's possible. But it will be very rough on the camel."

William Willimon is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. He also is editor of Pulpit Resource and the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching (Westminster John Knox) and author of Undone by Easter (Abingdon).