Year B
Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

The 1999 movie…  The Matrix…  is a story about a society which exists in a computer generated reality…  like one of those computer games where each person has an avatar…  and all of the avatars on everyone’s computers interact with each other in real time…  millions of people…  who are not only sedated…  but who are kept in egg-shaped fluid-filled pods…  like wombs…  and every one of them is hard-wired into a massive main-frame computer system…  but they don’t know it…  they have no way to know that what they experience…  a life that looks and feels just like this one…  is a reality that exists only in their awareness…  and in their collective experience…

And within this computer generated reality…  Thomas Anderson is a man who by day…  is a mid-level computer programmer…  but by night…  is a hacker known as Neo…  who questioned his reality…  who always had a sense that something was wrong…  but the truth is more than he can imagine… 

So Neo is contacted by the legendary…  and on-the-lam computer hacker Morpheus…  and because I so appreciate word origins…  Morpheus…  is the mythological god of sleep and dreams… and is the word from which we get morphine…  but back to the story…

Morpheus shares the prophecy that someone would be born into the Matrix with the power to free its people…  someone called…  the One…  and Morpheus believes that Neo is this person…  but as a result of being contacted…  Neo himself becomes a target of the police…   the police however…  including the relentless Agent Smith…  are nothing more than computer programs whose purpose is to prevent any change in the programming which would enable the humans to wake up…  and discover the lie…  and when Neo wakes up…  wow…  but if you haven’t seen the movie…  well…  I won’t spoil it for you…  but it brings down the virtual house of cards… 

Well…  Wisdom has built her house…  and to those without sense…  perhaps to those who are not yet awake…  she says…  come…  eat of my bread…  and drink of the wine I have mixed…  and walk in the way of insight…  and because I so appreciate word origins…  the word that’s translated as insight can also mean to discern between…  when in 1Kings 3:9…  Solomon says to God…  Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people…  able to discern between good and evil…  and we too are to walk in the way of insight…  to discern what’s true and what’s false…

And Jesus said…  I am the living bread that came down from heaven…  whoever eats of this bread will live forever…  and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh…  and unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood…  you have no life in you…

And speaking of eating…  Thomas Cranmer…  a sixteenth century leader in the British Reformation…  and author of the Book of Common Prayer…  wrote about our need to not only hear the scriptures…  but to read…  mark…  and inwardly digest them…

In Jewish belief…  blood was life…  and blood belonged to God…  but if we take what Jesus is saying at face value… it’s almost impossible…  not to conclude that he’s talking about cannibalism…  its no wonder that the Jews quarreled among themselves…  saying… how can this man give us his flesh to eat…  but we have to remember that Jesus was Sophia…  was Wisdom incarnate…  was the Wisdom referred to in our reading from Proverbs…  and Jesus knew the Jewish dietary laws…  he knew that Leviticus 17:13-14 said…  anyone who hunts down an animal or bird that may be eaten…  shall pour out its blood…  and cover it with earth…  but whoever eats it…  shall be cut off…  so if Jesus doesn’t mean it literally…  how does he mean it…

JD Walt…  on his website seedbed.com wrote…  clearly…  Jesus shifts into a new gear in today’s text…  it’s like he’s grabbing the people by the lapels and trying to wake them up too…  Jesus is revealing a completely different kind of life…  eternal life…  it’s different in quality…  quantity…  depth…  love…  power…  and every other similar category we could name…  understandably the people aren’t getting it…  they say things like…  how can a person go back into their mother’s womb…  and…  how are you going to get any water from that well without a bucket…  and…  it would take a fortune to feed all these people even a snack…  and today is no different…  it’s like telling Neo that he’s really not going to work in a shirt and tie…  but exists in a watery cocoon…  and expecting him to believe it…

Fr. Bertie Pearson…  Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Georgetown, Texas…  writes…  if you stare up at the sun for too long…  you start to see nothing but darkness…  that’s not because the sun disappears…  but because there’s way too much light…  more than you can take in…  and so you are blinded…  if however…  you hold up a prism…  and allow it to catch that same blinding light…  it splits it into the comprehensible spectrum of colors…  from violet to red…

In a similar manner…  you can’t see God…  not because God is hidden or won’t reveal herself to you…  but because God is infinite…  eternal…  God is far too huge for us to comprehend…  but when the experiences of God’s actions are filtered through the prism of the world…  we experience God’s presence as beauty…  truth…  compassion…  justice…  peace…  joy…  and love…  and they show us glimpses…  shadows…  and the faintest reflections of God’s true goodness…

Just as Morpheus wants Neo to wake up…  to seeing the Matrix in which they live and which fools them into thinking it’s real…  Jesus calls us…  to a life of being awake…  of seeing how we’re hooked into systems which promote fear…  and which set limits on what we believe to be possible…  it’s like the difference between being wired into the Matrix…  and being wired into Jesus…

We are given mortal life through mortal food and drink…  we are kept alive…  day by day…  by pizza and Pepsi…  by eggs and milk…  by bread and wine…  and you can increase or decrease your consumption…  but give up food and water for Lent and you might not make it to Easter…

In quoting Jesus in vv. 49 – 53…   John chose to use the Greek verb phago…  this word is translated as “eat”… but in v. 54…  John changes to verb to trogo…  trogo is found five times in this Gospel and only once elsewhere in the Christian Scriptures… in John 13:18… but from v. 54 onward… it’s used to describe what Jesus tells us we must do to have eternal life within us…  and trogo means to gnaw…  chew… crunch…  but there have been some people…  in some churches…  who at communion…  never chew… they dislike the idea of chewing on Jesus… they let the wafer or bread dissolve in their mouths… but the Gospel tells us that this act…  is an active one… not passive…  we are to gnaw on the Word… chew on its meaning… crunch every last bit of nourishment out of it…  and this is why our two denominations established weekly communion in the mid – late 1970s…

In John 14:12…  Jesus said…  Very truly…  I tell you…  the one who trusts in me will do the works that I do…  and in fact…   will do greater works than these…  I wonder what these greater works might be…  I wonder if it might be to first wake up to our oppression…  I wonder if it might be to challenge the systems which keep us oppressed…  I wonder if it might be strive for justice and peace for all people…  I wonder if Neo…  knew Jesus…