August 15, 2004

"Going For the Gold Part 3 - The Training Table"

  There is a story about a crew of park employees who are driving along the street digging holes. There are six in the group who dig the holes and about 300 yards behind them is another truck with six guys and they are coming with shovels and filling in the holes. After watching this for several minutes, a bystander asked one of the workers, "Would you mind telling me what you're doing?" The man smiled and replied: "We're planting trees. The guys with the trees have the day off."

Did you ever feel that way, like you’re not getting anywhere, that you’re just spinning your wheels in life? Could it be because you’re living on the wrong diet?

All this talk about Olympic athletes who try to enhance their performance with a little “juice” makes it sound as if this is something new. It’s not. Athletes have always tried to get the edge on their competition with a little something extra. You know what they ate in the ancient Greek Olympics? Sheep testicles. That’s right. Boxers and wrestlers back then played for keeps—no padded gloves, no illegal holds. You won by beating the other guy senseless, and sheep testicles were thought to give you that extra testosterone to survive. Either that or once you ate them, you begged for death.

What else did the ancient Greeks try? How about strychnine? One of the deadliest poisons known, strychnine was mixed with wine to make your heart pump faster. And that wasn’t just the ancient world. In 1904 the winner of the Marathon, Thomas Hicks, had to be revived by four doctors after his victory because he had a little too much strychnine with his brandy and passed out.

Most athletes today know there’s no substitute for a good healthy diet to make your body mature. Sure, some are always trying to beat the system with steroids or some other kind of juice, but disgrace comes upon those who get caught. Glory comes to those who have the discipline to stick to the training table, and grow up the right way.

The same thing holds true for our spiritual life. We’ve been talking in this sermon series about leading a victorious life, about winning the prize of eternal life, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, who some people think was the Apostle Paul, says you’d better stick to the proper diet. He writes, “You people are babies. You want to stick to milk, but it’s time to grow up and eat meat, to become mature in the faith.” If Paul lived today, he might write that too many people are stuck on the junk food diet.

They are spending billions of dollars on security for these Olympics. You know why? They are searching for the worst terrorists of all: fast food junkies. Police will arrest anyone who tries to sneak a soft drink into an Olympic site other than one made by the official sponsor, Coca-Cola. Likewise, if you try to bring a sandwich into the stadium, it better have the golden arches on it, or you’re headed for hard time in the slammer.

Of course, it takes a lot of money to run the Olympics, but I wonder if it makes sense to talk about the official candy bar or the official soft drink or the official fast food of the Olympics when the athletes got there because they stayed away from junk food. Probably quite a few are looking forward to a pizza after their event is over, but they had the discipline to stick to the training table before they ran their race. Can we say the same?

Junk food takes away your appetite for nourishment. Like physical junk food, spiritual junk food is very tasty and appealing, but it doesn’t build up our strength and endurance, and it takes away our appetite for the solid food of the word of God. And when I say spiritual junk food, I’m not talking about pornography.

Recently there has been a lot of interest in something called the Da Vinci Code. If you haven’t heard of that, let me sum it up quickly. It says that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, but was taken down from the cross and revived. Afterwards he made his way to France, where he and Mary Magdalene married, had children and their descendents still live there today.

What’s more, Leonardo Da Vinci was in on the plot, and his painting The Last Supper reveals the details, and the Pope and the Vatican are all in on the plot. People have been buzzing about this story. Nothing like a good scandal to get people interested in religion. But you have to wonder: Is stuff like the Da Vinci code real spiritual nourishment? Is that all people are consuming, or are they also reading and studying the word of God regularly. Will empty calories really get you where you want to go?

In Alice In Wonderland, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, “Would you tell me please, which way I want to from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” said the cat. “I don’t much care,” said Alice. “Then,” replied the cat, “it doesn’t much matter which way you go.” That so applies to our spiritual life, folks. If you don’t know where you want to get to, you can’t know how to get there. Do you want to get rid of what’s bogging you down? Fewer trips for junk food and more attention paid to the training table will do it.

So I have several thoughts I want to share about the training table this morning. First, as a culture, we are hooked on the comfortable life. In today’s gospel story, Jesus has just fed 5,000 people and they are following him, wanting more hand-outs. Moses had provided their ancestors manna in the wilderness for 40 years, maybe this Jesus could do the same now. They want Jesus to meet their physical needs, but they have no idea how empty their spiritual lives are. Too many people spend their lives taking in more and more material goods, and they don’t realize how empty it’s going to be at the end.

George Orwell wrote about this emptiness in modern spiritual life when he told the story of a wasp who landed on his plate and began to suck on a bit of jelly. Orwell took his knife and cut the insect in half, but he kept on sucking on the jelly. In fact, you could see a tiny stream of jelly coming out of the insect’s esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he realize what had happened to him. Many people have a lot in common with that wasp. They could care less about spiritual things, but only want to enjoy the sweetness of possessions.

Such people are focused on greed and are unaware of what’s happening to them. Only when it’s time to fly away will they grasp their condition.

I would suggest that we are living with the dangers of a fast-food diet. It has affected us as individuals and as a nation. People are just getting too heavy. We’ve developed adolescent eating habits and paying the price. But the same holds true for the church. We need less fat and sugar in our spiritual diet. We need to dig into the meat of God’s word and really digest it in our lives. We need to move beyond a basic, entry level relationship with God and start to go deeper with him, truly surrender our lives to him.

And that leads straight into the second point—It’s not easy to stick to the diet. Of course, not every Olympic athlete has to stick to a diet. I was reading this week that the average Olympian consumes 5,000 calories a day. A weightlifter packs it in to the tune of 10,000 calories a day. On the other hand, can you imagine what those little girl gymnasts go through to keep their bodies so tiny. They’re not living on pizza and spaghetti, I can imagine.

But of course, you and I get on a diet, and most times they are doomed to failure. It’s too hard. Why? Because we’ve changed the whole way we eat. We don’t eat for sustenance today, we eat for pleasure. We even think of some dishes as comfort food. Are you with me here? I’m one of the leaders of that particular parade, but it stretches a long, long ways. Think of some food for your childhood that still makes you smile. Got one? For me it’s grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Why? Because growing up Catholic, we ate a lot of grilled cheese and tomato soup on Fridays, when you couldn’t eat meat.

It’s hard to give up that comfort, whatever you happen to enjoy. It’s too painful.

And that’s what the followers of Jesus thought when he began to talk about his flesh being the source of life, that those who ate at his table would never be hungry again. This didn’t make any sense. Their brains started to overcook. “This is too hard to understand,” they said, and they started to drift away. They were okay as long as Jesus was handing out free food, but when they began to be challenged, they walked away. So Jesus turned to his inner circle and asked, “Will you walk away, too?” Peter answered, “Lord, where would we go? Who would we seek? You have the words that lead to eternal life.” That’s what the training table is all about.

3—We sustain each other at the training table. There is a reason why we always take communion together, folks. It’s because love can’t exist in isolation. Do you get that? Love simply doesn’t exist except in relationship.

Have you ever wondered why geese fly in a V formation? We’ll soon be seeing geese, flying wherever geese spend the winter, but why in a V? For years specialists in aerodynamics wondered the same thing. Two engineers used a wind tunnel to simulate what happens in a V formation. What they figured out is that every goose that flaps its wings creates an upward draft for the bird behind it. When all the geese do their part in a V, the whole flock has a 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.

Each bird, then, is dependent on the others to reach their destination. But there’s more. When a goose gets tired and starts to fall off the pace, the other geese honk at him and get him back in place. We can learn a lot from this. We all have a common destination in mind, our heavenly home with our father, but some of us—all of us, let’s be honest, get tired and fall off the pace. I’m not advocating honking at each other, but I am saying when we gather at the Lord’s Table, we give a lift to each other.

   4—Finally, the question becomes, what is served at the training table? And the answer is, bread. Jesus said he would provide the bread of life. We certainly don’t think of bread as necessary to life anymore, especially those of us who are on low-carb diets. But to understand our Savior’s words, we have to reclaim this sense of bread as the foundation of life, the way it was in ancient days. There are two parts to the communion we are about to share—one, the physical aspects of these little pieces of bread, the smell, the taste, the feel.

But there’s the other part, the side that our physical senses can’t grasp. The nourishment that Jesus offers, what makes us grow, is the transforming love of his presence in our lives. Christians of various denominations argue about what happens during communion. Does this bread and grape juice really become the body and blood of Jesus? People literally have murdered each other over this question, but a man named Frederick Denison Maurice, who was Anglican, brought a voice of reason to the debate.

He said you all are asking the wrong question. What happens to the bread and grape juice isn’t as important as what happens to the person who receives the bread. The real issue is the transformation of the individual.

A rabbi told the story of how, as a young boy, he and his family were prisoners in a Nazi death camp. They were given barely enough food to survive—bread, water and a little lard. Despite the harsh conditions, the family managed to observe Sabbath every week, somehow scrounging around for a candle to light as they said their Sabbath prayers. But one week there was no candle. So the father took some of the lard and molded it around a string, lighting it and leading the family in prayer,

And the boy who grew up to become a rabbi protested in anger. When the prayers were over, he confronted his father, saying, “How could you waste what little lard we have to make a candle.” And his father answered, “Son, without food we could live for three days. Without hope, we couldn’t live an hour.”

Catch this folks, it’s so important—an athlete sticks to the training table because it gives him hope for victory. We stick to Christ’s training table because there we find hope of ultimate victory. We find his love, his care, his protection, his grace, his peace which surpasses all understanding. God’s presence in our very lives, today and every day.

What happens when we partake of the bread of life? Communion goes by many names, but the effect is the same. It changes us. It is not a reward from heaven for good behavior, and neither is it empty calories. It is food for the journey of life. It is love, divine love, poured into us in such a way that is also pours forth out of us.

Just as good nourishing food enters the very cells of our body to make them grow and strengthen, so communion goes to our very heart and changes us. There are miracles you can see and miracles you can’t see, but communion is both. You can’t see the way it gets into the heart and transforms it, but you can see way people incorporate Christ into the way they live their lives, nourished by the Spirit, living the way Jesus called us to live.

Today, may we experience the miracle of Jesus, seen and unseen, as we break bread together at his training table. May we carry into the world the nourishment of his love, this food that endures for eternal life.