I enjoy watching and listening to children receive communion. Even if they don’t understand what we are doing they just seem to get it. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I’ve seen and heard.

He doesn’t do it quite as much as he used to but when I place the bread in Jack’s hands he often shakes and buries his head in his hands and makes a smacking “mmmm” sound. 

“My flesh is true food,” Jesus says in today’s gospel (John 6:51-58) and I think Jack gets that. He’s gnawing, munching, and crunching that bread like it’s a piece of meat which is what Jesus tells us to do. When Jesus talks about eating his flesh the Greek word that is translated as “eat” actually means “to gnaw, munch, crunch.” Jack, thanks for the reminder. 

I no longer remember who it was but I remember a mother and her young daughter at the communion rail. The young girl watched me dip the bread in the wine. I held the red stained bread before her and said, “The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Her eyes got big. She turned to her mom and, pointing to the chalice, asked, “Is that blood in there?” 

“My blood is true drink,” Jesus says in today’s gospel and I think it might have been a bit too true for that little girl but she got it. Her mom whispered, “We’ll talk about it later.” I hope she said, “Yes, it is.”

It seems that this flesh and blood thing is more simple and real for children in a way that maybe it’s sometimes not for us adults. Or maybe it’s that adults have more discomfort and difficulty with the body – our own and other’s – than do kids. And yet, “God put faith in a body.” (Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, 57)

“God put faith in a body” when “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14) Before that “God put faith in a [woman’s] body” when God sent the angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she would conceive in her womb a child and she would give birth to the Son of God. (Luke 2:26-38) And “God put faith in a body” when Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

If “God put faith in a body” why then do we so often live disembodied lives; physically, emotionally, or spiritually? Why are we so quick to separate and bifurcate the physical from the immaterial, damning one and glorifying the other? Why do we assume that “the only holy things are invisible” when God assumed a body just like yours and mine, when God was born of woman’s body just as were you and I, and when, as one author writes, God “drank from the breast of his creation”? (Cole Arthur Riley, 58)

We could answer those questions in a thousand different ways but my guess is that our relationship with our bodies is a theme that runs through all those questions. I’m also guessing that for many of us that relationship with our body is one of the more difficult relationships we have.

Many of us just aren’t comfortable in our own skin. We don’t know what to make of or do with our bodies. We compare ourselves to others and the crazy and destructive standards of what is beautiful, acceptable, and lovable.

Some of us don’t understand or trust our bodies. We’ve been judged, criticized, shamed, or embarrassed because of our bodies, not just by others but even by the Church. We’ve been told that bodies, and especially the bodies of women, are the source of sin. But that’s just not true. In the beginning God looked at the bodies God had created and declared them “very good.”

Some of us are struggling with a body that is aging, ill, or one that can’t do what it used to do. Sometimes our bodies have been neglected, abused, or violated by others or by ourselves. For many the spiritual life is in opposition to a bodily life, the body being a necessary nuisance, a burden to overcome. 

Our spirituality, however, should never be an escape from or a rejection of our bodies but a deeper engagement with our bodies and the bodies of others. What if the spiritual and bodily are as enmeshed, intertwined, and mutually necessary as are yeast and flour in a loaf of bread? 

Bodies matter. That’s a truth we see Jesus living throughout the gospel. He fed the hungry. He cleansed the lepers. He gave sight to the blind. He opened the ears of the deaf. He raised the dead to life. He said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” Bodies matter.

So let me ask you this: What’s your relationship to your body? Do you like your body? Do you respect and care for it? Do you see it as holy and beautiful? Are you listening to it? Is there guilt, judgment, shame, or embarrassment about your body? Do you have joy and gratitude for your body? In what ways are you inhabiting your body? What aspects of your life are embodied and what aspects are disembodied? How are you seeing and caring for the bodies of others? What would it be like and take to welcome the body, yours or another’s, “even those bodies the world discards and demeans”? (Ibid., 67)

Here’s why I’m asking those questions. I don’t think we can fully accept the reality of Jesus’ flesh and blood until we accept the reality of our own. To the degree we can’t accept our own flesh and blood we will disincarnate Jesus and there will be no life within us. Maybe that’s why we are more comfortable with the bread and wine of communion than we are the flesh and blood of Jesus. 

I don’t want to live like that and I don’t want you to either. I want us to gnaw, munch, and crunch on life like Jack does. I want us, like that little girl, to be shocked and amazed at how real and close life really is. I want us to discover sacred life in the flesh and blood of Jesus, ourselves, and one another. And that brings me to a third child, Kennedy. 

In just a few moments we will baptize her and once again God will put God’s faith in a body. Look at that beautiful and precious little body. Do you see the sacredness of her flesh and blood? Isn’t she perfect? What if she’s mirroring the sacredness of your own flesh and blood? 

One day she will have to come to terms with her body; its size, shape, color, abilities, her experience of it, and her feelings about it. What are your best hopes and prayers for her about that? What would you tell her about the sacredness of her own flesh and blood? What do you wish someone had told you? What do you want Kennedy to believe about her body and what do you need to believe about yours? 

Kennedy, I hope and pray that you will love, accept, care for, and respect your body; that you will never let your value or beauty be determined by your or another’s beliefs or opinions about your body; that you will discover again and again the sacredness of your flesh and blood. 

I want you to know that all flesh – your face, your body, and those of every other person – are inherently sacred and beautiful. That’s not something you earn, prove, or get. It’s something you already have and are.

Every time you do or experience those things, Kennedy, you are eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus. Clean your plate and empty your cup. It will not only change how you see and know yourself, it will change how you see and live with others. 

Kennedy, bodies matter. “God put faith in a body.” From the very beginning God has been doing that. And we will see it happen again when you are baptized. The question for you, me, and all those gathered here is this: Will we? Will you and I also put faith in a body?