After Pentecost
Exodus 12:1–10
1The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, 2"This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. 3Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a household. 4And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. 5Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 6and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. 7"Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. 10And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. (Exo 12:1 ESV)
Let's get physical! We usually think of church and faith as spiritual matters, quite distinct and separate from the physical and material world. We have created a dichotomy between spiritual and material life. We segregate Sunday morning from Monday morning. Worship and faith seem unrelated to real life with its challenges, struggles, hurts and pains. What we did on Sunday morning doesn't really affect what we do on Monday morning when we return to work, to school, to business, to the market. In that arena we have to be practical, realists, hard working, tough, and in control.
The spiritual realm, though, seems otherworldly, soft, dreamy, unreal; perhaps even irrelevant and impractical if not downright boring. We think of spiritual people as going around with their heads in the clouds, idealists, without a good grip on reality. Going to church may even seem dull and uninteresting. We yawn when we are told to "store up our treasures in heaven, not on earth," because the treasures we really want are the things of this world—riches, success, happiness, health, life without trouble or pain. We think heaven is just floating around on clouds playing a harp all day.
Now, that doesn't mean we completely want to dump God. We still want a god, but one who will satisfy our physical and material needs and wishes. One who will give us success and keep us well and make us happy. One we can keep around for emergencies; to whom we can make a 9-1-1 call when in dire need, but who does not make any demands on us or meddle in our lives apart from Sunday morning.
But today were going to change that spiritual-material paradigm. Instead of isolating worship, God, faith, and religion in an "otherworld" spiritual realm, we will see that they are intensely physical and material, and we will set God loose onto the other six days of the week.
You see, God really is all about physical and material things.
Why? Because the same God who created our spirit and gave us a soul, is the God who created the earth and all the material stuff in the universe. He is the creator of heaven AND earth. The God of the physical world is also the God of our souls and spirit, and he works in and through the physical creation to save us and give us all that is good. That is what sacrament is all about. You see, when God saved Israel out of Egypt, he did so as we read in our text, by the death of the first born sons of Egypt; real babies who cried at night and sucked their mothers' breasts. He told the Israelites to kill and roast a lamb and paint the blood on the doorposts of their houses; real flesh they could taste and real blood that stained their doorposts. He saved the Israelites with real, physical and material things. When you go to work on Monday morning, it is God who gives you employment. It is God who provides for you by educating you in school. It is God who fills the stores with the abundance of the earth to feed and clothe you. It is God who provides medicines and medical technology. It is even God who gave us technology so you can have cars to drive and cell phones to call with and iPods, Facebook, U-tube and Twitter. So faith and the Christian life really do belong to the physical and material part of life. God comes to us in and through the stuff he created. That is sacrament.
This is seen most when God came into the world to dwell with us, he did so by becoming a human being. He became part of his physical creation. He became one of us. God became not just a spiritual being, but a physical, material being.
He thereby validated the material world. God validated his creation. He sanctified humanity by becoming himself a human. He is physical. The Apostle John said: "We saw him with our eyes, we heard him, we looked upon him and we have touched him with our hands." He is real and solid. He now has a flesh and blood body. Children could feel his arms around them as he took them into his arms and blessed them. The blind man felt his hand as Jesus led him out of the town and opened his eyes. The deaf man felt his finger in his ears when Jesus opened them. Lazarus heard his voice when he called him out of the tomb. Peter felt his firm grip when he was sinking into the sea and Jesus pulled him out.
He is real; he is physical. Don't look for him then in dreamy spirituality, but in the hard, physical realities of this world. He is there in everyday life. He gets down on his hands and knees with us as we toil and labor. He gets his hands dirty in the muck and mud of our sin, in the hurts, the sickness, the death of the real world. He walks the halls of the hospitals, he is in the ER and ICUs, in our hurts and pains. He is in the jail and prison, and in the hard, disgusting realities of life. He is in our suffering and pain. He doesn't ask us to go up to heaven and ascend to him, rather he comes to us in our physical world, his is God in human flesh and blood.
He came to get himself dirty with our sin; to absorb our sin into his own flesh. By our own deserts, we are all going to hell, but God came in human flesh to do something about it. Just as he touched a leper and healed him, so he touches the leprosy of our sin and absorbs it into himself and fills us with his righteousness.
On Good Friday, he took our sin to the cross and put it to death. The smell of blood and sweat and raw flesh filled the air. Jesus could feel the thorns that pierced his head. He could feel the nails that pierced his hands and feet. He felt the splinters of the rough wood of the cross. That was a real body that was laid in a hard, cold, dark tomb made out of solid rock.
But on the third day the women found the tomb empty. That flesh and blood body was not there. That body had risen from the dead. When he appeared to the disciples that night and ate a piece of fish, the disciples watched him him chew and could see his Adam's apple move as he swallowed. Thomas saw the holes in his hands and feet and the wounds on his side. When the dead are raised on the Last Day, it will not be to some dreamy, ethereal, spiritual existence, but we will be in our very own flesh and blood bodies. "Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." At the Resurrection we will be solid, not a vaporous spirit. We will live in a real material world, not just a floaty, dreamy cloud.
And Jesus, whose body rose, is both man and God. He is God with a body of flesh and blood. He is not a dismembered spirit. Where his body is, Jesus is—man and God.
So in Holy Communion, when Jesus' says: "take eat, this is my body...Take drink, this is my blood," Jesus is here, in the flesh. Once again, God is present in the material stuff of creation—bread and wine. He is not merely present spiritually. Nor do the bread and wine represent or symbolize his body and blood. His body and blood are here, hence Jesus is materially and physically present in his own resurrected and living flesh.
So when we eat this physical bread and drink this physical wine, we are eating the very real, physical body and blood of God himself. Worship and faith and our "spiritual life" now become very real and very physical. In the Sacrament the spiritual and material realms are joined together. God saves us with the very real death of a physical man, the first born Son of God—Jesus Christ—just as he saved the Israelites through the death of the first born sons of Egypt. Behold the Lamb of God whose blood cleanses us from our sins. Faith is now very physical and real. We are saved by a real body and the real blood of Jesus. When we eat and drink them, worship becomes physical and material.
In the Sacrament, God comes into us and becomes part of us physically. He is joined to us in Baptism and continues joining himself to us in Holy Communion. Therefore, God now lives in us.
St. Paul says, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" In the Sacrament, "You are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit," you now "live and move and have [your] being in Him."
That makes our faith and the Christian life real and physical. Faith becomes physical on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday and so forth because in you, Christ goes into the physical world: into vocation, into the home, the family, the school, the market place. The Christian life is not just dreamy spirituality waiting for a day when we are taken up out of this world into heaven. The Christian life is not idealistic and irrelevant pie-in-the-sky. The Christian life is now intensely material. It focuses on THIS world, because the Christian life is Christ living and serving your neighbor in and through you.
St. Paul describes the Christian life when he says, "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God." And again he says, "Present the members of your body to God as instruments for righteousness." We, the believers in Christ, use our physical body to love and serve our physical neighbor. It is in and through our material bodies and physical lives that God touches people with his love, his compassion, his caring, and his mercy. It is through our voices that God speaks to the world. The epistle to the Romans says, "Having gifts that differ, let us use them; if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching, the one who exhorts, in his exhortation." It is through our lives that God restores justice to the world. It is through our efforts that God fights against poverty, racial prejudice, and oppression. Jesus sent his disciples out to "Proclaim the kingdom of God; healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, casting out demons. You received without paying, now give without pay."
Our lives as believers focus on the well-being of others. "Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up." "We urge you brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all," says St. Paul, just as you people did last Friday when a group of you gathered together in this sanctuary to pray for a brother in the hospital. That is what the Christian life is all about in this world. As followers of Christ we turn our focus and attention to the real, physical and material lives and people of the world. We live to serve. Our worship of God is to serve our neighbor.
Our Christian lives, our worship, our faith are now all about this world. No, not our own self-fulfillment. Not our own pleasure. Not our own happiness, but that of others. Instead of having our heads in the clouds, we have our feet firmly planted on the ground where they can stamp out evil and suffering. We have our hands on the plow so they can provide for the needs of others. We have the Word of God in our mouths so we can teach others about Christ. We have a prayer on our lips to pray for one another.
Get physical. Eat and drink the real body and blood of God, which empowers you to "Present you bodies as living sacrifices," and to "Use them as instruments of righteousness," in this real and material world. Amen.