“Where else would I go, Lord?  You alone have the words of eternal life.”  I think it’s how I would answer if someone asked me, Dorry, why is it you believe in Jesus?  What drew you to faith and keeps you there?  In Christ I have found the words of eternal life.  For me, Jesus is the perfect word, no matter what my situation.  When I am lonely?  Jesus befriends me.  When I am feeling ashamed?  Jesus takes my guilt away.  When I am scared to face the truth or to take the next step?  Jesus walked a tough road and promises to walk with me.  When I have lots of energy and need a place to invest myself?  Jesus calls me a disciple and sends me out into the whole word!  That’s why I am a Christian.  Jesus has the words of abundant life.  The risen Christ is our proof that Jesus does indeed have the words of eternal life.

We are picking up the story of Jesus’ ministry in John chapter six, so let me give you a thirty second summary of what has happened in John’s gospel so far.  So far, so good.  Jesus started out by calling a handful of disciples.  His following grew by turning the water into wine at the wedding in Cana.  That’ll boost your popularity, won’t it?  He wowed the crowds by throwing the money changers out of the temple.  He performed many acts of healing.  This is all good stuff, stuff we can get behind, right?  If we were travelling with Jesus two thousand years ago, at this point in his ministry, we would be woo-wooing big time.

It gets better in chapter six.  John records how Jesus fed five thousand men, plus women and children, with only a few loaves of bread and a few fish.  Go ahead, cheer for that!  That’s amazing.  Then, Jesus walks on water.  This is such a highlight of Jesus’ ministry that the phrase “walks on water” is used in all kinds of settings today, referring to someone who is at the top of their game.  All good stuff.

But for some reason, the crowds demand another sign to prove that this isn’t a fluke.  Feeding thousands of people with one bag of groceries wasn’t enough to satisfy them.  But it appears, Jesus has had enough.  Instead of giving them what they wanted, Jesus picks a fight with them.  He challenges them with a very controversial teaching.  Apparently Jesus’ plan isn’t to just keep amassing as many disciples as he can.  He is not interested in bigger and bigger and more and more.  Jesus is interested in authenticity.  Jesus is interested in separating the wheat from the chaff.  He purposefully shocks them, it seems, just to see what will happen.

And what happened?  Many of the disciples left because Jesus told them that it was in eating his flesh and drinking his blood that they would be saved.  Now, remember, we have had exposure to this teaching lots of times.  But to the Jews who were hearing this for the first time, to them that sounded like cannibalism.  To them that sounded like profanity. Jews would never engage in human sacrifice or eating human flesh.  And Jews were strictly forbidden from drinking the blood of animals. Their dietary laws had very specific rules about food preparation so that no blood would be consumed.  Jesus tells them that the way to God is by doing things that they have always been taught are strictly forbidden.

Just imagine if someone came into our church and said, those teachings you hold as sacred?  You’ve got it all wrong!  That would be pretty tough to swallow, wouldn’t it?  Why on earth would Jesus test people this way?

I think it has something to do with the fact that, Jesus came to be both glue and solvent.  For the first five and a half chapters of John, we see Jesus as the glue:  binding up what’s broken, patching what’s torn, filling in the gaps of what is missing.  Feeding, healing, celebrating.  We love the glue!  But Jesus also came to be the solvent:  to use his ministry to break down unjust structures, so something more pleasing to God could be built instead.

There was a powerful group of Jews called Pharisees who were convinced that the only way to God was by following the law, literally, and literally, to extremes.  Following the law had become primary for them.  But in his ministry Jesus demonstrated that loving God and loving neighbor was more important than the letter of the law.  Jesus gave this challenging teaching, about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, pretty early on to make it clear, he was interested in a different kind of faithfulness than what many of the Jews were used to.  Those who were interested in this new kind of faithfulness stayed.  But many did not.

Faithfulness is the mixture of glue that allows us to stick with God, no matter what, and solvent that helps us detach from the everything that is less than God’s ideal for us.  The Christian faith asserts that God is always working for our good.  But that doesn’t mean life will always seem good.  That doesn’t mean life will always keep getting better and better.  There will be setbacks.  There will be pruning.  There will be trials.  There will be times when it feels like everything we know is being called into question.  Our task is to continue to cling to Christ, even when many other people are turning away.

Have you ever heard of Lesslie Newbigin?  He was a British missionary to India for several decades in the 1900’s.  I have great admiration for missionaries.  Can you imagine leaving your home and going to live in a foreign country, having no idea if people would be glad to meet you or not?  But Newbigin soon found out that his courage was nothing compared to the people who became Christians in India.  He wrote about a group of leatherworkers in South India who had heard the good news of Jesus and converted from Hinduism to Christianity in the late 1940’s.  The leatherworkers were of a low caste, and the gospel message resonated deeply with them. Here was Jesus, telling them that they were people of great dignity and worth!  They were truly set free by the gospel.

But it wasn’t long before the leatherworkers began to experience persecution.  They were denied access to the community wells.  They were locked out of their jobs as replacement leather workers were brought in to do their work.  They had no school for their children.  No water, no jobs, no hope for the future, barely enough food for today—these Indian leatherworkers were economically much worse off for having become Christians.  When Lesslie Newbigin heard of their plight, he arranged for a government social worker to go and help them get some land to cultivate, form a leatherworkers co-op, dig a well, and get a school.  But none of that would happen overnight.  In the meantime, he was very worried about them and asked himself, what did these folks really gain by becoming Christians?  But their faith was amazingly strong.  Even though they had been Christians for only a very short time, they knew enough about Jesus to know, he had the words of eternal life.  They knew that their situation was temporarily much bleaker than it had been if they had never become Christians.  But they knew that ultimately, as a people, they would be much better off with Christ than they ever would have been without him.  The gospel had set them free from a life without dignity, hope, and love.

Jesus has the words of eternal life.  But that doesn’t mean discipleship will be easy.  At times, God calls us to endure hardship.  God may even call us to truly suffer.  Our struggles become the solvent that brings down the “what is” to make way for the “what can be”.  Sometimes Christ calls us to examine things we have held dear for generations.  The Living God is always calling us to become more alive in him.

You don’t need me to tell you that all this change is hard!  True discipleship is so hard, we cannot possibly stay faithful without a lot of help.  I brought in this cutting board to show you.  I made it in wood shop in 8th grade.  It’s made of strips of oak and maple glued together.  For twenty-nine years, this was a great cutting board.  But about ten years ago I started having a problem with it.  It kept splitting down the middle, in between these two joints. I tried gluing it together with regular glue.  I tried gluing it together with Gorilla glue.  It would hold for a while, but then it was back into those same two pieces again.  Finally I mentioned this problem to a man in my first church, Dave, who is a carpenter.  I asked him if he could recommend a glue that would really work this time.  He said to me, Dorry, the glue is not your problem.  Even Elmer’s will do just fine.  What you need, though, are some clamps.  You’ve got to put that bead of glue in there, and then clamp the wood and let that sit for several days until that glue is really good and dry.  If you do that, it should hold a lot longer.

Since I don’t have any clamps, Dave took my cutting board home and glued it up for me.  He also sanded it down and made it look a whole lot better than it did before!  It’s been working great for years now.  I was thinking this week about what a difference those clamps made, and it reminds me of our story today.  I think the miracles of Jesus, those were like the glue.  They were the start of lots of people getting stuck to Jesus.

But in order to stay stuck to Jesus, people needed something more.  Sooner or later, the Teacher is going to give all of us a very hard assignment.  Sooner or later, the circumstances of life will test us all.  What will keep us faithful?  It’s not just our own resolve, that’s for sure.  Not even experiencing a miracle can keep us stuck to Jesus over the long haul.  The thousands of people Jesus fed one day were back the next, demanding another sign.

No, the only way our faith can be sustained is by God.  Jesus said, no one can come to him unless the Father has enabled him.  Unless we have the help of God, we cannot sustain our discipleship.  Unless we somehow tap into the power of God, we will not be able to follow Jesus to the places Jesus would have us to go, whether that is intellectually, spiritually, or physically.  In order to stay stuck to God, we need some clamps.

But we will also need some solvent.  Jesus knew he was calling people to a faithfulness unlike any religion.  Not a faithfulness based on rules and laws and compliance.  No, Jesus was calling people to faithfulness based on relationship.  A relationship with God the Creator, Son, and Spirit—as well as relationship with other people.  Jesus doesn’t just have the words of eternal life.  Jesus is the Word.

I came across a quote recently from Flannery O’Connor, “People want their faith to be an electric blanket, but it’s really a call to the cross.”  That call to the cross, it makes some people turn away.  But if you stick around, you will find that the cross leads to a life better than you could have imagined before!  Christ alone has the words of eternal life, words that both bind us to God and dissolve our connections to all that is not of God.  May we have the courage to embrace true faithfulness: the glue and the solvent, the binding and the releasing, the easy and the hard, trusting in the Word that leads to eternal life.  Amen.