17^th August 2012

Rev Dr Max Champion at St John's UCA Mt Waverley Sunday 05 August 2012

Lessons - Psalm 34:1-22; John 6:24-35

Taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are they who trust in him!
(Psalm 34:8)

This text whets the appetite of Jews and Christians alike. At Passover, Jews are reminded of God's sustaining grace in the wilderness. At the Lord's Supper, Christians celebrate the costly love of Jesus. We are fed with the bread and wine of grace.

The satisfaction of knowing God's love is described by the Psalmist in down-to-earth language. Not for him abstract words about 'spirituality'.
He uses sensual imagery to invite others to enjoy God. 'O taste and see
. . .!' When starving for food or hope, he invites us to find nourishment
for body and soul!

Throughout Scripture people are invited to feast on the goodness of God.
'Manna' is provided in the wilderness. The Rabbis must prepare solid fare to sustain the faithful on their pilgrimage. Jesus eats and drinks with the rich and the poor, 'tax collectors and sinners'. He feeds the hungry crowds. He shares the Last Supper with his disciples. After his resurrection he eats with them. These are material signs of God's sustaining goodness and mercy.

Eating and drinking are marks of true faith! But the food and wine of faith should not be consumed thoughtlessly. Paul had to warn the Corinthians that the Lord's Supper is not an occasion for self-indulgence
(1 Corinthians 11:22ff). This is no 'fast food' faith to be eaten 'on the run'; no 'Big Mac' religion that thrives on mass demand for immediate satisfaction; no celebration accompanied by gluttony or guzzling. The goodness and mercy of God are an acquired taste, to be carefully nourished.

Unlike this food, popular religion is 'consumer driven'. Today it is widely thought that the recipe for spiritual success is to satisfy the tastes of individual consumers so that all will get what they want - a faith to satisfy our own diverse tastes in spirituality.

The Psalmist does not encourage this self-indulgent faith. But he does invite us to experience the 'delights' of faith in God's goodness and grace. He is no wowser or kill-joy. But he insists that, to have a 'taste of heaven', we must treat the ingredients of faith with respect. Such faith can be compared with the gourmet cook who knows fine food or the wine taster whose palate is attuned to the best wines. The 'goodness of the Lord' (v8a) is a reality to be savoured, not gulped down!

The Psalmist also knows that, when life's experiences are bitter-sweet, faith in God is 'hard to swallow' (v19). At such times satisfaction will be found, not in having our needs immediately met, but in being sustained by God's eternal grace amidst suffering, persecution and death. Despite the 'bitter taste' of terror, ridicule, affliction, tribulation and death, he invites the faithful to enjoy the 'goodness of the Lord' (vv19,21,22) and to live in hope, 'content' that God upholds those who resist evil and supports those who suffer evil.

This does not make sense to us. We usually think of 'happiness' as the absence of sickness, hardship, suffering, evil and death. Television programs and advertisers so exploit our desire for instant gratification that our 'taste buds' cannot distinguish between the 'fine food of faith'
and the 'fast food' of consumer religion!

Indeed, the more churches turn to mass-marketing techniques, the less they will be able to distinguish faith in God from the desire to have our needs immediately satisfied. The success of large religious franchises is due, in part, to their ability to exploit people's desire for 'fast food faith'.

In mainstream churches the problem is different. We tend to copy our consumer society in believing that a person's 'spiritual happiness' is purely a matter of 'taste'. The Psalmist, though, invites us to be nourished by 'food' that is unlike any other! Faced with a smorgasbord, we are invited to 'taste' the one food that fully satisfies body and soul - to let our 'tastebuds' be trained by the Master Chef, not the promoters of fast food spirituality whose recipe for happiness destroys our taste for the finest, most nourishing food.

We must resist the temptation, no matter how well intentioned, to sell Christianity as a 'consumer religion'. Like the Psalmist, we must offer the one full-bodied religion which satisfies the universal hunger to know the goodness and mercy of God. And we should be content to deepen our faith in the same way that experienced gourmet cooks or wine buffs learn, savour and enjoy their craft over a lifetime.

A satisfying faith that springs from knowledge of God's goodness does not happen in an instant. It may begin, as it has for many people, when a person experiences a taste sensation like no other. But it has to be sustained in a world where foods of inferior quality compete to satisfy our spiritual taste-buds instantly. Our 'food journey' is a life-long adventure that begins from a 'passion for food' that nourishes our bodies and our hopes.

The ultimate source of this sustaining food is found in the victorious sacrificial love of Christ. This is expressed profoundly in John 6 where Jesus says, 'I am the bread of life; he whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and he whoever believes in me shall never thirst.' (John 6:35) In other words, Jesus sustains the life of the world by embodying the costly love of God for broken and sinful people.

Instead of giving us what we want, he gives us what we need: the assurance of God's mercy and goodness in a world where evil, suffering and death take away our appetite for life and our thirst for righteousness. It is not that Jesus ignores our material needs. Far from it! The crowd is fed.
He eats and drinks with righteous and sinful alike. He shares bread and wine with his disciples. Faith is not to be 'spiritualised'!

However, the satisfaction of consumer needs in itself cannot make us hopeful in the midst of sin, evil, suffering or death. We are not to 'labour for food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life that the Son of Man will give you' (John 6:27). We may have everything we desire but lack the one thing that feeds our minds, nourishes our bodies and sustains our souls - the taste of God's grace embodied in the One who 'tasted bitter rejection' and the 'sweet taste of victory'.

The one thing that we need is enacted in the Lord's Supper. As we gather around the Lord's Table, we participate in the meal in which we 'taste and see that the crucified and risen Lord of life is good' and experience a 'foretaste of the heavenly banquet' that is promised in him.

In the Prayer of Humble Access this sense of 'taste' is expressed in very sensual language. 'Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.' The writer of these confronting words was not a macabre literalist but a theologian with a keen sense of what it means for Christians to be united to Christ. He is emphasising the fact that, at the Lord's Supper, we 'ingest' and 'drink-in' the goodness and mercy of God displayed in Christ. He thus invites us to enjoy what God has done in Christ - to be 'happy' in 'tasting and seeing' that it is the crucified- and-risen Christ who truly sustains us body, mind and soul in the whole of life and in the midst of the world.

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Rev Dr Max Champion is minister in the St John's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia.

Dr Champion is Chair of the Assembly of Confessing Congregations within the UCA.

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