by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good morning, prayer and fasting friends. We are enjoying a brief respite of rain soon! We will continue to pray for our church and God’s world and the joy S/He bestows.

Our word this week is real. So the question that is usually asked of Christians by the angry, the antagonistic, the curious, the unsure is “What is so real about your Jesus, your God?”

• We say God is real and Jesus is His Son.
• And they will say “But how do you know?”
• We’ll say “Because I can feel Him in my heart.”
• They’ll say “But that’s just a feeling; it’s not proof.”
• We’ll say “But He changed my life.”
• And then they’ll say “That could have happened anyway.”
• We’ll say “Oh, no. This was different because I am a different person.”
• They’ll say “Really? How?”
• We’ll say “I feel different. The world looks new. Nothing is the same. I don’t want to do the same things.”
• They’ll say “That can happen if you have a new hobby or a brain tumor or chemical imbalance or a new love or if you’re high. You haven’t proven anything.”

And on and on and on… So the question remains: Just what is real about God or Jesus or this whole Christianity thing and is it something that we have to prove? That Jesus really is the Son of God? That it matters? That it makes a difference. Pretty big questions, huh? And that might be the point of it all: These are questions so big that should we be asking, should we even try to defend them?

My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. Your ancestors ate bread and later died. Whoever eats this Bread will live always."
John 6:55-58 (TMB)

Jesus was pretty clear about this. About a thousand years after Jesus stated these words, the concept of Transubstantiation, the belief that during the Eucharist (Communion), the wine and bread actually become the blood and flesh of The Christ, was called into question within the Catholic Church. Consubstantiation was offered by Berengarious of Tours in contrast to the dogma of the church: That the presence of The Christ was in the wine and bread, but they did not actually become His body.

This heretical doctrine is an attempt to hold the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist without admitting Transubstantiation. According to it, the substance of Christ's Body exists together with the substance of bread, and in like manner the substance of His Blood together with the substance of wine. Hence the word Consubstantiation. How the two substances can coexist is variously explained. The most subtle theory is that, just as God the Son took to Himself a human body without in any way destroying its substance, so does He in the Blessed Sacrament assume the nature of bread. Hence the theory is also called "Impanation", a term founded on the analogy of Incarnation.
newadvent.org

The Protestant Church (us) reveres the Communion elements as symbolic of the presence of Jesus in the ceremony; it is one of the two sacraments, the other being baptism. The modern Roman Catholic Church still sees the literality of the elements being the blood and flesh of Christ but with a little twist.

…transubstantiation states that the substance of the elements are miraculously changed even though their appearance is not. In other words, the bread and wine will appear as bread and wine under close scientific examination, but the true substance is mystically the Body and Blood of Christ. Synonymous with transubstantiation is the doctrine of the Real Presence. Where transubstantiation is the process of the change, the real presence is the result of that change. In other words, the doctrine of the real presence states that the bread and wine contain the actual presence of Christ in bodily form as a result of the process of transubstantiation. Roman Catholicism states that the incarnation of Christ itself--where Jesus was a man but contained an invisible divine nature--is analogous to the doctrine of the real presence.
Matt Slick, “Transubstantiation and the Real Presence,” carm.org (Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry)

And there it is, the doctrine of the Real Presence [my emphases]. Just what is the Real Presence?

The gospels tell us that Jesus referred to such consecrated bread and wine as his body and blood; he bid his followers to do as he had done and to eat and drink in memory of him. But did he mean that Christians who did so would literally be eating his body and blood' Such an idea of "transubstantiation" seems barbaric to some people, with its echoes of human sacrifice and cannibalism, and simply unnecessary to others. Even the medieval church authorities recognised the problem of arguing that a literal transformation occurred. One of the principal exponents of the doctrine of transubstantiation, Lanfranc, was the archbishop of Canterbury 1,000 years ago. He explained that the bread and wine are somehow converted into "the essence of the Lord's body" but that "the qualities of the earthly substances...are preserved, so that those who see it may not be horrified at the sight of flesh and blood". So it changes but it looks, tastes and feels the same! This is a physical distinction that defies physics. And it is baffling to modern Christians.
“Is the Church a club with rules you accept or leave?” Sunday Independent
(Ireland), June 10, 2012

Transubstantiation says that they become the blood and flesh of Jesus and after the Protestant Reformation for many, they became symbolic of what Jesus commanded, “to make a meal” of Him. This doctrine is still a point of discussion into the 21st century, and since many of our children attend Catholic schools as a viable, affordable alternative to poorer public schools, you can assume they have heard of these concepts, especially on Fridays.

The doctrine of the real presence - that "after the consecration, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ are contained truly, really and substantially in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist" (Council of Trent, 1562:3) - was not formulated in the Counter Reformation just to oppose the many varieties of Protestant thinking, but is a teaching that goes back to Christ Himself and was seen as such from the birth of Christianity. By the 12th century, following the rediscovery of Greek philosophy by the west, there was a need to clothe Christian articles of faith in concepts that could be understood by the educated. St Thomas Aquinas thus drew on the teaching of Aristotle concerning substance and accidents. The Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, sanctioned the use of the word transubstantiation in its present context - a philosophical definition that the Council of Trent enjoined on Catholics in the aftermath of the Reformation and amidst the diversity of opinions of the new Protestant sects.
“Christians have always accepted the doctrine of the real presence,”
Jim Newry, Irish News, May 17, 2002

As we can see from the passage above, Thomas Aquinas made this cannibalistic notion palatable to “the educated” and referenced the ancient Greeks, specifically Aristotle who lived and died 300 plus years before the birth of Jesus. We can assume that the common people did what was needed to survive and receive whatever blessings of the church they could and thus, they just accepted. But it had to be made easier for the educated to accept the unthinkable. Aquinas had to make it palatable for the elite. Really?

So, Scripture teaches the real presence and transubstantiation is a formula of the Church to help us grasp what the real presence means. But the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is still essentially a mystery. "The mystery, " writes St Thomas Aquinas, "invites as act of complete faith, accepting both the divinity and humanity of Christ: 'you believe in God, believe also in me'. Faith is of things unseen, Christ's Godhead was hid and in this sacrament so also is His manhood."
Ibid.

Aquinas clothes, what seems to be easy for the plain folk to accept, this notion that Jesus meant for us to remember Him by consuming His corporeal Self. Yuk…after all, human sacrifice was a pagan concept – or was it? Ask Abraham (Abram) and Isaac. Did God really want Abraham to slaughter his son? Oswald Chambers addressed this idea of what God really wanted from Abraham.

He said, "Take your dear son Isaac whom you love and go to the land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I’ll point out to you."
Genesis 22:2 (TMB)

One of the most poignant passages of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament emerges out of Abraham’s obedience.

lifeaftercaregiving.wordpress.com

Isaac said to Abraham his father, "Father?" "Yes, my son." "We have flint and wood, but where’s the sheep for the burnt offering? Abraham said, "Son, God will see to it that there’s a sheep for the burnt offering." And they kept on walking together.
Genesis 22:7-8 (TMB)

As Christians we believe that verse 8 is a reference to the Lamb of God- Jesus - and from Abraham to Jesus was about 2000 years and another 2000 to now - 2016.

The great point of Abraham’s faith in God was that he was prepared to do anything for God. He was there to obey God, no matter to what belief he went contrary. Abraham was not a devotee of his convictions, or he would have slain Isaac and said that the voice of the angel was the voice of the devil. That is the attitude of a fanatic. If you will remain true to God, God will lead you straight through every barrier into the inner chamber of the knowledge of Himself; but there is always this point of giving up convictions and traditional beliefs.
My Utmost for His Highest
April 26

105 years after Chambers wrote this, Peter Enns says something similar.

Rather, God exposes the limitations of our thinking. Then we can see the inevitability to letting go of the need to know and trust God instead ---- as best as we can each moment ---- because God is God. Trust like this is an affront to reason, the control our egos crave. Which is precisely the point. Trust does not work because we have captured God in our minds. It works regardless of the fact that, at the end of the day, we finally learn that we can’t.
Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty
2016, pg. 89

From The Nazarene, the Lamb of God, The Christ to us, His Church, His Bride, is another 2000 years. Could Chambers and Enns be saying essentially the same thing: That our educated, informed reasoning (Aquinas explicating Transubstantiation) gets in the way of belief or Enns’ suggested word “trust?” Yet at the same time, slavish obedience to any doctrine (YWHW or God, Abraham, and Isaac) leads to blind, twisted fanaticism? Kind of smacks of the religious culture war going on in this Presidential election cycle, doesn’t it?

So, “whassup?”

If the real presence of The Christ is in the Communion wafer and grape juice, transubstantiated or not, where are we in relation to It? What sacrifices are we being asked to stack on the altar of the One True God, the Great Unknowable, YWHW, G-d in order for us to linger in His presence? What tunnels of slavish doctrine, belief, rules, order, business, patronage, shibboleths, degrees, vocations, titles, work product must we haul up our mountains in Moriah in order to abide with God on this side of life? Is S/He calling to us through forests and deserts of our own religious making? What modern, intellectual, reasoned, esteemed, respectable fashions is God going to have to blast away with Her Spirit, hurricane-force pneuma, in order for us to really be in the presence of God, in the presence of The Christ? And can we stand?

"Though He slay me, I will hope in Him. Nevertheless I will argue my ways before Him.
Job 13:15 (NASB)

Because even if he killed me, I’d keep on hoping. I’d defend my innocence to the very end.
Ibid. (TMB)

God may kill me, but still I will trust him[a] and offer my defense.
Ibid. (CEV)

Do we believe in the real God, the One we can’t control, make up in our minds, subject to our own neediness, enough to submit to the ultimate fear, death? And therein lies our answer to the questions first posed at the beginning of our discussion: The Christ. Because He really submitted Himself - His physical self, His only earthly life - for us, we don’t have to. All we have to do is trust, like Abraham, and God does the rest. There will never be satisfactory answers to those kinds of questions because The Christ heals idiosyncratically. Enns eluminates:

Believing is a “who” word ---- letting go of fear and the burning impulse to act, and trusting God. So when I come across that word in the Bible, I replace it with trust, and it always makes a big difference. I’m challenged to get out of my head, where I’m warm and safe, and feel the risk of trusting God. Believing is easy. It gives us wiggle room to think our way out of a tight spot. But trust doesn’t have any wiggle room. It explodes it. Trust is about being all in.
97. Ibid.

So Who is God really? You cannot ask someone who God is for them for you. You have to ask and keep asking, every day, every night, every minute, who God really is for you, for yourself. And when S/He answers --- and eventually, S/He will --- you will know without a doubt the Source of the question itself. What a comfort!

God is the Question, the Answer, and the Source.
Whew…and we thought we could figure It out all by ourselves…

Jesus, thank You for tolerating our questions, dogma, doctrine, rules, enslavements, even as we roll around in it 4000 years after Abraham and 2000 years after You. Thank You for reminding us that we are not a club, a secret society, an encampment but an open society for the whole world. Remind us to be enslaved to You and not our religion. Hold fast to us as we wriggle away, sometimes slither away to lazy, routinized believing and behaving. Break into those crusty layers of defense and bathe us in Your newness. You are fresh, alive, pulsing, and imminent every minute. We just need to turn away, turn around, and listen for Your Call because it’s always there, always. Though the direction is unknown, unclear, and shielded in fog, You reach out Your Hand to us and drag us to You. For this, we give thanks.

Jesus said these things. Then, raising his eyes in prayer, he said: Father, it’s time. Display the bright splendor of your Son So the Son in turn may show your bright splendor. You put him in charge of everything human So he might give real and eternal life to all in his charge. And this is the real and eternal life: That they know you, The one and only true God, And Jesus Christ, whom you sent.
John 17:1-3 (TMB)

Blessed assurance; Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
born of his Spirit, washed in his blood.

This is my story, this is my song,
praising my Savior all the day long;
this is my story, this is my song,
praising my Savior all the day long.
Fanny Crosby

Amen and amen.