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Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
will have eternal life.
Several years ago, I started to listen to a podcast from Dr. Peter Attia.
It is a Medical and Health podcast.
It is really detailed and it is really powerful.
He takes a subject each week and
it goes into it for like an hour or sometimes two plus hours.
Goes deep into it.
It is very fascinating.
He is called the longevity doctor.
He focuses on health span as in quality of years
and not length of life as in what we call lifespan,
which is the number of years.
In particular, he gets into the last decade of life;
the quality of life in that last decade.
Additionally, last year, I received a gift
to go to one of these very expensive health spas
for a week in Tucson, Arizona called Canyon Ranch.
It was a fantastic week.
It was like a retreat.
I learned all the regular stuff that we typically hear
about nutritional balance,
between what you should take and what you should not take
and how much exercise you should take.
All the stuff that we have heard time and time and time again.
But the one thing that caught my attention,
and I heard differently for whatever reason,
was the need for building muscle.
Muscle is important and the older you get,
the more important it becomes because you lose it.
After 50, it starts to deteriorate rapidly as opposed to up to 50.
The importance of what that muscle does for not only your body strength,
but actually longevity of life.
Because strength will keep you living longer and healthier.
I found it fascinating and I was inspired by it.
I am not sure whether I was inspired
because I have hit that certain age.
Right? Now that I am 59.
Getting up there to that famous sixty next year!
Or whether it is because I lost my brother and my spiritual director,
and a number of others to pancreatic and other cancers.
Or whether it is just because I hurt my knee 18 months ago.
Maybe it was the combination of all of them.
It hit me hard and I listened.
It was not so much new information, but new inspiration.
Over this last year, I am now the lightest I have been in life in fat weight.
I am the heaviest that I have been in muscle weight
and I am the, the fittest I have been probably in 40 years.
It is just amazing what that inspiration could to do.
Now why do I bring this up?
We hear today, and we have heard this for the last several Sundays,
the Bread of Life discourse from chapter six of the Gospel of John.
In it he talks about how the Christ that comes to us in the Eucharist
is the bread of life that came down from heaven for all of us.
And it is true bread and is true flesh and true blood
and his blood is for the life of the world.
We have all heard this before;
there is nothing new in this information.
We have all heard this every three years.
In fact, we hear it more often than that.
We hear it during Lent as well.
We hear it multiple times in Easter and now here.
It is not new information,
but I am hoping that we will have new inspiration;
new inspiration to really get the message
as we hear today in all these readings.
Basically we hear,
“Hey, you know, there is something greater in life
than just this present moment.
There is something really more powerful in life than just living.”
The letter to the Ephesians goes on about just living and having fun,
which in that context was just drinking and partying.
And so they are all, each of these different readings,
trying to wake us up.
Jesus, the most forceful of all in telling his disciples
and the would be disciples,
“Listen, I am true food, I am true drink this flesh
and body of mine is the real thing.”
So what are we meant to do with this?
How, how are we meant to hear this?
One of the things I heard down in Canyon Ranch is this BMR.
BMR or “basal metabolic rate” is how much
your body needs to maintain itself calorie wise.
And once you go over that,
you need to do exercise because you are taking in more
than you need right now.
The more muscle you have, the more that base level goes up.
You need more to contain more.
So mine is astronomical 2100 calories.
By lying flat the ground all day I will consume 2100 calories.
I will not put on a a a ounce of of of weight.
Now I know a lot of you women are going like, what?
That is not fair. I know, I know.
But when you are a big boy like me,
you get to have some of that benefit.
So that is for our physical bodies.
We believe that we are also spiritual bodies
and that we have a certain level of need,
a base level of need for our spiritual bodies.
We need to give it food,
true food and true drink that nourishes our spiritual bodies.
If we do not, then we are going to be malnourished
and have some maladies.
We call those maladies sins.
It is a metaphor to the extent that
we are not taking care of our spiritual bodies.
So, there is no new information here for any of you,
like we have all heard this before,
but I am hoping that we can be inspired
by what Christ is saying to us;
We need to not only come to this table
to receive the true food and the true drink,
but then what we have to understand that
we have to exercise our spiritual body to build a spiritual muscle.
And that is called works of justice and works of charity.
We have to be what we have received.
We have heard me say this a thousand times,
but if we do not do that, then all we are doing is serving ourselves.
All we are doing is feeding ourselves.
And there is a bigger body that we are called to feed.
We are called to be the bread for the life of the world.
We are called to be this true food for the world;
we are called to give of ourselves.
That is the spiritual muscle building:
it is about acts of kindness and acts of gentleness,
acts of forgiveness, acts of charity.
Where we help somebody else and
we exercise our spiritual bodies by doing something for somebody else.
The beauty of this is not only are we
building up our own spiritual strength,
but we are also being true food for somebody else.
See how there is a double benefit?
It is not just good for us, but it is good for the world.
This is what Jesus is trying to say.
Now let’s be honest, Jesus hits this hard.
He says to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood.
Now a better translation would be “Gnaw on my flesh.”
That is actually the translation “gnaw on my flesh and gop my blood.”
He is being particularly crass to try and wake them up and say,
“Listen, this is true stuff. This is me.
You have to be me in the world.
You have to eat my flesh and
then be me in the world.”
It is so shocking that we will hear next week
that a whole ton of them walk away;
it is too much for them.
But I do not want this to be too much for us.
I want us to become what we receive.
But I want us to understand why we need to do this.
It is because the whole world needs this nourishment so desperately.
We are the remnant few who come to church.
We need to be the bread of life for the world.
If we do not do it, then who is going to do it?
There is no one else out here.
It is just us guys.
It is up to us to live what Christ gave to us
and to become that in the world.
It is not just a suggestion.
Oh, if you get a chance to be kind,
oh, do get to be charitable if you get a chance.
No, it is a mandate.
It is a promise that you make when you come here.
When you say amen, you are saying,
I promised to become what I receive.
This is not for lighthearted.
This is real stuff.
This is what we are promising every week.
So today, let it be serious.
When we receive the body of Christ and we say amen,
just know what we are undertaking.
We are saying amen.
To be promising, to become what we receive,
the bread of life for the world
that is so desperately needs it true flesh for the world.
True blood. Now I understand that is not a head thing.
Jesus was trying to get them outta their head
and into their heart because it is mystery.
And what we do today is participate in this mystery
to become the mystery in the world.
I know it is hard stuff and I know you have heard it a thousand times,
but today let us live it.
Today, let us live it with every sinew of our strength,
our spiritual bodies pushed to the limits.
We are the true food for the world, the true blood for the world.
We give ourselves the bread of life for the rest of the world.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
will have eternal life.
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