Right. Let the e-mails begin. Those of you with young children will be telling me I should be more discerning about what I preach. Maybe use other language than what Jesus used. The kids will get the idea that Christians are cannibals.

Well, it’s not just the kids. In the early church this language caused the Romans to accuse Christians of just that. After Rome burned while Nero fiddled, the Romans were looking for scapegoats to persecute. They were afraid of the Jews, but by AD 64 the Christians were no longer only Jewish believers in Jesus, so they were easy targets. They met in secret and feasted on the body of their dead leader, said the propagandists.

And we Christians didn’t work too hard to refute them, because Jesus didn’t mince words when he talked about what we have to do to have eternal life. In John 6 Jesus refuses to use a simile, saying something like, “Faith is like eating.” No, he says, “eat my flesh and drink my blood.”

Anne Rice couldn’t have been more graphic. Oddly enough, the novelist about vampires has become a committed Christian nowadays and has written a book called Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, in which she imaginatively fills in the missing years of the boyhood of Jesus. Anne Rice, Christian apologist. Go figure. Irony and faith are fraternal twins, I tell you.

But these uncensored words of Jesus are what sets in motion all the misunderstanding and makes us struggle to understand. Whoever eats me will live because of me. What could he mean by that? And couldn’t he have just tipped us off that he meant it figuratively and not literally? Couldn’t he have said, Now, here’s a metaphor to suggest my meaning? Well, sure, he could have. But since he didn’t, we have to work at it. Which may be just the point, don’t you know?

Too many people want their faith fed to them out of a Gerber’s bottle. They want it soft and smooth. They don’t want to have to chew on it to swallow it. They don’t want to tax their spiritual digestion. Like the man who left our church years ago because he told me he has to think on his job six days a week, and when he comes to church, he doesn’t want to have to work that hard. He wanted me to spoon-feed him, tell him what he already knew. Some of you would not put it the same way, but you might think it gets over your heads now and then. I think Jesus must have gotten the same response to this teaching. I expect he wanted to say, If it’s over your head, you can raise your head.

So if we all need to raise our heads to get what Jesus wants us to get, where will that take us? It might take us to the Lord’s Table. Commentators point out that John 6 can be taken as a lengthy discourse on the Eucharist, the sacred meal of Christians that also goes by the names Lord’s Supper, Communion and Mass. After all, Jesus launches into this idea of eating his flesh and drinking his blood only after he says that he is the Bread of Life, the bread that comes down from heaven as food for the soul. He likened himself to the manna that God gave to the children of Israel in the wilderness, only he is the living bread that never spoils and that nourishes us to everlasting life. He gets more literal and graphic then by saying that the bread that we eat is meat, and that the meat is his flesh. Yuck!

This passage eventually led to the Catholic doctrine of … BIG WORD: ALERT, MUST RAISE HEAD HERE … transubstantiation. In order to honor Jesus’ teaching about this, the church came up with the theory that when the priest rightly speaks the words of institution at the Lord’s Table, the internal character of the bread and wine changes into the actual body and blood of Jesus himself, thus making him truly present in the act of eating and drinking the bread and wine. Even though it still tastes to our taste buds like bread and wine, that is only the outer quality of the thing we taste; the inner substance has changed from one thing to another—thus it has been trans-substantiated.

Most Christians believe that Jesus is somehow mysteriously present in the sacred meal that is partaken of in his name. Yet we argue over how he is so present. It reminds me of standing in a group of people who are talking about you as though you aren’t there. You just want to raise you hand and say, Hello, here I am.

It might surprise you to know that Baptists, though we have been rightly accused lately of being literalists about almost everything, have been figuratists of the first order on both baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Believe and be baptized and thou shalt be saved, the Bible says. Even though we believe in both belief and baptism, that they should go together, we do not go on to say that unless you are baptized, you cannot be saved, as if there is something magical about the water that effects the salvation. No, we believe that Christ is present in baptism in a mysterious yet inexplicable way, just as we believe he is so present in the Lord’s Supper.

The heart of the matter of faith is that faith is a matter of the heart and matter both. That is to say, some people like to think that belief comes down to a feeling that you have about Jesus or an idea that you hold in your mind. Even in the time of the early church, people were tempted to limit faith to the realm of the abstract only. But if God came among us in the flesh-and-blood person of Jesus the Christ, then somehow faith must involve our whole being in the world. It must have to do with our bodily life here and now, not just an idea or feeling now that will allow us to escape the body someday and go as a free spirit into the big sky called heaven.

I learned something about all of this during our recent mission trip to Kenya. After spending several days of hard work in rural West Kenya, we took a day for safari in Masai Mara, a national game reserve. And, yes, we saw lions and elephants and giraffes and rhinos and zebras and lots and lots of wildebeests. Oh, and the sunrises and sunsets—spectacular. Beautiful enough to turn the most calculating engineer into a raving romantic. But the most riveting part to me was becoming acquainted with the Masai tribe itself. The Masai are nomadic, not spending too long in any one place. One reason for that is that they build their huts out of sticks and leaves and cow dung. They just don’t last very long that way. The Masai do not eat vegetables, which makes me think many American boys would be good candidates for becoming Masai warriors. They look down at farmers because they scar the ground on which cattle graze. The Masai believe that God gave them all the cattle in the world, so if you have a cow, it is fair game for the Masai to take it. This interesting tribe eats every part of the cow. In fact, one of their favorite drinks is a delicious mix of cow’s milk and blood. Yummy, huh? I hear Starbucks is adding it to the menu. Any of you kids still want to be Masai warriors?

Many Masai are Christians now, and the story of their evangelization is fascinating. The late Roman Catholic missionary Vince Donovan wrote a book called Christianity Rediscovered about his encounter with the Masai and how he taught them the gospel. He said that an elder of the community corrected him one day when he and his translator tried to express the meaning of faith. The word he originally used in the Masai language means “to agree to.” The old man said that to believe like that would be similar to a white hunter shooting an animal with his gun from a great distance. Only his eyes and fingers would take part in the act. He said that for a person truly to believe is like a lion going after its prey. “His nose and eyes and ears pick up the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power of the body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down the lion envelops it in his arms [Africans refer to the front legs of an animal as its arms], pulls it to himself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a [person] believes. This is what faith is.” [Orbis Books, 1978, p. 48.]

Is this what faith is to you? Does it involve your whole body as well as your heart and mind? When you think of what it means to believe in Jesus, is it only about getting that warm feeling in your heart or the right ideas in your head? This is the very thing I think Jesus counters when he says to the those religious leaders in his day who questioned his message that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood, they could have no part of him.

Jesus demands total commitment from those who follow him. He wants you to hold nothing back. He invites you to eat him up, drink him down, take him in, and let him nourish you from the inside out. Proper etiquette for passionate Christians involves eating with your hands, so to speak. This is no knife-and-fork faith politely practiced with a dainty napkin dabbing the corners of your mouth. You can’t come to faith in Christ halfway, from a safe distance, keeping your cool, maintaining your social image. You have to give him everything if you are to receive everything in return. Ours is an all-consuming faith, because ours is an all-consuming Christ.

Some of you never consider whether faith in Christ will affect more than the system of beliefs you subscribe to or the fuzzy feeling you get inside when you come to church. But Jesus wants you to bring your work and your wallet and your worries to your faith. He wants to enter into you and transform your whole life. So he asks you to take him in, to consume him so that you will be consumed by him.

All of this is no achievement that God asks of you. When the Masai elder told Vince Donovan that faith is like a lion on the prowl, he made one more observation. He reminded the missionary that the Masai did not go in search of this good news of eternal life. They were not hunting for this gospel. But the missionary was hunting for them, searching them out, traveling great distances to find them, to understand them, in order to bring the news of the High God to them. And what this man saw is that it wasn’t the missionary who was searching for the Masai; it was God. “All the time we think we are the lion,” said the old man. “In the end, the lion is God.”

God is searching for you and me. Hunting us down. God is reaching out to consume us as prey, holding nothing back, risking everything to become one with us. And all God asks is that we join the sumptuous feast of faith in which Christ is both the host and the meal. Become partakers of Christ and find food for your soul.