Man, you keep eating those—you’re going to turn into a chicken! That’s the set-up line for the McDonald’s commercial you’ve probably seen by now and either love or hate. This middle-age guy falls in love with Mackie D’s new premium chicken sandwiches and becomes addicted to them. The camera follows this chicken sandwich-obsessed guy around, and before long he starts dropping feathers, until at last he gets out of bed and you see his chicken feet hit the floor.

I was reading ad-agency and brand-manager reactions to this commercial online and was amused by the comments. Most of the creative types love it, but the client types that pay for this stuff think it was a huge mistake. McDonald’s always pitches to kids, and even when they pitch to middle-aged overweight overeaters, they pitch to the kid in them. This one was different. One critic concluded: Memo to McDonald’s—please stop scaring our kids or we’re not coming back.

Memo to Jesus: Please stop scaring all of us by telling us we have to eat your flesh and drink your blood. Memo from Jesus to us: You are what you eat. If you want to live in heaven forever, you have to eat the bread of heaven. You have to turn into the kind of people who are fit to live there.

It makes a kind of sense, I guess, even if it does push the gag reflex a bit. For the past two weeks we have listened to Jesus dish out this meal to us unsalted, saying over and over again that he is himself food for the soul. We have to take him in, feed on him, let him nourish us unto eternal life. And we have struggled to understand his figure of speech, gross as it is, don’t you know?!

But we are not the only ones to have trouble swallowing this. As this very long and repetitive chapter 6 of John’s gospel winds down, we see all those who first listened to his teaching were choking on it, too. This teaching is difficult, the disciples say; who can accept it? Jesus hears their complaint and recalls the murmurings of the children of Israel following Moses in the wilderness. God had given them manna to eat day by day and quail now and then for their protein, but after a while they grumbled about the limited menu and dreamed for a little Egyptian home cooking.

But this limited menu is just what Jesus is talking about. He wants people to see him as the true delicacy of God that nurtures and sustains life. He himself is soul food, and we have to develop a taste for him.

The food we ate on our mission trip to Kenya would not show up on a McDonald’s menu. The main vegetable was grass. Okay, they called it kale, but it tasted like grass to me. Lots of starches, too—potatoes and maize. And gravies to cover, no, smother the mystery meat we consumed nightly. If I had to eat that every day, I fear I’d turn into a new breed of cow. Out in the bush we saw vultures and hyenas and a silverback fox cleaning up the carcasses of wildebeests that had been deprived of their choicest organs by the lions. The whole thing made me long for McDonald’s, I tell you.

But we know what that kind of longing does to you, don’t we? McDonald’s is trying to healthy-up its menu now as responsible corporate citizens (and also to avoid the lawsuits from stupid people who want to get rich by suing a restaurant for making them fat). But we all know the truth: You are what you eat.

Years ago the Dallas Mavericks had a promising young forward named Jay Vincent. He struggled with his weight and conditioning, and although he lasted nine productive years in the league, I don’t think he ever rose to his potential. Boston Celtics great John Havlicek, who played 16 amazing seasons and won eight world championships, said of Vincent (and I am sure I am paraphrasing here): If you eat cheeseburgers, you’ll play like a cheeseburger. His point? You are what you eat.

This applies more broadly than just nutritionally. In computer terminology, “garbage in, garbage out.” What you put into your mind as well as into your body will turn you into the kind of person that reflects your diet. Or as Pink Floyd puts it: All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.

If, for instance, you take in nothing but White House press releases and conservative news services, you will think the economy is roaring ahead and the war on every front is victory in the making if we only have the stomach for it. If you take in only those critics who have a vested interest in the failure of the administration’s policies, you would think everyone is going bankrupt and there is nothing in the world worth fighting for. It’s a harder chore to feed your mental appetite for information with a balanced diet of news and come to your own conclusions without becoming a card-carrying conservative or liberal based upon what you are being fed. You are in charge of the information you take in. In another vein, if a man sits at his computer and obsesses over pornography, do you think that will have no effect over the way he views women generally and his wife in particular? And if a woman nurtures her body image on Cosmopolitan magazine and its fashion siblings, do you think she will consider herself attractive or fatally flawed?

Turn it a different way. If you want to be a better golfer, you can’t will yourself to it; you can get there only by devouring good teaching and practice habits and course management. But if all your waking moments, and Sunday mornings, too, are devoted to developing your hobby or your business or your leisure, you will be good at those and miss out on the life that really is life.

If, on the other hand, you want to be the kind of person who survives the grave and makes other people look to you and say, So that’s a Christian; maybe I’ll become one after all, then you have to take in Jesus, who defeated death once and for all. You have to feed on him and live off him. You have to allow his life to be lived through you. You have to set your priorities around becoming like him. Without a steady diet of Jesus, we are deprived of the nutrition we need to be formed into the kind of people that are fit for time and eternity.

We have so many options on the menu these days. Think about your daily intake. I don’t mean literally whether you are following the FDA food-pyramid guidelines; I mean whether your spiritual diet has a strong base. Are you feeding upon the kinds of soul food that will make you strong and fit, or is it all sweets and fast food? Salvation is not a quick meal at the drive-though stained-glass window of a church that caters to your cravings; it is a slow-food, sit-down affair with many courses that take a long time to digest in a church that offers up the kind of food for the soul that will feed you till you want no more.

You feast on Jesus himself. You chew on his Word. You dine with his disciples. You invite people to the table with you that you otherwise would never eat with. You give thanks before partaking. And you give it all time to digest and don’t expect to be satisfied in one sitting. Feasting on the Bread of Life means savoring the Savior, not shoveling him in and going your way without regard to how he wants to change you from the inside out.

The spiritual formation of your soul requires the Spirit of Jesus giving it shape and form. And now is as good a time as any in your life to commit or recommit to just that. We are beginning a new Sunday school year. I am beginning today a new year as your pastor. We are starting a remodeling project that will make room for new people and for some of you regulars who have slipped into irregularity by skipping meals with us around the Table of the Lord and are starving for the Word of God. Clear your calendar for Christ and his church. Make a clean start of it.

Okay, so here’s my last Africa story for a while. One afternoon I got to talking to Daniel Ole Soit, one of the Masai chief’s thirty sons. He told me about how a boy comes to be a warrior. All boys who reach about age 15 will begin training for their warrior years that usually lasts about ten to fifteen years until they become elders and are allowed to marry. The entrance rite is circumcision. At age 15. In front of the whole male community. Try not to picture this. They gather round, and some are assigned the task of watching the boy’s eyes, while others watch his fingers. They are looking to see whether he has mastered his fear and can control his emotions under the severest pain of the cutting ritual. If he passes the test, he is admitted to a group that is taken to the bush for up to two or three years of training. He has to learn how to handle a spear, how to live off the land, how to survive in the wild, and how to kill a lion. Only after bringing a lion back to the village that his spear provided the killing blow to can he be considered a man.

You thought baptism was a big deal? The point is that becoming a Masai warrior requires total commitment to that goal. If a boy fails to conquer his fear, he is shamed and sent out of the community. This rarely happens, however, because, well, it takes a village. From the time the boy is born, the whole Masai people begin to teach the boy what is expected of him, how to eat and behave and what to expect. If he fails, they all have failed. They all have a stake in his success.

The same is true of the church. We are here to help you conquer your fears and find faith, to develop Christ-likeness. We don’t try to make you like everyone else; we help you find what Christ wants uniquely to make of you. We teach you what we have learned of him. We pray with you and for you. We encourage you and challenge you. It’s what we do. It takes a church.

It takes you, too, though. We can’t do it without you. If you are missing in action because you have decided o become someone else or something other than a follower of Christ, we are no help at all. You have to decide if this is what you want.

Many fell away from Jesus because of his call to commitment. The Twelve remained, because, as St. Peter put it, Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.

Can you say the same thing? Since you are what you eat, who you are depends on whether you take in the Bread of Life himself and let him feed your soul until you want no more.