New DNA from the Lord

This Maundy Thursday sermon was preached April 2, 2015, at Grand View Lutheran Church at a joint service with Luther Memorial Church.

I’ve signed on to teach one of Grand View’s freshman seminars next semester. Students in my course will examine the various patterns in their lives, from time management to the paper-writing process to their family history. As part of the class, they’ll have a DNA test done in order to learn more about what the pattern of their genome says about their ancestry. In order to know exactly what kind of information students will learn, I sent in a vial of my own saliva to see what it said about me. I got the initial results back this week and learned that I belong to two distinct genetic streams called haplogroups, one traced through all my male ancestors beginning with my father and the other through my female ancestors. It turns out that I’m the product of a genetic mutation on my paternal side that happened in southern France about the time of the Ice Age, and on my maternal side things go way back to early human migrations from Africa to southern Pakistan.

Wild, huh? But that’s the least of it. Doing a DNA test from 23andMe will also give you information about how much Neanderthal DNA you carry in you. I’m proud to say that the preacher standing before you today is made up of 3.2% Neanderthal genes – more than 98 out of 100 other people have. So I have that going for me, and if you wonder why I can verge on the earthy and boorish, there’s good reason.

Your preacher tonight, this part-Neanderthal named Ken Jones, is the product of thousands of years of ancestors from whom I’ve inherited my very being. My eye color, the fullness of my beard, the shape of my toenails, my lima bean ear lobes, my propensity for weight gain, and all kinds of genetic markers that may indicate a likelihood for cancer or Parkinson’s disease, all of these have come to me unbidden through 22 pairs of chromosomes. I chose none of it, and I have to live with it, all thanks to an ancient woman in Pakistan and a mammoth-hunting progenitor in southern France, not to mention a Neanderthal that hooked-up with a human partner. It’s my millennia-long inheritance.

All of this DNA and genome business comes to the fore for me tonight because of a word Jesus used at the Last Supper when he instituted the sacrament of Holy Communion. It’s right there in the Words of Institution: “On the night in which he was betrayed our Lord Jesus took bread and gave thanks. He broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat. This is my body given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.’ Again, after supper, he took the cup saying, ‘This cup is the new…’” And there we hit that word. In Greek it’s diathēkē. “This cup is the new diathēkē in my blood.” Our current permutation of hymnal translates the word as “covenant.” Jesus is giving a new covenant. An ancient covenant was a legal and binding agreement between two parties, and covenant language is strewn across the 37 books of the Old Testament. God had made a covenant with the ancient Israelites, which, of course they had a mighty hard time upholding. Now in the sacrament of the altar given to you by Jesus, he makes a new agreement with you.

The problem with thinking of the Lord’s Supper as a covenant is that it implies that we’re a party to the covenant and have some say in it. You’d never go through the elaborate ritual of name-signing in a house-closing if you didn’t see yourself as an equal partner with the home seller. But the sacrament doesn’t work that way. There’s nothing for you to do here. If you could contribute in any way to what the Lord’s Supper offers, there would be no need of it to start with. Here’s Jesus’ body and blood given and shed for you, all on account of your inability to get your act together, fully follow the Commandments, or desire God’s will.

So if we miss something by calling what Jesus offers to us tonight a covenant, there’s another way into understanding what our Lord has to give us. The other way to translate diathēkē is will or testament. When Jesus says, “This is my diathēkē,” he’s saying that this sacrament tonight is his last will and testament. We know how that kind of thing works. When our son Sam was born, a member of our congregation who was a lawyer drafted a will for us that’s now been in place for over two decades. Our will dictates exactly what our beneficiary receives. Sam gets it all. Our last will and testament declares it. His inheritance comes not by being good enough, not by accomplishing a single thing, not by meeting our expectations. Our diathēkē will come to him as sheer gift.

Of course, Sam has already received a prior gift from us, and that’s his genetic structure. His haplogroups aren’t exactly like mine, because half his genes were handed on by his beloved mother. But every single gene is all his, including whatever bits of Neanderthal DNA he’s inherited. It belongs to him without his behest. He’s the living embodiment of a first inheritance and of another that awaits him when we die.

And that’s exactly what happens for us in the sacrament tonight. When Jesus says, “This is the new testament in my blood,” he means exactly that. He’s giving you the inheritance that is first his as the Father’s only-begotten Son: forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. That’s what he’s come to give. In the sacrament he gives his last will and testament that declares that his gifts are for you. There’s nothing for you to do. He’s not much interested in being a role model or an arbiter of piety, so that you can be all you can be. Frankly, he knows how awful you are at hewing closely to him, committing to God, or being devoted to a spiritual life. Instead he lays it out in the sacrament in a way that is legal and binding. He is righteous and faithful for your sake, all the way to the cross. He does it all in order that you might live. That’s his bequest.

When we hear the words of institution spoken from the altar, the pastor functions like an attorney will one day when Mary and I die. Gathered in some lawyer’s office, our heir will be present for the reading of the will. And it will be explicitly declared what is now his: Mary’s earrings and assorted jewelry, shelves full of books, the bed my grandfather was born in, the art on our walls, dishes and silverware, and whatever toilet paper is still under the bathroom sink. When you hear the words of institution, you hear exactly what you have coming to you.

The irony is that if you’re at all honest about yourself, you know exactly what you justly have coming to you from God: nothing at all at best and damnation at worst. But Jesus is no just Lord. He’s not into issuing contracts and holding all parties to the letter of the law. He likes flaunting the law on your behalf and breaking the bonds of every demand. He’s got an eternity of forgiveness, life, and salvation in his back pocket and he’s champing at the bit to make sure you get it.

But here’s the rub: just like our own last will and testament, there’s one thing that has to happen for it to come into effect. Someone’s gotta die. When Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper, he knows exactly what’s coming. He will be betrayed and arrested. He will be tried and adjudicated as an out-and-out sinner. He will suffer scourging and mocking. He will be crucified. He will die. And your inheritance can’t be proclaimed without it. That means that tonight, Maundy Thursday, isn’t just a reenactment of the Last Supper or a kind of remembering that puts the pieces of Jesus broken body together again so we can, in turn, break them in our ritual. No, but Jesus’ own actions and command are the proclamation that what happens on Good Friday and Easter are indeed for you.

When you take and eat and take and drink, what happens to Jesus’ body and blood is the same exact thing that happens when you eat a B-Bop’s burger or drink a glass of the best pinot noir. Jesus’ body and blood go down your gullet, only to be broken down, so that the nutrients of his forgiveness and mercy can be sent via your bloodstream to every single cell of your own body. Because of this sacrament you will carry around Jesus’ death and resurrection in each of those cells – nerve cells, ear lobe cells, calloused heel cells, left gluteal cells, liver, spleen, and pancreas cells, eyeball rod and cone cells, salivary gland cells. Each of your cells will carry Jesus in the same way that they carry your DNA.

In fact, Jesus is already at work in you, creating a new person in you, unbound by your past, your present worries, your weights and woes. He even promises that all that DNA, both human and Neanderthal, is bound for an end and new beginning. He’s the first-born of the Resurrection and aims to take you up with him and give you, too, a new body. For a stocky guy who has his grandmother’s genetic predisposition toward weight-gain and a sinner who’s inherited my brokenness and death from my first parents in the Garden of Eden, that’s extremely good news. And the promise stands true for you, as well. In Jesus’ forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life, the old you is coming to an end and new life is coming to you like some divine somatic gene therapy.

So steel yourselves, my friends. Let the sinner in you gird its loins, as if it’s going to do any good. For the Lord himself has died to give you your inheritance in this sacrament. And this is not your own doing, but it’s given by the free will of the only one we truly can say freely wills what God intends. It’s his will that he die that you might have life. It’s his testament that you own everything that is his. Thanks be to God. Amen.