Doubtless because I was eagerly anticipating a visit this weekend from one of my long-standing friends, a woman who has known me for more years than either of us care to count, I found myself in a nostalgic mood, remembering years past. This very Gospel was the text for the first Sunday I ever preached, in my very first parish, Larchmont, New York where I began as a curate on an August Sunday in 1976. It was my first sermon, I was 24, I had been ordained four days earlier, and I was the Episcopal Church's, possibly the world's, leading authority on Scripture, and the most amazing preacher that Larchmont, New York had ever heard.

Sorry you all have to put up with the end result, but I seem to have lost some of that brilliance over the years. I don't really remember the sermon, it's possible I suppose, that no one else does either. But I certainly do remember the text, this text, the one this morning, about the flesh and blood of Jesus, now that I remember quite well. And that text hasn't gotten any easier, and I still don't know what to say about, or what to make of it, and I yet I will preach on it once again nonetheless.

"Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you." In those long-ago days, I do remember that I was determined that the congregation should appreciate how bold, how startling, those words of our Lord were. I was graphic, I was lurid. I hinted at possessing a greater knowledge of Greek than I had (which was no knowledge at all basically). Looking back, I now suspect that the congregation of kindly grandmothers who thought I was cute were probably sweetly amused at my furious intensity.

Scholars tell us that the words for eat and drink, used in this passage, are, in the original language, quite startling. The exact translation of eat, as in eat the flesh of the Son of man, is rather more down-to-earth than eat in the sense of simply to consume, or the word for drink simply referring to imbibing. More like gnaw and gulp. Oh my, what I did with that, re-phrasing it and repeating it in ever more vivid terms. I recall that I went overboard. I used to do that. Long ago.

There was actually a point to all of that silliness - the original phrasing was very blunt, direct, unvarnished. It meant "really eat" and "really drink". Nothing metaphorical or poetic. No wonder the Pharisees and many of the disciples were aghast, and scandalized by this teaching. I would have been too. Particularly if I knew enough, as they knew enough, to know the Scriptures by heart. For whatever reason, I had been spared that difficulty by the time I made it to Larchmont. I still possess that immunity.

But by now I have at least cooled down, yet I am possibly more sympathetic to those Pharisees and disciples who could not accept that teaching, who took major offense. Such teaching, such phrasing, on the face of it, if you knew your Bible, could not but offend and upset the pious, the devout, the religious.

The Biblical Law on the subject of eating flesh and blood together could not have been more specific. "No!" "Absolutely No!" Forbidden. Big-time forbidden.

And along comes Jesus and says, flat out: "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him."

Heavy-going for people who knew and loved their Scripture and accounted them the eternal revelation of the Will of God, as many of us still do. It could not have been easy to listen to this teaching, this claim of Jesus with any reverence or equanimity. The Pharisees, doubtless, assumed that Jesus was proposing that they come forward and consume his very life. He was. The Old Testament explains the prohibition on consuming flesh and blood together by saying: You shall not consume the blood with the flesh, for the Blood is the life"

The blood is the life, which is precisely the invitation that Jesus is making - to partake of his very Life. An invitation that must have struck them as awesome and off-putting.

Even some of the disciples could not accept the invitation. Next week's Gospel records the reaction of some of them: "Many of his disciples when they heard it said: "This is a hard saying, who can listen to it? Jesus knowing in himself that the disciples murmured at it, said to them, Do you take offense at this? After this many of his disciples drew back, and no longer went about with him." Indeed they did take offense.

In my 30 years of calming down, I see that a variation, another nuance, emerges for me more now in this text - an allied, but somewhat different, aspect more appeals to me more. "As the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me." We live because of him. Cause and effect. Him - therefore us. An extraordinary claim.

We live because of him. Not just that we believe because of him, not just that we are Christians because of him, not even that we are saved because of him. We live because of him.

I think sometimes, most of the time, we would assert that we live, and because of that fact, we are therefore are in a position that we might love him, might worship him, might respond to him.

However, it is his opinion that we live because of him. Not that we start out living and then we start out to respond in some fashion to him, but rather only because of him do we start out at all. Our faith, our hope, our lives, begin, proceed out of, depend upon him. "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him'"

Here is language that does more than contradict serious and profound dietary laws, kosher restrictions, covenant provisions, here is language that is almost too amazing for discussion, a claim, an assurance that is exhilarating in its compelling promise.

Our Lord is not just talking about the theoretical possibility of an imagined communion with him, he is offering to give his very own life, his flesh and blood, so that we might live our own lives, and so of course he speaks with a clear intensity with an appropriate passion which might well cause offense, such offense that many will draw back and no longer go about with him

Our Lord reminds us this morning, even at the cost of offense and embarrassment, about the astounding reality of the Incarnation, the reality of his Body and Blood - offered, taken, broken, received in the Mass - that passionate participation in his Passion, that loving incorporation into his love, that chance to live, because, and only because he lives and gives and offers us his flesh and blood, which is the life, our Life, his life, our life in him. Even staid, aging preachers get that as well as foolish young firebrands.