Last week in Bible study when we were struggling through all of the weird “eat my flesh and drink my blood” language, I jokingly mentioned that we were not unique in struggling with what Jesus was saying here. Because in verse sixty, right after the section we’d just read, Jesus’ own disciples remarked, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And if the disciples, who were standing with Jesus, who had the benefit of having been traveling with Jesus, couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, then no wonder we can’t quite understand it either.
And Jesus’ response to his disciples discomfort was not to explain it further or back off and take a lighter tone. No, Jesus found the point of soreness and pushed even harder into it. “Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? … among you there are some who do not believe… For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” This approach shouldn’t surprise us, Jesus had been doing this throughout the whole Bread of Life discourse. When the crowd he had fed with five loaves and two fish came searching for him, he chastised them for not working for the food that endures. When they complained he claimed to be from heaven, when they knew he was Joseph and Mary’s son, he told them they couldn’t know him unless they were drawn to him by God. When they were disturbed by his calls to eat his flesh, he told them that only by eating his flesh could they live.
As we wrap up the Bread of Life discourse, I’ve been thinking about why Jesus might have done this, to take something that made the crowd and his disciples uncomfortable and just keep pushing further into it until eventually, as we read this morning in verse sixty-six, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Wasn’t pushing so hard that people turned away counter-intuitive to what he was trying to do? But something about this reminded me of someone; it reminded me of my physical therapist. Let me explain.
As I think most of you know, this summer I’ve been seeing a physical therapist to try to work through some issues I’ve been having with my hip. The problem is one of the muscles around my hip was underdeveloped, apparently a super common problem in runners, and it made the other muscles over function, which caused them to tighten up and get inflamed. The treatment for this is a combination strengthening the underdeveloped muscles and loosening the overused ones, to balance everything out. The strengthening part is fine. Each time I go in, the therapist leads me through a series of funny exercises. I walk with a stretchy band around my ankles, I stand on one foot and throw a medicine ball at a trampoline, I slide my foot back and forth along a slippery board. It’s a workout, but I run marathons, for fun. Kicking my foot backwards, not that big of a deal. But the part that I love to hate is the stretching and loosening the tight muscles. After I’ve done all the funny exercises, the therapist has my lay on my back on a massage table, and she kneads into the muscle to try and encourage it to relax. And let me tell you what friends, it hurts. She leans into it with the base of her hand, and her elbow, and I lay there, clutching the side of the table just trying not to cry.
While this is going on, I’m supposed to be relaxing into the pressure, or else the muscle won’t relax and all the pain is for nothing. There are few things more counterintuitive then trying to loosen a muscle that someone is digging into for all they’re worth. And it’s not just painful, it’s also a really vulnerable feeling. It’s my hip, right, so basically this means twice a week I have a twenty-minute long butt massage that ends in me biting back tears of pain while simultaneously trying to breath into it, relax, and place my entire weight into a person I’d never met before last month and really don’t know all that well. The strengthening part’s ok, because it’s something I’m doing, something I can control. But the stretching part feels more like its being done to me, and I’m not a big fan of that.
But, as much as I don’t like it, I have to admit, it’s helping. Recovery is so, so, so much slower than I’d like, I want to be back up and running, like, yesterday, but even I can admit its improving. On Wednesday when Kendra and I were chasing the bat out of the church I was able to sprint full speed from the bathrooms, through the kitchen, and across the social hall without any pain. That’s a huge step forward from earlier in the summer. And even in the painful pushing into the muscle there is some relief. Because as much as it hurts, it feels better. As the therapist is pressing down into the muscle, I can feel the knot start to give way, I can feel the blood flowing into it, I can feel the tightness start to loosen. It hurts, but it is a good hurt, a hurt that I can tell is leading to healing.
And I wonder if this sort of hurt is exactly what Jesus was trying to do for his disciples. I wonder if he was trying to push them past a point of tension into new life. He could have laid back, not driven so hard into the weird and hard pieces of this teaching, could have talked more about the spirit and less about his flesh, could have given them the actual food they wanted in the beginning rather than these harder teachings. These things would probably have made Jesus more popular, and maybe would have kept many from turning away. But look where the reading from this morning ended, it ended with Peter confessing, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” And would Peter have been able to make such a bold confession, “We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God,” without having been challenged in this way? I would guess not.
I could have quit physical therapy at any point if I wanted to. I've had no pain during any of my normal life activities. I can walk, sit, move, totally fine. But I kept going because it still hurt when I run, and without running I don’t feel like I’m truly living. So I let the physical therapist push me past the point of pain trusting that what I’ll gain on the other side is a richer, fuller, more vibrant life. And I think that is what Peter and the disciples found when Jesus had pushed them through this Bread of Life discourse. It hurt going through, but on the other side they found the Source of Life itself, the Holy One of God.
Jesus pushes us so hard because he loves us too much to let us be our same stagnant selves, to let us stay where we are instead of grow to who we could be. And Jesus does this however we come to him and whether we ask for it or not. This talk about seeing the Son of Man ascending is the same challenge he issued Nathanael, when Nathanael came to him way back in chapter one. Quick refresher because that was a while ago, at the very start of Jesus’ ministry, Philip, one of Jesus’ first disciples, went and found Nathanael and invited him to come meet Jesus. To which Nathanael quipped, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But when Jesus saw Nathanael coming, he told Nathanael he knew him because he’d seen him “under the fig tree before Philip called you.” To which Nathanael replied, stunned, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.” Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than these… you will see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
The crowd listening to the Bread of Life discourse came to Jesus with their doubts, “this teaching is hard,” and Jesus pushed them to a new and fresh idea. Nathanael came to Jesus in faith, albeit a limited faith, and Jesus pushed him too, to a deeper and richer understanding. This is the hard and wonderful reality of grace, of a God who loves us unconditionally, exactly who and where we are. A God who loves us that much is never going to be satisfied with where we are, but is always going to want more for us, always going to want better for us. It is precisely because God loves us exactly who we are, that God is pushing so hard for us to be more. So when you find your faith challenged, when you find yourself pushed, let this text be a reminder to lean into the challenge, to let yourself be pushed. Ours is a God who never settles for us to be anything less than our best, God just loves us too much for that. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, August 27, 2018
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Conversation Points for John 6:56-69
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• At the heart of John’s Eucharistic theology is relationship and presence. The key of v. 56 is the verb “to abide” (meno). Meno is a very common word in John’s gospel to express the interrelationship between Jesus and the believer, and that relationship as an extension of the interrelationship between Jesus and God.
• V. 58 is the summation of the whole Bread of Life narrative, that Jesus is the bread of life who gives eternal life, which is never ending relationship with him and through him with God.
• V. 59 serves to locate Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue, the traditional Jewish location of teaching and learning.
• The disciples’ grumbling in v. 60 is described with the same word as the crowd’s grumbling in v. 41, (gongyzĹ, sometimes translated in the NRSV as “complain”).
• Jesus challenged the disciples’ complaints with an open-ended statement, “what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending…” V. 62 connects the offensiveness of Jesus’ Bread of Life teachings with his whole life, the Son of Man language connects to Jesus’ return to God (3:13; 20:17), the eternal nature of the Son of Man (1:1-2, 18; 8:58), and his descent from God (3:13; 6:38, 51). 1:51 (“And [Jesus] said to [Nathanael], ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’”) works in the same way to move the disciples past their immediate response, be that response faith or doubt. In this way the ascent of the Son of Man (Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension is all tied up in the ascent) is greater than anything the disciples have yet experienced.
• V. 63 is confusing because it seems to undo all Jesus had taught about the importance of eating his flesh. O’Day argues Jesus is pulling from 1:14, “and the Word became flesh.” Flesh alone, the eucharist alone, is not magic. Rather it is bread/flesh with the Word that gives life. From Luther’s Small Catechism, “These words [“given for you” and “shed for you”], when accompanied by the physical eating and drinking, are the essential thing in the sacrament.”
• V. 64-65 deals with one of the key tensions, that between God’s work and human decision. V. 65 reiterates the statement in v. 37, 39, and 44, we cannot reach Jesus without God reaching us.
• The reference to “the Twelve” in v. 67 is rare in John’s Gospel, it only happens here and at one of the post-resurrection accounts (20:24). Unlike the synoptics, in John the group of disciples is much more fluid. The reference appearing here means John probably pulled this section from another account, a Johannine version of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi.
• Peter’s confession in v. 68 uses both “believe” and “know,” two words that are used interchangeably in John’s Gospel. The repetition serves to intensify the confession.
• The title “Holy One of God” is only used here in John’s gospel, though it was the term used by demons in Mark. “Holy” is the Greek hegiasen can also be translated as sanctified, and it means to be set apart.
Works Sourced:
O’ Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• At the heart of John’s Eucharistic theology is relationship and presence. The key of v. 56 is the verb “to abide” (meno). Meno is a very common word in John’s gospel to express the interrelationship between Jesus and the believer, and that relationship as an extension of the interrelationship between Jesus and God.
• V. 58 is the summation of the whole Bread of Life narrative, that Jesus is the bread of life who gives eternal life, which is never ending relationship with him and through him with God.
• V. 59 serves to locate Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue, the traditional Jewish location of teaching and learning.
• The disciples’ grumbling in v. 60 is described with the same word as the crowd’s grumbling in v. 41, (gongyzĹ, sometimes translated in the NRSV as “complain”).
• Jesus challenged the disciples’ complaints with an open-ended statement, “what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending…” V. 62 connects the offensiveness of Jesus’ Bread of Life teachings with his whole life, the Son of Man language connects to Jesus’ return to God (3:13; 20:17), the eternal nature of the Son of Man (1:1-2, 18; 8:58), and his descent from God (3:13; 6:38, 51). 1:51 (“And [Jesus] said to [Nathanael], ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’”) works in the same way to move the disciples past their immediate response, be that response faith or doubt. In this way the ascent of the Son of Man (Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension is all tied up in the ascent) is greater than anything the disciples have yet experienced.
• V. 63 is confusing because it seems to undo all Jesus had taught about the importance of eating his flesh. O’Day argues Jesus is pulling from 1:14, “and the Word became flesh.” Flesh alone, the eucharist alone, is not magic. Rather it is bread/flesh with the Word that gives life. From Luther’s Small Catechism, “These words [“given for you” and “shed for you”], when accompanied by the physical eating and drinking, are the essential thing in the sacrament.”
• V. 64-65 deals with one of the key tensions, that between God’s work and human decision. V. 65 reiterates the statement in v. 37, 39, and 44, we cannot reach Jesus without God reaching us.
• The reference to “the Twelve” in v. 67 is rare in John’s Gospel, it only happens here and at one of the post-resurrection accounts (20:24). Unlike the synoptics, in John the group of disciples is much more fluid. The reference appearing here means John probably pulled this section from another account, a Johannine version of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi.
• Peter’s confession in v. 68 uses both “believe” and “know,” two words that are used interchangeably in John’s Gospel. The repetition serves to intensify the confession.
• The title “Holy One of God” is only used here in John’s gospel, though it was the term used by demons in Mark. “Holy” is the Greek hegiasen can also be translated as sanctified, and it means to be set apart.
Works Sourced:
O’ Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, August 20, 2018
You are Loved: A Sermon on John 6:51-58
For the past month we’ve been working through this Bread of Life discourse and you’ve maybe begun to notice that Jesus is pretty repetitive in this chapter. In fact, as it goes on and Jesus meets opposition, he only seems to dig in deeper, pushing harder and harder into the most challenging points of his argument. This is a hallmark of Jesus’ speeches in John’s Gospel, to find a point of soreness and push and push and push until the audience either falls away or comes to a new point of understanding. We’ll really see that when we read the last section of this discourse next week.
But today we have this weird section where Jesus is just digging in on the idea of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And in all fairness, let’s just admit that the things Jesus is saying here are weird. This language about eating Jesus flesh and drinking his blood are disturbing, the stuff of horror movies. And if you think the language is visceral in English, oh man, the Greek is even stronger. The word for flesh here is sarkos, and it’s the word for like a hunk of meat. There’s something really bodily, really carnal in how this word would have sounded to John’s audience. And the word here for eat is trogo, which means to chew, to crunch, to gnaw on. This is in contrast to earlier in this same passage, where Jesus used phago for to eat, which has a broader range of meaning. So again, there is this very vivid, very visceral word here: chew on my flesh, drink of my blood, those who do these things will live forever.
These words are weird, and the audience for Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse was not the only group in history to have trouble with these words. This language of eating flesh and drinking blood was one of the things Rome held against the early church, accusing them of cannibalism and human sacrifice; of being danger and a menace to polite society. Yet, and this is a bit of an interesting aside but I think it’s relevant, all of this fear-mongering about how Christians will literally eat you did not keep people from being drawn to this Jesus movement. Because Rome’s attempts at fear-mongering couldn’t turn attention from what was really happening in these fledging Acts communities, the poor were being fed, the naked were being clothed, the sick were being cared for, and the lonely were being loved. What people encountered when they gathered around the table of the early Church for this meal of flesh and blood, was a table where there was enough to go around, where the wealthy and the poor came on equal footing, where those who were hungry in all ways, not just physically but spiritually as well, found food.
Today the arguments about the Eucharist being cannibalism are pretty much over, but the church still engages in these weird, esoteric arguments about EXACTLY what Jesus meant by “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood will have eternal life.” There’s the sacramental argument, does the bread and wine LITERALLY become flesh and blood, what the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation, the bread and wine transforming into body and blood. Is it a merely a symbol, staying bread and wine, but reminding us of flesh and blood. Or something in between, both bread and wine AND body and blood, all that the same time, the fancy churchy word here being consubstantiation, con meaning with, both bread and body, both blood and wine, together, completely both, at the same time. If you’re curious where the ELCA falls on this, in the classic Lutheran fashion our church’s answer to which of these three it is, is yes. Which, you may argue, is not an answer to the question at all, to which the church again says, yes. What exactly happens at communion is for our faith tradition not as important as what communion does, and what it does is give us forgiveness and life and salvation. So what does the ELCA believe? We believe Christ is truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine of communion. We believe that this bread and wine has Christ’s word bound to it, and that in this Word and bread and wine we get daily refreshment and strength for the struggles of life, forgiveness of sin, and life, and salvation again and again, as often as we eat and drink. And we believe this is God’s doing and not our own, so that nothing we do can affect God’s promise. Luther wrote in the Large Catechism, “Do you think God cares so much about our faith and conduct that he would permit them to affect his ordinances?” Pardon the masculine pronouns, its Luther, point being it takes a fairly high view of one’s own power and importance in the world to think that God would be hamstrung by something we could do. But which of the fancy Latin terms is it, that the church doesn’t worry about so much. This is the body and blood of Jesus given for us, it is because Jesus said it is, it is life-giving, it’s a gift God wants us to have, and God gives to us over and over again in spite of, and even in fact because of, the fact that we cannot ear or deserve it, and that’s all that really matters. In fact, Luther also said that the times we feel the least worthy are the times communion is the most for us. I think Jesus pushed the crowd so hard into the weirdness of this story so they could get out of their own way and just be fed, just be loved, just be changed by this gift.
This is hard for us smart, rational, thinking brains to do. But luckily, God also gave us an amazing guide in how we do this, and that guide is children. Let me tell you a story about how I got a glimpse of the gift of communion. Atonement Lutheran Church is an inner-city congregation in Syracuse, New York. And I’ll also tell you, they are the model for who I think we could grow up to be, because like you all, they had an incredible capacity for chaos. In fact, I think we’ve actually even got a leg up on them in the chaos tolerating department because they would not have handled last week’s mid-worship scene change nearly as well as we did. But anyway, one of the ministries at Atonement was what they called Wednesday Church Night, and it was a meal followed by children’s activities and a worship service. And Wednesday Church Night was chaos incarnate. We’d have one-hundred plus people at the meal, sixty of whom general stayed for worship, thirty to forty of whom were children. The kids would spend most of the worship service in the chapel for Christian education and then would come into the sanctuary during the Passing of the Peace for communion. Once the kids came in, it was all hands on deck for kid wrangling. And as the intern, and as the youngest person on staff, if it wasn’t my turn to preach I was expected to be right in the middle of it. One Wednesday evening I ended up next to one of the regulars, a boy about six. He and his brothers had grown up at Wednesday Church Night, they lived in the apartment complex the church managed and they came to worship every Wednesday, and occasionally on Sundays to snag donuts at coffee hour. So this kid had grown up in church, had grown up taking communion. But for whatever reason, on this particular evening, the words hit him differently. So when my supervisor was saying the Words of Institution, “this is my body, given for you, this is my blood, shed for you,” the kid turns to me and, with all of the volume control of an excited six-year-old, sort of stage whispered to me, loud enough so of course half the congregation could hear him, “is that blood in that cup?” And I, my grown-up, analytical, seminary-trained mind immediately went into overdrive. I started running through everything I’d learned in Confessions class in my head, trying to figure out how to break down that whole explanation about in, with, and under that I just shared with you, how to condense pages and pages of theological scholarship, into language that a six-year-old could understand, that I could whisper to him, without interrupting the service further, in a sentence or two. Oh no, I don’t think small when it comes to theology. All this went through my head in the space of a few seconds, until I decided that saying anything was better than saying nothing at all. So I turned back to him, but by that point the service had moved on to saying the Lord’s Prayer, and he had turned his bulletin into a trumpet and was using it to yell the Lord’s Prayer into his neighbor’s ear as loud as he possibly could, while his neighbor tried to beat him off with his own bulletin. In other words, he’d totally moved on and it was not the best time to try and interrupt him to have a deep theological discussion.
I interrupted the bulletin trumpet fight, but by then it was time for me to go up to assist with distributing communion, holding the cup for intinction was always the intern’s job. So I’m standing there, holding this cup, just dreading this kid coming forward, what kind of a scene could develop. Would he yell, would he scare the other kids, what was going to happen here? My hands were shaking as he got closer. But you know what this little scamp did? My supervisor handed him a piece of the bread, “the body of Christ, given for you.” And I knelt down to lower the cup to his level, “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” This kid held that piece of bread between his grubby little six-year-old fingers and with great flourish dipped the bread in the cup up to his knuckles. Fun fact, I never got sick a day on internship, and I attribute that to the fact that everyone dipped their whole hand in the communion cup, and it was my job to drink it at the end of the service. But anyway, I digress. So, with his fingers still submerged in the wine he looked right up at me, and I swear to you he winked, then he pulled the bread out of the cup, put it in his mouth and chewed with great gusto, saying, “Amen, thank you Jesus.”
This kid didn’t care what happened with the bread and the wine that was body and blood. He didn’t need the deep theological argument; he didn’t need to be convinced or even to believe. Children have an incredible capacity for wonder, everything is new so everything is possible, and that wonder at a God who comes to us in bread and wine, who meets us in the beautiful chaos of community, of places where we can be our whole messy, complicated, dipping our fingers into the knuckles selves, who loves us unconditionally, even as we still have so much to learn, that kid got that. He knew that church was a place where he was fed, both his body and his soul, where he was loved, where he was valued and treasured, and since church was that place, then God was that place as well. If it was blood, then it was blood. What mattered to him was he knew that he was loved. And you are loved too. Amen.
But today we have this weird section where Jesus is just digging in on the idea of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And in all fairness, let’s just admit that the things Jesus is saying here are weird. This language about eating Jesus flesh and drinking his blood are disturbing, the stuff of horror movies. And if you think the language is visceral in English, oh man, the Greek is even stronger. The word for flesh here is sarkos, and it’s the word for like a hunk of meat. There’s something really bodily, really carnal in how this word would have sounded to John’s audience. And the word here for eat is trogo, which means to chew, to crunch, to gnaw on. This is in contrast to earlier in this same passage, where Jesus used phago for to eat, which has a broader range of meaning. So again, there is this very vivid, very visceral word here: chew on my flesh, drink of my blood, those who do these things will live forever.
These words are weird, and the audience for Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse was not the only group in history to have trouble with these words. This language of eating flesh and drinking blood was one of the things Rome held against the early church, accusing them of cannibalism and human sacrifice; of being danger and a menace to polite society. Yet, and this is a bit of an interesting aside but I think it’s relevant, all of this fear-mongering about how Christians will literally eat you did not keep people from being drawn to this Jesus movement. Because Rome’s attempts at fear-mongering couldn’t turn attention from what was really happening in these fledging Acts communities, the poor were being fed, the naked were being clothed, the sick were being cared for, and the lonely were being loved. What people encountered when they gathered around the table of the early Church for this meal of flesh and blood, was a table where there was enough to go around, where the wealthy and the poor came on equal footing, where those who were hungry in all ways, not just physically but spiritually as well, found food.
Today the arguments about the Eucharist being cannibalism are pretty much over, but the church still engages in these weird, esoteric arguments about EXACTLY what Jesus meant by “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood will have eternal life.” There’s the sacramental argument, does the bread and wine LITERALLY become flesh and blood, what the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation, the bread and wine transforming into body and blood. Is it a merely a symbol, staying bread and wine, but reminding us of flesh and blood. Or something in between, both bread and wine AND body and blood, all that the same time, the fancy churchy word here being consubstantiation, con meaning with, both bread and body, both blood and wine, together, completely both, at the same time. If you’re curious where the ELCA falls on this, in the classic Lutheran fashion our church’s answer to which of these three it is, is yes. Which, you may argue, is not an answer to the question at all, to which the church again says, yes. What exactly happens at communion is for our faith tradition not as important as what communion does, and what it does is give us forgiveness and life and salvation. So what does the ELCA believe? We believe Christ is truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine of communion. We believe that this bread and wine has Christ’s word bound to it, and that in this Word and bread and wine we get daily refreshment and strength for the struggles of life, forgiveness of sin, and life, and salvation again and again, as often as we eat and drink. And we believe this is God’s doing and not our own, so that nothing we do can affect God’s promise. Luther wrote in the Large Catechism, “Do you think God cares so much about our faith and conduct that he would permit them to affect his ordinances?” Pardon the masculine pronouns, its Luther, point being it takes a fairly high view of one’s own power and importance in the world to think that God would be hamstrung by something we could do. But which of the fancy Latin terms is it, that the church doesn’t worry about so much. This is the body and blood of Jesus given for us, it is because Jesus said it is, it is life-giving, it’s a gift God wants us to have, and God gives to us over and over again in spite of, and even in fact because of, the fact that we cannot ear or deserve it, and that’s all that really matters. In fact, Luther also said that the times we feel the least worthy are the times communion is the most for us. I think Jesus pushed the crowd so hard into the weirdness of this story so they could get out of their own way and just be fed, just be loved, just be changed by this gift.
This is hard for us smart, rational, thinking brains to do. But luckily, God also gave us an amazing guide in how we do this, and that guide is children. Let me tell you a story about how I got a glimpse of the gift of communion. Atonement Lutheran Church is an inner-city congregation in Syracuse, New York. And I’ll also tell you, they are the model for who I think we could grow up to be, because like you all, they had an incredible capacity for chaos. In fact, I think we’ve actually even got a leg up on them in the chaos tolerating department because they would not have handled last week’s mid-worship scene change nearly as well as we did. But anyway, one of the ministries at Atonement was what they called Wednesday Church Night, and it was a meal followed by children’s activities and a worship service. And Wednesday Church Night was chaos incarnate. We’d have one-hundred plus people at the meal, sixty of whom general stayed for worship, thirty to forty of whom were children. The kids would spend most of the worship service in the chapel for Christian education and then would come into the sanctuary during the Passing of the Peace for communion. Once the kids came in, it was all hands on deck for kid wrangling. And as the intern, and as the youngest person on staff, if it wasn’t my turn to preach I was expected to be right in the middle of it. One Wednesday evening I ended up next to one of the regulars, a boy about six. He and his brothers had grown up at Wednesday Church Night, they lived in the apartment complex the church managed and they came to worship every Wednesday, and occasionally on Sundays to snag donuts at coffee hour. So this kid had grown up in church, had grown up taking communion. But for whatever reason, on this particular evening, the words hit him differently. So when my supervisor was saying the Words of Institution, “this is my body, given for you, this is my blood, shed for you,” the kid turns to me and, with all of the volume control of an excited six-year-old, sort of stage whispered to me, loud enough so of course half the congregation could hear him, “is that blood in that cup?” And I, my grown-up, analytical, seminary-trained mind immediately went into overdrive. I started running through everything I’d learned in Confessions class in my head, trying to figure out how to break down that whole explanation about in, with, and under that I just shared with you, how to condense pages and pages of theological scholarship, into language that a six-year-old could understand, that I could whisper to him, without interrupting the service further, in a sentence or two. Oh no, I don’t think small when it comes to theology. All this went through my head in the space of a few seconds, until I decided that saying anything was better than saying nothing at all. So I turned back to him, but by that point the service had moved on to saying the Lord’s Prayer, and he had turned his bulletin into a trumpet and was using it to yell the Lord’s Prayer into his neighbor’s ear as loud as he possibly could, while his neighbor tried to beat him off with his own bulletin. In other words, he’d totally moved on and it was not the best time to try and interrupt him to have a deep theological discussion.
I interrupted the bulletin trumpet fight, but by then it was time for me to go up to assist with distributing communion, holding the cup for intinction was always the intern’s job. So I’m standing there, holding this cup, just dreading this kid coming forward, what kind of a scene could develop. Would he yell, would he scare the other kids, what was going to happen here? My hands were shaking as he got closer. But you know what this little scamp did? My supervisor handed him a piece of the bread, “the body of Christ, given for you.” And I knelt down to lower the cup to his level, “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” This kid held that piece of bread between his grubby little six-year-old fingers and with great flourish dipped the bread in the cup up to his knuckles. Fun fact, I never got sick a day on internship, and I attribute that to the fact that everyone dipped their whole hand in the communion cup, and it was my job to drink it at the end of the service. But anyway, I digress. So, with his fingers still submerged in the wine he looked right up at me, and I swear to you he winked, then he pulled the bread out of the cup, put it in his mouth and chewed with great gusto, saying, “Amen, thank you Jesus.”
This kid didn’t care what happened with the bread and the wine that was body and blood. He didn’t need the deep theological argument; he didn’t need to be convinced or even to believe. Children have an incredible capacity for wonder, everything is new so everything is possible, and that wonder at a God who comes to us in bread and wine, who meets us in the beautiful chaos of community, of places where we can be our whole messy, complicated, dipping our fingers into the knuckles selves, who loves us unconditionally, even as we still have so much to learn, that kid got that. He knew that church was a place where he was fed, both his body and his soul, where he was loved, where he was valued and treasured, and since church was that place, then God was that place as well. If it was blood, then it was blood. What mattered to him was he knew that he was loved. And you are loved too. Amen.
Sunday, August 12, 2018
God Endures: A Sermon on John 6:35, 41-51
This weekend is the one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white nationalist groups from around the country gathered to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The protests quickly turned violent, the most serious occurring when one of the protestors drove his car through a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring nineteen and killing one, a young woman named Heather Heyer. A helicopter carrying two members of the Virginia State Police also crashed that day, bringing the death total to three. All this week, various news sources have been covering the anniversary of those events, and one that got me thinking was a comment from Joshua Johnson, host of The 1A, who remarked, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said ‘the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ But if Dr. King was right, how long is this moral arc and how long is it taking us to get there?”
Friends, I’ve said this before, but I’m tired. I actually wasn’t even thinking about the anniversary of the protests earlier this week, because I kept hearing stories about how the climate is warming faster than earlier thought, and some scientists are predicting we are dangerously closing in on the point of no return. This was to say nothing of the closer to home, more immediate concerns within our community of financial struggles, health concerns, etc. I share this with you not to illicit your sympathy, but just to say, I’m tired too. I know you’re tired, because I’m your pastor and it’s my job to know. And I also know that most of you aren’t even at the global climate change level of concern, because these closer in things, health, finances, grief, and relationships, these things are obviously and importantly more front and center. With all this, how do we get up and get through the day?
We are in the middle of this discourse by Jesus about how he is the Bread of Life. Last week we heard him say, “don’t work for the food that perishes, but the food that endures for eternal life.” This morning we heard him say, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” I’ve been thinking a lot this week about this idea of endurance, about what Jesus meant when he said he was “the food that endures.” We know Jesus was speaking metaphorically, that this was not some sort of weird acetic diet plan, where if your faith is strong enough you never have to eat, because eating is a biologic necessity. The reading this morning started out, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” yet from the cross Jesus said, “In order to fulfill the scripture, ‘I thirst.’” And we know communion is not supposed to be a one-time thing, our liturgy says, “as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we remember Christ’s death until he comes again.” “As often,” it says. Not once, not even when, but as often. So what is endurance, if we get hungry, and we’re supposed to do this communion thing a lot? What is the food that endures?
There is a verse in this morning’s text that cracked it open for me, and that was verse forty-four. Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” Let me read that again, so you catch it, “no one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” As Lutherans we proclaim we are saved by grace through faith, and it is not our faith, but God’s faith, that sounds like what Jesus was saying here. We can’t come to Jesus, we can’t choose Jesus, until God first chooses us, until God draws us. Which, God has done, in the person of Jesus.
This endurance, this “food that endures,” isn’t our food, it’s God. God is the one that endures. No matter where we go, what mistakes we make, how badly we screw up, God is the one who endures in us, with us, through us, again and again meeting us where we’re at and moving us forward into a new reality. It is slow, it is infinitesimally slow, but we are moving forward. King’s moral arc is bending. As blasphemous as this is going to sound given the current state of the world and how things feel, things really are improving. One of the many gifts of our sacred scripture is we can see this progress. So, quick history lesson. We think of the Bible as one book, but it’s really a collection of sixty-six books written over thousands of years. Which means that in this one book we can see humanity evolving, we can see God moving us ever onward from one place to the next. Back in Exodus, the Ten Commandments, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or house, or slave.” To Galatians, “there is no longer male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free.” I don’t think this shift means God changed. I can’t imagine back in the time of the Exodus, God was onboard with slavery and women being property, and then God got enlightened along the way and was like, “oh, women are people and no people are property.” Rather, I see this as a sign of God meeting God’s people where they were at in their cultural context and slowly moving them along to where God wanted them, wants us, to be. Are we there yet, no, obviously not. The “Jews will not replace us” signs in Washington, DC this weekend assure us we’ve got a long way to go, but compared to the books of Joshua and Judges, where it was considered completely acceptable to wipe out entire communities of people, we’ve come a long way. And if God didn’t give up on us then, God isn’t going anywhere now. The Bible gives us three thousand years of God’s history of sticking around with God’s stubborn and wayward and easily distracted people. Friends, clearly this God we worship isn’t going anywhere.
I’ve been talking pretty globally, but there is also something intensely personal about how God endures. God doesn’t just endure with us as a species, God endures with us as individuals. Watch this. “The Lord be with you.” [And also with you.] Lift up your hearts. [We lift them to the Lord.] Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. [It is right to give God thanks and praise.] Did you see that? Did you see how you all just knew that? You didn’t have to think about it, it just was automatic. That, my friends, is the food that endures for eternal life. You will literally never lose that, because it isn’t stored in your mind, it’s stored in your body, it’s stored in your soul. During seminary I did a chaplaincy internship at a skilled nursing facility and I spent most of my time in the memory care unit. These folk had lost most of their identities, most of their memories, most of who they were. But when we would gather around the couches, read the twenty-third psalm, sing hymns, and say the liturgy, word perfect, every time. I remember sitting with my grandmother towards the end of her life when someone from her church came to give her communion. As the woman was reading a Bible story, my grandmother piped up, “who’s Jesus, he seems nice.” But when it came to the liturgy, when it came to the Lord’s Prayer, she knew it. And I knew, that while she had forgotten who Jesus was, Jesus hadn’t forgotten her. That food that endures was enduring in her, it was feeding her, sustaining her, holding her when she could no longer hold it. And now, as a pastor, I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ve even seen it in people who’ve walked away from the church, who’ve left the faith, who’ve openly disbelieved, there is still this thing that keeps drawing inside of us. We can try to leave God, but God never leaves us, we carry God in our bodies, no matter what happens, because God endures. The word translated as belief, is really better translated as trust because belief has this sense of intellectual agreement, but this endurance is beyond our intellect, it is something we carry in our subconscious, we can no more forget it than we can forget to breath.
So be comforted, dear friends in Christ, for God endures. In you, with you, forever. The moral arc of the universe is long. So very, very long for those of us who can see at best just a hundred years of it. But it is bending, bending, bending, towards God. Amen.
Friends, I’ve said this before, but I’m tired. I actually wasn’t even thinking about the anniversary of the protests earlier this week, because I kept hearing stories about how the climate is warming faster than earlier thought, and some scientists are predicting we are dangerously closing in on the point of no return. This was to say nothing of the closer to home, more immediate concerns within our community of financial struggles, health concerns, etc. I share this with you not to illicit your sympathy, but just to say, I’m tired too. I know you’re tired, because I’m your pastor and it’s my job to know. And I also know that most of you aren’t even at the global climate change level of concern, because these closer in things, health, finances, grief, and relationships, these things are obviously and importantly more front and center. With all this, how do we get up and get through the day?
We are in the middle of this discourse by Jesus about how he is the Bread of Life. Last week we heard him say, “don’t work for the food that perishes, but the food that endures for eternal life.” This morning we heard him say, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” I’ve been thinking a lot this week about this idea of endurance, about what Jesus meant when he said he was “the food that endures.” We know Jesus was speaking metaphorically, that this was not some sort of weird acetic diet plan, where if your faith is strong enough you never have to eat, because eating is a biologic necessity. The reading this morning started out, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” yet from the cross Jesus said, “In order to fulfill the scripture, ‘I thirst.’” And we know communion is not supposed to be a one-time thing, our liturgy says, “as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we remember Christ’s death until he comes again.” “As often,” it says. Not once, not even when, but as often. So what is endurance, if we get hungry, and we’re supposed to do this communion thing a lot? What is the food that endures?
There is a verse in this morning’s text that cracked it open for me, and that was verse forty-four. Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” Let me read that again, so you catch it, “no one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” As Lutherans we proclaim we are saved by grace through faith, and it is not our faith, but God’s faith, that sounds like what Jesus was saying here. We can’t come to Jesus, we can’t choose Jesus, until God first chooses us, until God draws us. Which, God has done, in the person of Jesus.
This endurance, this “food that endures,” isn’t our food, it’s God. God is the one that endures. No matter where we go, what mistakes we make, how badly we screw up, God is the one who endures in us, with us, through us, again and again meeting us where we’re at and moving us forward into a new reality. It is slow, it is infinitesimally slow, but we are moving forward. King’s moral arc is bending. As blasphemous as this is going to sound given the current state of the world and how things feel, things really are improving. One of the many gifts of our sacred scripture is we can see this progress. So, quick history lesson. We think of the Bible as one book, but it’s really a collection of sixty-six books written over thousands of years. Which means that in this one book we can see humanity evolving, we can see God moving us ever onward from one place to the next. Back in Exodus, the Ten Commandments, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or house, or slave.” To Galatians, “there is no longer male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free.” I don’t think this shift means God changed. I can’t imagine back in the time of the Exodus, God was onboard with slavery and women being property, and then God got enlightened along the way and was like, “oh, women are people and no people are property.” Rather, I see this as a sign of God meeting God’s people where they were at in their cultural context and slowly moving them along to where God wanted them, wants us, to be. Are we there yet, no, obviously not. The “Jews will not replace us” signs in Washington, DC this weekend assure us we’ve got a long way to go, but compared to the books of Joshua and Judges, where it was considered completely acceptable to wipe out entire communities of people, we’ve come a long way. And if God didn’t give up on us then, God isn’t going anywhere now. The Bible gives us three thousand years of God’s history of sticking around with God’s stubborn and wayward and easily distracted people. Friends, clearly this God we worship isn’t going anywhere.
I’ve been talking pretty globally, but there is also something intensely personal about how God endures. God doesn’t just endure with us as a species, God endures with us as individuals. Watch this. “The Lord be with you.” [And also with you.] Lift up your hearts. [We lift them to the Lord.] Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. [It is right to give God thanks and praise.] Did you see that? Did you see how you all just knew that? You didn’t have to think about it, it just was automatic. That, my friends, is the food that endures for eternal life. You will literally never lose that, because it isn’t stored in your mind, it’s stored in your body, it’s stored in your soul. During seminary I did a chaplaincy internship at a skilled nursing facility and I spent most of my time in the memory care unit. These folk had lost most of their identities, most of their memories, most of who they were. But when we would gather around the couches, read the twenty-third psalm, sing hymns, and say the liturgy, word perfect, every time. I remember sitting with my grandmother towards the end of her life when someone from her church came to give her communion. As the woman was reading a Bible story, my grandmother piped up, “who’s Jesus, he seems nice.” But when it came to the liturgy, when it came to the Lord’s Prayer, she knew it. And I knew, that while she had forgotten who Jesus was, Jesus hadn’t forgotten her. That food that endures was enduring in her, it was feeding her, sustaining her, holding her when she could no longer hold it. And now, as a pastor, I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ve even seen it in people who’ve walked away from the church, who’ve left the faith, who’ve openly disbelieved, there is still this thing that keeps drawing inside of us. We can try to leave God, but God never leaves us, we carry God in our bodies, no matter what happens, because God endures. The word translated as belief, is really better translated as trust because belief has this sense of intellectual agreement, but this endurance is beyond our intellect, it is something we carry in our subconscious, we can no more forget it than we can forget to breath.
So be comforted, dear friends in Christ, for God endures. In you, with you, forever. The moral arc of the universe is long. So very, very long for those of us who can see at best just a hundred years of it. But it is bending, bending, bending, towards God. Amen.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Conversation Points for John 6:35, 41-51
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• V. 35 is the first of the “I AM” statements. These are another literary technique in John’s Gospel. In these statements, Jesus identifies himself with common ancient Near East experiences. “I AM” helps connect to the Exodus experience. We already saw that in the manna reference, now Jesus’ “I AM” harkens to God speaking to Moses from the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, “I AM who I AM... Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
• The second half of verse 35 connects coming to Jesus and believing in him as synonyms. As was also true in Jewish wisdom tradition, the bread of life Jesus was speaking of was his teaching and revelation.
• The crowd’s response to Jesus was unbelief. V. 41 is the first time in the dialogue the crowd shifts to “the Jews.” It is important to make the distinction that in John’s Gospel “the Jews” is used negatively, which is more a reflection of the Johannine community’s tension with the mainstream Jewish religious movement than conflict between Jesus and the wider Jewish community. Jesus’ tension was with the religious leadership, not with the Jewish people.
• The word in v. 41 and 43 translated “complained” is the Greek word gongyzo. It is the same word used in the Septuagint to describe the Israelites grumbling in the wilderness (Exodus 15:24; 16:2, 7, 12: Numbers 11:1; 14:2, 27; Psalm 105:24-25).
• Rather than address the complaints, Jesus reiterated the theme of the discourse, that God is drawing people to Jesus and resurrection.
• The reference to the prophets in v. 45 is not totally clear. It could be Isaiah 54:13, “All your children shall be taught by the LORD, and great shall be the prosperity of your children.” Another possibility is Jeremiah 31:33, “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
• In v. 45, “hearing” and “learning” are used as synonyms for “seeing” and “believing,” as the human response to what God offers.
• In v. 47, “very truly I tell you” (amen, amen, lego ami) signals the start of a new section. Yet rather than a new topic, Jesus reiterates the previous themes of eternal life and Jesus as the bread of life.
Works Sourced:
O’ Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• V. 35 is the first of the “I AM” statements. These are another literary technique in John’s Gospel. In these statements, Jesus identifies himself with common ancient Near East experiences. “I AM” helps connect to the Exodus experience. We already saw that in the manna reference, now Jesus’ “I AM” harkens to God speaking to Moses from the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, “I AM who I AM... Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
• The second half of verse 35 connects coming to Jesus and believing in him as synonyms. As was also true in Jewish wisdom tradition, the bread of life Jesus was speaking of was his teaching and revelation.
• The crowd’s response to Jesus was unbelief. V. 41 is the first time in the dialogue the crowd shifts to “the Jews.” It is important to make the distinction that in John’s Gospel “the Jews” is used negatively, which is more a reflection of the Johannine community’s tension with the mainstream Jewish religious movement than conflict between Jesus and the wider Jewish community. Jesus’ tension was with the religious leadership, not with the Jewish people.
• The word in v. 41 and 43 translated “complained” is the Greek word gongyzo. It is the same word used in the Septuagint to describe the Israelites grumbling in the wilderness (Exodus 15:24; 16:2, 7, 12: Numbers 11:1; 14:2, 27; Psalm 105:24-25).
• Rather than address the complaints, Jesus reiterated the theme of the discourse, that God is drawing people to Jesus and resurrection.
• The reference to the prophets in v. 45 is not totally clear. It could be Isaiah 54:13, “All your children shall be taught by the LORD, and great shall be the prosperity of your children.” Another possibility is Jeremiah 31:33, “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
• In v. 45, “hearing” and “learning” are used as synonyms for “seeing” and “believing,” as the human response to what God offers.
• In v. 47, “very truly I tell you” (amen, amen, lego ami) signals the start of a new section. Yet rather than a new topic, Jesus reiterates the previous themes of eternal life and Jesus as the bread of life.
Works Sourced:
O’ Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Needs, Wants, and Hunger: A Sermon on John 6:24-35
I finally broke down and bought a new car this week. The Jeep has been a faithful member of our family for nineteen years and one-hundred and eighty-nine thousand miles. It’s moved me across the country three times, it’s gotten me through feet of snow and countless snowstorms. But recently it’s been a bit less reliable. Every few months or so something flares up requiring a trip to the shop and several hundred dollars. It was supposed to go in to the shop on Wednesday, because it no longer has a working turn signal, but Monday when it refused to start, yet again, in the parking lot of my physical therapist, that was it. But in all honesty, even sitting in the parking lot of the PT with a car that wouldn’t start; as I was on the phone with my best friend, venting my frustration before calling the tow truck yet again, I tried to rationalize if replacing the Jeep was really the right decision. “It’s been towed three times this year. Wait, no, only twice, this will be the third time.” “Wasn’t it towed at least once the winter before last also.” “Yes.” “OK, so we’re still looking at like an every six month pattern here.” Kelli texted me the first day I had the car, “did your car start this morning?” “It did!” To which she responded, “Your standards are too low.”
The truth is, and several of you have politely mentioned this to me, I’ve needed a new car for a while. There have been too many repairs, too many times needing to be rescued from the Meijer parking lot, too many bruised shoulders from the lift gate crashing down when I tried to put my bike in the back. I knew I needed a new car, but it was a hard decision to make. A new car felt frivolous, like a waste of money and resources. I’m frugal, to a fault some may say, and I didn’t want to spend the money on a new car when I had a perfectly serviceable old one. Car buying is also stressful. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of researching what I should get, figuring out a fair price, negotiating with a car salesman, all that stuff. So even though I really did need a new car, especially since the whole turn signal thing really meant the Jeep wasn’t even street legal anymore, I didn’t want one. So I put it off.
Needs and wants are complicated feelings. It’s oh so easy to mix the two up, or to let the wrong one triumph over the other. Which we know, but the more familiar side of that is probably mistaking a want for a need. Think about kids begging for a toy, “but I NEED it.” There are plenty of things we think we need, that really we just want. But harder, at least for me, to catch, and just as insidious, is the temptation to mix up a want for an actual legitimate need. I needed, if not a new car, at least to stop driving the old one. But I didn’t want to, and I worked really hard to convince myself that a new car was just a want, that with enough determination and effort I could get the old one to work, not a need.
I think we do this a lot with God. We talk a good game about needing God but at the end of the day I think we would rather just want God. Because if we need God then we are dependant and dependence is not a great feeling. Needing God is great when God is doing things we are comfortable with, when God is making us feel good about worship, or helping our neighbors, or doing the right things. When we can go to God with simple concerns, and however they turn out, it’s ok. Or that if we just work hard enough, believe strong enough, pray deep enough, are good enough, we could earn God’s love. But if we can earn it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. If we deserve it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Or if it works when it’s convenient, again, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Our need for God is blind desperation. It is the hemorrhaging woman reaching out to touch Jesus’ cloak. It is Jairus the leader of the synagogue rushing through the crowd to beg for Jesus’ mercy. It is the stay of execution, the first breath of someone who was drowning, the light coming down the tunnel of a cave two miles under a mountain. We can ignore it, we can miss it, we can mistake it for a want, but it doesn’t change the truth of our reality. In Jesus, God has “set God’s seal” on us, and we can no more go without this love than we could go without air, because God is in fact the air we breathe.
Confusing want and need is not a modern problem, the crowd had it too. Our Gospel this morning picks up the morning after Jesus fed five-thousand on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd woke up and, like any of us would be in the morning, was hungry again. And remember, the reason Jesus fed them was because they were in the middle of nowhere with no access to food. The crowd woke up in the exact same predicament they had been in before, only this time Jesus wasn’t there. So they went after him. When they found Jesus, they had this super interesting conversation around the word “work.” Let’s slow down and walk through this, because I at least found it really powerful. So the crowd came to Jesus and asked, “Rabbi, when did you come here.” But Jesus, being Jesus, didn’t answer that question. Jesus instead jumped right to the heart of the matter, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” “Signs” is the word used in John’s Gospel to describe the miracles Jesus performed, because in John’s Gospel, these miracles were as much about what they revealed about who Jesus was as they were about the acts themselves. And normally, when Jesus performed a sign, those who witnessed the sign learned something new about the nature of God, and they believed. But this crowd, per Jesus, didn’t learn about God’s abundance, they just got their needs met. They were thinking transactionally, thinking small picture. But what Jesus was offering was bigger than that, it wasn’t transactional, it couldn’t be earned, it was only something that could be given, as Jesus explained, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures…which the Son of Man will give to you.”
Now, let’s be clear, food is a need. We need to eat or else we will die. Jesus is not offering some kind of bizarre diet plan where if you pray enough you can go without food. Nor is Jesus promising that if you believe enough you won’t be hungry. Hunger is a huge problem in our nation and in our world. ELCA World Hunger exists for a reason, we help stock and staff the food pantry at First Methodist for a reason, people need food. So this isn’t about actual, physical food any longer, this is about a different need. The need for faith, the need for belonging, the need to be a part of something beyond ourselves, the need for God. And that is a need that no amount of breakfast could fill, that no amount of money could buy. It is a need that could only be given by God. The “work” of this need is the work of receiving, of being willing to receive. Which, at least in my own experience, is hard work, maybe even harder work. I would much rather be the one earning, the one giving, then the one receiving. Yet the food Jesus was offering, he told the crowd, was food they had to receive.
To which the crowd pushed back. OK then, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Again, transactional thinking. Ok, if you’re not going to just give us the bread like last time, let us earn it. What do you need us to do? Jesus responded, reinforcing his earlier statement, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Yet again Jesus did not tell the crowd what they were to do, but what God had already done. The work of God is that you believe. Because believing, remember is not intellectual accent to an idea, belief is about seeing. It is about entering into relationship even as you cannot understand. Even belief itself is a gift. Just like we do not choose to fall in love, belief is God’s work; it is a gift we receive. I think it’s from Mark actually, but it’s one of my favorite verses of scripture, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”
But the crowd, oh they were persistent, challenged one last time, “What sign are you going to give us then, that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” And again, Jesus reiterated, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven.” It’s not a thing, this gift. It’s not something you can hold in your hand, or intellectually understand, or earn or do. It’s a gift, it’s given freely, you have it already, it’s yours. But again, the crowd, so literal, “Sir, give us this bread always.” To which Jesus responded, the first of what are called the I AM statements, these revelations of the nature of God and God’s love, “I AM the Bread of Life.”
What I love, and hate, about this passage is that I don’t understand it. Clearly Jesus wasn’t talking about food, because we do need food. And he wasn’t giving a statement of faith, because he said the work of God is that we believe, not that our work is that we believe. I don’t really know what Jesus is talking about here, and like the crowd I find myself leaving hungry, leaving unsatisfied.
Which, as much as I hate to admit it, is maybe the greatest gift. To leave hungry, to leave unfulfilled, to leave wanting more. Because that hunger assures me that there is more, that God has more, that I can have more. When I look around at the world, at the hunger, at the pain, at the fear, this hunger that is not physical but is spiritual presses me onward, pulls me inward, and pushes me outward, and that hunger feels like gift. It feels like grace. It feels like love. Hard grace, sure, not the cheap grace of peace, peace, when there is no peace, but the deep knowledge that there is food that will fill this need, that it is God, and that it is there. Just beyond my reaching, but also close enough to grasp. At this table we get just a taste of this bread. Not enough to leave us satisfied, but enough to keep us coming back, again and again, for the food which endures. Amen.
The truth is, and several of you have politely mentioned this to me, I’ve needed a new car for a while. There have been too many repairs, too many times needing to be rescued from the Meijer parking lot, too many bruised shoulders from the lift gate crashing down when I tried to put my bike in the back. I knew I needed a new car, but it was a hard decision to make. A new car felt frivolous, like a waste of money and resources. I’m frugal, to a fault some may say, and I didn’t want to spend the money on a new car when I had a perfectly serviceable old one. Car buying is also stressful. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of researching what I should get, figuring out a fair price, negotiating with a car salesman, all that stuff. So even though I really did need a new car, especially since the whole turn signal thing really meant the Jeep wasn’t even street legal anymore, I didn’t want one. So I put it off.
Needs and wants are complicated feelings. It’s oh so easy to mix the two up, or to let the wrong one triumph over the other. Which we know, but the more familiar side of that is probably mistaking a want for a need. Think about kids begging for a toy, “but I NEED it.” There are plenty of things we think we need, that really we just want. But harder, at least for me, to catch, and just as insidious, is the temptation to mix up a want for an actual legitimate need. I needed, if not a new car, at least to stop driving the old one. But I didn’t want to, and I worked really hard to convince myself that a new car was just a want, that with enough determination and effort I could get the old one to work, not a need.
I think we do this a lot with God. We talk a good game about needing God but at the end of the day I think we would rather just want God. Because if we need God then we are dependant and dependence is not a great feeling. Needing God is great when God is doing things we are comfortable with, when God is making us feel good about worship, or helping our neighbors, or doing the right things. When we can go to God with simple concerns, and however they turn out, it’s ok. Or that if we just work hard enough, believe strong enough, pray deep enough, are good enough, we could earn God’s love. But if we can earn it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. If we deserve it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Or if it works when it’s convenient, again, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Our need for God is blind desperation. It is the hemorrhaging woman reaching out to touch Jesus’ cloak. It is Jairus the leader of the synagogue rushing through the crowd to beg for Jesus’ mercy. It is the stay of execution, the first breath of someone who was drowning, the light coming down the tunnel of a cave two miles under a mountain. We can ignore it, we can miss it, we can mistake it for a want, but it doesn’t change the truth of our reality. In Jesus, God has “set God’s seal” on us, and we can no more go without this love than we could go without air, because God is in fact the air we breathe.
Confusing want and need is not a modern problem, the crowd had it too. Our Gospel this morning picks up the morning after Jesus fed five-thousand on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd woke up and, like any of us would be in the morning, was hungry again. And remember, the reason Jesus fed them was because they were in the middle of nowhere with no access to food. The crowd woke up in the exact same predicament they had been in before, only this time Jesus wasn’t there. So they went after him. When they found Jesus, they had this super interesting conversation around the word “work.” Let’s slow down and walk through this, because I at least found it really powerful. So the crowd came to Jesus and asked, “Rabbi, when did you come here.” But Jesus, being Jesus, didn’t answer that question. Jesus instead jumped right to the heart of the matter, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” “Signs” is the word used in John’s Gospel to describe the miracles Jesus performed, because in John’s Gospel, these miracles were as much about what they revealed about who Jesus was as they were about the acts themselves. And normally, when Jesus performed a sign, those who witnessed the sign learned something new about the nature of God, and they believed. But this crowd, per Jesus, didn’t learn about God’s abundance, they just got their needs met. They were thinking transactionally, thinking small picture. But what Jesus was offering was bigger than that, it wasn’t transactional, it couldn’t be earned, it was only something that could be given, as Jesus explained, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures…which the Son of Man will give to you.”
Now, let’s be clear, food is a need. We need to eat or else we will die. Jesus is not offering some kind of bizarre diet plan where if you pray enough you can go without food. Nor is Jesus promising that if you believe enough you won’t be hungry. Hunger is a huge problem in our nation and in our world. ELCA World Hunger exists for a reason, we help stock and staff the food pantry at First Methodist for a reason, people need food. So this isn’t about actual, physical food any longer, this is about a different need. The need for faith, the need for belonging, the need to be a part of something beyond ourselves, the need for God. And that is a need that no amount of breakfast could fill, that no amount of money could buy. It is a need that could only be given by God. The “work” of this need is the work of receiving, of being willing to receive. Which, at least in my own experience, is hard work, maybe even harder work. I would much rather be the one earning, the one giving, then the one receiving. Yet the food Jesus was offering, he told the crowd, was food they had to receive.
To which the crowd pushed back. OK then, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Again, transactional thinking. Ok, if you’re not going to just give us the bread like last time, let us earn it. What do you need us to do? Jesus responded, reinforcing his earlier statement, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Yet again Jesus did not tell the crowd what they were to do, but what God had already done. The work of God is that you believe. Because believing, remember is not intellectual accent to an idea, belief is about seeing. It is about entering into relationship even as you cannot understand. Even belief itself is a gift. Just like we do not choose to fall in love, belief is God’s work; it is a gift we receive. I think it’s from Mark actually, but it’s one of my favorite verses of scripture, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”
But the crowd, oh they were persistent, challenged one last time, “What sign are you going to give us then, that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” And again, Jesus reiterated, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven.” It’s not a thing, this gift. It’s not something you can hold in your hand, or intellectually understand, or earn or do. It’s a gift, it’s given freely, you have it already, it’s yours. But again, the crowd, so literal, “Sir, give us this bread always.” To which Jesus responded, the first of what are called the I AM statements, these revelations of the nature of God and God’s love, “I AM the Bread of Life.”
What I love, and hate, about this passage is that I don’t understand it. Clearly Jesus wasn’t talking about food, because we do need food. And he wasn’t giving a statement of faith, because he said the work of God is that we believe, not that our work is that we believe. I don’t really know what Jesus is talking about here, and like the crowd I find myself leaving hungry, leaving unsatisfied.
Which, as much as I hate to admit it, is maybe the greatest gift. To leave hungry, to leave unfulfilled, to leave wanting more. Because that hunger assures me that there is more, that God has more, that I can have more. When I look around at the world, at the hunger, at the pain, at the fear, this hunger that is not physical but is spiritual presses me onward, pulls me inward, and pushes me outward, and that hunger feels like gift. It feels like grace. It feels like love. Hard grace, sure, not the cheap grace of peace, peace, when there is no peace, but the deep knowledge that there is food that will fill this need, that it is God, and that it is there. Just beyond my reaching, but also close enough to grasp. At this table we get just a taste of this bread. Not enough to leave us satisfied, but enough to keep us coming back, again and again, for the food which endures. Amen.
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