Does This Offend You?

Sunday, August 27th, 2006
Proper 16 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 6:56-71

56Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” 59He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.
60When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” 61But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? 62Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? 63It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. 65And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” 66Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. 67So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” 68Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” 70Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.” 71He was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot, for he, though one of the twelve, was going to betray him.

I remember the first time I walked into a Sunday School class at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville. I’d visited several churches since July of 1987, when I flew back from the two years I served in Spain, and was dealing with re-entry back into the culture of the United States after having been away from it.

I say ‘dealing with’ because two years can go by pretty fast, but it is a significant amount of time when you are going through formative – and TRANSformative experiences – both spiritually and emotionally. Moving from wherever those experiences took place BACK into what used to be familiar territory, but with a radically different outlook, can be a trying experience, and this was one of those.

I’d just spent the previous two years living in a culture that was post-christian – that accepted the fact of their historical enmeshment with the church, but which was, and continues to be, intent on ignoring the voice of faith. The society had relegated faith to irrelevance. The power acquired and wielded by the church over the previous 500 years resulted in a backlash against it – and by association, against most matters of faith. There were no active measures to keep it quiet, there is no suppression – no ACTIVE suppression of the practice of faith in Spain – on the contrary; there is a freedom of expression that had not been experienced for a long time in Spain, but the culture has been exposed to a view of the church that is foreign to the New Testament record – a church – an earthly church – that became powerful, and VERY powerful, and in the power, it became corrupt, and in that corruption, it lost it’s moral compass and strength.

That morning I walked into the adult 1 class, and the discussion if I remember correctly, was about the Good Samaritan. The question was, predictably, who was the most Christlike in their actions. A man who was sitting across from me, a schoolteacher, spoke up and said something along the lines of “I know we’re supposed to say the Samaritan was, but I can’t. If I came across that man, I’m not going to go out of my way to help him!” The response of the class was … mostly silence. I had only been attending Crescent Hill for about a month at that point, but if that was what I was going to find there, I thought, the point of the Gospel is completely lost here. It was the closest I came to getting up and walking out of a Sunday School class in my life.

***

In our text this morning, we’ve come to the end of chapter 6, and it is the conclusion of the lessons on bread, on wine, on the spirit, and on life – at least for the time being.

One commentator, William E. Hull, in summarizing chapter six of the Gospel of John, put it this way: “(the chapter) opens with 5,000 excited warriors (the folks who’d been fed on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and want to make Jesus a King), and ends with twelve troubled disciples, one of whom was a traitor!” (The Broadman Bible Commentary, Volume 9, Broadman Press, 1970, p 279)

The crowd-pleasing miracle at the beginning of the chapter gives way to what begins as a theological discussion on the significance of what real life is, and ends with Jesus being rejected by many of those who had up until then been his followers.

What turned them off? What changed? Did Jesus? I think not. What changed was their knowledge OF Jesus. Jesus’ message had always been – and would continue to be – the same. It’s in the perception of that message, in the internalizing of it, in the pondering it, mulling over it, studying it, and ultimately, putting it into practice – or not – that we find how we really see Jesus. Is he … an image? A picture on the wall, a concept, a word, someone who lived a long time ago and had some good things to say, but who probably wouldn’t cut it in today’s world, a religious genius, who knew how to manipulate people into believing he’d done something when he was actually doing something else? Is Jesus someone we relegate to the irrelevancy of Sunday mornings, to the reading of the Christmas Story on Christmas morning and the Easter story at Easter, someone we consider a historical figure, or are we willing to explore what it means to make Jesus actually Lord of our lives?

I know we speak a lot in Baptist circles about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives. That is standard Baptist practice. It’s part of the culture of being Baptist. It comes as naturally to us as fried chicken in the fellowship hall. But what do we mean by that? And is that the only relationship we should aspire to in our faith pilgrimage? I remember at one point in my life going through a phase where I was pretty sure I had the inside track on what this whole business of being a Christian was about. There wasn’t a lot, if anything, anyone could tell me that I didn’t already know … kind of like a 15 year old, but in the faith sense of the word.
I remember saying with a degree of certainty that now seems alien to me, that I didn’t need to go to church to be a Christian. And it is true to a point – you CAN accept Christ and begin to follow him and NOT be a part of a family of faith, but it is a terribly lonely place to be. So lonely, in fact, that THAT is why Jesus entrusted us to each other. Because we are not alone in this – we weren’t intended to BE alone.

There is comfort in companionship, true, there is also enjoyment, fellowship, and camaraderie, and there is even joy. But there is also accountability. There is a word we don’t hear too often unless it is in a congressional hearing.

There’s the … “iron sharpens iron” aspect of living together in community – when there is more than one mind thinking on something, different views, different perceptions come into play, and begin to fill out the picture we have of the Gospel. What would be a one-dimensional picture if one of us were the only one to think of Jesus in a certain situation gradually becomes … richer, deeper, the details begin to get filled in; the shading begins to lend depth and dimension to the somewhat flat portrait we had at first.

***

The reason I had almost walked out of the Sunday School class that morning was primarily simple aversion to fact that the statement made by the man across the circle from me flew in the face of the message of Christ – but it was also due to what I perceived initially to be a tacit acceptance of his statement by the rest of the class. I was new, I hardly knew anyone in the church, so I was not at a place where I felt like I could call him on it. I did say something that didn’t quite come out right. I think I may have been too afraid of what might come out that I held myself back considerably. That’s not an excuse. In retrospect, I still think I should have spoken up more forcefully than I did.

But I’m glad I didn’t walk out. I got to know him as the years went by, and learned more of where the statement came from – he was a new Christian, and from his experience of having to fend for himself from a very early age. He had not, in his life, experienced the grace of either receiving or extending a helping hand in the name of Christ. There were times when I heard or saw him react in later years that gave me the impression that his views on the matter had changed.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

That is something we will, as I mentioned last week, continue to explore together.

What does it mean to make Jesus Lord of your life? That is something we begin by answering individually, but end answering as part of a community of faith – as members of the body of Christ.

Let’s pray.

Eating for Life

Sunday, August 20th, 2006
Proper 15 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 6:51-58

51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 52The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

Again with the bread.

I promise the subject will change – so let’s get started.

Over the last three weeks we’ve been moving through the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John, and have been unwrapping, so to speak, John’s telling of Jesus’ presentation of himself as the bread of life. We are drawing towards the end of the chapter, and Jesus is drawing towards the end of his explanation of just what he means when he called himself the “bread of life.”

Today’s passage actually overlaps with last week’s. The lectionary reference actually does that on purpose, to provide some sense of continuity. Though, thinking about it and reviewing the themes and the wording of the passages we’ve been studying over these last weeks, it wouldn’t seem necessary to do that so much for continuity’s sake – but more so for the sake of differentiating one passage from the other.

Three weeks ago, our passage was from the beginning of the chapter, and Jesus performed the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, and from that point on, we’ve been following what seems to be the fallout from the single event. It seems the majority of the chapter has been devoted to a discussion that began when the crowd caught up with Jesus and his followers in Capernaum the day after having fed them, and Jesus’ reply to their request for more bread was an intentional sidestepping of the superficial nature of the question to get to the heart of the matter.

There’s a radio program that comes on late at night on National Public Radio out of Washington University called ‘To The Point’ – every time I hear the title, it reminds me of what Jesus did when people asked him a superficial question – he drilled right through it to the underlying question – the underlying need, want, desire, motive, and answered THAT.

The discussion so far began with a conversation about breakfast, about not having to work so hard to eat and live. That was on the part of the crowd that had just had a taste of the miraculous when Jesus fed them with the five barley loaves and the two fish. Jesus’ reply was to focus on what is truly lasting – the bread of life – provided them by God in HIM, Jesus – his words

“This is the work of God – that you believe in him whom he (God) has sent.” (cf. v. 29)

And the continuation of the conversation is an explanation of what it means to believe in Jesus, what it means to follow Jesus, and what it means to bring him into your life. That was what we were exploring some last Sunday, when we read the passage immediately prior to today’s, where Jesus starts off by telling the folks to whom he was speaking (not just his disciples, but folks from Capernaum and the surrounding towns of Galilee, as well as the usual Pharisees and teachers of the Law – the scholars of the day) that he was “the bread that came down from heaven.” To which the ladies in the back replied “I changed your diaper when you were a baby. I KNOW where YOU came from!” – or something like that (actually, scripture records the people saying “isn’t this Jesus, Joseph’s son whose father and mother we KNOW?” – it seems a little more proper to quote something a little less … REAL … right?

It speaks to the expectations of the people that their responses reflected such a concrete understanding of what and who the Messiah – the savior of Israel – would turn out to be.

Jesus then started to spell out for them who the Messiah was – and what his role was, and what his MISSION was. And in that explanation, we get to the nitty-gritty of the gospel.

In today’s passage, we come to the heart of the conversation between Jesus and the leaders, as well as the crowds, who were so insistently following him. The people were hungry, Jesus gave them food. The people asked for more food, Jesus told them “God has sent you food that will satisfy your hunger for what MATTERS forever”. They ask him to give it to them. He tells them “I am the bread of life. Believe in me and you’ll never hunger for meaning again.”

Then he takes it to that next step. He’s given them the concept, now he’s going for the application. And he gets really REALLY graphic.

“I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”

Jesus dropped a bomb. He told them they had to eat HIS flesh, and drink HIS blood in order to have the life he’s been telling them about. The “bombness” of the statement is found in the fact that in the Judaism of the day, and still to this day, it was and IS, forbidden to eat the flesh of an animal with it’s blood still in it – check out Genesis 9:4 – that goes back to the days of Noah. Leviticus 3:17 makes it a perpetual statute – in other words, a permanent law – that we must not eat any blood. Likewise in chapter 17, verses 10-14 – the law applies to foreigners as well as the Israelites. We find a similar injunction in Deuteronomy 12:23.

So why is Jesus directly contradicting the laws as they were laid down from the beginning? Why is he flying in the face of specific prohibitions – and taking them a step beyond to speak not of an animal’s blood, but a HUMAN’S FLESH AND BLOOD??? That is cannibalism- and THAT was prohibited as well in Jewish law. It is a practice that was as abhorrent to the Israelites of the day as it is to us today. And yet, here Jesus is, telling these people that that is exactly what they have to do.

Was he telling them to step up with a good sharp knife and have at him? Was he telling them to kill him and carve him up? What was he telling them?

We need to understand the concept of ‘flesh and blood’ a little better in Jewish thought. “Flesh and blood” was a common way of referring to the state of being human. It was a way of saying ‘I am part of the earth’ – in contrast to part of heaven. We’ve all heard the phrase “My own flesh and blood” when someone is referring to a relative – a son or a daughter, brother or sister – I suspect that the phrase originated from somewhere in there.

Jesus is saying this:

1. He is giving the true bread of God from heaven.
2. He is himself that bread of life.
3. Bread by its very nature is to be eaten, therefore, somehow Jesus is to be eaten.

What we need to understand is that Jesus was, in pointing explicitly to his flesh and blood, insisting that the life-giving sustenance which he offered humanity was conveyed not by some timeless thought or intangible spirit unrelated to his particular life, but by his incarnate existence as a concrete historical reality living in their midst.

Christ’s temporal existence was the unique link mediating the eternal life of God to humanity.

To put it in another way, by the very fact that he lived, and breathed, and walked on the earth, God was offering God’s self in the person of Jesus to bring life to us all.

To believe in Jesus is to not only follow his teachings, his lessons, his practices and ethical principles, but it is to believe that he was born, wandered, taught, ate, did everything we do as humans, and yet did not lose in any way the divinity of who he was – the Word of God made flesh – that goes back to why John begins his gospel the way he does – In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means that we need to never lose sight of who we believe in and why. We need to be constantly reminded that ours can be a reasonable faith, and with reason we can go far, but at a certain point, the point of the incarnation, and the resurrection, and the ascension, we part ways with those who rely solely on reason to be their guide in life, and become people of faith.

Faith allows us to hold the claims of our faith close to our hearts and say “Yes, it might seem to be empirically impossible, but that’s okay. I’m not called to have all the knowledge, all the answers, I’m called to believe.”

In his letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 1:23), Paul calls it the stumbling block to the Jews, and foolishness to the gentiles.

We need to remember what it is we are foolish about, and stand firm on that solid ground.

Let’s pray.

Bread of Dissent

Sunday, August 13th, 2006
Proper 14 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 6:41-51

41Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

What was it about Jesus that so infuriated the leaders of his day? What was it that set their teeth on edge, that made them cringe, or tear their garments, or want to chase after him with an armload of rocks to throw at him?

It seems the image we have of Christ today is the victim somewhere along the line of a publicity rewrite. Somebody wanted to make him a lot more popular than he started out to be, a lot more palatable than he might have otherwise been; a lot more pleasing to the general public.

I’m reminded of one of the selling points when you see an add for a cat from the animal shelter – “de-clawed”. I wonder if we haven’t sanitized the image, tamed the rhetoric, smoothed the rough edges, and come up with a Jesus that is … just so NICE, that you wonder why anyone could possibly have anything against him – and by extension, against US, as his followers? After all, doesn’t Jesus preach peace, and justice, and truth, and righteousness, and isn’t he so incredibly gentle that it would basically take a madman to oppose him in all his frailty? A friend of ours has a term for it – terminal, toxic, NICENESS.

Before I get into this, here’s the disclaimer: I don’t have anything at all against niceness, against nice people, against the concept or practice of being nice … heck, I think I’m probably one of it’s strongest proponents … and I DO believe Jesus was incredibly nice – that he showed us a way to be nice that hadn’t even been THOUGHT of, much less experienced, in the world before he arrived on the scene.

What I’m getting at is that we make a mistake if we stop there. And I confess to you that *I* DO that TOO often – stop at the end of the niceness and say “that’s what Jesus was all about”, when in truth Jesus was as fully multidimensional, as fully complex an individual as we are. You’ve heard the terms “single issue voters”, or “single issue candidates”? Well, I don’t think Jesus was either—and while I can understand the reasoning that would make one a single-issue voter or a single-issue candidate, it would not be advisable to call Jesus a single-issue Savior.

Yes, he DID come to reconcile the world to God.

Yes, he DID come to teach us the way to live meaningful, rich, FULL lives.

Yes, he DID come to show us how to face tyranny and injustice and call a spade a spade, and not let the truth get buried in the froth of distracting chatter.

Yes, he DID come to live a life that shows US how to live in his footsteps.

…

You see? We can’t stop at any one of those items on the list and say “this is what Jesus was ALL about.” It’s a yes, AND list, not an either-or list.

So what do we do with that?

How do we figure out what it means to follow Christ when he was about so many different things?

In all honesty, it is safe to say that these all stem from a single point.

Life, fully lived, as God intended.

God gave us life and we squandered it. We devalued it, we discredit the life of those with whom we disagree, we belittle the ideas and philosophies of those who are different from us, we more often than not find ways to diminish the views and attitudes and … contributions of those with whom we are not comfortable sharing a PLANET, much less a room.

But it is all part of what it means to participate in the life of this world.

Yes, the world is broken, yes, it seems to have broken more over the last 5 years, and especially in the last 6 weeks, with everything that is going on … it seems almost overwhelming to even contemplate the hope that it will one day get better.

But it will.

Hope tells us that. Faith tells us that.

Love pushes us in that direction.

Last night I had the privilege of conducting the wedding ceremony of a couple in Montross. The groom is from a local family. The bride is from Mexico. When we met for their premarital counseling, I asked them how things were with their different cultural backgrounds. They didn’t gloss over their answer. They both said there were times when they realized there were some pretty big hurdles to climb in that area. But what got them through was the fact that they are committed to each other and had made that promise to love each other – whatever happens. The bride’s three brothers and one of her sisters were able to be at the ceremony, but her parents were not. They are back in Mexico. At the beginning of the ceremony, there was a beautiful song sung by a cousin of the groom – in Spanish – that spoke of the wonder that love unbound brings to a life – how it opens our eyes, how it shows us things we’ve never seen before, how it communicates when there is not always an easy way TO communicate … and the bride began to cry.

I know it’s not unusual for the bride to cry at her wedding, but I couldn’t help but wonder what was behind the tears. I suspect it had to do partly with the absences of immediate as well as extended family members that she would have dearly loved to have seen on this occasion, of all. But I think it might have had to do with the words of the song – to realize that there is something strong enough to break through the walls that we build around us – for protection, or for isolation, for insulation or for defense… there are as many reasons to put up those walls as there are people in this room. But there is an overarching, overwhelming and COMPELLING reason to tear the same walls down.

Love.

I started out talking about how we’ve come up with a nice Jesus, (good boy!) whom we are much more easily able to pigeon hole into a box and keep him there, away from the darker aspects of our lives, the ones we want to keep hidden from him – and from God – and pretend that there’s really no need for him to either see them or be aware of them.

Does it sound as silly to you hearing it as it sounds to me saying it?

That we really DO somehow think that God doesn’t know – THROUGH PERSONAL EXPERIENCE – what some of those darker aspects of life on earth are all about?

Why do we equate niceness with innocence? Because we don’t think that anyone who has been around the block a couple of times can remain NICE. They have to develop an edge somehow. They have to be rough deep down inside – where the wounds first appeared, and scarred over … where the knife-words or -acts cut, or festered, and created that blackness that we express by being ‘real’, a euphemism that usually translates into salty language or bawdy humor at some point. We have a way of communicating our experiences without actually communicating them, don’t we?

So let’s take one of our better-known passages and read it in new language, to see where it leaves us:

If I can sing so gorgeously as to melt your heart with the beauty of my song, and don’t love, I am fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.

If I am uncommonly wise, brimming with insight that illumines the minds of many, and do not love, I am a waste.

If I apply my gifts and make a contribution in my church that makes a difference in the world and love is lacking, I might as well not exist.

If I reject the shallowness of my culture and live by values that are honest, pure, responsible and right, and am not so loving, my values don’t mean squat.

If I pray daily, think spiritual thoughts, give generously, volunteer for mission work, and am actually loveless, none of it counts.

If I am totally committed to care for the neglected, am an advocate for the poor, and am personally lacking in love, I amount to precisely nothing.

The point Jesus was making was that it makes a difference what moves us – what motivates us, what fires our engines.

If it isn’t love, then there’s precious little worth doing.

That is a radical concept to folks who are consumed with DOING for doing’s sake. That is, I think, what got the leaders so riled up at Jesus – the fact that he was telling them “look at your heart, what is THERE, what is making you do all this stuff? If it isn’t love, you might as well not be doing it.”

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Let’s explore that together.

It means to seize hold of that love that we have at some point in our lives experienced, that we have known that we have felt, that we have shared. And make that our engine. Make that our fuel. Make that that which fills us to the point where we cannot hold it in.

We are in the process, we are coming to the point where we are going to have a meeting to vote on who is going to lead this church as committee members, as teachers, as officers, and I would invite you, those who have added their name to that list, to make a conscious effort to make love your motivation for being in the position. Whether it is sitting down there or up here, behind me or back behind the sound mixer, whether it is being downstairs in one of the classrooms with the children during the worship hour, or whether it is taking care of the outside or the inside of this building, whether it is making sure that all the light bulbs are on, or that the carpet is clean. Make it love.

Make love your fire.

Let’s pray.

Bread of Heaven

Sunday, August 6th, 2006
Proper 13 B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 6:24-35

24 So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. 25When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” 26Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 28Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” 29Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 30So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” 32Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

Once again, we start with food.

Keep in mind, this is picking up just a few short verses from where we left off last week. The last sentence from last week’s reading told of Jesus’ going off on his own – alone – when he realized that the people he’d just fed – all five thousand of them – wanted to make him King by force. Jesus left the people and first went off to be by himself, then met the disciples and traveled with them a few miles away, to Capernaum, and the people followed them.

This morning we pick up the very next morning. At least some of the same crowd is still looking for Jesus with the “Jesus for King” placards bouncing up and down among them. If you look real closely, you may just be able to make out the smaller signs that some of them were carrying: THEY say “What’s for Breakfast?”

You see, the people are still stuck on the fact that their stomachs having been filled so easily the evening before. When they find Jesus, their first question is interestingly phrased. They ask of Jesus, “WHEN did you come here?” Notice, please, that they are focusing on the passage of time – on the time, specifically, between meals. Their question was probably aimed at reminding Jesus that “Hey, it’s about time for breakfast!” It would seem incredible, don’t you think, to have experienced a miraculous feeding along with thousands of others, and not be aware on some level of the spiritual significance of the event, especially if they had witnessed the event from beginning to end.

Can you imagine watching five loaves of barley bread and two fish be multiplied into enough food to feed five thousand men, plus a likely equal number of women, and an unknown number of children, and not come away as interested in the person at the center of the miracle as in the miracle itself? Wouldn’t it seem to be an obvious follow up question from the people to ask Jesus who he was?

It seems that was not the case. They had it in their minds that Jesus was to be an earthly Messiah, a political and military leader OF COURSE. Wasn’t that what they were supposed to be looking for? Someone who could help provide them their earthly needs? Fulfill their earthly desires? Make them victors rather than victims?

How often does that happen to us? That we have so set in our minds what the other person is supposed to say, or do, or think, or FEEL, that we don’t even realize it when they don’t respond the way we expected them to, sometimes to the point of reacting as if their response WAS what we THOUGHT it was going to be when in fact it was nothing of the sort? That is in a way, just what is happening here, between the crowd and Jesus.

They are literally thinking Jesus is a new Moses, coming to liberate them, and to duplicate their feeding just as the people of Israel experienced in the desert with Manna from Heaven. Jesus responds to their underlying NEED in answering their question about when he arrived in Capernaum. He knocks away the superficial ‘when is our next meal’ out of the water and addresses their deeper need. We spoke last week of some of the more basic human needs: food, clothing and shelter, but we also touched on some other, harder to quantify needs – we listed self worth, security, and success. These were the needs that Jesus begins to address, and in addressing, he redefines them, as he so often does.

Self worth, as the world defined – and to a large extent STILL defines it – is measured in direct proportion to the amount of value placed on one’s worldly possessions, not on what it is that makes one an individual, a unique and precious child of God. One whom God loved enough to die for. The people are asking Jesus for a meal, and Jesus is trying to make them see that what they are – what WE are – truly hungering for can only be found in the eternal – in that which does not perish. So he answers, and he tells them they should not work for the food that perishes, “but for the food that endures to eternal life”.

Well, again, it seems that the people couldn’t hear for their belly’s growling. Again they are stuck on Moses, and understand Jesus to be telling them that the food he has for them is like the Manna the people got in the desert through Moses – they woke up each morning and it was just THERE – lying there on the ground, and they were only to gather enough to last them that day – no more. If they did, it would go bad. So they respond to Jesus’ perceived offer and ask him to tell them what they need to be about he business of DOING in order to receive that same ‘manna’ they are hearing Jesus talk about.

So Jesus tries to be even clearer in what he is saying. If you notice, as the chapter progresses, Jesus is being more and more specific in explaining who he is and what he is here to do, and the clearer he gets, the less popular he becomes. It started when he healed the paralytic and forgave him his sins in front of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, and it continues through this passage.

The people ask Jesus what they need to DO – operative word being “DO”, and Jesus turns it around and says it’s not about DOING, it’s about BELIEVING – and believing in him whom God has sent – Jesus himself. The DOING has been on God’s part – it’s nothing they or we can do on OUR part to attain … mercy, salvation, grace, whatever you want to call it.

The language of faith that has developed over the last two thousand years is truly beautiful. To read some of the church fathers, or some of the medieval Christian mystics – and even some of the more recent writings – even many of the hymns we still sing after three or four or five hundred years, if not longer, is to be aware of the amazing creativity of the human mind – the gift of speech, and word, and phrase, and how reading or hearing something can turn our day around completely is one of the purest forms of joy that can be experienced. But there are two sides to that coin.

Somewhere I read – I’m sure with the internet, you may have as well – of a person who dies, and wakes up in the afterlife, and is given a choice to make. He is shown through one door, which opens onto a banquet hall, with a huge table loaded with food. There are people all around the table, and they are starving – none of them can eat anything. They are not able to bring their hands to their mouths to feed because they have no elbows. Their arms remain straight, and they can only sit and complain and bicker and argue.

The next room the person is shown is almost a duplicate of the first, but here, everyone is joyously feasting. They, too, have no elbows, but the difference is that here, rather than trying to feed themselves unsuccessfully, they are feeding each other. You see, they are no less equipped to take care of each other now than when they DID have elbows.

It’s a little smarmy, isn’t it? But it makes the point, doesn’t it?

What is it that, as Christians, we most cherish in our pilgrimage through life? What is it that keeps us going, that gives us the energy to wake up and get up each day and meet it head on, with varying degrees of confidence, granted, but with the assurance that we have something to look forward to – either at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, or at some point in the not too-distant future? What do we mean when we say “Bread of Heaven”?

Let’s draw the correlation with our physical bodies. What does our body need to keep going? What provides us the energy to get up each morning and make it through each day, and week, and month, or year?

Food, of course.

It’s the same with our spirits.

The question for Jerusalem Baptist Church is this: what does our spiritual food look like? We might need to change that wording just a little bit – to what does our spiritual food SOUND like? How is our table set?

Are our ‘meals’ brimming with words of encouragement, and affirmation, and concern, and love, and hope, and peace, and togetherness, or are they silent events, where few if any comments are made until we are away from each other and only then are the true words of our hearts expressed; of bitterness, and envy, mistrust, disdain, and even hatred.

If we are to be a true reflection of the Kingdom of God on earth, which do you think will be heard as a truer representation of that? I can tell you, but I think you already know.

35Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

So what is it that we truly hunger for in this life? Forget about the fact that it is nearly lunchtime for a minute, and let’s ask ourselves, what is it that we have been longing to hear, to TASTE in our souls, in our very hearts?

Is it compassion?

Is it acceptance?

Is it forgiveness?

Is it repentance?

What kind of meal is this that Jesus is inviting us to share in – to take an active role in setting the table, and to feed each other?

Let’s pray.