Sermon preached August 9, 2015
Texts: John
6:35-41-51
“Dazed
and Confused,” Led Zeppelin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehwSEVbBZl4
This
is a good “Blues Fest” song. Do you
think people ever felt dazed and confused when Jesus was speaking, particularly
in the way he speaks in the Gospel of John?
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of
life. Whoever comes to me will never be
hungry, whoever believes in me will never be thirsty…. 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. Even the first listeners were a little dazed
and confused.
Even
looking at more contemporary renderings of the passage does not make it that
much easier.
Jesus said to them, “I, I am the loaf of
life. The one who takes my route will
never go hungry, and the one who bases his life on mine will never stay
thirsty…. I am indeed the live loaf that
came down from on high. If one eats from
this loaf, he’ll be alive in the new age.
Now the loaf that I’ll give for the life of the world is my own flesh. (Cotton
Patch Version).
So
let’s do a little reflecting and then ask what all this might mean for our
lives. First of all it is really
important for us to remember again that part of the context for John’s Gospel
is a family fight among Jews who were followers of Jesus and those who were
not. In verse 41 where it reads, “then
the Jews began to complain,” we should remember that this was not all the
Jewish people, for the followers of Jesus were also Jewish. The sad history of Christian anti-Semitism
does not allow us simply to let these words stand without some comment.
Verses
47-48: Very truly, I tell you, whoever
believes has eternal life. I am the
bread of life. We tend to think of
the word “believe” as giving cognitive assent.
It is something to do with our thinking.
“Yes, I think Jesus is the bread of life.” The Greek word is much richer than that and
has much more to do with trust. Former
Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowen Williams, in his book on basic Christian faith,
entitled Tokens of Trust, makes this point well, comparing Christian
“belief” with belief in UFOs or the Loch Ness monster. Hence
the radical difference from ‘believing’ in UFOs or the Loch Ness monster. To believe in these doesn’t make that much
difference to how I feel about myself and the world in general…. [Christian belief is] about where I find the
anchorage of my life, where I find solid ground, home. (5-6)
Finding
anchorage in trusting Jesus leads to new life, not just life beyond this life,
but a new quality of life here. Here are
a couple of other renderings of verse 47.
“I truly tell you that he who lives his faith has spiritual life” (Cotton
Patch). “I’m telling you the most
solemn and sober truth now: Whoever believes in me has real life, eternal life”
(The Message).
Finally,
we should remind ourselves that the language here is poetic language, the
language of metaphor, symbol and parable.
Jesus isn’t literally bread, isn’t literally a loaf of bread. The words of Jesus here are introduced by a
feeding story, where a crowd is gathered and in need of food, Jesus takes five
loaves and two fish, blesses and distributes them, and there is enough. If Jesus were literally bread, why any need
for the five loaves? People are fed, but
Jesus thinks there may be deeper hungers, and the language shifts to metaphor
and symbol.
So
what? We’ve done some good background
work on this passage, but so what? What
might this say to us? I want to get at
that through a series of observations and questions.
All
that happens here seems to imply that human hunger is not just hunger for food,
for daily bread. There are hungers/for a nameless bread poet Carl Sandburg wrote (“Timesweep”
in Collected Poems, 758). Poets can be helpful in trying to figure out the
meaning of the poetics of Scripture. The
poet William Carlos Williams, on one of his poems (“Asphodel: That Greeny
Flower”) wrote:
It
is difficult
to
get the news from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for
lack
of
what is found there.
We have hungers of the heart and soul.
We hunger for meaning. We hunger for aliveness.
We hunger for connection. We hunger for joy. We hunger to discover our gifts. We hunger to
use our gifts for the good of the world. We hunger for love. We hunger for God. The words of Jesus here are intended to open
us up to these other hungers.
If
we have so many hungers, how can we make sense of them, how can we deal with
them? First let’s admit we are
privileged in that hunger for our daily bread does not consume us. Most of us are privileged to be able to ask,
“What should we have for dinner? Should
we go out, or cook at home?” rather than having to ask, “When will I next
eat? Where will my next meal come from?” The church that proclaims Jesus as the bread
of life, acknowledging the full range of human hungers must not ignore that
fact that the basic hunger for bread goes unanswered too often in our world. In John 6, Jesus feeds the people before
moving to this other conversation about the bread of life.
Yet
there is hunger for a nameless bread and such a thing as “death by bread
alone.” I purloined my sermon title from
the title of a book by the late German theologian Dorothee Soelle.
“One does not live by bread alone.” In fact, bread alone kills us. To live by bread alone is to die a slow and
dreadful death in which all human relationships are mutilated and strangled. Of course, such a death by bread alone does
not mean that we cease to exist. Our
bodies still function. We still go about
the chores and routines of life; we accomplish things; we breathe; we produce
and consume and excrete; we come, go, and speak. Yet we do not really live…. This is what the Bible means when it speaks
of death. Death is what takes place
within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus, but as
threat, danger, and competition…. The
death of which the Bible speaks lays hold of us in the very midst of life. It is the boredom and emptiness of going
through all the motions of living while being totally drained of all humanity
and reduced to the level of an old work horse. (3, 4, 5)
In
these dramatic words, Soelle is trying to tell us that we can misuse and
mis-order our hungers. We may spend too
much time, energy and attention entertaining ourselves rather than being
engaged in life. We may spend too much
time, energy and attention on accumulating rather than on creating or relating.
I
recall here the words of the theologian James Gustafson about the Christian
life. The question for us, Gustafson
thinks is “What is God enabling and requiring us to be and to do?” the general response is we are to relate ourselves and all things in a manner appropriate to
their relations to God (Ethics From a Theocentric Perspective, Volume
One, 327). This is a way of saying
that we need to pay attention to how we order our hungers, how we feed our
hungers.
So
what might someone coming to this planet say about the ordering of our hungers
in this society at this time? Say
someone just dropped in and wanted to find out about how we use our time, our
energy and our attention? They might
find that we spend a lot of time, energy and attention on spiritually empty
calories, things that may contribute to death by bread alone. We pay a lot of attention to
celebrities. We may know more about the
Kardashians than about our cousins. We
are deeply loyal to athletic teams. We
wrap our identity around them. They call
forth some of our best energy. We gather
to celebrate their successes and mourn their defeats. The team becomes us. We have “political” debates but spend much
time before them analyzing who got in to the debate rather than discussing the
issues that might be debated, then we spend a lot of time afterwards figuring
out who “won” rather than discussing the policy proposals. Apparently after the earlier debate on
Thursday, a lot of people wanted to know how old and how tall Carly Fiorina is.
There
is nothing inherently wrong about keeping up with the Kardashians, or following
the Twins, the Vikings, the Packers or whomever. It is o.k to ask about debate processes, and
Carly Fiorina is 60 and 5’8,” though you have to wonder why no one is asking
how old or how tall Mike Huckabee is.
The concern we should have is how much time, attention and energy we
give to things which may be the equivalent of empty calories – they taste good,
and are o.k. in perspective, but not highly nutritious.
So
we want to order our hungers, attend to how we use our time, energy and
attention. But it is not a matter of
cultivating “the spiritual” over “the material.” A Jesus spirituality is not an ethereal
spirituality that is only concerned about worship, prayer and the next
life. Body and soul are
intertwined. Jesus fed the people before
he got into this metaphoric discussion about other hungers. It was this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose
father and mother were known, who was also the bread of life, the loaf that
came from on high. It is in this life
that we make our relationship to God real.
We worship to connect more deeply with God and to seek grace and wisdom
for ordering our lives, here and now. We
pray to help us reflect on how we will use our time, energy and attention, here
and now.
If
Jesus is our bread, if we trust that, how do we live? We acknowledge our hungers and their
variety. We order our hungers and how we
meet them. We give time, energy and
attention to what matters most – kindness, generosity, growth, helping others
grow, welcoming others into the love of God, doing justice, fostering
reconciliation. There will be time for
entertainment and a few empty calories, but too many is death by bread
alone. And to find in Jesus our bread of
life is to understand that eternal life is something that happens now.
A
story. Yesterday we had a celebration of
life service here for Floyd Mott. You
may or may not recall Floyd by name, but if you were here in worship on July
19, you will never forget it. At that
point in time, Floyd (65) knew he was dying.
He had also never been baptized, and it was something he wanted. Why? I
can’t give you all the reasons, but somehow in recent months our church had
given him a place where he could meet Jesus as the bread of life. We offered hospitality, welcome, worship that
connected, that help him discover a deep hunger and helped feed that hunger. So Floyd chose to be baptized, and so, too,
did his granddaughters Kaitlyn and Macie on that same morning. Then Saturday, we offered Floyd’s family and
friends a place to gather to celebrate his life and offer his life back to God.
Our
lives are not perfect lives. Our church
is not a perfect church, whatever that means.
When we order our lives so that we are paying attention and using our
time and energy to be a place of welcome, hospitality, kindness, caring,
connection remarkable things happen.
Jesus, the bread of life becomes more a part of us, and is more real for
others. Let’s keep at it. Amen.
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