Eat Me and Live Forever.

John 6:56-69

August 26, 2018

I.

Jesus says that if we consume his flesh and blood we remain in him and he in us, and we live forever.  It is indeed a difficult saying, even for us.  It requires a lot of interpretation because taken literally it makes no sense.  Even if eating someone’s flesh were possible it would be cannibalism, something the early church was actually charged with by the Romans.  Jews were not allowed even to eat rare meat; the idea of eating human flesh and drinking human blood was abhorrent in the extreme, as it is for us today.

The crowd that once was so excited about the Jesus who produced miraculous bread on the hillside that they wanted to carry him off to Jerusalem and make him king, is dwindling.  But the end of this chapter he is down to a mere 12 people who stick with him.

We know, I think, what this is like, this dwindling.  For Jesus this happens in a few hours in Capernaum; with our churches of what used to be called the “mainline” denominations it has taken 45 years, but many of us know what it’s like to remember when there were lots of people enthusiastic about Christianity, and to look around now and see only a few.  That morning Jesus had been the most popular figure in Galilee!  Now he’s down to just a handful of loyalists.  What happened?

Well, what happens is he keeps talking.  And the more he talks, the more people recoil, shake their heads, shrug, and go off to find some other way to spend their day.  Because what he is saying was considered crazy.  “Eat me and live forever!” is the gist of it.  C. S. Lewis once quipped that Jesus is either who he says he is, or he is mentally ill.  In this story the crowd is coming to the latter conclusion with every word that comes out of Jesus’ mouth.  “This is a hard teaching.  Who can accept it?” is kind of a sanitized version of what they were probably really saying.

This is what always happens when the church is led by the Spirit to pay attention to Jesus’ words.  People say, “Wait a minute, I thought this was a social club!  I thought this was about success and family and patriotism and civic duty!  I thought this was about maintaining the status quo and personal morality and enforcing the laws!  ‘Eat me and live forever?  Turn the other cheek?  Sell all your possessions?  Bless our enemies?  Hate your family?  Be born again?’  These are hard teachings; who can accept them?  Not me.  I’m outa here.  There’s way more fun things I can do on Sunday morning than listen to this nonsense.”

There is in the church this time-bomb called “the gospel.”  The church sails along sometimes for centuries selling out to the wealth and power of culture, feathering its nest in the comfortable center of society, sucking up to governments and commerce until it becomes virtually indistinguishable from the ruling class.  But then, inevitably, someone actually reads the gospels and suggests that maybe we should pay attention to Jesus Christ.  At which point, if the establishment leaders can’t put a lid on it, the whole place blows up.  Someone realizes that Jesus actually doesn’t favor war, or injustice, or inequality, or any of the other atrocities that civic leaders have cynically press-ganged the church into serving. 

II.

And people start to leave.  They want a positive message.  They want to be affirmed.  They want stability.  They want to be uplifted.  They want comfort.  And the story of a man crucified for blasphemy and sedition doesn’t cut it for them.  And if this man says some things that challenge the whole basis of my comfortable, white, suburban existence, “well, gosh, look how late it is, I’ve got a tee-time in 20 minutes!”

This is the way the Lord prunes his church, using the sword of the Word to cut off the dead and fruitless branches.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” says Jesus.  “Whoever eats me will live because of me…. the one who eats this bread will live for ever.”

He is talking about the sacramental eating and drinking, which itself represents the way we receive Jesus’ teachings and life.  We receive them by our faithful obedience in keeping his commandments.  We receive them by abiding in him by living the life he gives us to live.  We receive them by this simple act of eating the bread which is the communion in his body and drinking from the cup which is the communion in his life-blood.  By taking in these elements we ingest the words and prayers spoken over them; we take in the story; we take in his life so that now he lives in us.  Now his life is ours.  This is the way Jesus has given us to participate in the life of God, and thereby live forever.  We receive the love and life of God in Jesus Christ, by sharing and giving his life and love to and for others.

This is our confession of faith.  It is words and actions, beginning with the eating and the drinking, and then extended into the works of compassion and justice, peace, love, and forgiveness, the humility and generosity that characterize the life of God flowing through us into the world in imitation of the One who empties himself, giving his life for the life of the world.

Even when it is carefully explained and even when people do understand it more than literally, it is still alienating.  They would still have walked away because the deeper meaning, that it is his teachings and life that we take on, is at least as demanding and counter-cultural.  Indeed, the more we understand him the more difficult his message becomes because it is about taking up a cross, our own cross, and following him.  It is about discipleship that costs us our soul, our life, our all, in the words of one classic hymn.  Maybe the crowd does not dwindle because they don’t understand; maybe they understood all too well what Jesus demands of them, and realized they wanted no part of it.

III.

This is the pruning of the church.  But fruit trees get pruned for a reason.  It is for growth.  It is to focus and direct the energy of the trees — so they may produce more and better fruit. 

When people drift away from him and even the disciples grumble that this teaching is too weird and too hard and not what they signed up for, Jesus says, “Does this offend you?  Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?  It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.  The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.”

The proof will be in his resurrection and ascension into the fullness of time.  This is the key to that wild and breathtaking promise that “the one who eats this bread will live forever.”  Whoever takes in and becomes and expresses Jesus’ body and blood, his teachings and life, whoever loves him and keeps his commandments will never die.  Jesus repeats this brash and outlandish claim several times in this gospel. 

Obviously, trusting in Jesus does not mean there will not come a time when our physical organism gives out.  Such changes are an integral part of the greater dance of life in God’s creation in which we are always exchanging energy and essences and matter and life with each other.  Individuals give their life to and for others, all the time, and the individual that you have decided is “you” participates in this.  

One of the things we come to realize in Christ is that life is way bigger than us; it is vaster than the little particular individual manifestations we identify with for an absurdly brief time.  Jesus calls us to awaken to a life infinitely larger than what we imagine is temporarily contained by our carbon-based bodies.  Just as he is within everything and everyone, so in him we also become conscious of being within everything and everyone.  This indeed is the meaning of ascension; it is an expansion into everywhere.  

The Lord Jesus becomes incarnate by a “descent” from the everywhere of God’s infinite Presence, and then after his death he is resurrected and “ascends” back into that Presence.  When we identify with him and receive him into ourselves in trust and obedience we also realize our own true nature in this vastness of God’s Light.  Jesus refers to this as being raised up “on the last day,” a phrase he uses 3 times in this chapter.  The last day being the fulness of time realized in him, eternity.  

When Jesus asks the remaining 12 confused disciples if they also want to leave him, it is Peter who gets it.  “Lord, to whom can we go?” he says.  “You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  The words of the Word who became flesh to dwell among us, following and obeying them, being conformed and informed by those words, expressing them in our own lives, that is what delivers us to eternal life.  That is how we live forever.  Not in ourselves or these temporary configurations, but with and in him and in God.

IV.

The gospel says the disappointed and confused crowd “turned back” from Jesus.  The word used means back to the past.  They refused to allow Jesus to draw them forward into a new way of thinking and acting; they revert back to the familiar, the comfortable, the predictable, the secure.  They go back to the way things were before Jesus’ crazy talk about eating him and living forever.  They want to go back to when it was all about everybody having bread.  Maybe they live in nostalgia for how great it was just that morning when the whole town was ready to make Jesus king!

The story gives us a choice.  We can come ahead into eternal life with and in Jesus Christ, or we can turn back and stay in what we know.  We can embrace hope, or sink into nostalgia.  We can ascend to life, or stay mired in death.

He has the words of eternal life.  There is no place else to go.  He is the living bread that feeds the world.  It is his life, which we ingest in the sacrament and which informs us in the words of his teachings, which we express in our love for the world in his name.  For whoever trusts in him will not perish, but live forever.

+++++++

The Wolf You Feed.

John 6:51-58

August 19, 2018

I.

We are what eat.  Indeed, we are what we feed in ourselves.  If we force our bodies to subsist on a diet of junk food — fast food burgers, sugary drinks, greasy fried potatoes — the 5 food groups of college; fat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol — then what we are feeding is our ego-centric, self-gratifying, self-righteous consumer selves.  On this diet our bodies become addled, obese, clogged, thick, and finally diseased and dysfunctional.

The same goes for what we figuratively ingest in terms of words and images.  If it’s pornography and violence, if it’s paranoid and hysterical lies that feed our fears and anxieties, if it’s stories that feed our resentments, stoke our egos, and encourage us to be competitors and enemies of each other — then we end up with constricted, calcified, congested, blind, and paralyzed souls that are incapable of seeing or hearing the truth of God’s love revealed in Jesus.  We live in an echo-chamber or hall of mirrors reflecting back to us our own fears and desires.

We can fatten ourselves with the counterfeit contentment of consumerism, addicted to our own self-preservation and to our own present pleasure, hoarding goods produced by other people’s labor, and ever needing to protect and defend our private stash, while always making it bigger.  Indeed, such measurement is how we define “success” in our culture.  The more you have the better you are doing.

But this approach will lead to inevitable extinction because neither the earth nor its Creator can tolerate such a destructive and out-of-control form of life.  We know from nature that such organisms may thrive for a short time but they do not survive in the end.  We also know this from Scripture, where we find several consuming, colonizing empires successfully gobbling up vast territories with great violence… all of which collapse from the weight of their own greed and destructiveness.  The Book of Revelation is the blow-by-blow account of the ultimate fate of such ways of thinking and acting.    

In our bodies, such unrestricted growth and consumption is called cancer.  One cell decides to be an ego-centric, selfish individualist, and spread its malign influence to others.  We know what happens to bodies with cancer left untreated.  And then when the body the cancer has conquered inevitably dies, so does the cancer.  Cancer is the essence of death.

The same foul spirit, the spirit of greed, lust, gluttony, consumption, out-of-control growth, and careless waste is the enemy Jesus comes to neutralize.  That was the message of Satan in the temptation stories in the other gospels.  Satan appeals to the human mania for getting, taking, hoarding, gaining, winning, keeping, consuming, and controlling.  Jesus proves who he is by not caving in to that temptation.  

That’s why Jesus’ discourse on the Bread of Life is so important.  The Lord radically contrasts our addiction to literal bread, the bread we eat and consume, which stands for wealth and power, with his message of self-emptying love.  His answer to those who were so impressed by his bread-making that they want to sweep him off and make him king, is that it’s not about the bread, it is about the love that produces, gives, and shares the bread.

II.

Jesus is about giving.  His life is a pouring out, a self-emptying.  His life is about forgiveness and generosity.  His life is about not holding on to things, but letting them go in love and freedom.  His life is about celebrating in joy and wonder the undivided diversity that is God’s creation.

To make his point, Jesus takes the bread and wine rituals which are at the heart of Israelite faith going all the way back to Abraham, and he connects them to his own self-offering for the life of the world on the cross.  By his word, he makes bread and the wine to be the way we participate in him, and thus in God, and then, as him, we find ourselves going forth in self-offering as well.  Just as the literal, physical nutrients in the bread and the wine actually and physically become the flesh of our bodies, so the Presence of God in Christ is also spiritually, ritually transferred to us, or more precisely fed and thereby awakened in us, when we consume them in the Sacrament.

Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Jesus refers here to his crucifixion which will happen a year later practically to the day.  The bread also is a way of talking about his teaching, his words.  His crucifixion is an embodiment, an enacting, a representation of his words in which he does with his own body what he has been saying for 3 years.  And his words and actions in his ministry are an expression in advance of the ultimate offering of himself he will make on the cross.

So, the crucifixion is not an interruption of Jesus’ career as a teacher and healer, it is not something that was politically inevitable but not a necessary part of his work, as some today are suggesting.  It is the fulfillment of what he is always about because he clearly sees himself in the roles described in the Hebrew Scriptures: the Passover Lamb, the Atonement sacrifice, and the Servant of God who suffers on behalf of the people.  

Yes, he gives his life to us in his teachings and his healing and liberating ministry.  Following him and obeying him is an essential element of participating in him.  This aspect, discipleship, has often been neglected by the church, to its shame.  But all these things lead up to, anticipate, and reflect in advance his ultimate giving of his life when he is lifted up on the cross and in his resurrection.

Because he comes not just to talk to us, but to do something for and to us.  He doesn’t say “think about this in remembrance of me,” he says “do this in remembrance of me.”  

Which means that the place where this all comes together is at his Table, because that is where his word becomes flesh again and again, first in the bread, and then through the bread in us.  The Sacrament is how his word becomes our flesh, and this does happen quite literally, and even in a sense physically by the quality of our discipleship.

III.

So he establishes this link of identification between the literal bread of the Sacrament, the figurative “bread” of his teachings, and the “bread” of his own body, his own flesh, broken on the cross.  To participate in one is to participate in the others, and it is the only way to do so.  To eat the bread is to follow his word enacted on the cross.  

We participate in the literal bread by breaking it and eating it.  The Greek word used is not the usual word for eat, it is more visceral and physical, more like “chew” or as some commentators translate it, “munch.”  It focuses on the act of teeth grinding and saliva dissolving the substance of the bread in your mouth.  

We are prone to overly spiritualize it until it’s barely recognizable as actually eating anything.  Some ministers don’t even like the word “eat;” it’s too gross, I guess, so they say “partake.”  Jesus wants us to experience him as the bread that we bless, break, and put in our mouths and chew on like the real food it is.  He wants us to sense the texture, the taste.  He wants us to be present to this act.  The fact that it is something we do with our bodies is important to him.  

The bread is still material bread and that is the way we have to take it because we are material beings and so is the One who became flesh to dwell among us.  A symbol points beyond itself to something else, but this Sacrament — because he says so and we trust him, and because we repeat his words over the elements — is the way to remember him and participate in him and receive his life.

A DNA test of course will reveal that the bread is still wheat and hasn’t in any physical way become human flesh… until we eat it.  Then it does literally become human flesh, ours.  It gets transubstantiated in us.  Especially as this bread, over which we have spoken the words of institution and the invocation of the Spirit, empowers and nourishes Christ-in-us so we may continue his mission in his name.  His work becomes ours.  We are his body in the world.  We carry his life, or blood.

That means that, in feeding his Presence in us, we live into his mission and ministry.  It means that now we are the ones through whom the love of God pours into the world.  It means we are the ones emptying ourselves for others.  It means we are the ones embodying his forgiveness, generosity, healing, acceptance, compassion, welcome, goodness, shalom, justice, and joy.

IV.

I am reminded of this often retold Native American story.  A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at battle.  One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, humility, peace, and love.  The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like anger, greed, resentment, lies, fear, hatred, and ego.  The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”  The grandfather quietly replies, “The one you feed.”

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is about feeding the “good wolf” in us, which is Christ; and we feed Christ with Christ.  We receive his life to live his life.  We receive his body to become his body.  The way to awaken and realize his saving Presence within us, is to receive him, to eat his body and drink his blood, represented in the bread and the cup.  We know that is what we are doing because we know and feel and see its truth in our actions.

+++++++    

 

The Crack in Everything.

John 6:35, 41-51

August 12, 2018

I.

In the gospel of John there is no account of the Last Supper where Jesus lifts up the bread and says, “This is my body.”  Instead, the Lord addresses the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper here in chapter 6, in conjunction with his provision of bread for 5000 people gathered on a hillside.  Both perspectives center on Passover, and both start with literal bread.  But in John we get Jesus’ spiritual reflections on the bread, showing it to represent himself.  He is the bread who is broken for the life of the world.

After that experience, he retreats to Capernaum, and the people seek him out and find him there.  Last week we saw how he was bringing the people along with him until finally they say, “Give us this bread always,” leading Jesus to his proclamation, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

But there are some folks there who are not so sure.  The gospel refers to them as “the Jews,” but this does not mean the entire Jewish people so much as the religious leaders, the establishment, the custodians of the reigning orthodoxy of the time.  They begin to complain because they are still taking Jesus literally and if you do that his words are unintelligible and ridiculous.

There is in the New Testament a sharp division between the people who get it, or at least start to get it, and those who don’t get it because they insist on taking Jesus literally.  Remember Nicodemus back in chapter 3?  Assuming Jesus means by “born again” that we have somehow to climb back into our mothers’ wombs, which is breathtakingly stupid?  Remember the woman at the well in chapter 4, who starts off talking with Jesus about actual water, but then is able to stick with him when he shifts to talking about metaphorical, symbolic water?

Here in chapter 6, he is trying to draw people from obsessing about the actual bread he provides on the hillside, and open their minds to see that as a metaphor for something way deeper, higher, broader, and brighter.  That physical bread points to real “bread,” which is himself and his teaching.  Just like bread feeds your body, so I will feed your spirit, is what he is saying.

But the religious authorities and their followers can’t swallow this.  They start off with, “Wait a minute, he didn’t come down from no heaven; he grew up in Nazareth.  We know his family.  Some of us went to high school with him.  Don’t give me this ‘I came down from heaven’ stuff.  Who does he think he is?”  It’s like they’re demanding his birth-certificate or something, because unless it says “Heaven” under “place of birth,” he’s obviously lying.  That’s the level of sophistication we’re dealing with here.

The gospel is incomprehensible if we take everything merely literally (like many conservatives) or historically (like many liberals).  The Lord is trying to haul us into a different way of thinking, which Paul calls having “the mind of Christ,” past this literalist dead end.  He is saying that visible, measurable, tangible things point beyond themselves to an invisible spiritual Reality that cannot be talked about in any other way than story, metaphor, symbol, image, poetry, and parable. 

II.  

Jesus’ response to their obstinate boneheadedness is to say, in effect, either you get it or you don’t.  It’s kind of like when Louis Armstrong was asked by a reporter to “define jazz.”  He said, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”  You have to have the answer inside you to begin with.  It’s intuitive; you can’t figure it out.  Jesus comes into the world to unlock the faith God as placed within everyone, which most of us are completely unaware of.  When he heals someone, Jesus often says, “Your faith has made you well,” as if to suggest that their healing was already within them and Jesus is the catalyst bringing that out and making that real for them in their bodies.

This is not something that can be directly taught.  We can’t go to school and learn how to think differently in this way.  It’s not about objective information or data.  We can’t “grasp” it.  We have to be “taught by God,” Jesus says.  He talks about it as a drawing, the way we scoop up water.  It’s an attraction like magnetism.  It is drawn out of us.  The Lord says we have to be “drawn by the Father.”  We don’t make it happen; but we have to let it happen. 

Jesus also says that he teaches in parables precisely to separate those who “have ears to hear” from those who only focus on the literal meaning of what he says.  It reminds me of how a dog, if you point to something, will be very interested in your finger.  They don’t usually have the mental capacity to make the interpretive leap to understand that your finger is actually pointing to something else.  

We have to let go of our preconceived notions, and be open to what God has to teach all of us.  That’s why he quotes a universalist statement from the prophets that “they shall all be taught by God.”  God has this knowledge, wisdom, and insight for all of us.  No one is permanently doomed by their stupidity.  But too often we do suppress and ignore this interior wisdom and hide in the prison of taking things literally.

Jesus is saying this about these religious leaders and their followers.  It’s not about the finger.  It’s not about the literal bread.  It’s not even about the manna in the Bible that the ancient Israelites ate.  It’s not about anything you can grasp and control.  Those things point to something else.  The Israelites may have had miracle food from God in the wilderness, but they still died.  

The Lord is talking about “bread” from “heaven” that when you “eat” it you don’t “die” anymore.  You live forever; you are raised up on the last day.  You emerge into the eternal now of fulfilled time.  There is something that if you receive and incorporate it into yourself, it feeds your deepest Self, which is the Image of God, Christ-in-you, by whom we participate in the very nature of the Creator.  In him we detach from the limitations and liabilities of our egocentric-personality driven existence, and fall into everywhere and all-time.

III.

When Jesus says, “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die,” I imagine him pointing to himself, to his own body, his own mortal flesh, the flesh that God’s Word became to dwell among us, the flesh indeed that each one of us has, shares, and is, and which we have in common with him.  God speaks us into existence at the beginning; God even makes our flesh and skin.  Our whole life and existence comes from God, including our physical bodies which participate other bodies in the cycles of life in God’s creation.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” says Jesus.  “Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  He is talking about his crucifixion in which his flesh, his mortal body, is literally, physically broken in an act of terror and brutality by the Romans, but which God turns inside-out revealing the Way of true life.

Now it is not by self-preservation that we survive, even though that will arguably get us through a few mostly miserable years on this earth, after which we perish.  But it is according to Jesus’ example of self-offering, self-emptying, and self-giving that we not just survive but live forever.  On the cross Jesus becomes, in the words of Leonard Cohen, the “crack in everything” through which “the light gets in.”  

That is what he is signifying when he breaks bread.  It is his most characteristic act.  It is the act by which people who know him instantly identify him.  It is something he must have done with great solemnity and uniqueness, regularly and frequently.  Along with the pouring of wine it is the one thing he tells us to do to remember him.  It has become the one thing all Christians do by which we are recognized and identified.

When we break the bread we are remembering him, and we are remembering ourselves, our true selves — we are remembering who we really are, we are remembering Christ-in-us, the hope of glory, as Paul says.  And in remembering ourselves as Christ’s body and individually members of him.  Identifying with his brokenness, we also offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, that we may also be how his Light gets into the world.  His Light of love, peace, justice, healing, service, and joy, his Light of Wisdom and Presence and goodness, his Light of truth… comes into the world by means of this bread, the bread of his people who bear his Word.  Eating the bread means we become him and he becomes us, his mission is our mission, his death is our death, his life is our life, given now in him for the life of the world.

IV.

Now this — all of us together — is the bread that came down from heaven.  We are the Body of Christ.  We are distributed, spread out, sent into the world to identify with others, sharing in their brokenness, losses, and failures, and allowing God’s Light to shine through us, in our compassion, welcome, acceptance, and blessing, as well as in our ministries of material generosity.       

For in and as Christ we know that to live merely for ourselves, for this life only — for my self, my family, my class, my nation, my species in competition with others — is to embrace our own extinction.  It is to be weighted down with the chains of our hoarded possessions, which crush us into oblivion.  

But to live for others — all others, all people and the whole creation — without accepting division and enmity but realizing our essential oneness — is to live forever.  It is to be all-in-all as Christ is all-in-all. 

+++++++      

We Are the Bread.

John 6:24-35

August 5, 2018

I.

In his characteristic prayer that Christians use at least daily, the Lord Jesus has us ask God to “give us this day our daily bread.”  Jesus recognizes that bread is obviously important as food for our bodies.  It is something we all need to survive.  I would even call bread or food a fundamental human right.  Jesus himself has just fed 5000 people on a hillside with miracle bread.  Feeding people physically is important to him.

God places us in a creation of astounding abundance where there is more than enough to feed everyone, even a population of 10 billion humans.  The fact that this doesn’t happen and we have hungry people and a yawning gap in the world between a very few who have way too much, and almost everyone else with way too little, is a product of human sinfulness, egocentricity, selfishness, and greed.  It is like this because we choose to mess up the distribution.  

Jesus comes to change the world.  If we can be liberated from the bondage to greed and the fear which spawns it, we can see a new economy emerge in which all are fed.  Those who witness that miracle of the bread are on board with this new economy.  They are all about the provision of bread; they want to see everyone fed.

So when Jesus weirdly disappears after they want to take him to Jerusalem and make him king, they pile into boats and try to find him somewhere along the coast of the Sea of Galilee.  Eventually they do locate him, predictably, in his headquarters-town of Capernaum.

They want more bread.  They want to build on the bread experience.  They want to use Jesus to do the good work of providing bread for all, especially the hungry.  They want to build a better distribution system, and fulfill Jesus’ prayer about giving all of us this day our daily bread.  Indeed, they want to fulfill Jesus’ parable in Matthew 25 about serving him by serving the needy.  “I was hungry and you gave me food.”  They’re all about that.  They want to be one of the nations that is received into the joy of the Lord because they served the least of these, the destitute, deprived, disenfranchised, diseased people on the bottom of society.

I totally get that.  All my life I have been on the side of a socially active, progressive Christianity.  And I noticed at the recently concluded General Assembly that our denomination has never been so focused on addressing the injustices that pervade our society.  We’ve never been more about feeding the hungry, no matter who they are.  You’d think I’d be ecstatic!  And you’d think Jesus would be all over us with approval and accolades.  Well done, good and faithful servants!

And yet, when faced with the enthusiasm of people who want to change society and change the government and get hungry people fed and make Jesus the king, Jesus himself says, “Not so fast.  You’re all still focused on the physical, literal bread.  That is important.  But it is not the most important thing.  It’s a superficial and derivative thing.  It’s secondary.  That food eventually perishes.  Don’t work for the perishable food.  Work instead 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.”  

II.

Then they say to him, “Okay, whatever… but what must we do to perform the works of God?  Give us our marching orders!  Show us what we need to do to install this new order where everyone gets fed.  Tell us the new policies you advocate.  We’re ready to get organized.  Send us out with some of that bread.  We want to do God’s work in your name!”  

Jesus answers them, “You want to know what the work of God is?  Here it is: that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  In other words, the work of God is not primarily going out and doing good things.  Doing good things is important and essential; there is no eternal life without doing good things as Jesus teaches and exemplifies.  But the good things we do are secondary and derivative; they are the results and consequence of something primary, essential, and deeper happening within us.  That has to be unlocked and accessed first.  

The point for Jesus is not going out and changing the world; it is changing people… who then go out and change the world.  And it is not changing people into something new and different; it is changing them into who they really are and always really were, but didn’t know it.    

That’s what he means by “believe.”  It is not about our opinion or what we think.  It is certainly not our views about historical events, or our verbal and cognitive acceptance of certain theological doctrines.  Believing means trusting in who we really are as human beings created in God’s Image.  God has revealed this to us in Jesus Christ, who is the Son of Man, or the Human One, with whom we each share in true humanity.  It means placing our wholehearted faith, hope, and trust in Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  Not at first out there, but within.  It means his is your way, your truth, and your life.  Christ becomes real in you; more to the point, in him you become real.  You participate in him and therefore in the divine nature itself.

And real people do real things and make a real difference in the world.  

Don’t get obsessed with the superficialities, says Jesus.  Don’t get swept away by the turbulence.  Go deep.  It’s not about the bread; the bread points to something more profound and real.  As long as it’s just about the bread then we are stuck in politics and economics, where even if you throw out the corrupt old boss you discover the new boss is just as bad, in insignificantly different ways, because we haven’t changed anything fundamental.  We just moved some pieces around on the board.

But if you turn away from the old boss in your heart and soul and mind, and allow the true boss, Jesus Christ, the Image of God, the One sent from heaven into the world, to emerge in you, then everything changes.  Then you will be spiritually fed by “bread” that doesn’t perish, but feeds you for eternal life.  Then you live forever because you have discovered that forever actually lives in you.

III.

So when Jesus says that what we must do to be doing God’s work is believe in him, it doesn’t mean do nothing.  It means, as they say in 12-step groups, “let go and let God.”  It means “give me the steering wheel of your life.”  It means “become the me that is in you.”  It means “follow me.”  We do God’s work by having Jesus work in and through us.

Jesus says, “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world….  I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

God’s “bread” which gives life to the world is God’s holy Word, who is Jesus Christ.  Just as bread gives life to people when they eat it and it literally becomes them, so also God’s “bread,” gives life to the world by becoming flesh in Jesus and being “consumed” when people hear and follow his teachings, and when he gives his life on the cross.  In this way his life comes to permeate the whole world.

We come to him and trust in him by participating in him and his mission, which means we are also, in his name, the “bread” that gives life to the world.  We empty ourselves of our self-important, self-righteous egocentricity, and identify as he does with the world’s brokenness and weakness, its failure and disease, its rejection and exclusion.  We offer ourselves in love for the world, as Christ does, and so the world is redeemed in him through us.  

In a sense, we who follow Jesus are the “bread.”  We are broken and distributed when we share the love of God with others, enabling them to find the bread, the Presence of Christ, within themselves.  Together we gather to share the bread of his life and teachings together.  Which is why the epitome of Christian life is expressed in this Sacrament where we share the bread and the cup and so share in Christ himself.  The idea is that this sharing becomes our way of life, and its pattern is extended in the way we live once we leave this place.  We continue as a people of self-offering and redemptive sharing, spread throughout the world like light, or salt, or leaven.

We have to be the bread now.  We have to be the ones who bring life and blessing into people’s lives.  We have to be the catalysts for healing, enabling others to know the faith that is in them that they never realized was even there.  

We have to be the people of humility and generosity, gentleness and joy, openness and acceptance, freedom and peace, compassion and hope, witnessing always and only to the living Presence of Christ in the world, in our hearts, in the soul of everyone and everything that God makes.  We have to be the ones who are sent into the world, not to condemn the world or anyone in it, but that the world might have life in Jesus Christ, the bread of life.

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Passover in Galilee.

John 6:1-21

July 29, 2018

I.

In the gospel readings for these past few weeks Jesus has been spending a lot of time in boats, going up and down the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  Here the gospel makes the point of reminding us that the Romans had renamed this body of water the Sea of Tiberias.  Tiberias was a Roman Emperor, and all such lakes and seas were claimed by the Emperor.  So Jesus is basically trespassing on the Emperor’s lake while he is in the business of preaching, teaching, healing, and otherwise setting up an alternative to the Emperor’s regime.

Neither he nor, later, the Apostle Paul, appears to think that the practice of using Roman property and privilege to undermine Roman rule is at all contradictory or hypocritical.  They are both proceeding under the assumption that, according to Psalm 24, the whole Earth belongs to God in the first place, and if the Emperor thinks he has stolen something from God and declared it to be his own, he is mistaken, even if he can force people to pay him for what they catch in “his” lake.  So Jesus has no qualms about “stealing” back for God something that has always belonged to God anyway.

This point is underscored first by the fact that it is Passover; it is actually the second Passover of Jesus’ ministry.  The previous Passover, a year before, we may recall, Jesus instigates a riot in Jerusalem over the invasion of commercial interests into the Temple.  “Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!” he yells, as he is overturning money boxes and using a whip to drive out of the Temple the livestock earmarked for sacrifice.

Originally a barley harvest festival, Passover had been for at least a thousand years the annual celebration of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  It’s an extremely political holiday, like Israelite Independence Day.  Only the nation is not independent, which means that celebrating Passover is not just a religious observance but a deliberate, in-your-face statement aimed at the conquering, colonizing Romans.  The Romans always sent extra troops to Jerusalem for Passover, just in case the people got out of hand with this “independence” stuff.  (Perhaps the Romans wished they would just make Passover it a religious holiday.  Maybe the Romans would have preferred that they keep religion and politics separate.)

This Passover, though, Jesus is not in Jerusalem.  After last year he may not be allowed to go to Jerusalem.  Certainly the police would be watching for him.  So he celebrates this Passover up in Galilee.  That is the context of his sitting on the hillside with his disciples and attracting a crowd of 5000 people.  Instead of going to Jerusalem for the holiday, which is the tradition, these people decide to spend Passover with Jesus.  They come to Jesus as the new Temple instead of the old one.  

They know what he has been doing for the sick, that is, those in bondage to disease.  They know what he has been preaching about the Kingdom of God.  Maybe they want a piece of this liberating action.  What will he do this Passover? 

The next Passover, by the way, in a year, he will be back in Jerusalem where he will give his life for the life of the whole world on a Roman cross.  

II.  

So Jesus, his disciples, and 5000 people are all on this hillside together.  and when it gets late in the day, Jesus asks one of the disciples, Philip, a rhetorical question, to test him.  He says, “Gee, Phil, wherever are we going to buy enough bread for all these people to have dinner?  Didn’t we see a Panera in the last village?”

To which Philip replies, “Jesus, even at only 4 bucks a head it would take about 20 grand to buy food for this many people.  That’s like half a year’s pay back when we were fishers, before taxes.  We don’t have that much scratch.  If we had that much in the money box, Judas wouldn’t even be able to pick it up, because this is the first century and money is pieces of metal.”

Another disciple, Andrew, is listening in.  He helpfully pipes up that there is one kid here with enough foresight to bring a bag lunch for himself, consisting of five cheap tiles of matzoh and two dried fish.  But of course, that is not nearly enough for so many people.  Imagine a thousand people each getting a crumb from sheet of matzoh.

But Jesus has other plans.  If the previous year’s Passover demonstration is about not making the Temple a market-place, this year the point is that we’re not going to make the Earth a market-place either.  In Mark’s version of this story, the disciples advise that Jesus send the people to the market to buy food.  Jesus, however, rejects the market-based solution to this or any problem.  He says, in effect, “This is Passover; we’re done with Pharaoh’s economic system of buying and selling, because we remember when we were the ones being bought and sold.”

No.  Jesus does not send the people to go get on lines at foodtrucks.  He does not have them fend for themselves at the market where the people with money are satisfied and those with no money go hungry, and where the prices are jacked up due to self-serving mythologies like “supply and demand,” and so forth.  

He has the people sit down.  He takes up the pieces of bread from the boy.  He gives thanks to God, possibly according to the traditional Jewish blessing recognizing that God is the One who “gives us bread from the earth.”  Then the distributes the bread and the fish to the 5000 people.

None of the gospels explain or adequately even describe how the people are fed.  But they are.  And that is the point.  Jesus comes into a situation of scarcity and lack, and somehow turns it into abundance.  Everyone is fed.  They even collect 12 baskets of leftovers.  

It is probably, aside from the resurrection, the most spectacular and characteristic thing Jesus ever does.  He feeds people, starting with almost nothing.  It becomes the one thing the church would continue regularly to do, both in terms of the ritual by which those who follow Jesus are identified and constituted — the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper — and in terms of a continuing mission of generosity and service in the world to those in need.

From that Passover on, everything the church does it does “eucharistically,” that is, as an expression of heartfelt thanks to God for amazing, astounding, miraculous abundance.  It is the one thing that Jesus specifically commands us to do regularly and frequently to remember him: taking, blessing, breaking, and sharing bread together.

III.

A normal politician who could do such things would immediately have lawn signs printed up and bring this trick on the road.  Once the people realize what has happened, they go bonkers for Jesus.  “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!” they exclaim, quoting Deuteronomy 18.  They are ready to take him on their shoulders, carry him to Jerusalem, and make him king by force.

A politician who can produce bread is golden.  The Emperor in Rome kept the support of ordinary Romans by distributing free bread.  Leaders will always tout and grab the credit for a booming economy.  If Jesus could do this bread thing on a regular basis, he could walk into Jerusalem as king tomorrow.

Instead, as night starts to fall, Jesus leaves the crowd and withdraws further into the hills by himself, until they can’t find him.  The disciples get into the boat to sail back home to Capernaum without him.  A strong wind kicks up, and the sails are not effective, so they have to resort to rowing.  After three or four miles of this hard work, they see in the darkness, Jesus, walking towards them.  On the water.  And they are terrified.

Jesus says, “I Am.  Do not be afraid.”  And immediately they find themselves inexplicably floating onto the beach at their destination, Capernaum.

The people wanted to bring Jesus up to Jerusalem and make him their king.  What they didn’t realize is that he is already the King.  Not just of this cranky little country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.  He’s King of the whole place!  All people.  All creation.  Time and space itself.  Being crowned king in Jerusalem, or even Emperor in Rome, would be a nearly infinite step down for him.  

He has not come to show us one way among many.  His is not a new, trendy political or economic philosophy.  His way is The Way.  He has come to connect us to what is Good, True, and Beautiful.  He plugs us into the Love, Peace, and Justice at the heart of all that is.  He connects us to God.

We will see now that Jesus does not come to grow the economy, a metaphor for which is this provision of bread for everyone.  As we will see in his subsequent teaching, he comes to overturn and replace not just the economy but the limitations and shortcomings of human life generally.  He is not about winning at the same old game; he is about a different game altogether.

IV.

He is the Way.  He is the Truth.  And he is the Life.  By following him in his Way, by trusting him and obeying him, we participate in the divine nature itself.  We become real and alive.  We live forever in the form he reveals to us, not subject even to waves or wind or gravity or time, not jerked around by circumstance, or the petty disturbances and turbulence of mortal existence.  

Following Jesus is not just some helpful hints for coping or even thriving in this existence.  It’s not about being rich, or popular, or powerful.  It is so much bigger than this that people don’t get it, as we will see.  They want a king who will merely provide bread for their bodies. 

Jesus is offering something beyond all that.  It includes healing and nourishment, it includes community and affection, but these are by-products of who we really are, which we discover in him.

He is asking us to move out of our fear and set our sights far higher than just survival or even worldly success.  He is bringing us home and calling us into our true nature as children of the living God.     

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