Strange question, when money isn t the problem.

Transcription

1 John 6:35, August 9, 2015 Becoming What We Eat Every three years the church devotes several weeks to the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. When I was younger it was challenging for me. I had one idea out of all of this: Jesus said, I am the bread of life. Seemed plain enough for me, simple enough for me. But the Gospel of John, someone once said, is like water shallow enough for a child to wade in, and yet deep enough for an elephant to swim. This chapter is something like a vein of gold found above ground but which if dug into runs very deep. I don t know how deep we ll get with today s passage, because even if I were among the best of the 49ers and could excavate with the best of them, I would still most likely be skimming the surface. Here is our passage: John 6:35, The crowd is out in the wilderness. Five thousand of them. And they have no food. And Jesus, with an eyebrow raised, says to Philip one of his disciples, What are we going to do? Where are we going to come up with enough money to buy food for all these people? John says he already knew the answer. He just wanted to see how his disciple would answer the question. And Philip says, I don t know. It would take two hundred days wages to buy enough food, and, I suspect Jesus smiled, because whether or not they passed the plate, you got to remember where they are. They are in the wilderness. Not a one single Panola Bread or a McDonald s in sight. Not even a Day Old Bread Store. Not even a soup kitchen. It s wilderness. And Philip gives a wrong answer because Jesus has started his thinking with the wrong question. Where will we get the money? Strange question, when money isn t the problem. Philip, what are we going to do? And Philip wrings his hands. I don t know. What do we do. We have no money, and worse, we have no food. 1

2 Well, not really. There is some food. Andrew, one of the disciples of Jesus has discovered a boy who must have been lived somewhere out there in the boonies, with some bread his mother made. Disciples look in the bag. And the boy says, Here s what I have. And he makes them an offer. Not a barter, but an offer. Or better put, the boy makes an offering of five loaves and two fish. And Andrew, another disciple, smirks and pats the young boy on the head. And he tells Jesus, Well, we ve got a boy here with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. But what is that for so many people? What are we going to do? No money. And barely enough to make a modest handful of lunches. The disciples are starting to get a bit anxious. So what they do is call a committee meeting, and they start doing the math. Five thousand people are enough to fill up to overflowing one side of the Oconee County High School football stadium. And we have here five loaves and a couple of fish. Levi? Where s Levi. Ex- tax collector, now a disciple. What s your idea, Levi? We could feed those with the highest bids and make a killing here. That s the kind of motion you get from a former tax collector. Do I hear a second? Do I hear a second. Having heard no second and glad of it, the motion dies on the floor. What about you, Thomas? How do we feed these people? 2

3 Well, unless I see these loaves for myself, touch them with my finger and taste them with my tongue, I refuse to believe that these loaves exist. That s about what we might expect, Thomas. You re always doubting, Thomas. Bartholomew, what about you? We never hear anything from you. You have been called as a disciple, one of the twelve. And you never say a thing. Well, it all depends on how big the loaves are. If you ve got five loaves, each the size of a small ox, and the fish are giant red snappers, I think we can pull it off. The food, Bartholomew, was found in boy s lunch bag. The loaves fit in the boy s lunch bag. No wonder we never hear from you. What are we going to do, Philip? What are we going to do, fellows? It just doesn t add up or multiply out but bring me the boy s offering of food, Jesus says. And tell the people to get ready for lunch. And the boy gives the bread and the loaves into the hands of Andrew the disciple, and Andrew the disciple places the fish and the loaves into the hands of Jesus, and that equation has nothing to do with doing the math. Jesus doesn t do math. When something anything - - is placed in his hands, it s like what they says about a game between Tech and Georgia throw all the statistics out the door, because Jesus does those things that we consider impossible. Now if you ve been around this church lately, would you say one huge, Amen? Would you, please? 3

4 Andrew the disciple puts the fish and loaves into the hands of Jesus. And suddenly as they begin passing the plate, it s as if the bread keeps piling up from out of the blue. Five loaves. Two fish. Five thousand people. Twelve baskets filled with the leftovers, which I suppose they might could have used to feed the poor. How does it happen? A boy, a child, put what he had to give into the hands of Jesus, and said, Do what you will, Jesus. Do your thing. I think that for the first time in my life, for the first time in my life, I have a clue of what these people felt. Many of us do, because we have done the math, and wondered how we would ever purchase a property. And we have done the math and calculated how long it would take us to raise money for a matching grant fund. And our calculations at the time, gave us hope for, by the end of the year, and in forty days and forty nights it has been accomplished. I now have a clue, some sort of clue, about how those five thousand people in the wilderness felt when they watched what they had considered impossible came to pass before their very eyes. Where will get the money, Philip? he said with a wink. And then, bring what the boy has to offer to me. And what happens when you give what you have in your hands over to Jesus. For these people in the wilderness, like myself, it is mind- blowing. And so Jesus feeds them. But John s Gospel is written in such a way as to be a reminder of a story. And these people, drawn together, pulled together, having been fed by the hand of God, they cut their teeth on this story. They had the story a hundred and one nights, even the children, and they remember those stories. You remember the stories. The children of Israel have escaped Egypt. They, too, are out in the wilderness. They also ask, What are we going to 4

5 eat? And yet every day, God feeds them. They wake every morning to a miraculous feeding. During the night, a substance has formed on the stones. They didn t know what it was. But someone gave it the finger test. Feels like some sort of bread. Smells like some sort of bread. Tastes like some sort of bread, and after seeing that no one came down with explosive nausea, someone said, It is some sort of food. What sort of food. What is it, someone asked. Manna, which translated means, What is it? and someone still chewing on it answered, Yes. And so that s what they named it. Manna. What is it? (Back in grade school, I remember being served a lot of manna.) For forty years, God provided the food. And for forty years the people ate. And these people remember, and they realize, they too, have been fed by the hand of God. Right before their eyes, and almost out of the blue, there is the food. But Jesus also cut his teeth on the story, and he knows that His own heavenly Father fed these descendants of Israel for forty years. And he also know that for thirty- nine years eleven months and twenty- nine days, they were ungrateful. How we loathe this miserable food. I don t care how good the bread might taste, you can just get so accustomed to it that you take it for granted. And the blessings and the miracles can be handed out by God and yet produce no real love for God. People start looking at the gifts and in the initial excitement of the gifts can take their eyes off the Giver. They can take their eyes off the reason these blessings began pouring in. And it doesn t take long for them to lose their 5

6 sense of awe and love for the fact that God has worked for them and through them His miracle. And Jesus knows the story. He may have fed the crowd yesterday, but had he produced any love for His heavenly Father. The next morning, these five thousand people, gather again, anticipating that the food from the hands of Jesus would be there again. But this next day, no small boy steps forward with a bag of groceries, no five loaves and two fish are offered, in fact nothing is offered, but everything expected. Jesus, feed us. Now even if there had been another boy with a lunch pail, even if there had been several small boys with grocery bags, would Jesus have given a repeat performance? He could multiply loaves any time he chooses, but sometimes he chooses to do so. Every sign that he performed in John s Gospel, all seven of the signs as told by John, was done in order to reveal the heart the very nature and character of God to them. Your small church can become 50,000 richer in one month, only to have people grumble and worry and fret that the next month s offerings are only 25 thousand. If you start looking at the gifts instead of the giver. Jesus knows that the story of the children of Israel. And knows that in the wilderness they turned their attention to the bread which was never quite good enough, and never develop their love for the one who was and is and will be the bread, and who wants our hearts and to keep our hearts feeding on Him. Jesus told them, You came here today not because what you considered what you saw yesterday as any sign from God, but simply because you wanted - - another sandwich. The bread you got yesterday was like the 6

7 manna that your ancestors received from God when they were in the wilderness, but everyone who ate that bread died. That bread won t give you life. I am the bread of life which came down from Heaven. I give you my flesh. I give you myself. Feed on me. You can believe in me and in what I can do, and you can even be the one who benefits from what I do, but unless You feed on me, you will die. And here s their response. They grumble at him. Here is Jesus offering them the opportunity to become entwined in the very heart of God, and they grumble. What is all this talk of coming down from heaven. Isn t that Joseph s son? When people don t understand, they grumble. When people don t understand what it means to have God with them, they grumble. It s the wilderness story of that escape from Israel all over again, and Jesus knows the wilderness story. And so Jesus won t give them any Panola or Sunbeam or Wonder bread on this day. It doesn t get poured out simply because they showed up. There s been nothing offered, there is nothing delivered. And so, on this second day, he will not feed the crowds bread, because he wants them to learn to feed on him and love Him even when He should nothing for us that we can see. Some years back, a woman I knew had a son in his early twenties who faced a delicate and risky surgery on a tumor near his spinal cord. For days and weeks, she worried over him. Would the tumor be malignant? Would her son, once an athlete now confined to a wheel chair, ever be able to walk again. She lived through the pre- op meetings, at the hospital, with the surgeon, signing 7

8 release forms that reminded her of all the terrible turns this surgery on her son might take. She leaned heavily on her mother for support. But as the date of her son s surgery drew night, her mother grew ill, took a turn for the worse, and entered another hospital. So off this woman went from one hospital to the next, and on the day of her son s surgery, her mother died. And so from one hospital to another hospital and from the second hospital to the funeral home to make arrangements. She was telling me about all of this and said, people were worried about me, afraid I would have a nervous breakdown. I said nothing. Simply nodded my understanding. But, she said. I felt this enormous sense from outside myself that I was being taken care of. It was like being a child again, she said. I just felt that God was in complete control. But, she continued, After a few days this feeling started to leave me, and I started to panic. I prayed that the feeling wouldn t leave me, but the feeling left. It was like God was saying, You have to walk without feeling me with you. But you must know that even if you don t feel me with you, I am still with you. God knows when to treat us like birds who need to be fed and wrapped by the wings of its mother, and God knows when those same birds must be nudged from the nest in order to soar. But you trust that he is there, even if you don t see him. If He simply repeats His performance for you and me everyday we begin to get presumptuous and arrogant with the feeling of privilege. And God can t stand the smell of that sort of pride because the people he wants to 8

9 draw to Him through you and me cannot be drawn to Him through pictures that don t truly depict his nature. And there is an element of faith that inspires, sometimes when all is going better than one could ever imagine, but also when you see nothing happening at all. The book of Habakkuk, one you may have never heard of, puts faith in God in these words: Though the fig tree should not blossom, And there be no fruit on the vines, Though the yield of the olive should fail, and the fields produce no food,, Though the flock should be cut off from the fold, And there be no cattle in the stalls, Yet will I exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. And I will feed on Him. I will pray to Him. I will listen to Him, and I will put into His hands what I have and who I am, and when you and I do that, some will grumble, but others will begin to see Him in the works and will believe in Him. 9