What Truly Nourishes Us

Transcription

1 What Truly Nourishes Us August 6, 2018 Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost John 6:24-35, The Rev. Dr. Seth E. Weeldreyer Bread. So many different ways to feed our hunger and taste-buds desire. What s your favorite? Hearty wheat full of seeds? Wonder (or as they called it Scotland: windy bread )? Raisin-cinnamon from the Fourth Coast bakery when I eat with someone at the Crow s Nest. Croissants, donuts, cinnamon sopapillas I discovered this week when visiting the youth painting project? Or those men s breakfast pancakes we imagined Jesus multiplied last week. Even those of us with Celiac disease or the need otherwise to limit gluten can share growing options of muffins, brownies, cakes, and raisin bread. Tell me after worship, if I left out your favorite! Until then in the spirit of Amen!, can we get an MMMM?! Bread as life. So many different ways to feed our minds and hearts. So much we ingest. News we watch or hear or find on-line. Books. Magazines. Marketing. FaceBook. Face to face conversation. You know, that s what Jesus talks about, of course. How we nurture abundant life like the most simple, staple nourishment for people in all ages and cultures. Jesus just shared the miracle of what started as a few loaves and fish feeding a huge crowd. Now they re back for more. Who can really blame them, probably most very poor, living meal to meal. They tried to make him king to be their on-call vending machine. Jesus escapes. They follow like a pack of Pavlovian dogs, panting for another morsel. He tries to connect physical craving with the deeper, spiritual hunger all of us feel.

2 It was a few pieces of delightful focaccia with savory seasonings and a bit of butter, when we met for lunch. We d sent messages about communion details. She mentioned her struggle with events of life, our world, and faith. Much like what many of us, have expressed. All the news hardly ever good. Echoing through family gatherings, work colleagues, personal decisions we face. Stress. Anxiety. Frustration. Depression. Needing to nourish goodness, hope, joy, purpose, peace. Friends, hungers take many forms. We hunger for a fresh start after mistakes, broken relationships. We hunger for the world to be how we think it should be good, fair and just. We hunger for vibrant health, like we felt at (you fill in the age). We hunger for a beautiful, blissful church experience. We hunger for things to fill our homes, closets, our time and desires. Such hunger isn t inherently bad. Often, we taste and even feast on a bit of goodness in life that satisfies an immediate pang. And we expect more of it will surely make life even better. More personal accomplishments, close relations. More legislative action or government policy. More 29-year-old fun and invincibility. More epiphanies or spiritual highs in church. More stuff to bring pleasure. Trouble is, all of that perishes. Human life is imperfect and frail. We fail. Leaders act corruptly. Policies and practices have unintended consequences and faults we can t foresee. People say or do things insensitively, even in church. Things break or simply lose their appeal. And we know, inevitably, unavoidably we all face the greatest enemy or mystery that is death. Do not pursue food that perishes, Jesus urges, rather true nourishment of eternal life. Truly, I tell you, I am bread of life. In me my way and truth you find the very presence of God. Believe and you will know, you will share how this holy food from heaven makes the world come alive.

3 Sometimes, friends, it may be hard for us to know how hungry we really are. Ironically food itself, or other habits and addictions can mask real emptiness inside. Sometimes we just keep going and going, like when we realize it s well past lunchtime, and we go to get our food and find the breakfast we brought still untouched. I felt hungry when I went to the Chautauqua Institution last month. Many insights nourished me about life in our culture. Hope for our country. Faith at the heart of goodness in it all. Loving goodness in you and me and I believe in the heart of everyone. That belief and seeking such goodness in all people guids how I try to live. Maybe that s why I feasted so much on a lecture David Brooks served up. Brooks began by recalling that the great cultural banquet at Chautauqua arose from spiritual depth. A beautiful legacy continued in many church and Jewish houses. A legacy of goodness, like Fred Rogers. He d just seen the movie. He said it s a bit weird, about a guy going into a closet, taking off a jacket, putting on a sweater, changing shoes, talking to children. But all around him people were crying (Brooks, too), simply because Rogers was such a good man. It s goodness we need these days. He told about a time Rogers humbly asked a child with cerebral palsy who couldn t speak or walk to pray for him. Not to make the child feel good, as someone presumed. Rather because the child had known such suffering, he must be close to God. You see, Brooks said, Rogers came from a tradition where the weak are closer to God than the strong, children closer to God than adults, the marginalized closer to God than the celebrated. That s a deep tradition in American life and American spiritual life that we seem to have left behind. But Brooks wouldn t give it up. He suggests that we all innately yearn for a deeper sort of goodness in life that is spiritual joy and peacefulness, like Fred Rogers embodied. Then he quoted Paul Tillich, about how suffering carves through what we thought was the basement of our soul and reveals a cavity below that; and carves

4 through that to reveal a cavity even farther below. And when we find that depth of ourselves, we know that there s only a spiritual food that can fill those cavities. i As I listened to David Brooks, wiping a few tears from my cheeks, I d say I savored the bread of life. Thanks to modern technology his lecture has multiplied like Jesus loaves! You should really taste it. Great humor and insights. I forgot to cite the web address on the bulletin cover. It ll be on the sermon when published. Or talk to me after worship. I ll conclude the Brooks feast with a final morsel of sacred food. Friends, I believe God created us to be primarily desiring, loving creatures, yearning for the good. And at our best we act out of that loving desire. Brooks explained that we crave a kind of moral joy to fill our soul. Moral joy is what we get when we re part of a people pursuing an ideal. We fulfill yearnings of heart and soul, with each other, when we move in unison on behalf of some ideal. And we lose track of where one person ends and another person starts. ii That s what bread and cup we share at this table is for us. In communion we come with our hungering hearts and soul yearning for a fuller life, for a better world. The ideal and reality of our faith nourishes us grace Jesus embodied, God s reign of love he proclaimed, the peace of Christ we taste, the courage to serve we savor amid the brokenness of our world. The Holy Spirit fills us and moves us together toward that ideal, not so focused on me or mine versus yours, rather flourishing as individuals in community. As I reached for another piece of focaccia she repeated: how do we live that reality every day? How do we live that eternity amid all that is perishable? Joining that crowd long ago, she hungered positively for the radical power in Jesus, that others might find offensive. Friends, if we re not going to just disconnect, escape, or go into a mole hole and hide, here are three quick ingredients for life I d offer.

5 1) It helps to have wider perspective on the world, or maybe rather a more focused vision of goodness close to home. Amid all the angst about national and world issues, policies, and concerns, at the more local level, people see such goodness in their community all the time. That s what other presenters chronicled as they traveled all around the country. So it is here in the Kalamazoo area. Not perfect. But life is abundant and good. 2) Choose what to ingest, how to feed our minds and hearts. Of course, I m always going to urge us to spend a little time each day with reading from the Bible or some other devotional. And amid all the other cinematic possibilities, go to watch the Mr. Rogers film. And as ever, I ll say it a lot. Practice gratitude. Give thanks consistently and often, trying to come up with 100 things everyday. It s not hard. Things big and small. That will feed hope, generosity and joy. 3) Then finally, go to seek goodness in others, the better angels in all of our natures. And even when faults and folly wound our lives and relationships, abusing others who are broken, hungry, poor, respond with grace. The grace of God we receive at this table and in so many other ways of life. Share that love, compassion, mercy, generosity that bread of life with others. That s what Debra Dean Murphy sampled during the West Virginia teachers strike earlier this year. She teaches at West Virginia Wesleyan College. As the walkout loomed, she writes, teachers and organizers across the state planned for how to feed food-insecure children through the strike s duration. At the small Methodist church on the street where she lives, retirees and full-time workers and people without jobs gave time, money, and energy to make nutritious meals in the basement kitchen. They served 1,100 people kids, parents, and the teachers picketing long hours

6 across the street. In the process, volunteers had their own prejudices confronted amid all the community s problems and possibilities. That s communion made real. The simple gifts we take into our bodies at Christ s table, Murphy explains, sustain us for living holy communion in the world: for practicing the kind of hospitality Jesus practiced when he fed hungry followers and ate with all the wrong people, and pursued God s fair order of grace for all. Our own bodies are meant to nourish other bodies not to judge them or try to fix them but to love them, and to see that their flourishing (and our own) depends on embodiment of gospel kinship and mutuality, a recognition of shared vulnerability and destiny. All of us must eat to live and all of us belong to each other. iii Dear friends, the bread we share is delightful our loaf hand-made by an anonymous member of our church; the baskets gluten-free for all. Just maybe it could be our favorite what we crave amid the vast varieties to fill the deepest cavity of our being. The bread of life. The body of Christ. What truly nourishes us and all the world through us. Thanks be to God. Amen. i Quoted and abridged from David Brooks, lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, July 5, ii Ibid. iii Quoted and abridged from Debra Dean Murphy, Eucharistic living in Christian Century, June 6, 2018, 37.