In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Transcription

1 The Stuff of Life (Part 1) John 6:21-35 A sermon delivered by the Rev. Joseph A. Novak on August 5, 2012 at the First Presbyterian Church of Ithaca, Michigan. In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. This is a hard text. If this text were a piece of bread, it would be one of those stiff, artisan French loafs, which require a hammer and chisel to get to the soft, doughy center. If this text were a lake, it would be a frozen lake with three-foot-deep ice that requires a power augur to drill through. If it were a piece of wood, it would be a thick piece of hard maple that takes an hour of chopping before it s ready to split. It s a hard text. And Jesus is little help in understanding this text. In fact, throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus is more difficult to understand than he ought to be. The gospel of John is filled with odd sayings, long lectures, questions without answers, and answers to the wrong questions. Just when you start to understand what Jesus is saying (and we re always just starting to understand), Jesus says something bizarre, confusing, and enigmatic. The line from John s Gospel to the Jesus who is the Way, Truth, and Life, is not a straight line. If this text were a road, it would be a road with curve after curve, with bump after bump, and with little indication that you re going the right way. This is a hard text. But here we are, knee-deep in the mire of this text, searching through the fog, hoping to be encountered by the good news of the gospel. What is this text about? What is the point? How does this text fit in with last week s text? What is the relationship between this story and the Table you see set before us? Whats the point of it all? Let s start at the beginning. You ll remember the story from last week. Jesus miraculously feeds a crowd of five thousand with a peasant boy s lunch. The people get excited and think that Jesus is going to lead a revolt against the Roman empire. So they try to make Jesus become their king. Jesus flees, and his students, his disciples, not sure where Jesus went, get into a boat and start rowing across the sea. Jesus walks out to them on the sea and climbs into the boat and helps them get where they are going. Annnnnd scene. The next day, the crowd who were fed by Jesus, noticed that Jesus, the boat, and his disciples were gone. Looking around and not finding Jesus, they head down to the docks and board some ships headed across the sea to Capernaum. The text says they were looking for Jesus. Maybe they were hungry again, maybe they needed some more bread. Maybe they thought they d try again to force Jesus to lead them out of captivity. When they get to the other side of the lake, they found Jesus, but they weren t sure how he got there. Teacher, they said, when did you get here? Jesus immediately realizes that these folks were angling for something. They had an agenda. You know this kind of person, you know five minutes into a conversation that 1

2 the person you re talking to wants something from you. If you ve ever known someone who is into a pyramid scheme, you know the signs that mark an agenda-ed conversation. A few years out of college, I was walking through a Target in Pasadena, California, when an acquaintance of mine at college called me on my phone. I say acquaintance because I had maybe two conversations with this guy during our four years of school together. I also say acquaintance because when I looked down at my phone to see who was calling, the caller ID was stumped. Obviously this was not someone I talked to regularly. But I pick up; Hello, this is Joey. I say, hesitantly. Joey Novak! It s Peter Smith from college! How are you Buddy? I m fine, Peter. I say. He was a friend of a friend of a friend, so I was thinking that maybe something happened to someone and he was calling people to tell them the tragic news. Is everything okay? I ask. My wife looks at me quizzically. Who is that? She mouths. I shrug my shoulders and listen to the phone. Everything is great! Listen, I hear you re living in (and here I hear the computer keyboard click a couple times) Pasadena, California and you (click, click) are at seminary. Yes that s right, I say. Fabulous! Hey, listen, Joey, I m working for a terrific company selling energy drinks and making tons of money. I just bought a brand new car with cash. At this point he lists off the features of his new car. Suddenly it hits me. He s going to try to get me to work for this terrific company. I politely interrupt his monologue about his new car and tell him I m really not interested. You don t want to make a few thousand more dollars a year? He asks. I know it sounds crazy to you, Peter, but I m not interested. Thanks. Talk to you later. And I hang up. We don t like agenda-ed conversations. Jesus hears them say: Teacher, when did you get here? But he realizes that they re there for more bread. I ll tell you why you re really here, Jesus says in reply. You re here because you filled up on the bread yesterday and you want some more. You re not really looking for me. Then Jesus shifts into a higher gear. He says, You re working too hard for food that will perish, instead, you should work for food that lasts forever. Only God can give that kind of food and he gives it through his Anointed Servant. And they say: What exactly do we need to do in order to labor for God? You say that God will give us bread. What must we do to collect this bread? In other words, What kind of business is God transacting with us? What does God expect from us? Typical answers to this kind of question in Jesus day involved things like: alms-giving, peacemaking, prayer, acts of mercy, memorizing commandments, ritual purity, articulating right doctrines, reading Scripture. In my church growing up it was: don t play cards, don t smoke, don t drink, don t dance, don t think about dancing, don t watch movies, don t listen to the radio, don t hang out 2

3 with friends who listen to the radio. God expected us to be people who did a lot, or, in my case, who didn t do a lot of things. In any case, we live in a world that has turned God into a convenience, we think of him like a 24/7 quick-e-mart that is always open and always ready for our business no matter when that religious feeling strikes. We think that God is the kind of being with whom we exchange things like prayer and tithes and good deeds and he gives us money and happiness and security. So the question the crowds ask is actually a really important question: What business is God about? What kind of things do we give to God and what does he give to us? Many of us have asked this question. Some of us might be asking this question today. What is the God of Christianity all about? And Jesus reorients our whole approach. He takes the straight-line, capitalist, business-model of a God who trades in good behavior and confuses it. God isn t trading favors with the human race. God is not exchanging good behavior with kindness and favor. He isn t looking down on you, marking off your good days with a green marker and your bad days with a red marker; He isn t some cosmic Santa Claus who rewards you if you re nice. Jesus says: This is the work of God. That you might come to trust in the one whom he has sent. And here it is: God s primary business with the human race is about faith. It s about belief. It s about looking at God through the lens of Jesus Christ. This is the entire scope of the Christian faith. The foundation of Christianity is the radical claim that God has his primary dealings with the world through the person of Jesus Christ. We do countless things for God, we spend hours in prayer and reading the Bible each week, we give our time to help the hundreds of people coming through our food pantry each month, we give our money to the church. But the word of this text to us today is this: Don t be confused! God isn t trying to get you to earn or buy your way into being his child. You don t leverage your volunteer hours to earn a greater portion of God s grace. So, don t give your money to the church because it looks good on your taxes. Don t give your time because it feels good to tell your neighbors you volunteer at church. Don t donate your food because you feel guilty having so much. Give your money because you believe that God is working through Christ to to do something amazing here in Ithaca. Give your time because you have entered the waters of baptism and have emerged as a disciple of Jesus Christ and you would follow him wherever he leads. Give your food because you trust that God cares for the poor of our town just as much as he does the rich. The work of God is belief in Jesus Christ. And this kind of belief, this kind of trust is not a binary object. You don t flip a switch and suddenly you have belief in Jesus. It is a life-long work, the kind of job from which you never punch out, the kind of work with which you are never finished. John Webster says that True growth in the Christian life, true faith, is simply growth in seeing that the Gospel is true. Like a seed planted in the ground, faith grows. Faith that God really did love the world so much that he dressed his Word up in our flesh to help us understand 3

4 who he is. Trust that Jesus Christ is truly the essence of God made to be fully human, born of a human womb. Faith that through Jesus Christ we ve actually been shown all we need to know about who God is. Trust that, through his sacrificial death, the sins of the world were paid for, set aside, and made clean. Faith that in his glorious resurrection, even the unbeatable armies of Death and the Grave were laid to waste in its wake. Trust that he will come again to unravel the webs of evil, injustice, and greed and establish a kingdom for all time. This is the work of God: To believe. This is the life-long work of the Church: To confess Jesus is Lord. This is our work as Christians: To trust in Jesus Christ, who is Lord of All. The people in our text want to know about God s business and Jesus tells them God s business is about belief. But, as the story continues, the crowd isn t satisfied with belief. There must be more. Prove to us that you re who you say you are. We won t just blindly accept things to be true. We don t just believe without evidence. We need a sign. What sign will you give us so that we might believe you? Our ancestors wandered in the desert ate manna, remember? Moses gave them bread from heaven to eat. What sign will YOU do? And here I m a little confused. Perhaps you are as well. Didn t Jesus the day before do a miraculous sign? Didn t get turn bread into more bread, enough to feed five thousand people? Wasn t that enough? What more did these people want?and that s the point, isn t it. Nothing is ever enough. The more we bargain with God for evidence. The more we plead with God for a sign. The more we hedge our bets and stop walking out in faith, the less likely we are to actually do anything, since we re always wanting confirmation for everything. The people wanted sign after sign from Jesus to continually verify that he still was who he claimed to be. But the work of God is trust. Belief. Faith. The work of God s church is trust. belief. Faith. And Jesus looks at the crowd, looks at us, and says: My Father has always given and will continue to give the stuff of life to the world, the bread of heaven. Life comes from the hand of the Father. This is the kind of bread you need. And Jesus says: I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Jesus is the stuff of life. We ve been reading through Genesis and we keep hearing this refrain: And God said. Christians believe that every time God opens his mouth to speak, he speaks his Word, his Voice. And this Voice is what holds the universe together. God s Voice is what causes life to grow. This Voice is what sustains everything. John Calvin said once that if God were ever to stop speaking, the mountains would melt, and the world would be thrown off its axis. God s Voice holds it all together. And the climactic claim of the Christian faith is that this Voice became flesh and lived with us. Jesus Christ is the Voice-made-flesh, the incomprehensible power of the universe made visible and accessible. So when Jesus says I am the bread of life, he speaks truly. For all life in the world comes because he is God s Voice. Life comes from God the Father by way of Jesus Christ. 4

5 The work of God is belief. Belief in Jesus Christ, who is the bread of life. This is the message of our Gospel and the heart of what we are preparing to do today. In a few minutes we re going to give you some bread and offer you some wine. And in this action, in the sharing of bread and wine, we actually receive bread from heaven, we enter into the very presence of Jesus Christ. At this table we receive food that sustains our faith. We look out and see the faces of our community, each taking an equal portion of bread, each being offered wine from the same cup, we show no favoritism here, we privilege no one at this Table. We offer it freely, we offer it abundantly. And as we take this together, as we pray and thank God together, we enter into a sacred rhythm that declares over and over again that God loves the world and he gave us his Son to seal our relationship forever. And even if you don t believe it today, Even if you and God aren t on speaking terms, Even if you don t know whether this whole church thing is for you; I will still offer you bread and wine because the love and mercy of God is for everyone, without exception and without precondition. And today, the gospel comes to you in the shape of bread and wine and it is yours for the taking. I m reminded of a short story called A piece of bread by François Coppée. In it, a well-to-do Duke secretly joins the French army during the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth century. There, he quickly becomes disgusted with the hard, crusty bread he is rationed and he throws it into the mud outside a tavern. A starving soldier named Jean-Victor rushes into the muddy street and rescues the bread, wipes it off, and eats it hungrily. The two men begin to talk about their past and the Duke is stunned by the hellish and hungry life Jean-Victor has led. The man remembered his best days by describing the kind of bread he ate that day. Moved by compassion, the Duke promises to help Jean-Victor after the war. That night, the Duke misses his sentry alarm and sleeps through his watch. Jean-Victor quietly takes the Duke s place so he can sleep longer. That night, the Prussian army advanced and attacked the French camp, and Jean-Victor was the only casualty. The story fast-forwards several years later and focuses on the Duke who leaves a bar with a friend. As they walk home, the Duke sees a chunk of bread lying in the muddy street. Hurriedly, the Duke stoops into the mud, picks up the bread, wipes it off with an expensive handkerchief and sets it on a wooden table. What did you do that for? Are you crazy? His friend asks, laughing at the Duke. It is in memory of a poor fellow who died for me, replied the Duke. Do not laugh. On this table is bread. On this table is wine. Together let us remember Jesus Christ, the Voice of God who spoke the universe into being, yet who allowed himself to be killed at our hands in our confusion and disbelief. For Jesus interceded for our behalf and gave his life for ours. And because he was raised from the dead, Jesus gives to us his Holy Spirit which is present here, willing us to believe in Jesus Christ. This is the work of God: That you might come to believe in Jesus Christ, the bread of life, who is the very stuff of life for the entire world. 5

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