BREAD FROM HEAVEN

Sermon preached by Dr. Mark Smutny

Sunday, August 2, 2009

So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.  When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”  Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.  Do not work for the food that perishes, but 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.”   Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?”  Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”   So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you?  What work are you performing?  Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”  Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.   For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”   They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”  Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.                                                                                           - John 6:24-35

Every Thursday morning, here at the church, about eighty to a hundred families form a snaking line from just outside Fellowship Hall down along the colonnade toward Freeman Chapel.  They're waiting to receive food baskets, enough food supposedly, to feed a family of four for a week.  It's quite a collection of humanity that gathers outside on the colonnade.  You really know there's a recession going on.

Inside Fellowship Hall, eighty to a hundred white laundry baskets are being filled with an assortment of potatoes, pineapples, heads of iceberg lettuce, bags of pinto beans, assorted canned goods, baby diapers and other sundry items.  Busy hands of church and community volunteers are gearing up for the moment when the people lined up down the colonnade are allowed inside Fellowship Hall to pick up their baskets overflowing with food to feed their hungry families.

The doors to Fellowship Hall are opened and a sea of humanity pours inside.  In they come: mothers with young children, unemployed and underemployed fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, some with canes, some speaking Spanish, some speaking English, some speaking Haitian patois and other languages I don't understand.  In they come: the young, the old, and the in-between.  Some, I think, might be homeless.  Some look tired and worn out. Others look cheerful and it's easy to strike up a conversation with them.  Some come in and they won't look you in the eye.  It's like they don't know what to do with a tall white male who wears dress shirts, nice slacks and wears nice shoes.  I think I might scare them.  I must look pretty powerful to them and they don't have much power at all.  They're hungry.  They don't have enough power to put food on their table through their own income.  To them I look pretty rich.

Some of the children run around in circles, playing tag out on the patio, playing made-up games, like I used to play when I was a kid.  They seem innocent while their parents struggle to feed them.  It would do you good to see what goes on here on Thursday morning:  children playing, church members hauling around bags of onions, packing pineapples and pinto beans into white laundry baskets, trying to help, trying to give back, trying to make life a little easier for lives that have it hard, helping to feed the hungry.  To see all of this directly would do you good.  “Did you see me when I was hungry?” asked Jesus (Matthew 25:35).  It would do you good to come down on Thursdays and see what goes on down here.  You might see him.

The people who come here to PPC on Thursdays to get a food basket do so, in part, because they're hungry for material food.  They are here to get their family's physical needs met, to get their daily bread, to use a phrase from The Lord's Prayer.  If you ask them, especially if you ask the mothers why they're here on Thursday mornings, they'll tell you that without  PPC's God Loves You Food Ministry providing decent meals for their children for the coming week, life would be far more difficult.  Life for them, you see, is that precarious.  Life, for them, is lived on the margins.  Life is lived on the edge. 

In our story from the Gospel of John, chapter 6, verses 24-35, page 98 in your pew Bible, there's another group of people who live life on the edge.  The crowd that follows Jesus described in John's Gospel in chapter 6 is, in many respects, a lot like the crowd of people that gathers along the colonnade on Thursday mornings here at PPC.  Both are hungry.  Both can be uncertain how their next meal will come.  Like the crowd that gathers at PPC on Thursday mornings, the crowd that follows Jesus to Capernaum lives life precariously, lives life on the margins.

Only a day or two before our current story, the crowd had been fed by Jesus in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand.  They had been physically filled with loaves of bread.  Materially their stomachs had bulged with the abundance of the miracle and it had felt very, very good.  I imagine the loaves of bread they had eaten must have been hearty whole-grain Middle-Eastern bread, the kind that sticks to your ribs and takes away that dull ache that only the truly hungry know.  They had been physically satiated and felt satisfied like after a nice Southern California summer barbeque.

However, that was a day or two before.  Now they were hungry again.  Their stomachs told them they were ready for another miracle.  They were ready for Jesus to fill them up again.   So they went looking for him.  They looked high and low and in their search they got into boats and crossed over to Capernaum. After searching everywhere, they finally found him.  They wanted their material, physical needs met and since Jesus worked his magic before, they thought he would do it again.  They were hungry.  When they found him, they wanted to know where he had been.  The text says, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”  They sound a little irritated.  Maybe it was the hunger making them irritable or maybe they thought they deserved the bread like a spoiled child. 

In any case, Jesus looks the crowd right in the eye and says, "You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.  Then he says to them, "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.  He’s saying don’t just look at your physical needs. Look for eternal things.

The people, who thought they just wanted bread to fill their empty stomachs and to satiate their physical hunger, seem to be thrown off-course.  They came for bread made out of wheat and yeast and the Rabbi speaks about eternity. Murmurs float through the crowd.  Some began to feel convicted.  They say, “Life is more than bread.”  Some realize their need is far deeper than any food basket or loaf of bread can ever provide.  The dull ache inside is not for physical food.  It's the ache for God and for God's direction, purpose and meaning for their lives.  Their deepest hunger, they discover, is not for the bread of this world. Their deepest hunger is for the things of the Spirit. 

Now, mind you, I have never, ever personally been truly hungry physically.  Oh, I've been ravenous after working hard all day through physical labor or hiking twenty miles as a Boy Scout.  But I've never been so poor that I didn't know where my next meal would come from.  But I have certainly known hunger of the spirit.  I've known what it means to feel so spiritually hungry that I knew I was starving.  I know what it means to lust for a rich and meaningful life.  I know what it means to hunger and thirst for God's righteousness and be truly hungry for the life of the Spirit.  

So as I see the crowd in Capernaum recognize their own spiritual hunger and yearn for the food that is eternal, I remember the times I have turned to God and sought God’s help.

·        Like the time when I buried my grandmother and my heart couldn't stand the pain of losing her and I prayed to God for help.

·        Like when I work too hard and I forget my wife, my children and my friends and I turn to Jesus in prayer and he helps me rearrange my priorities so that my work waits and my loves get their husband, father, and friend back in their proper order.

·        Like  the time I almost lost my wife, when she was almost taken from me, Dr. Barbara, when her heart almost stopped working, and I turned to Jesus to help me through and he came and he helped me.

I know what it means to turn to Jesus, and ask for the bread that endures, the bread that is eternal, the bread from heaven.

So in John Gospel, chapter 6, when the crowd gathers and begins to realize that the bread they need is more than physical bread, and Jesus begins to teach about bread from heaven, I can say with some authority that this bread from heaven is what God and Jesus offers to you today. 

Jesus says this bread comes from believing in the One who was sent from God.  He's talking about himself.  He says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and his way, his truth and his life” (John 14:6).  This is the bread of life.  This is manna from heaven.

However, in our story from John, the Capernaum crowd doesn't get it so easily. They interrupt Jesus saying, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe in you?  What work are you performing?"  Once again, they want some miraculous, whiz-bang proof from Jesus.  They want evidence. They want another flashy miracle, a demonstration that Jesus is the One from God.

They then refer to the ancient Hebrew story of the time when the Israelite slaves, recently freed from Pharaoh's oppression, while wandering in the wilderness, were miraculously fed manna.  They say, "Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness.”   They want from Jesus another miracle like the manna miracle to prove he's got the stuff so that they can believe in him.   

They remind me of crowd at a circus wanting another high-wire act in order to believe that the gymnast really can walk down the high wire even though she just walked down the high wire.

They remind me of the millions of people who watch televangelist hucksters promising healing miracles in order to believe in Jesus.

The Capernaum crowd wants another flashy miracle so that they can believe that Jesus, indeed, is God's own Son, the promised One of Israel, when right in front of their faces, there he is.

Jesus says to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”   They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

It seems in the story that the people’s recognition of their spiritual hunger grows deeper right as Jesus is speaking.  As he speaks to them and points out that the manna miracle did not come from Moses, but came from God and from God alone, their spiritual hunger deep inside is exposed evermore raw and deep and clean. 

In their profound hunger and need for God they say to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."  It seems the key to receiving this bread from heaven is to ask God for it, to ask Jesus for it and it is given.  “Ask and it will be given you. Seek and you will find” (Matthew 7:7). 

Today it’s Sunday morning at PPC.  Like on Thursday mornings at PPC, long snaking lines will soon be formed for the hungry.  However, unlike the line that forms on Thursday morning, the lines that form today will not snake from Fellowship Hall past South Hall and Gamble Lounge onto Freeman Chapel.  The lines that form today will begin in the sanctuary aisles and head toward the table of our Lord in the glorious celebration of the Lord's Supper.  The lines that form this morning will have something to do with hunger.  They will have something to do with the ache deep inside that longs to be satiated with food that endures.  This morning's hunger is the kind of hunger that is appropriately fed by bread from heaven.

My friends, the table is set.  The bread is baked, the juice poured.  You are invited to the feast that endures.  Jesus invites you saying, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."  Come, my friends, enjoy the feast at the table of our Lord. Amen.