Sermon Cloud

BREAD OF HEAVEN

             It’s always a dangerous thing whenever I try to illustrate a point using a scientific example.  I think the sciences are wonderful disciplines, but I never had a passion for science, never aspired to be a scientist, and probably didn’t pay enough attention in any of my required science classes.  I have the kind of appreciation for science that makes me say “WOW” when I read about some new advance in a magazine or see it on television.  It’s safe to say that someone whose most articulate evaluation of science is “wow” is never going to win a Pulitzer Prize, so I’m asking all you science majors out there to please cut me a little slack as I try to explain what a hologram is.

             Holograms are what a lot of us commonly call “3-D photographs.”  Holography was discovered in 1947 but it wasn’t widely used until the development of the laser in 1960.  Holograms are common now – they’re used for data storage, you see them on credit cards and even on some children’s toys like the rings with hologram pictures on them that they can get from gumball machines. [1]

             The explanation of holograms that I read on a couple of internet sites tied my brain in knots.  But I found this simple definition, in an unexpected source:  A book on methods of teaching Christian discipleship.    It says that a hologram is “a photograph of which every part has three-dimensional information about the whole object photographed.  If you cut the hologram into small pieces, you can unfold the whole image by illuminating any piece of it with laser light.”[2]  So if you have a holographic 3-D photo that gets eaten by your dog, and you have just a little piece of it left; if you have the right light, you would be able to see what the entire, original, intact photograph looked like by viewing it with a laser.  Isn’t that cool?

             The reason I thought of this as an illustration for our gospel text this morning, is because I think the crowd following Jesus and questioning him have a bunch of little pieces of information about who Jesus is, but they don’t have the eyes to see the whole picture:   that Jesus is the Messiah that they had heard about all of their lives, whose coming was prophesied in their scriptures. 

             By this point in his ministry, he was famous throughout Galilee.  I told you last week that when he fed more than 5,000 people a full meal, using just five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, that the crowd thought he was just another miracle worker, or magician or street entertainer – that the miracle was just a good trick.  But good trick or not, there was no denying that their stomachs were full, and if this Jesus guy could pull it off like this every day, they could eat forever for free!  So the first thing the crowd tried to do was make him king by force.[3]

             Jesus and his disciples escaped the crowd by taking a boat to the other side of the lake, but now the crowd has caught up with him in Capernaum, and they’re full of questions.  Jesus knows that their enthusiasm for him comes from having full stomachs – that they are much more interested in bread than they are in where it came from or who gave it to them. 

             Before we judge them too harshly, we should stop and remember that we’re all basically the same:  we come to Jesus not so much for who he is, but instead to have our own needs met.  Sinful humans are in need of a savior, and for a lot of people it doesn’t matter if his name is Jesus, Mohammad, Hitler or David Koresh,[4] “just get me through the day.”  

             And even Christians aren’t immune from this failing.  Often we go to churches not because we want to worship Jesus for who he is, but because we’ve always gone to church on Sundays (except when we didn’t); or we like the preacher or the kind of music, or all our friends go there.  So we sit in our familiar places with our friends listening to some good music and a not-too-long sermon, and sometimes we even give money to projects we like (but maybe not to the projects and ministries we don’t like).  Once in awhile we usher or teach Sunday school, but if someone insults us, or if the preacher says something that’s too “out there,” or if the music is better at the church across town, “we’re outa here.”  The net result of all of that religious activity is that it works for us.  It fills our stomachs with bread, and we’ll come back – or go somewhere – next week, because like the crowd in Galilee, we’re all about the bread.

                 Jesus knows the crowd – and us – really well, and without even waiting for a question, tells us, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”[5]  He knows our tendency to focus on our stomachs, and our material well-being, our houses and cars and clothes and bank accounts – and he’s reminding us that we don’t “live by bread alone” but by “every word that comes from the mouth God.”

             Now the crowd is willing to consider that Jesus is presenting himself as the Messiah, but the crowd asks Jesus what sort of works they’ll have to do, what kind of rules they’ll need to obey, so they won’t lose their place in the bread line.   The Hebrew nation has always seen itself as being involved in a give-and-take relationship with God, and even Christians do that a lot, too.  God’s people don’t understand the grace of God – that the love of God is a free gift that we don’t do any work for, and that there isn’t enough work we could do to earn a loaf of bread from the hand of God, let alone a ticket into heaven.

             In this morning’s gospel, Jesus tells all of us there are no “works” (plural), there is only one “work” (singular) and that is to believe that he is sent from God as the Son of God.  There is no accumulation of the times you are present in church, or the times you taught Sunday School or ushered or sang in the choir.  There are no “extra points” for going to seminary, or on a mission trip, or preaching a sermon, or giving a big wad of money.  We all stand equally before God on the sole basis of our belief in Christ - the single work that God requires.

             But this is a tough crowd – and they want more proof.  Healing the lame and the blind wasn’t enough.  Walking on water wasn’t enough.  Feeding the 5,000 people wasn’t enough.  They want another sign, “because, ya know, you gave us bread one time while we sat by the lake, but when our ancestors wandered 40 years in the desert, Moses fed us too, every day, with manna.  So what’re you gonna do to top that?  You want us to believe that you’re the Son of Man, the Messiah of Israel?  Then you’re gonna have to do better than Moses.” 

             Jesus’ response is to remind them that Moses didn’t give them the manna, that the food came from Jesus’ Father, God in heaven.  The crowd gets it now – they know that Jesus is going to have to make good on his claim that he is the bread that comes down from heaven to give life to the world;.   So the crowd pushes back hard:   “[So you say.]  ‘Then from now on give us this bread’”!  

             What nerve!  They say that when people are in a crowd they are bolder and more brazen to say things that they would never say if they stood alone.  Can you imagine standing before Jesus Christ, alone? You, as a sinful human being, standing before the God of the universe and challenging, “If you want me to believe you’re God, then pony up!”?  That’s what this crowd is doing:  “If you want us to believe that you’re the Messiah, hand over the bread!”

             Can you imagine?  I can.  That’s my testimony of my conversion.  There was no altar call, no congregation singing, “Just as I Am” as the preacher urged me to “raise your hand.”  I was 27 years old, and I was going to church and I helped in the church nursery and sang in the choir because I thought that’s what you did if you wanted to have a nice life and raise a family.  I talked about “God” but I almost never said the name, “Jesus,” except as a swear word, because I wasn’t interested in who Jesus was, I was all about God fulfilling my needs as a wife and mother.

             And then one day, my husband had left me and our son for another woman, I’d been fired from my job, my house was being foreclosed by the mortgage company and our electricity was turned off.  I sat in the middle of my living room floor, crying – and telling God that I’d done everything I was supposed to do to live a good life, and look what had happened!  I’d held up my end of the deal and what did he do for me?  Did he keep my husband at home?  Did he keep me from losing my job?  Why were we losing our home? 

             There on my living room floor I raised my fist and told God that I wasn’t going to do it anymore:  that if God really existed, he was going to have to prove it to me by doing absolutely everything, because I wasn’t going to do anything he wanted anymore.   It was as if I was right there with this crowd saying, “So you say you’re God?  Then from now on give me bread!”

             Then Jesus declared, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”  I can tell you that that’s the truth that I have staked my life on and I’ve never been disappointed a single day since I gave up working for God and started living for Jesus.

             When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, he told them to ask, “Give us today our daily bread.” [6]  By having us ask God the Father – every single day – for the bread that keeps us alive in both body and soul, Jesus is giving us a way to remember where our provision comes from, that God is our source of everything.  We are usually pretty meek and mild when we pray this prayer, heads bowed, eyes closed, using 16^th century words like “hallowed be thy name.”  

             But I’m thinking that maybe it makes more sense for us to pray this petition with our eyes open and our heads thrown back, and our mouths open wide like baby birds waiting for their share of the worm.  Have you ever seen a nest of sparrows squawking for their breakfast?  Have you ever heard a human baby screaming for his mother’s milk?  There’s nothing polite about it – they are all demanding. If the sparrows had arms instead of wings, they’d probably raise their feathered fists to heaven, and the human babies do make fists while they cry to be filled.

             Because for all of us, for you and me and babies and sparrows, it is all about us and our needs.   And God delights in filling those needs for us, and God delights when we remember that it is God who fills us in the most basic, as well as the most extravagant, ways.

             In a moment we’re going to share the Lord’s Supper with the whole church – every believer who was ever born, and who has ever died – everyone believer present today – and every believer yet to be born.  The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor wrote that Jesus knew that between the day he left us and the day he’ll return that his disciples would “need something warm and near that they could bump into on a regular basis; something so real that they would not be able to intellectualize it and so…untidy that there was no way they could gain control over it.  So Jesus gave [us] things [we] could get [our] hands on, things [we can] smell and taste and swallow.”[7]

         We know that Jesus cares enough about our bodies – our flesh – to give us bread to fill our stomachs and keep us alive.  And we know that Jesus cares so much about our spirits, that he gave us his body – and his blood – to give us life for eternity.  And we know that Jesus gives us this meal – the bread that is his body – to sustain us until he returns.

             How does that change the way you think and act?  When he gave us this meal, Jesus didn’t say, “Believe this in remembrance of me”; he said “Do this in remembrance of me.”[8]  This meal embodies our life together.  When we do this, our doctrines take on flesh.  Because if Jesus cares so much about our bodies, if he was so generous with his body, if he gave us this bread and called it his body for us, then, as the Catholic priest and social activist Daniel Berrigan once said, it should matter to us, “Whose flesh are you touching, and why? Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why?  Whose flesh are you burning, and why?”[9]

             And after awhile, it becomes not so much about us and our needs anymore…the prayer isn’t “give me today my daily bread,” it is “give us today our daily bread.”  Feed everybody, not just me - or give me enough to share. 

             It’s as though we’re all small pieces of a hologram of Christ.  Each piece has our face in it and each piece has the face of Jesus in it.  And when we find something worth loving in a stranger’s face, or share our daily bread with someone in need, the light of Christ will reveal the bigger, original picture – and just by being a little piece of the picture, we can show Jesus to the whole world.   

©2009 Deborah Hollifield

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography

[2] Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach  (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998) 97.

[3] John 6:15

[4] Doomed leader of the Branch Davidians who died in the government’s attack on their Waco, Texas compound in 1993.

[5] John 6:27

[6] Matthew  6:11

[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, (New York: Harper Collins 2009), 44-45.

[8] Taylor 44.

[9] Samuel M. Powell, ed., Embodied Holiness, “Introduction,” (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), quoted in Taylor 45.