Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

August 6, 2006

“A Loaf of Bread, A Slice of Life”

Sermon by Pastor Lamont Koerner

The Gospel for this morning comes to us from John, the 6th Chapter. [John 6:24-35]

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 lake, 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.”

The Gospel of the Lord

About, oh, I don’t know, maybe eight and a half hours or so ago, your companion parish over in Mkimbizi was gathered for worship, and more than likely the pastor stood up and said, “Bwana Jesu Asifiwe,” which means “Lord Jesus be praised,” and the congregation responded “Amene.” Even though, hard as it might be to believe, there in Tanzania they probably had coats on; the wind is probably blowing, and it’s pretty cold—well, for them—it’s 68, maybe 70 degrees; no humidity to speak of. It’s the kind of stuff we would relish right now, wouldn’t we? But that was about eight and a half hours ago. They’re off at home by now living their daily life, and they are thinking about these passages, about the bread of heaven and the bread of life, in very ways very different from us I think.

We just heard this passage about Jesus as the bread of heaven. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. We heard him poke fun in some ways and kind of draw them in a little bit by saying, “You’re coming to look for me not because you think I’m some great miracle worker or because you think you see some great signs from God. Why did you really come to find out where I was?” “You came because you got a free lunch yesterday, right? You ate all the bread you could get.” It was one of those great Lutheran potlucks, and anybody that wandered in off the street could have as much hot dish as they wanted. So they came back to see if it was going to happen again today.

Were they there for some deep spiritual reason? No. They were there, they say this to him themselves, don’t they, “Well, so what kind of work are you doing? You know, back in the old days Moses gave our ancestors food every day, just gave it to them.” The people were there for the food. But Jesus didn’t walk into that trap, either. He said, “You know, it wasn’t Moses who set the table and gave them all this food.” And notice the shift in the timing there. He says, “it was”—that is, past tense—“it was not Moses who gave you the bread of life or the bread from heaven.” Now he’s talking to them as though they had been there, that they were there. “It was not Moses that you gave you the bread of heaven, but it is my Father who gives you now the real bread from heaven.” There is no real division between the past and present and future at all. It’s kind of together for Jesus, saying, “We are all of us together in this.”

And the things we seek, though we might think that it’s really about having enough food to get by day to day, so we’re not hungry, we’re not thirsty all the time, it’s really more than that. We are an insatiable people, are we not? There are all kinds of studies that say that part of the reason we Americans end up being overweight often times is not because we have some kind of lack in character or anything like that. It’s because essentially we are people who, no matter how much food we have in the refrigerator, are always hungry. We are always unsatisfied. There is this place within us that isn’t quite filled up, and we keep trying to fill it up. Maybe it’s food, maybe it’s another trip, maybe it’s another, house or boat or car, or whatever it is. We try desperately to fill up our lives so we can really be full finally; no longer hungry, no longer afraid.

My grandparents grew up in the dust-bowl times back in the Dakotas. They never were rich people, but they had enough in those later years to get by. But if ever I had a conversation with them about something, like where they were living, how they are doing financially, or anything like that, they were always a little worried, they were always a little afraid because, it could all be lost, it could be gone tomorrow. So they hung on to every dollar as though it was the last one they had. They never spent money they didn’t need to, they patched things up; they used things over and over again. My grandmother found more ways to use plastic bread bags than anybody I had ever seen. She always washed out plastic bread bags. When the bread was gone, she dumped the crumbs out. And, of course, those didn’t get wasted either. We had chickens and ducks and all of that, so she would just take that stuff out into the yard and put out the crumbs and anything that was left; and, of course, the chickens or whoever would eat that. And then those bags got washed out and hung on the clothesline, so that they were ready to use for other things. Well, they never threw anything away.

When we first came to the Twin Cities, my wife and I, we lived in a place that was just incredible. I was at the seminary, at Luther Seminary, and my wife was in residency at the medical school at the University of Minnesota. We didn’t have any money at all. Neither of our families had a lot of money, so we were going to school on loans and money that we could make on part-time jobs. And, of course, there is no way you can work and be in medical school, it just doesn’t happen. So I got a job. We found this marvelous place to live. We lived in Edina as students and we lived in a beautiful home that had an indoor pool. We had a watts line to make long-distance calls that were free to us anytime we wanted; we had our own entrance, washer and dryer, and all of those kinds of things, even though we were dirt poor. These were wonderful people with whom we lived. We took care of their yard, we cleaned their pool; we essentially took care of the place, because they were gone a lot.

But, in talking with them, something they never forgot was that early in their lives they had an idea to manufacture a certain kind of thing, and it was going pretty well, so well, in fact, that they thought they could step out and let other people run the business. And at this point they’re maybe in their mid-forties. Life was pretty good. So they stepped back. Within a year and a half, the company was almost bankrupt, and it scared them so much that now they were unwilling to let go of any of the details of the business. They ran it themselves; they took care of things themselves. Things were going very well again; they had more than enough to live on. But they were always afraid that it would go away. They were not secure. There was always a nagging doubt, a certain hunger, a certain emptiness that didn’t really go away.

That’s the kind of hunger and thirst, the kind of lack of being satisfied, or full, that Jesus is talking about. “You know, you’re coming because you’re going to get free things. But I’ll tell you what, what I have to offer is more than that.” Now, we could say of those people, “Boy, are they ever shallow and silly people for coming just to get a loaf of bread.” But Jesus doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say they shouldn’t come for the bread. If we want to take him literally, I suppose that would put us in a different fix, wouldn’t it? We could add this verse on to several other verses in the Bible we could find. That’s the danger, of course, of taking a thread and hooking verses together across the Bible as though they fit together without any consequence. We could say, “All right. Jesus says, ‘I will give you what you need, this life, this bread of heaven, I will give it to you. The Son of Man will give this to you. You don’t have to work for it; it will be handed to you. And, consider the lilies, or the birds of the air. You know, Solomon, in all his glory, was clothed the way those flowers are; those birds don’t have to work a day and they have all the food they need. So, come on folks, just hang it up. Call in sick tomorrow if you’re still working and don’t ever go back because Jesus or God will take care of you.” Maybe you’re a little bit too pragmatic for that. You’re not really going to just hang it up and not work. Some people may try to do that with these verses, but you can’t do that. It isn’t meant to be literal.

But it’s also the case that we ought not to come down too hard on people for coming to church for the wrong reason. Right? John is writing about 60 to 90 or so, the church is in place, and there are people in the church who are beginning to complain. “There are some folks who don’t understand. They don’t get it. Some of the people in our pews don’t really understand this Christianity stuff, and we ought to really straighten them out. They have to figure out what they are supposed to be doing, and they should pull their fair share, and they ought to work like the rest of us. They’re just sitting there, acting like it’s all grace—just one potluck after another.”

But Jesus doesn’t say they ought not to be there. And he said, “Well, now, come on, you come for the bread, maybe, or the potluck, the tater-tot hot dish, or something.” But there is more to it than that, because you will find in a Christian church fellowship, community, connections that will go much further beyond those hot dishes and loaves of bread than you could ever have imagined. What God has to offer in a place like this is deeper than that, more fulfilling than that. If we will be open and allowing the Holy Spirit to flow through us, to work through us, and to reach out to those around us, to connect us and weave us together as God’s people in this place, much more will happen.

I remember a time when my father and I were complaining—well, my dad wasn’t complaining. My dad had this marvelous way of always seeing the best in people, always assuming the best things. Well, unfortunately, I maybe didn’t pick that up quite as much as I should have. But I and my father had gone to the pastor’s house, we were having dinner there, and the pastor and I actually got into a conversation about people who come to church just for the high times, the fun stuff, the festivals, the camping trips, all the things like that, and they’re never around when there is painting to do and there is never anybody around to help clean out the rooms and all the work you’ve been doing around here, for instance; or, when there is really tough stuff to do, they just sort of disappear. And my father was listening to this for a long time and finally said, “Yeah. But, you know, think about, when do people come to see Jesus, really?” “Didn’t they come really to see the miracles that were going on? Didn’t they come for the food that got passed out? And when they were there then, when they saw all that stuff happening, that’s when they got hooked.” When they came to see all that stuff, then they thought, “Oh, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on here.” “Who is this Jesus?” And they asked more questions, and they found out—you know what—“There’s more here than I realized,” and they stay. So Jesus isn’t really hard on these people who come just for the bread. But he says, “Hang in there. There is more to it than just that.”

This verse is laden with all kinds of language that’s fun to play with. Take it home and look at it. See how many times the word “give” shows up, and see how many times the word “work” shows up. And notice that it’s normally the people who are asking Jesus questions who always want to talk about work. “What should we do to do the works of God?” “What are you doing, what kind of work are you doing?” And Jesus keeps coming back to saying, “Well, it isn’t about Moses doing a big event and getting food for you. It was actually God who was there giving these things to you, to all of you. Don’t work for the bread that perishes, you know, the food that will go away, that will rot in the fridge. No. More than that, work for the food that will endure to eternal life,” and then he says, “that the Son of Man will give you.”

Look at the difference. We as people in the world always want to figure out, “What do we do to earn it?” “How do we deserve it?” “How do we get it?” We’re not very comfortable with the language that says, “God is going to give you something that you need and that on your own you cannot somehow make happen.” On our own, we will always be restless, we will always be hungry, we will always be thirsty; deep down inside, we will never be at peace until we finally come to a point we rest in the promises of God in Jesus Christ. That’s Jesus’ claim. “I am the bread of life. If you come to me you will be satisfied. There will no longer be this desperate, deep-down hunger that will drive you. If you believe in me, trust in me, you will no longer have this all-consuming thirst that keeps driving you on. In me you will find the life you need because I am God’s bread come down from heaven, to give life to the world. And I am with you always. Believe me, trust me, hold on to me.”

The bread of life is something we all need. A loaf of bread, a cup of wine—a sparse meal, doesn’t look like much. We’re going to share that in a little while. And it may well be that it certainly isn’t going to keep us satisfied physically for very long, this tiny little piece of bread or wafer and that little tiny sip of wine. How can it possibly keep us satisfied?

And yet in this bread and wine there is the blood and body of life and promise of God in Jesus Christ, given to you and to me. And in this bread and wine that is offered to us come the gifts that will satisfy us, that will keep us from being hungry, desperately thirsty.

We live in a world that is incredibly frightening in many ways. It’s hard to pick up the paper and find a part of the world that isn’t, somehow or other, in turmoil. Whether it’s Africa, or the Middle East, or portions or Europe, or wherever you look, there are difficulties.

It is, it seems, impossible to finally be at peace. And it is probably true, one could argue, that there is no peace for any us while there are some who live without it. We need to find a way, as Christian people, to live in this world so that we, in our lives, become messengers for peace, and life, and hope in the world, such that there can be peace, there can be stability, there can be new and alternative ways of being in this world, for all of us, because God’s promise in Jesus Christ is not just for you and for me, it is for the whole world, it is for all God’s people. God is the creator of every human being, every plant, every animal; God’s promises are for all.

This bread of life that comes to you and to me is meant to not only sustain our lives but to flow through us, to offer life and hope to those around us. God offers you more than just a piece of bread, but really a slice of life, the life of God come down to give hope and life for all.

May we—as we take this bread and wine today—be strengthened, encouraged, and motivated to follow in the footsteps of this Jesus, to go into this world, into our communities, through our homes, through our work, and our relationships, to be a word of hope and life to all around us.

Amen.