Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 9, 2009

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. John. (John 6:35, 41‑51)

Jesus said to [the crowd,] “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

God loves you so that you are able to love one another. God loves us in order that we might love one another, and, indeed, the whole world. God loves us so that we will love one another. That’s what this passage is all about. It’s what we are all about.

There’s an old saying that goes, “You are what you eat.” It’s not literally true, of course, but there’s a lot to it. I kind of know what that means.

This last week I was in California, and I was staying with friends, and those friends are vegans. You all know what a vegan is? You know what a vegetarian is. A vegetarian doesn’t eat meat. But a vegan goes even further and doesn’t eat any meat byproducts, so no dairy, no eggs, no butter. It’s pretty rough on a guy like me who loves his bacon. But for several days I partook of that diet. And what was especially hard was that right across the street from the house where I was staying was Harry’s Hamburger Joint. I could smell it. And I was sorely tempted several times to wander over there and order the hamburger meal for $4.99, with French fries. But I didn’t do it.

When I was dropped off at the airport in mid-morning, and I was walking by those fast-food restaurants on my way to the gate, all of the sudden it was as though a hand reached out and grabbed me and pulled me in by the shirt, and I found myself ordering one of those breakfast sandwiches. You know the kind? Like sausage, eggs, and, I don’t know if you can call it cheese—it’s orange—but, anyway, it’s hot, and it’s gooey, and it’s full of salt, and I’m sure high fructose corn syrup, like everything else that we eat. I ate it. My mouth was happy but my stomach wasn’t. I realized I had made a mistake. I had gotten used to really good food, and now my tolerance, which is usually quite high for junk, was gone. So I sat there, miserably waiting for my plane, not feeling so good.

You are what you eat. The way in which we eat affects what we become and the way in which we are in the world. I could talk at length, I think, about the ways in which we don’t take care of our bodies by eating well—both as a culture, and me as an individual as well. But I don’t want to talk about that this morning. I want to talk instead about the way in which food becomes a metaphor in the Bible for our spiritual life. What we take in affects what we become spiritually, and the way in which we are in the world.

Jesus says in our passage today, “I am the bread of life.” “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever has faith in me will never thirst.” It’s a metaphor. He’s speaking metaphorically.

Now, as we know, and as we have gleaned from the last few Sundays where we spent time in the Book of John in the 6th Chapter and thereabouts, there are a lot of parallels between what Jesus is saying and doing and the story of Moses in the Book of Exodus. Right? Jesus has walked across a sea, miraculously, taking his 12 disciples with him and leading them to safety on the other side of the sea. Then he climbs a mountain, and he teaches a large crowd of people, who become hungry, and he feeds them, miraculously, with bread and fish.

It’s the story of Moses, in parallel, crossing the Red Sea, out into the wilderness, receiving the Commandments on the mountain, teaching the people, and then feeding them miraculously. Jesus says, interestingly, not “I am Moses,” or “I am like Moses.” He says, “I am the bread. I’m the bread, the bread of life. I’m like that manna that God gave in the wilderness from heaven,” miraculously, that nourished and sustained the people in the wilderness.

Let’s recall that story just a little bit together. Let’s see if we can enrich this image in our minds, this notion of Jesus as bread, bread of life.

The story, as you recall, is that Moses, by God’s hand and with God’s help, leads the people through the miraculously parted Red Sea, and then behind him Pharaoh and the armies, that are chasing them to grab them and bring them back into slavery, are drowned as the waters closed on them.

The children of Israel then find themselves out in the wilderness. And the wilderness is not nothingness. It’s not nowhere‑ness; it’s not emptiness. The wilderness is wild. It’s a wild place, it’s a dangerous place. It’s full of problems and dangers, natural dangers, and people who want to attack them, and do. It’s that in-between place where they wander for 40 years, between the place of bondage and their destination, which is paradise.

It’s a metaphor as well for life in this world; our own journey through life. We have miraculously found ourselves here. Here we are. But we also are aware that there is another passage to come ahead. We’re not entirely sure of what that is going to be like, but we know it’s ahead. In the meantime, we’re here in this place, where we experience hardships and afflictions, wildness, and danger, and hunger.

The children of Israel are hungry, and they’re not happy about that. They need some food. They don’t have natural, established ways of growing and harvesting food. So they go to Moses, and they’re complaining. Now, I think when we learned this story in the past, and when we imagine it now, because we sympathize with Moses, we sort of look down on the children of Israel. We think of them as complainers, whiners, maybe—you know, like any little thing that goes wrong they go and they want to kill Moses. Right? Well, these people are not whiners; they are not complainers; they are not weak. They have been slaves in Egypt, doing hard toil and labor for centuries. These people are freed slaves. These people are strong, they are tough, tough people, which give us an idea of just how desperate they had become. They needed food. They really, really needed food. So they go and they complain to Moses, and they are angry. “Why did you bring us out here, and our children, to die? At least we had food back there. We may have been slaves, but at least we had food. Why did you do this to us? Now we’re going to die.” Moses passes along the complaint to God, as you know, and then God responds by sending bread from heaven.

It’s human nature that the pain we experience in our lives we pass along to others. It doesn’t make it right, but there it is. It’s human nature that the afflictions that we experience in life, we pass along to others. It’s not right, but there it is. The abuses that we have experienced, we pass along to others. It doesn’t make it right, but there it is. It also works the other way. The love that we experience when we are loved can be shared. When we know that we are blessed, we more easily become a blessing to other people. We pass it along. We are caught up in energies that are age old, energies of love and energies of affliction.

There are two kinds of bread in the story. There is the manna that comes down from heaven, which Jesus calls “the bread of life.” There’s another kind of bread in the story. It starts just before the children of Israel are allowed to pass out of Egypt, and they celebrate what we now call the Passover. And they are instructed to have bread, but not to leaven it, because there is no time for the bread to rise. This is the flat bread; this is the unleavened bread. And, of course, in the Passover ceremony, and the Seder ceremony of the Jews to this day, they celebrate the ceremony with the flat, the unleavened, matzo bread. In Deuteronomy, that bread is called “the bread of affliction,” the bread of affliction. So in the story we have two kinds of bread: the bread of affliction and the bread of life. The bread of affliction is meant to cause people to remember their own affliction, the fact that they were enslaved people, and that that is supposed to make them more compassionate toward those who are in any kind of affliction.

Affliction, God knows, is part of what life is all about. I imagine that all of you could tell a story of how you have experienced affliction in your life. But in the story, in the Exodus story, what is it that makes the difference between passing on pain and affliction, or passing on that which gives life to others? It’s the bread. The bread makes the difference. The people were ready to kill Moses. The bread of life comes and the anger is dissipated. The bread of life.

We are the body of Christ, it is said. We are the body of Christ. But we are not the body of Christ because we are Lutheran. We are not the body of Christ because we show up on Sunday morning to church. We are not the body of Christ because we believe certain things. We are the body of Christ when the love of God lives in us and flows through us into the world. We are the body of Christ when we, so to speak, take in Christ and the Spirit of Christ, and then live in and out of that energy and that spirit.

Jesus is the bread of life. But the question for this morning is: Are we the bread of life, as well? For that is what we are to be as well.

Amen.