Sermon: Food for Thought

Sermon of the Week:
Food for Thought–Living Bread

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 15, 2021.

Part five of a five-week sermon series about Food and the Christian Faith, called Food for Thought.

Special Music: O How He Loves Me
Hymn: Lord Make Us More Holy

Keywords: Willimon, Gospel of John, Living Bread, Incarnation, Food for Thought. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Psalm 34:1-8
and John 6:35, 41-51

When we try to wrestle with strange, hard to follow texts,
like this one, with all this talk about eating and drinking Jesus
regular bread compared to living bread,
it helps to step back and try to gauge what the author is trying to do with all this.
Sometimes that context can explain…well, a lot.

We’re only six chapters into the Gospel according to John here.
Many of our sermons in this Food for Thought sermon series
have been rooted here
Because we have five consecutive readings focused on bread,
And four of those five focused on Jesus,
Where he describes himself, one way or another, as the living bread.

It was reading through all these passages
That inspired me to think a bit more broadly about food and the Bible,
Why we dove into this topic in the first place,
And I don’t know about you, but I’m glad we did.

We’ve looked at the importance of self-care,
Looking after our own health,
When Jesus saw his disciples, working hard,
didn’t have any leisure even to eat.

We talked about the miracle of the feeding of the multitude
Five thousand people, and more,
Had all they needed to eat,
When all Jesus started with was some barley loaves and a few fish.

We’ve looked closely at the Sacrament of Communion
This welcome table
And the radical welcome that it represents
Where everyone has a place in the Kingdom of God
Where we are nourished, sated,
By God’s gift of bread and cup
As we partake of our Lord who is here, somehow
in the elements.

And then, last week, we looked at the Parable of the Great Banquet.
We had to leave the Gospel According to John to do that
But it was a worthwhile detour
A reminder that God invites everyone to the banquet
And we should take care
not to let our pride and our vanity and our privilege
Turn down the welcome of our God
But instead we should welcome those whom God welcomes,
With love and with open arms.

This week we conclude with today’s reading,
Jesus wrestling with some Judean leaders
About bread from heaven, living bread, the bread of life,
And the way that this spiritual food, Jesus’ very self,
somehow has the potential to fill something within us forever.

What is John trying to get at here, do you think?

Well, let’s go back to the beginning for a moment,
The beginning of this Gospel,
Where John talks about the beginning:
In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And the Word was God….

And just a few verses later: the word became flesh and lived among us.

Here John is trying to get our heads around the incarnation:
God made flesh,
God in the very person of this Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth.

This is an essential teaching of the Christian Faith:
God isn’t just up there; God came here, in Jesus,
In solidarity and in love,
To help make this world right
To bring about God’s new world, God’s shalom.

But the mystery of the incarnation proves difficult to comprehend.
We see this very early on in John’s telling of the story.
So, in chapter 3, we see someone as smart and as faithful as Nicodemus
Struggle to understand.
Born again? Born from above, you say, Jesus? As he scratches his head.

Nicodemus knows about physical birth,
But the blending of physical and spiritual realities,
Which is at the heart of the incarnation,
Is just too much for Nicodemus to grasp.

And then how about Chapter 4
The woman, by the well, in Samaria.
She has the same problem.
She knows all about the physical realities of water and wells,
But Jesus begins to amaze her
All this talk about “living water.”
This too is incarnational truth,
And, did you notice, it sounded a lot like what we heard today
There, o woman at the well: living water…you’ll never be thirsty
Here: bread from heaven, living bread…you’ll live forever, on this bread,
Which is me, in the flesh, the incarnate one.

And just like that
We have the astute and well credentialed Nicodemus,
The foreigner-outsider Samaritan, not to mention woman, at the well,
And now the masses, the people following Jesus…
All scratching their heads trying to understand.

Trying to figure out just how
“the Word became flesh and lived among us” is not easy,
Nor is it straightforward what that means, for us,
for our well-being, for our lives.

///
Maybe we can look at all this another way.

Will Willimon, the now-retired United Methodist preacher and Bishop
Used to quote the protestant reformer Martin Luther,
Who said “I wish I could get you to pray
The way that my dog goes after his food.”

Now, first, that’s bit rough, isn’t it.
Pun intended.

But what Luther was getting at was an observation
Of how he saw some enthusiasm in his pet
Some dedication, some energy,
That he also hoped for those under his care, as a parish priest
As someone who was looking after the care of souls.

Willimon argues that one of the greatest impediments
to our understanding this section of the Gospel of John
is the widespread, but incorrect, impression, that Christianity is “spiritual.”[i]

True, “Spirituality” has been “in” for some time now.
Many North Americans, Willimon observes,
Apparently want to be lifted up out of the muck and mire of the everyday.
What is here, in this world, isn’t quite enough for us.
We want to rise out of it, to go higher, to ascend.

As moderns, as scientific people, we have learned so much about our world
About everything imaginable, it seems,
What we can taste and touch and feel.
Thank you, science.
God’s good gift of using our minds and our senses
and our powers of observation.
And in the process, this world of ours got demystified somewhat,
Explained, unbearably flattened and figured out.

And this means, therefore, a greater urge to peek beyond the veil
To penetrate the less obvious.
Which explains the urge to figure out the “spiritual” in our day,
Just not the religious.

I mean, we certainly do know so much more about our world, that’s true,
But there is still mystery. So much mystery.
There’s a lot we don’t know, finite creatures as we are,
And so we push, maybe artificially, to the mysterious, the beyond.

Some of this is natural,
An interplay between knowledge and the unknown
And a recognition that, even as knowledge grows, the unknown is still there.

But it can get out of whack.
The ancient Greeks, too, got wrapped up in this,
The philosophers and the people who searched for the good, for the real.
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus…looked for truth not just here,
In this world, but sought to escape all of it,
Looking mainly at the realm of ideas, of spirit.
To them, this world was less than, deficient;
It is the world of the spirit that was considered good, ideal, true.

Recently, I found myself driving around Branson Missouri, of all places,
And passed by a building called Plato’s Cave.
It was so out of place that I had to look twice at the sign.
Plato’s Cave. In Branson Missouri.
The home of Dolly’s Stampede and the Duttons and Yakov
and more vaudevillian kitsch than anyone can handle
and in the middle of all that…stuff
was Plato’s Cave.
I had to go look it up. It’s just an apartment complex.
But such a strange name
for a place in Branson.

Plato, the Greek Philosopher, once offered the Allegory of the Cave
As a way to describe his understanding of understanding,
How we see and experience the world.
We’re all looking at the wall of a cave, you see
Illuminated by a light that is behind us.
We see the images on the wall, the shadows of ourselves
and other things in the cave,
and that’s our reality,
Plato’s line of thinking goes…
But that’s not really what is real.
What is real are the things that cause the shadows on the wall of the cave.
Plato, and many other Greek Philosophers,
Urged people to turn their attention away from what we think we see,
In this case, the material world, the physical world, or actual world,
Toward something more spiritual, more ephemeral,
What Plato might have called the spiritual world.

When taken too far, this leads to abandoning this world,
Striving to escape to some other world, some more real existence.

Now, there was a huge movement, at the time of the early church,
That incorporated much of this thinking into its understanding of things.
This so-called gnostic movement
devalued things that we experience,
Our bodies, the natural world,
people’s physical needs like hunger or companionship
And sought instead some other world,
some ostensibly divine world
That was thought to be better, more pure, more spiritual.

But that way of thinking,
whether it was Greek
or whether it was within the early Christian movement,
it was ultimately rejected, in part because of passages like these in John.

Remember: our tradition affirms that God is the creator of heaven and of earth.
That God sends the rain, the sun, the crops, the creatures,
which we are urged to care, protect, and keep.
The Gnostic tradition rejected all of that.

So consider John. This gospel.
Sure, John talks about the divine realm,
A spiritual reality,
We saw it here, in our reading this morning,
When Jesus talks about the bread of heaven,
The manna in the wilderness,
The living bread that will end our hunger.

But Jesus is talking about bread bread. About actual bread.
About our bodily hunger.
About our physical needs.

This is not the stuff of just spirit.
This is the stuff of incarnation,
Where God becomes part of this world,
Not to abandon this world, not to lead us away from it,
But to love this world, renew this world,
make this world the best world it can be.

What Jesus is offering, Willimon argues,
Is not an escape from the needs of this world, this existence,
But a recognition that we all long for something deeper, something more,
We might call that longing a HUNGER for something, right,
And that this is a quest that,
in the end,
Jesus has an answer for,
Because Jesus is God’s answer for our hunger,
The answer is God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ himself.

///
So often, we read these passages and try to find ourselves in them
And we wonder whether we live up to what Jesus is trying to convey.

Clearly the people here don’t get it.
As we’ve said, this incarnation thing, hard to get our heads around,
We’ve been dealing with the hunger of the people
Their physical hunger
Their emotional hunger
Their yearning to belong, to be validated, to matter,
And everywhere we turn,
We see Jesus responding to that hunger,
Addressing that hunger.
Filling the hungry with good food:
Taste and see that the Lord is good!

In the midst of this confusion
about what God is doing mingling among mortals
You see John trying to cut through it all
With what we might call the “I Am” statements.

Jesus says, directly, what he is doing,
What God is doing through him.

The first one is here: I am the Bread of Life.
Later: I am the Light of the World.
I am the Gate of the Sheep
I am the Good Shepherd
I am the resurrection, and the life,
The way, the truth, the life,
I am the true vine.

And then, here, he tells those who are listening
When he says I am the Bread of Life,
That he means: Look: God provides for you.
God has not abandoned you.
God cares for you.
God has not just food for your stomachs
But provision for your whole being.
And what God provides is so good,
So important, that we won’t hunger anymore,
In fact we’ll live forever,
In relationship with the God who made you and who loves you.
How awesome is that?

///
I think we read some of these verses wrong,
The verses that go
No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.
Or
Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God.

We hear those and we hear criticism, or exclusion,
Like God will only draw some people and not others…
and I wonder if that means me
Like only some people will see God…and I wonder if that’s me.

But they don’t say that.
What they say is that this whole God’s kingdom thing
It about God, the one who is doing all of this,
A generous, caring God
A God who gifts us with faith,
who showers us with opportunity.

Because whatever faith we have,
Whatever hope we have,
Whatever love we have…we have because God gives it to us in the first place.

Here’s how Willimon puts it:
Whatever we need in order to comprehend Jesus
Must come as a gift,
Insight not of our own devising.
It “Must come down from heaven.”

Lest all this talk of “heaven” suggest that we are dealing
With ethereal, otherworldly fuzziness,
Jesus compares his significance to that of everyday, mundane, bread.
He may be “from heaven”
But he is also that which has “come down”
He is the Word, the eternal Word, “made Flesh.”

Here, standing before us, in the flesh, is the fullness of God.
If you have ever wondered just what God looks like,
Or how God acts, or how God talks, then wonder no more.
In this faith, we do not have to climb up to the divine.
God discloses, unveils, comes down to us….

Let’s admit it. There’s something within us that likes our gods
High and lifted up,
Distant, exclusively in heaven.
We so want religion to be something spiritual,
Rather than something that is uncomfortably incarnational.
Yet here we are with God-in-the-flesh before us, saying
‘I’m your bread; feed on me!”

Our hungers are so deep.
We are dying of thirst.
We are bundles of seemingly insatiable need,
Rushing here and there in a vain attempt to assuage our emptiness.
Our culture is a vast supermarket of desire.
Can it be that our bread, our wine, our fulfillment
Stands before us in the presence of this crucified, resurrected Jew?
Can it be that many of our desires are,
in the eternal scheme of things, pointless?

Might it be true that he is the bread we need,
even though he is rarely the bread we seek?
Is it true that God has come to us,
Miraculously with us,
Before us,
Like manna that is miraculously dropped into our wilderness?

///
Luther was on to something:
That bread, that living bread, it is so amazing
That we should run after it.

In Jesus, the divine and the material meet.
In Jesus, God is offering something deeply meaningful,
Where we do not look for salvation
away from, apart from this world that God made,
No, God renews and redeems and loves THIS reality that we are in
And urges us to do the same.

Instead, we look for God’s incarnating presence HERE, in our everyday.
We EXPERIENCE that incarnation through normal things,
Water, in baptism,
Bread and Wine, at the good feast of our Lord, the Eucharist,
In our everyday, when we love our neighbor and seek to be kind
And work for justice and reconciliation and peace.

Jesus proclaimed the good news of God’s world
Incarnate. Here.
A world where death will not triumph.
Where love will win.
Where there is something eternal about what we are doing,
when we’re doing it right,
something that will satisfy our longing for purpose
and fill our bodies with what we need to live out our everyday
as people of faith, as disciples, as those who follow God on the way of Jesus.

Jesus tells us: this is a gift from God.
It isn’t merely something we choose to do. God does it. God provides it.
And, as we’ve learned through this series,
God offers it to everyone,
God calls us around the table,
God urges us to care for ourselves—body, mind, and spirit—
As we work to bring others in,
Those who traditionally have been left out,
told that they won’t ever be worthy.

God provides.
Ain’t that food for thought.

May we, my friends,
Turn to the incarnate one
With faith, with hope, with love,
And be grateful for God’s provision,
Trusting that it will be enough, more than enough,
And oh, so tasty, so so good.
And with that, may we open our heart in love to everyone
Because there is plenty of food in God’s good kingdom.

May it be so.
Amen.

—–
[i]See David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds., Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 3 Pentecost and Season After Pentecost 1 (Propers 3-16) (Louisville, Kentucky; Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), “Homiletical Perspective for John 6:35, 41-51” p. 333-337

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