Come to Jesus

John 6:35, 41-51

August 9, 2015

            The movie, Remember the Titans, tells the story of the integration of two high schools – one white, one black – in Northern Virginia in the early 1970’s. The students were integrated. The teachers were integrated. The football team was integrated; both players and coaches. Coach Yoast, the white coach who was in line for the head coaching position was instead made the defensive coach. The man who had recently moved to the city to become the coach at the black school was made the new head coach: Coach Boone. The integration would officially begin with the new school year. But the football team was integrated at football camp in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The players tried to segregate themselves, but Coach Boone forced them to be together on the field and off. There is tension and resentment from everyone, but eventually they get to know each other and like each other. As in all great sports movies, they become a true team.

            But the people back home didn’t get the memo. School starts with protesters at the gates. There are outbreaks of fights in the halls. The team is almost torn apart by the conflict, but they pull together – and start winning games. Not everyone is convinced. One night after a game, a small group of the players are hanging out together. One player, a white kid who had transferred to the school from California, wanted his friends – all black – to go to a local restaurant for something to eat. One of the black players resists, insisting that they would not be welcome. The white player doesn’t agree, so they go in to the restaurant. Just as the black player predicted, they were told to leave. The owner didn’t serve black folks or hippies.

            When they go back outside, the white player, the “hippie,” tries to apologize. “I didn’t know.” Humiliated and angry, the black player who had initially refused to go in starts yelling at his white friend. “What do you mean, ‘you didn’t know?’” “I told you, didn’t I?!” “I told you.” The white player, who is obviously stunned by what has just happened, keeps saying he was sorry and that he didn’t know. The night is over. They part ways. End of scene. 

            I love this movie and there are a multitude of memorable moments that I could draw on for sermon illustration after sermon illustration. But this one stands out in my mind because of the white player’s insistence that he didn’t know. It seems ridiculous that he says that. His black friend was right. He told him that they would not be welcome. He told him that it was not a good idea for them to go in to the restaurant. Yet the white player really didn’t know. 

            What does it mean to know something? My first response is to think of knowledge solely as an intellectual process. I’m given facts and information. I process them. I memorize them. I learn them. I know. So why didn’t the black player’s facts and information about the racist response they would receive in the restaurant result in the white player’s knowing? Maybe it is because knowledge is more than just a memorization game. Knowledge is intellectual, but it is also experiential. That white player did not know. He could not fathom or imagine what his black friend was trying to tell him. He didn’t know because he had probably never experienced blatant racism like that. But the black players knew. They knew to the depths of their beings that they would not be welcome in that white establishment. They knew it because they had lived it their whole lives. They knew. Their friend and teammate didn’t. But once he experienced it, he knew it too.

            What does it mean to know something? What does it mean to know someone? In this particular moment in this sixth chapter from John’s gospel, “the Jews” think they know Jesus. One thing that I have learned about John’s gospel is that when he refers to “the Jews” he isn’t necessarily implicating an ethnicity or a people. The Jews as John refers to them are the religious leaders and authority figures that were in opposition to Jesus. I say that because his use of that term has been misread and misused to justify anti-Semitism. I don’t think that John was anti-Semitic in the way we understand it. But I do think the he was highly condemning of the religious leaders who worked and plotted against Jesus. I also know that when John uses this term, conflict is close at hand.  We’ve gone from hearing about the “crowds” that surrounded Jesus to “the Jews.” There’s a storm brewing.

            The first verse we read today, verse 35, is one that we read at the end of our passage last week. It is a bridge verse. Then we skip to verse 41 and read that muttering and murmuring is happening among the religious leaders. It’s not clear to me why verses 36 through 40 are skipped, because they provide the impetus for why the authorities are beginning to complain. Jesus tells them that “I have come from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.”

            Okay, now I get it. Now I see why a chorus of grumbling is rising. Jesus has just asserted that he has come down from heaven. He has claimed to be the Son of the Father. He has claimed to be the one who opens the door to eternal life.

            What? This guy says he has come down to us from heaven? That he is the Son of the Father, Father as in God? Isn’t that Jesus? Isn’t he the son of Joseph? We know his father and mother. We know where he comes from, and it’s not heaven. I can understand their skepticism. It would be like me running into that obnoxious, whiny kid, Philip, the one who lived down the street from me, and the one I smacked in the head with a hairbrush – that’s another story; I was 9 and he deserved it – saying to a crowd of people that he was the Son of God and had come down from heaven. Knowing where that kid came from, knowing his mother and father, I would have an extraordinarily hard time believing him.

            The authorities listening to Jesus think they know him. They know the facts about him. They know where he comes from. They know his family. They know him. Jesus responds to them by saying, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” In other words, “Hush up.” Those grumbling and griping against him obviously don’t know Jesus. They have not yet been drawn to him by the Father. They don’t come to him because he is the bread of heaven, the bread of life. They are there to see what he’s up to. They don’t know him, because they have not experienced him as anything more than Joseph’s son. They don’t know him as the One God sent from heaven; they don’t know him and until they do, they cannot experience him as the bread of heaven.

            They .have not yet come to Jesus. What does that mean? What does it mean to say, “Come to Jesus.” Whoever comes to Jesus will never by hungry or thirsty. We realize that this isn’t physical hunger or thirst. But it is a longing for something. It is an ache for something. It is a recognition that something within you is missing. Jesus says I am the living bread. When you come to me, when you eat of this bread, that longing will be answered, that ache will be soothed. Someone in the YMCA Bible study once said, “We are born with a longing for God.” It seems to me that Jesus is speaking to that longing. He is speaking to that innate need within each of us for something … more. His answer to that longing is to come to him. In him they will, we will, find the living bread.

            But again I ask, what does it mean to “come to Jesus?” Is it an answer to the alter calls I experienced growing up; when the choir would softly sing, “Just As I Am,” over and over again, while Brother Bob would beckon all who wanted to give their lives to Jesus to come, come. Does coming to Jesus happen the moment a person reads a familiar passage of scripture, maybe one that she has heard countless times before, but this time it reads differently? Suddenly the light of understanding flashes on and she understands a meaning in the words she hadn’t understood before. Is that what it means to come to Jesus?

            In the Amplified version of the Bible, verse 35 reads like this, “Jesus replied, ‘I am the Bread of Life. He who comes to Me will never be hungry, and he who believes in and cleaves to and trusts in and relies on Me will never thirst any more (at any time).”

            He who comes to me, who believes in me, who cleaves in and trusts and relies on me will never be thirsty again. Believes. Cleaves. Trusts. Relies. When you come to Jesus, when you believe, cleave, trust and rely on Jesus, you experience the Bread of Life.

            I don’t think there is one answer to what it means to come to Jesus. I think there are many answers. I think for some it begins as an answer to an alter call; for others, it begins as a mindful recognition of a deeper truth. But whatever way that moment happens; either in a moment of great emotion or a moment of intellectual assent, a person who comes to Jesus knows him in a new way. It is experiential. It is both head and heart. One cannot preclude the other. To come to Jesus means that somehow, in some way, both our hearts and minds have been opened to knowing him. When we know him, we believe, we cleave, we trust and we rely on him. The good news is that we never know him perfectly. We are never perfect at believing, cleaving, trusting and relying. At least I’m not. But not knowing him perfectly in one fell swoop is okay. It is good news. Because that means we have opportunity after opportunity to come to Jesus. We have a lifetime of moments to know him. Knowing him is being in relationship with him, in community and in communion with him. Relationships don’t happen all at once. They happen every day, in many, many moments. How wonderful it is to know that we are called to come to Jesus again and again, and that our knowledge of him, our relationship with him has room to deepen and grow. No matter how you come to Jesus, just come to Jesus, just as you are.  Let all of God’s children know Jesus, come to Jesus, and say, “Alleluia!” Amen.

Food That Endures

John 6:24-35

August 2, 2015

            There is a joke that says there are only three things that will survive a nuclear holocaust: roaches, Twinkies and Cher. I don’t know about roaches and Cher, but I can believe that about Twinkies. For years I heard that Twinkies have a shelf life of several years. You could discover a bomb shelter built in the 1950’s, and if there were Twinkies stored there, you could rip open a package and get to eating. In reality, or at least according to Wikipedia, Twinkies do not last indefinitely. They actually have a shelf life of about 45 days. It used to be 35, but the formula – I mean ingredients – were changed to add ten extra days. Yet whether a Twinkie is good for 35 or 45 days, that is a long time for a food item to remain edible.

             Food is the key word. Twinkies may be classified, technically, as food. But I think that whether they are or not is a matter of opinion. I don’t want to commit libel against Twinkies or the manufacturers, but I think we can agree that a Twinkie would not be your first choice of a nutritious snack. A so-bad-for-it’s-good kind-of snack yes, but nutritious? Technically, a Twinkie is a yellow sponge cake with a creamy frosting-like filling. Sounds simple, but I don’t have to read the label to know that anything that can last on the shelf for 45 days has preservatives and ingredients with names I don’t recognize and would struggle to pronounce. Twinkies may be a yummy, guilty pleasure, but I’m not convinced they are real food. Even if they are, they are not a food of substance. If you refer to someone as a “Twinkie,” you’re implying that said person is flaky, shallow, perhaps fun to be with and easy on the eyes, but not a person of depth. Twinkie the food is kind of the same way. It may last a long time. It may taste good in the moment, but that’s about it.

            But bread, now that’s a different story. Bread, real bread – not the stripped down preservative-filled stuff you can buy relatively close to where the Twinkies are sold – is substantive. After all, no odes have been written about Twinkies. You don’t hear, “A big ole Twinkie, a jug of wine, and thou.” No one comes to your door with a box of Twinkies and proclaims, ‘Twinkies, so your house will never know hunger.” Realtors don’t recommend leaving Twinkies on the kitchen counter to someone trying to sell a home so that the house will feel more like home. But it is recommended that a seller bake a loaf of bread before a showing. Because that aroma of fresh baked bread evokes memories and touches all the senses of a potential buyer. Twinkies are generally not considered to be the staff of life. But bread is. I know that there is controversy about gluten. But I wonder if that isn’t due more to the processed and preservative filled bread produced in our country. Real bread is joy in a loaf as far as I’m concerned.

            Again, I’m not trying to take on the food manufacturing industry. My kitchen is certainly not preservative free. Nor do I want to make a compare and contrast statement about Twinkies versus bread. But bread is the theme of this chapter in John, and we will be talking about bread today and for a few more weeks. Last week chapter 6 began with Jesus taking just a few real loaves of bread and real fish and feeding 5,000 people with them. John does not refer to this as a miracle that Jesus performs, but a sign. It is a sign of who Jesus is and why he is in their presence. However miracle or sign, Jesus actually feeds people – a whole lot of people. Now that the actual feeding has happened, he wants the people to understand the deeper meaning of this sign. He is more than just a magician who managed to fill the stomachs of a large crowd. He not only gave them bread for the bodies, he is the bread of heaven that will nourish their souls.

            Today’s particular story begins on the day after Jesus fed the multitude. Jesus and the disciples were not in the boats that came from Tiberias, and when the crowd of people realized this, they got in boats and went to Capernaum, looking for Jesus. As soon as they find him, they question why his presence there. He responds saying, “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.”

            Jesus knows that the crowd wasn’t looking for him because of this wondrous sign he effected in their presence. They want to find him because the bread and fish they ate the day before were great, but they are hungry again. Hunger is an ongoing issue, then and now. If Jesus, this rabbi, could feed them once, he could do it again.

            Again, Jesus wants them to understand that this feeding was a sign of greater import than sating their hunger. They have a deeper hunger, and he has come among them to meet it. Jesus tells them that their work for bread that perishes will not sate the hunger he addresses. Instead they should work for the food that endures for eternal life. They still don’t get what he’s talking about. So they ask what works of God they must do. Jesus’ answer is simple, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Believe. That is the answer. That is the work they must do. They must believe.

            But the people press Jesus for more. You say that you are the Son of Man, the one God sent, but what sign will you show us that this is true? What work will you perform? We know all about God providing bread, because God provided manna in the wilderness for their ancestors. That manna was “bread from heaven to eat.”

            It would be understandable to read the tone of Jesus’ response to them as scolding. “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.”

            Perhaps he was scolding them, but I don’t think that Jesus was angry with the people for not recognizing the sign of God’s bread from heaven already in their midst. I think he was disappointed. After all, they were given a pretty significant sign with the multiplying of the loaves and fishes the day before. What more do they need?

            Yet just as the woman at the well asked Jesus to give her the water of life, thinking that she would no longer have to schlep heavy buckets each day, the people want to receive this enduring bread. With this bread, they would never know hunger again.

            Jesus answers with I Am. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

            Jesus says I am the food that endures for eternal life. Believe in me and you will feast on this bread from heaven. Always. It sounds so easy. Just believe and you will receive enduring, life giving bread; heaven’s bread. But I suspect the people listening to Jesus could not quite wrap their minds around the words Jesus spoke to them. I suspect that they could not separate the literal from the figurative, the metaphor from the surface meaning. They wanted food that endures.

We do too, don’t we? We want the food that endures. However it seems to me that the problem lies in the fact that we end that sentence too soon. We want the food that endures. Jesus spoke of “food that endures for eternal life.”  We just don’t want to be hungry anymore. Jesus knows that our bodies must be nourished, life depends on it. But we are also heart hungry, soul famished. We need food for our bodies, and food for our beings. Believing in Jesus gives us the food that endures for eternal life. But we get confused and seek out food that endures. The result? Twinkies. We want food that endures so we create Twinkies as a food product. But Twinkies as food that endures is also a metaphor. How often do we feed our bodies with stuff that really doesn’t nourish? How often do we try to feed our hearts with stuff that doesn’t nourish either? We want food that endures and our answer to that need is a Twinkie.

But Jesus offers a different food for our hearts. Jesus offers himself as the bread of heaven. We just have to believe. This does not diminish our need for real food. Food insecurity and gnawing hunger is a reality – not just in poorer countries around the world, but right next door. We know this. You only have to work one meal at the Salvation Army to know this. Jesus’ first act was to feed the hungry. This was a sign of his true identity. This was a sign to call them and us to belief, to faith. We receive the bread of heaven when we believe, but our response to that bread is to feed others. Yes, we are called to evangelize, to proclaim the good news that Jesus is the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation. But we are called to feed the physical hunger in others’ first. The mind and the heart and the soul cannot be fed until the body is fed first. Jesus fed the hungry crowds, then Jesus offered himself, the bread of heaven, as nourishment for their souls.

What food do we partake of this day? What nourishment will we give our bodies and with what will we feed our souls? No bread by our hands, no matter how wholesome, endures forever. Even the bread we share in communion will eventually perish. But as we share the bread and the cup this morning, remember that what we really share is the bread of heaven, the food that endures for eternal life.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!” Amen.

Taller Fences

How tall should the fences be

to shut out the people who don't look like me?

How wide a barricade,

how high the wall

that blocks the deadbeats

and their urban sprawl

What building can I build

that will keep me from seeing

the homeless, the helpless,

and those who are fleeing

homelands without homes

and tyranny unchecked,

maybe it's bad where they come from

but why should I stick out my neck

for the lazy, the useless, those

who won't try more

Get a job! Work harder!

Stop being so damn poor!

And don't throw your 

Socialist Jesus in my face

with his free handed love

and his unjust grace

the wheat from the chaff 

Jesus preached separation

the sheep segregated 

from the goat's damnation

In my America

this Christian nation

eternity is the prize

of my privatized salvation

Just how tall should the fences be

to shut out the people who are other than me?                                         

I Am

John 6:1-21

July 26, 2015

            On a hot summer day, much like this one, my neighborhood friends and I wanted to walk to a convenience store down the street and get an Icee – that frozen, sugary delight that eased the sticky sultriness of a Nashville summer. My friend’s mother declined the request for cash saying, “I don’t have any money right now.” My friend was undeterred. She looked at her mom with great seriousness and said, “Can’t you just write a check?” You see my friends and I did not understand the concept of money. Actually, that’s not entirely true. We completely got the concept of having it. What we didn’t understand was not having it. That isn’t to say that our parents were loaded; they weren’t. But we couldn’t grasp the fact that sometimes when we asked for money to buy something or do something or go somewhere, they didn’t have the available change at that particular moment. We just figured that the money was there when we needed it. I don’t want to make it sound like our parents just doled out dollar bills whenever we demanded them. We all had chores to do, and I received an allowance that was supposed to cover things like Icee’s. But our parents were a source of many things – love, support, discipline … and cash.

            As a child I approached the concept of money from a point of abundance. I assumed my parents had an abundance of it; whether they did or didn’t. But those childish ways are long gone. As an adult, my departure point for thinking about money is not abundance, but scarcity. Now I look at money from what I don’t have, not from what I do. When my kids ask for something, they usually preface their request with, “When you get your next paycheck …” I approach my life from a point of scarcity.

            Don’t get me wrong, I know that having a budget and living within your means is a necessity. I wish I had learned some of the financial lessons I’ve grasped in these last few years a long, long time ago. But the problem with the scarcity approach is that it is often based on perception, rather than reality. Even when there’s too much month at the end of the money, we aren’t going to starve. We still have enough. But scarcity is driven by fear. Fear narrows a person. What I mean by that is that fear makes one close-fisted, and even worse, close-hearted. Fear of scarcity makes me less generous, not just of my finances but of my spirit.

            There is a fear of scarcity in our passage from John’s gospel. A large and growing crowd has been following Jesus. As John puts it, “they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick.” Jesus takes the disciples up a high mountain and when he sees the crowd approaching, he asks Philip what they’re going to do about feeding all these people. In an aside, John tells us that this is a test. Jesus knew what he was going to do already.

            Philip answers out of scarcity. Even if we had six months wages, we couldn’t feed all these people. There is no way we could ever have enough. Andrew speaks up and tells Jesus about a boy who has a couple of fish and fives loaves of barley bread. But after telling Jesus this, he also points out the scarcity of the situation. What are five loaves of bread and two fish in the face of so many people?

            Instead of giving them an answer about what he’s going to do, Jesus just tells them to make the people sit down. Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks for them, and distributes them to the people. He does the same thing with the fish. After all those present had eaten their fill, he tells the disciples to gather up the leftovers in baskets. The leftover bread filled twelve baskets. 5,000 people were fed from two fish and five loaves of bread.

            What the heck just happened?

            What happened indeed? The people saw this sign and declared that Jesus was the prophet who was to come into the world. It’s not a surprise that their next move was to try and make Jesus king. Chronic hunger was an issue then just as it is now. Anyone who could feed that many people with so little food could ensure that hunger would be eliminated. But Jesus realized that they were going to use force if necessary to make him king, so he went away by himself. Our lesson ends with the disciples going by boat to Capernaum. Jesus was not with them when they departed. Yet in the dark of night, as the sea was becoming rough and stormy, they look out to see Jesus walking on the water toward them. This terrifies them, but Jesus says to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Although his words are translated as, “It is I,” this is essentially the Greek version of the Hebrew we read in the book of Exodus. From the burning bush, God replies to Moses’ question about God’s identity with the words, “I Am.” Jesus responds to the disciples fear with, “I Am.”

            We read these stories in the other gospels, but John conflates them into one continuous event. Why? As I understand it, John is not trying to highlight the miraculous in these stories. Yes, we can consider them miracles. But the word miracle is not used in John’s gospel. Jesus is not performing miracles. He is offering signs. Miracles seem to point to themselves, but signs point to something else. Jesus performs signs and those signs point to his identity. He is the I Am. For the next four weeks, we will be unpacking the rest of this chapter, because John devotes this entire chapter to illuminating exactly what Jesus identity as the I Am means. His multiplying of these fish and this bread is the sign he gives of how this food may satisfy their physical hunger, yet he is the real bread necessary for life.

            But even as this signs point to Jesus’ true identity as the I Am, it is also about the abundance Jesus gives in the physical, the here and now. There is an abundance of bread leftover. There is even an abundance of grass. That’s a rather overlooked detail in this text. John makes a point of writing that there was plenty of grass for the people to sit on. In an arid climate such as this one, grass was scarce. Grass in any amount was probably not something taken for granted. But in the presence of Jesus the grass grew in abundance. When it came to feeding the people, the disciples saw only scarcity. When it came to sitting down to eat, I imagine the folks gathered assumed that there would be a scarcity of grass as well. Even when that crowd wanted to force Jesus to be their king, it is easy to believe that they desired this because they saw food as a scarce resource in general. The people around Jesus, even the disciples, saw life through the eyes of scarcity. But Jesus gave life in abundance.

            Like the disciples, like those crowds, I see through scarcity’s lens; whether it is about my money, my time or my talents. I always believe there isn’t enough. But this story is about abundance, not scarcity. It is a real feeding of real people; however it is even more than that. It is a sign that points to abundance the people have yet to imagine.

            Are we able to imagine abundance? Are we able to conceive that God in Jesus is providing abundantly for us, not just as individuals, but as a congregation? Are we able to imagine God working abundantly in our life together? Or do we perceive only scarcity? Are we afraid there won’t be enough – whatever that enough entails? How does that fear drive us? How does that fear narrow our response to God’s call? I understand being afraid of all that lies ahead. I’m afraid too. But this is our moment to answer God’s call, not with fear but with faithfulness; not in anticipation of scarcity, but in expectation of abundance. This is our moment; this is our time, to see Jesus, to trust Jesus, to recognize that he is indeed the great I Am, and that the I Am is present in our midst. The abundance of God – God’s abundant love and grace – is right here with us. May our faith be abundant in return.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!” Amen.