MANNA, STEAK, OR FREEZE-DRIED?

(Preached August 3, 2003)

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.”                       -John 6:32-33

 

It’s great to be home, but I had a marvelous time away.

It was a time filled with a great variety of experiences and adventures.

There was the General Synod meeting in Minneapolis; a time filled with people (over 2,000 present), with meetings, with speeches, with meals, with worship. 

There was the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness; a time filled with the hard work of paddling a canoe, portaging over rocky terrain, focused on the immediate requirements for survival (food, shelter, protection, etc.) all the while surrounded by breathtaking scenery, leading me to marvel yet again at this God of love who not only creates a functional world to abundantly support human life, but who also makes that world incredibly beautiful. 

There was Chicago; a time filled with museums and shopping, with the wonders of a big city, with time spent with family and with wonderful meals.

 

While there are many ways to describe and highlight my time away, perhaps one of the best ways to do so is through

the food consumed.

 

Minneapolis was a site for communal meals with the entire General Synod, with the Open and Affirming folk, with the Florida Conference Delegation. 

I will also remember it for its abundance of coffee shops and for the one shop in particular that I made my own. 

The wilderness time will be remembered by Rebekah and Paul partly for the freeze-dried food, which to their amazement was actually pretty good food and very filling, not at all what they expected. 

And all of us will remember Chicago for the delicious meals — so good we ate way too much — marvelous steaks, grilled ribs and chicken, zesty barbeque.

 

Yes, food is a glorious, beautiful, delightful aspect of God’s good creation. 

Yet food is also a functional part of that creation.

Food is necessary for life, not just for pleasure.

And whether pursuing it for sustaining life or pleasuring life, we human beings can become obsessed with it. 

In the wilderness so much of what we did revolved around food, for without the conveniences of modern life, preparing a meal takes significant planning. 

We had to find fuel, secure good water, build and nurture a fire, plan and prepare the meal, eat, clean-up, hang the remaining food from a tree to protect it from bears, etc.  One and half of the packs we carried into the woods were

 

devoted to our food and food preparation equipment.

Even in Chicago, some of our most significant decisions each day involved where would we eat and when.

 

And so, it is not surprising that Jesus uses the people’s obsession with food to teach us about what is truly important in life.

The crowd with which Jesus is talking, had witnessed Jesus feed over 5,000 people with just 5 loaves and 2 fish. 

For people who lived from harvest to harvest and who knew what it was to suffer from drought and therefore go hungry, this was an amazingly powerful experience.

For these people, the gathering of food is deadly serious business; it occupies most of their daily hours.  They do not know refrigeration, or Tupperware, or Ziploc bags. 

In their culture most food must be eaten right away or it perishes, it goes bad.  For Jesus to tell them not to work for the food that perishes (which is most every food) but of the food that endures for eternal life, sounds both crazy and wonderful at the same time. 

It is no wonder they ask immediately “What must we do to perform this work?  What must we do to get this food?”

 

Then the real surprise comes. 

They don’t have to do anything!

God’s gift of bread which never fails, which is always there, which lasts forever, is waiting for them. 

 

They only have to believe in Jesus.

 

This call to believe is not a simple one. 

In the Gospel of John, believing in God means hearing what God is saying, learning from Jesus, and seeing in Jesus God’s most important word to us. 

Believing means being drawn to Jesus and submitting to all that he is and does.

 

A clear, neatly defined list of “do’s” and “don’ts” from Jesus would have been much easier to fulfill. 

A list with things like: Number 1, Give “X” number of dollars to the synagogue; Number 2, Attend the synagogue every Sabbath; Number 3, Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain....You get the idea. 

With a list like this you could check things off like you do on a grocery list as you put the items in your shopping cart.

Then, when the list is complete, you are done!

 

But believing in Jesus isn’t that simple.

It isn’t that simple because belief involves all of you: what you say and do; how you spend your money, your time, and creative energy; what you make sacrifices for; and what you love and treasure.

Trust in Jesus can’t be measured by a checklist, because trust is a relationship. 

Relationships grow and change, and they are never done.

 

The crowd that day wanted a simple transaction: “We’ll do X, Y, and Z and then, Jesus, you give us more bread and fish in return.”

Jesus tells them and us that what God desires above everything else is a relationship with us. 

God calls us to listen, learn, and let God shape our lives according to God’s way of doing things.

 

What Jesus is describing is faith.

Faith is not attained, contained, or maintained.

It is not a body of beliefs held to unswervingly.

It is, rather, a response to and the embrace of what is unbelievable; it is a willingness to live in relationship to the Mystery that is beyond our comprehension but which comprehends us.

For true faith involves the embrace not of beliefs, but of the living God — it is a relationship of radical trust.

 

What the crowd wants is what we so often want — they want Jesus to make their lives better, on their terms and in their categories.

We do the same thing when we assume that God’s role is make the life that we have designed and planned work out smoothly.  “O God,” we say, “I have these plans.  Make them work.”

Jesus is not a short-order cook preparing food to suit our whims.

 

Jesus is the Bread of Life, the food that endures for eternal life, and he comes as gift from God.

 

It was the same way in the wilderness for Moses and the Israelites.

They were hungry and they complained that Moses had taken them away from the fleshpots of Egypt, where, even though they were slaves, they had food to eat, and brought them out to a desolate place to die.  They had already witnessed the mighty acts of God in saving them from Pharaoh’s army, yet they did not have faith, they did not believe, they did not trust. 

Nevertheless, as Psalm 78 recounts, “...they had no faith in God, and did not trust his saving power.  Yet he commanded the skies above, and opened the doors of heaven; he rained down on them manna to eat, and gave them the grain of heaven.”

That is why Jesus reminds the crowd that it was not Moses who gave them bread from heaven, but God. 

It is always God who cares for us, nourishes us, takes care of us and sustains us.

That is why the central act, the central symbol, for our faith is gathering around this table to share this bread. 

This Communion reminds us each time we share in it that it is God who is the source of our nourishment; it is God who sustains our lives; it is God who feeds us. 

Each time we eat this bread we are reminded that it is God

 

who dwells within us and because of that truth we know that we can trust God and can live life as Jesus lived life -- full of compassion, forgiveness, inclusivity, justice, etc. 

Not because it is commanded of us or because God wants us to live this way but because we are the enfleshment of God who is this way. 

It has been said that we are as prone to love as the sun is to shine.

 

None of this means that things will always work out as we think they should work out. 

In many respects life right now for many of us feels like we are in the wilderness. 

At the national level, the United Church of Christ is experiencing tremendous financial struggles — the budgets approved for the next 2 years were approximately 2 million dollars less per year than the past two years, a 15% drop — primarily because OCWM giving to national has been declining.

One of the measures considered to deal with this crisis was to move General Synod to an every 4 year schedule instead of every 2 years.

That action was not taken by this Synod and one of the actions that was taken was a spontaneous outpouring of support by the delegates and visitors present as delegation after delegation passed the hat and made designated OCWM gifts to help pay for the next General Synod.

 

We are facing our own financial struggles here as we end one budget year and plan for the next. 

Our giving as a congregation is not meeting what we promised to give last summer when we made our Estimates of Giving for the 2002-2003 budget. 

Due to increases in other revenues and prudent fiscal management of expenses we may just squeak in without going deeper in debt.

But the Estimates of Giving for our next budget are way down and we are currently looking at possibly needing to cut $27,000 from next year’s budget. 

That will be difficult to do, as our budget is primarily spent on fixed building and ground expenses or on staff.

We might have to consider some staff cuts.

Unless we can find more income.

 

I believe this is a test for our faith.

For while there are lots of risks in the future, there is certainty, too.  The certainty rests in Jesus’ words.99

God will bless all our faithful risks, our faithful sacrifices, and our honest work in Jesus’ behalf.

Our passage closes with these words of promise: “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.’”

Let us hold fast to this promise, to our trust in the living God, and risk the future on God’s behalf.