Distributors or Roadblocks (Sermon)

John 6:35-59

Many of us have restricted diets. Jesus’ words about salt or bread bounce off us as we think about low sodium, paleo, gluten-free, heart-healthy, or the many different ways our diets are different from the diet of a first century Palestinian. However, for Jesus, his followers, and for most people around the world, bread is the stuff of life.

Separate bread in your mind from what it takes to make bread. Flour, salt, water, maybe yeast. What do you need to have those things? What’s required for flour? Wheat or some other grain. So you need stability to grow, tend, and harvest that. You need strength and maybe tools for the threshing and grinding.

Water needs to be clean. You need a well or a clean water source. You need a vessel to carry it in and a place for safe storage. Salt requires drying or discovery. You need time and space for this. It requires patience and expectation.

All of these are gifts that God gives us in Jesus- stability, growth, strength, community, safety, a body (for storage), patience, time, space. Let’s dwell on and in that understanding. The reality of bread is much, much more than the loaf in front of us. The gift of Jesus- God with us- is more than have either or physical or spiritual needs met. He is the embodiment of God’s desires and plans for you, for me, and for creation.

This is the point where my sermon derailed on Saturday night. I was thinking about God’s desires for us- the realities of being able to receive and eat the Bread of Life. Then I read the news about the conclusion to Michael Dunn’s trial for the murder of Jordan Davis. In November of 2012, Dunn asked an SUV full of teenagers at a gas station to turn down their music. When they refused and prepared to leave the station, Dunn fired at the SUV, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis.

At the conclusion of the trial yesterday, Dunn was convicted of several counts of attempted murder with regard to the other teens in the car. The jury ended up hung on the murder conviction for Jordan Davis. Do you think it matters in this case that Dunn is white and that Davis and the other teens were black? What would have been the outcome if a black man had fired into a car full of white teens for exactly the same reasons?

We live in a society, in 2014, where not all lives have equal value. Where people’s worth is judged based on their color, their race, their religious expression, their gender expression, their sexuality, their physical or mental abilities, their age and a variety of other factors. There are people in this congregation who regularly worry about their children or grandchildren, not in the way that we all do, but because of their color or other factors. We cannot pretend this doesn’t happen. We cannot pretend it doesn’t affect us. We cannot pretend that we can’t help.

We have said things- security, growth, strength, peace, community, bodies, safety, time, space- are God’s desires for creation as evidenced in Jesus as the bread of life. I assume we mean that they are God’s desires for all people, all people. Give us this day our daily bread is prayed by millions and millions of people. The inability to have bread- spiritual or physical- is not impaired by God’s willingness to distribute it. God has already shown that willingness by sending Jesus. The ability for all people to enjoy that bread- spiritually and physically- is impaired by how other people facilitate or get in the way of God’s distribution.

It matters greatly that the Bread of life is both a physical and a spiritual experience. It’s not just spiritual because there are real, concrete things our bodies must do as followers of Christ. It’s not just physical because there we have real, concrete spiritual needs that must be addressed and fed. If we have them, all people have them.

            We cannot listen to today’s reading, Jesus explaining about all who come to him being fed, and not feel some responsibility to respond and to help others respond. We cannot, we must not, listen to the news about the Dunn verdict and not feel any responsibility to respond and to help others respond. We cannot allow the forces that oppose God and God’s desires to make us believe that this problem is isolated to Florida or doesn’t have anything to do with our faith lives.

            If anyone, anyone, anywhere, anywhere, is afraid, is persecuted, is unable to imagine a better future, is isolated, is killed, then there are realities that are getting in the way of the Bread of Life. This happens in Anchorage. Schools have unequal resources. City communities receive unequal attention. Certain populations are profiled. Young adults do not believe they have valued potential.

            This goes beyond how we pray today. Either we are action takers, on a day to day basis, through the help of the Spirit, allowing our hands, our feet, our voices, our votes, our dollars, to be a way of distributing the Bread of Life. Or we aren’t. If we aren’t, then what are we doing? And who are we doing it for?

            In Jesus’ time, this teaching was scandalous, mainly because of what he says about blood. Jews did not eat blood. It was the life force of an animal. Therefore, it was forbidden. For Jesus to give instruction to drink his blood and eat his flesh, therefore to consume his life, this was disgusting and very off-putting to many, many people who heard him.

            It’s critical for us to hear those words today, though. If we understand that Jesus is present in our neighbors, the senseless killing of people around us- both actual killing and things that keep life from flourishing- we are witnessing the blood of Jesus being spilled, without life coming from it. We are witnessing the exact opposite of God’s desire and intention.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are the fruits of the Spirit. They grow from the nurturing of the Bread of Life. God’s plan for Jesus as the Bread of Life is to help creation enjoy peace, stability, growth, strength, time, space. As people who receive that Bread, physically and spiritually, we are called to be a part of how all people receive the Bread of Life. If you come to communion today, if you are praying today, if you are giving thanks for the forgiveness of sins today, you have entered into a covenant, a contract with God, in which you have agreed to respond and to be used for God’s purposes in the world.

Knowing that, believing that, will that change what you do? Today? This week?

            Stability, growth, strength, community, safety, a body (for storage), patience, time, space- required for bread, results of the Bread of Life. Bread that is intended for all people. We are definitely partakers for ourselves. When it comes to others, others like Jordan Davis, are we distributors or are we roadblocks?

Amen.

Why are you Eating? (Sermon 8/12)

1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

            My best friend and I are what you might call “eating friends”. She lives in Pennsylvania, but when we know we are going to get together- we immediately start making a list of restaurants in the area in which we will be. We make choices about which days to eat the big breakfast, lunch, OR dinner. We also have foods we both buy or bring, only on trips, because they are our vacation foods and because we enjoy eating them together. For us, the experience of eating together is a fun part of our relationship and our memories of things we have done together. (For the record, we do things other than eat. I think.)

            What are some of the reasons we eat? We eat for pleasure. We eat because it’s time. We eat because we’re hungry. Anyone who has worked at losing weight knows that it’s easy to fall into the trap of eating because you’re lonely, bored, or sad. We eat when we’re celebrating and when we’re grieving. But when it comes down to it, we eat to stay alive. We eat because without eating, we cannot function.

            So, we understand that while we often have many, sometimes overlapping reasons for eating, there is one basic reason why we eat- to stay alive. So here’s my follow-up question to that: why do we trust in Jesus? What are some of the reasons why we put our faith in Jesus, a Jewish man of two centuries ago, who some say was the Messiah of God?

            We may have faith in Jesus the Christ because of some experience- internal or external. We may trust in our tradition and the tradition of our families, a part of which is belief in Jesus. We may still be questioning in our hearts, but feel that Jesus is the best bet for an anchor in a rocky sea. We may be seeking our best life now and a great return for bread cast out upon the waters. Of all these reasons, when it comes down to it, why do we believe in Jesus?

            We want eternal life.

We want eternal life. We want to stay alive. We want heaven. We want the reunion with those who have gone before us. In a way that is beyond our imagination, we want the banquet and the rejoicing and the tree of life and city beyond imagination and the parade of nations and the drying of all tears and abounding joy. We eat to stay alive and, often, (more often than not) we look to Jesus as our ticket to doing the exact same thing. We treat the bread of life like a ticket to heaven. We look at the table as a foretaste of the feast to come and, when it doesn’t turn to ashes in our mouths, we see it as insurance and assurance that we will be at that feast.

            But the life of faith is so much more than that. More importantly, Jesus is so much more than a ticket to ride or insurance toward immortality. In today’s readings, God’s story unfolds to help us understand that bread of heaven (and bread from heaven) is for the life of the world, eternally. Which is wholly different than being for eternal life.

            When Elijah is fleeing from Jezebel (the actions preceding today’s excerpt), he travels to the end of the known world and then goes one more day- just to be on the safe side. He’s ready to die. He wants to die. God sends a messenger to Elijah, bringing him food and telling him to eat. Why does Elijah  need to eat? Because his work is not done. He has to eat for life- his own life and for the life of God’s word in the world. As a prophet, his work of speaking truth, of revealing God’s power, of bringing hope to God’s people is not yet over. Thus he receives bread for the journey because it is not time for him to die. Elijah receives bread from heaven, the bread of life, for his life here on earth (and for the other lives whom he encounters as well).

            When the crowds gather around Jesus, they grumble about what he has to say- even though he’s fed them, healed them, and generally amazed them. Still, they know his people, they’ve seen his followers, they know he sleeps and has physical needs. What’s this about heaven? Yet, he tells them the One who has come from God is the bread of life. The bread of life comes for the life of the world. Jesus explains that the bread of life feeds us for eternal life and for life right now.

            Like the crowds, we do not always like that “life right now” part. What does that look like? The writer of Ephesians says it is a life of uplifting speech (no slander, no backbiting), a life of kindness and gentleness, a life of forgiveness and imitation of Christ. Would this be the same Christ who gave up his life for the sake of the world? Are we supposed to imitate that Christ?

            That’s where our experience of Jesus gets tough- where we’d rather think about eternal life, than what’s happening right here and now. When the imitation of Christ means loving our enemies, not the ones far way, but the ones next to us, the ones who we see in the grocery store, at the family reunion, at the communion rail… When the imitation of Christ means trying something new and uncertain… When the imitation of Christ means admitting that you’re not, that we’re not in control… When the imitation of Christ means living by faith, and faith alone… all of that makes the bread of life seem a little dry and to catch in our throats.

            Eternal life, whatever it is like, will be fantastic. But we are here now. The bread of life… the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we experience in communion, in Word, and in community… this bread of life is food for this journey, nourishment so that we can live, sustenance so that we can live right now, provisions so that we can live right now for the sake of the world. Fuel for the imitation of Christ.

            Our faith is not a retirement plan. It is not a moral system that we use for guidance on occasion. We have been given the gift of faith, so that the world might know the joy of salvation, the salvation that has come through Jesus the Christ. We have been baptized into God’s history for the life of the world, the life of the world right now. We are fed- as a community and as individuals- in communion and in prayer- through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are fed so that we can stay alive. Alive in faith. Alive in Christ. Alive to do the work to which we have been called and to which we are being led.

            We are eating friends, food friends, bread sharers. Being fed from heaven right now- for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the world.

Amen.