Sermon from John 6:24-35
Good Morning! As
someone who has earned both his Master’s of Divinity and his Juris Doctorate, a
lot of people ask me what it’s like going from the legal profession to that of Christian
ministry. Well, for one thing I find I
can cross running water now, and the ability to cast a reflection really helps
when shaving. People wonder why I have
only half a beard… well to be honest it’s the half I still can’t see.
In at least half seriousness though, I sum up what it’s like
going from attorney to pastor as my Moses moments and my Rameses moments. I called being in the legal profession my
Rameses moments. Most people think it’s
because the Pharoah was the villain in the Exodus and that we like to think of
laywers as villains, but truth be told that isn’t really it. I call them my Rameses moments because I
would be at party, a social gathering, or just waiting in line for a burger and
someone would inevitably ask me that terrible question: “So, what do you do for
a living?” And I would answer them like
this, “I’ve graduated law school and I am trying to be an attorney.” And at that point these waves of people
looking for free legal advice would come crashing in almost drowning me with
thousands of inane selfish questions.
Now, however, I have what I call my Moses moments. People ask me what I do professionally and I
say, “Oh, I’m a preacher,” and it is as if the breath of God goes before me, driving
back the seas of people looking to avoid the religious person, and I can walk
to my destination unhindered as if on dry ground. What can I say, it’s handy if there’s a line
at McDonalds and I’m in a hurry.
It’s unfortunate, but as any parent of any child knows, offer
heavenly advice that pays dividends both in this world and the next and it goes
largely ignored, but offer earthly advice for earthly gain and people will
mortgage their houses and spend their children’s college money to get their
hands on it. I guess the logic must be
that since heavenly advice is given freely it must be worthless. Such is not only the world that we live in
today but it was also the expectation of the crowds in our gospel lesson for
today.
Our lesson begins where last week’s left off. Having performed the deeply Jewish miracle of
feeding the crowds in the wilderness with an unending supply of food, Jesus disappears up the mountain when the crowds saw
him merely as another human prophet and yet sought to make him king by
force. Jesus, however, did not stay on
the mountaintop but rushed to be with his disciples during the night as they
were caught in a sudden storm. The
crowds, already painted by the apostle John as quite thick-headed and
oblivious, set off to the nearest city
in order to look for him: Capernaum.
When they found him
on the other side of the lake they ask him, “Rabbi, when did you get
here?” Jesus, however, as he so often
does in John’s gospel, answers the crowds by not answering them, at least not
directly. He replies to their question
by going deeper, by answering not their words but addressing the very reasons
why they are there in first place. He
says, “Truly, I tell you are looking for me not because you saw the signs, but
because you ate and had your fill.” Now,
in John’s gospel, the word that he uses to describe Jesus’ miraculous actions
is not the word for a miraculous act, not “du-na-mis” but “say-my-on” literally the word “sign”, the
word used to describe the placard outside a merchant’s stall or the wooden boards outside of town telling
you what city it was. To John, Jesus’
miracles were not mere acts of power, they weren’t just interesting abilities or strange
supernatural events - they were signposts, acts that by their very nature
pointed the viewer to something greater, something heavenward. Jesus says to the crowds, you are not here
because you saw something that pointed you to the Father, you are not here
because God is even remotely that important
you, rather you are here because your bellies were filled in especially interesting
manner and that’s about it”. He tells
them “Do not work for food that spoils, but rather put your efforts into food
that endures unto eternal life. This
food the Son of Man will give you, for upon him has God the Father given his
seal.”
It is here that John leads us to believe that perhaps, at
least on the surface, that Jesus has finally broken through to them. “What must we do,” they ask, ”to do the work
that God requires?” While on the surface
it would seem that perhaps the crowds are finally reaching out in faith,
seeking honestly to live life the way God wants them to. The reality is this answer is incredibly
odd. For a Jew, steeped in the law and
prophets since their birth, for a Jew to ask anyone what the Hebrew God
required of his people is akin to a lawyer asking a judge when it would be okay
to object. It’s a very basic matter and the
fact that you are asking that question betrays what your priorities truly are. A lawyer who didn’t bother to read up on
basic trial procedure is one who doesn’t value his client or his
profession. Likewise a Jew who doesn’t
know how God wants them to live is a Jew who saw no value in either his God or
his people. It is an answer that betrays
the hearts of the speakers and foreshadows how this conversation with Jesus is
going to end.
Working with what he has, however, Jesus answers them in very
basic terms. “The work of God is this:
to believe in the one he has sent.” It’s
a very basic answer, one that is practically meant for children. The whole of the Jewish religion was based on
this precept, to be a Jew was to obey God’s messengers, to believe in the
people that God sent to them. That’s
what Prophets were, from Moses down to Malachi.
How do the crowds reply?
With something that is just mind-numbingly ridiculous. Like little children waiting for the great
Zambini to do another magic trick, and specifically after the miracle that
mimicked both Elisha and Moses, they ask, “what miraculous sign will you give,
that we might see it and believe you?
Our forefathers ate manna in the desert, as the scriptures say, “He gave
them bread from heaven to eat.” A people
who did not believe Jesus after his first miracle want another one? Are
miracles mimicking, no outdoing, your own Prophets so commonplace that you need
more to verify where this man comes from?
But still they want to see another miracle, going so far as to quote the
Hebrew Scriptures as their reasoning, except in fact that exact line is not
found in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a
hazy rememberence, something close enough in the fog of memory over an item of
only passing importance to them.
But Jesus does not quibble semantics, rather as he does
throughout John’s gospel he goes to the very heart of the problem. “You want a sign to prove that I am a
Prophet, believing it was Moses that somehow gave your forefather’s bread from
heaven. Moses does not give you bread
from heaven, my Father does. The true
bread from heaven is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the
world.”
Still not remotely getting it, the crowds respond, “Sir, from
now on give us this bread.”
Now, if you all are beginning to think that this is by far
the worst pastoral visit ever, you’re probably not that far from the
truth. What is amazing, here, is that
Jesus does not ever throw up his hands and give up on them. Rather, he takes the opportunity to once
again reveal who he really is. Using the
Divine Name reserved for Yahweh, he says, “I am the bread of life. Whosoever comes to me will never go hungry
and they that believe in me will never be thirsty again.” Unfortunately, however, as the scene
continues, the crowds despite being given another chance at faith don’t take
it. Indeed, as John’s account continues
it becomes extraordinarily evident that this group of people just never
will.
You see, ladies and gentlemen, to be among the faithful is to
argue with those who just will not get it.
There are people so mired in this world’s darkness that when the light
comes to them they reject it because they will not understand it…they will not
understand it because they will refuse to even try. Reading through our gospel lesson today, it
is clear that the crowds cannot see what Jesus is talking about. They cannot
see because they are so very occupied with what is worldly. Indeed, as Jesus tries to help them by
confronting the very motives the crowds have for seeking him; it seems the
crowds are just completely obsessed with getting Jesus to give them more
bread. “What sign will you do this time,
will you give us bread like Moses? How
about now, will you give us the true bread from heaven? We want this bread from now on!” Jesus was right about them, they didn’t come
to Jesus because they saw the signs, they didn’t come because their hearts yearned
for a relationship with the God who made them sustained them and redeems them, they
came because they ate their bread and had their fill and that’s about it. They came not to be fulfilled, but merely to
be filled full.
Such was the problem of the faithful in John’s day and such
is the problem with the supposed faithful in ours. In our day and age the Church seems
absolutely beset by problems that are a constant tangent, worldly issues that
tangle believers down and gets their priorities set on something other than
God. Turn on the television for even a second and
you’ll see many things, like Christians arguing with evolutionists - because
Scripture makes it clear that God cannot make adapting life. The LGBT and the homosexuality question still
rages hot - because Christ made it such a focus of his ministry. Angry hateful people on street corners shout
with picket signs - because picking 10 of your own favorite Bible verses to
memorize out of context is what makes us Christian.
But what are we to do about this? How are we at Eastside, a small community little
C church, supposed to address the problems of the Big C Church? I’ll tell you what we do. We remind the world that there was a reason
why Lutheran’s went into the business of church reform in the first place.
My apologies, but was it the Presbyterians or the
Pentecostals that nailed up those 95 theses?
Were the Baptists at the Diet of Worms in front of the Holy Roman
Emperor; or was it the Episcopalians protesting indulgences, the selling of
heavenly pardons for earthly coin. In my
opinion, I say it’s high time we remind these newbies how we kick it old
school!
We need to loudly and proudly remind our brethren just what
this business of the Reformation was really about because everybody seems to
have forgotten. The Great Reformation
was about Values, Community, and Conscience, not about getting caught up in
earthly tangents. It was about education,
in granting the public access to the very Scriptures that revealed who their
God is and in a language they could understand, it was not about warring with
the sciences. The Reformation was about
Christian community, about valuing everyone from lowly farmer to clergy as well
as the king. It was not about fighting
over which people to exclude from bathrooms.
Finally and most importantly, the Reformation was about putting Christ
back into center of the life of faith and allowing good men and women the
ability to follow their consciences without needless burden by the Church and
its earthly traditions.
At the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, if I know every
aspect of the fossil record and can without a doubt disprove evolution for all
time, but I have not Christ, what good is it?
If I come down with a signed document from God Himself, saying that he
agrees with the Westboro Baptists saying that homosexuals need to be stoned and
we should applaud when a one of them is bullied into suicide, but I have lost
the meek self-sacrificing rabbi in the wilderness, what good is it? Though I have memorized every verse in every
translation of Scripture and could quote it flawlessly in any language alive or
dead, but I miss the Savior, its central point, what good is it?
John’s Message needs to be our message, and that message is if
the point of our faith is an earthly agenda, something other Christ, whom John
calls the very Word of God, the true revealer of the Father, if our agenda is
anything other than him then it is folly. If our agenda is only proving other people
wrong, proving ourselves right, or simply picking out a good book to turn into
an idol, a book where we care about the words on the page but not one whit for
the spirit in which they were given, then we are the fools mired in the
darkness of our own worldly wants. In
whatever questions we ask and in whatever side that we take, Jesus must be at
its very core or our efforts will be worth nothing. Let us not be afraid to embrace our Lutheran
heritage, the rascal whose name we bear as our tradition, and let us not be
afraid to remind the world that it still needs us Lutherans to show these
Protestant upstarts how it’s done. Can I
get an Amen!?!
