John 6:37-51

Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down 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.” Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Ever loving God, Your Son Jesus Christ

gave himself as living bread for the life of the world;

give us such a knowledge of his presence

that we may be strengthened and sustained by his risen life

to serve you continually;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

(from the New Zealand prayer book)

Today’s Gospel lesson is a continuation from last Sunday’s reading.  We hear Jesus proclaim that he is the living bread come down from heaven.  This is a radical statement. The gathered crowd was only beginning to understand that Jesus was taking them way beyond the issue of physical bread to a claim of being able to impart life.  As the bread in the wilderness sustained their ancestors in a physical way, so now a young man whom many of them had watched grow up was claiming that he could give them bread that would impart everlasting life.  It is very tempting to immediately link this Gospel with the story of the last supper and our Eucharist.  It is almost too familiar for us and does not contain the shock factor that it would have to the hearers. 

One of the books I am reading this summer is “Confronted by God.  The essential Verna Dozier” Verna Dozier is a powerful prophetic voice in our church.  She is a strong advocate of the ministry of the laity and of a school of bible study that looks at putting the whole story into context.  When she does examine a passage she invites us to ask three simple questions.  “What do we hear the passage saying?  Why do we believe that this passage was preserved?  What meaning does the passage hold for us today and what is it calling us to do?  In Confronted by God Verna writes;

” Here is another reality to remember: my belief that I am fully accepted, through unacceptable, is a faith statement.  I can never prove it.  It may not be true.  The whole biblical myth could just be a delusion.  A risk is involved.  But what the Christian community at its best is doing is living as if that myth were true.  We are not going to find any validation of that myth in the world around us because the world marches to another drummer.  We talk about God only in terms of our experiences, because we are marching to a drummer that says our experiences are only a part of reality, not the whole of it.  And our interpretation of our experiences is always skewed and distorted by self-hatred and pride. ‘

 

Ultimately I believe that what Jesus offers us is the great commandment to Love God and Love one another. Jesus did not offer rules on how to live every hour of our lives.  He offered us a yardstick against which to measure the actions that we take every hour of the day.  That is the yardstick of love.   It is the later church, the institution that created many of the rules we know and love today.  Verna Dozier says that we need to regularly break open the institutions and see what is inside and ask ourselves if it make sense.  There are prophets out there today, in our own church, challenging the rules, just as Jesus challenged the rules in his day.  Do the challengers have the answers?  I don’t know.  I believe they are walking by faith and are willing to challenge the institutional church with their view of reality and what God is calling us to do today.  That is what faith is about.  It is about asking the questions and realizing that we won’t have all of the answers.

Verna Dozier says “Being made right is not the church’s work.  That is God’s work, and that work is done.  The work of salvation is finished.  The unfinished part, the part that is our is to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, in a world threatened by nuclear extinction, ravished by greed that secures the very rich at the expense of multitudes of the very poor, seething with age-old racial and religions hatreds.

This is the world we are called to turn upside down.  In many ways it is very much like the world into which the incarnate Lord came, and in many ways it is different.  The major difference today is that “Christianity” is a powerful establishment.  Religious establishments all act alike; they all arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to speak for God.  Laypeople must take upon themselves the awful burden of yielding the right to no one. Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Jesus, in our Gospel reading, is asking the people to walk by faith.  To accept that they are accepted.  Accept that their reality is not the only reality.  They, and, as I see it, we, will never know all of God’s reality.  We are told that if we accept the risk of not having everything tied down into a nice contained reality that we will be sustained. WE too are being asked to go out into the world and help draw people to God.  It will not be easy for us.  I do not have all of the answers that people want to hear.  I can’t offer a small, concrete and unequivocal reality.  Every time I think I have reality pinned down I find this little tugging at my sleeve.  That tugging is frequently the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit has this habit of saying “You think you have everything figured out?  Well, did you think to look over there?  That reality is different!” That is what we are doing now at

St. Paul

’s with shared ministry.  We are challenging the rules of reality.  We are challenging the notion ofwhat it means to be the church on this corner of 15th and J streets.  We are trying to listen to what God is calling us to do in this place.  I also believe that just about the time we have everything pinned down we will probably feel a little tug on our collective sleeves and hear that little voice asking “Did you think to look over there?”