Sermon for Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost – August 9th, 2015
Text: John 6:35, 41-51
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.
41 The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46 Not that any one has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
Just over a month ago, we heard the story about Jesus’ homecoming. The reaction of the people was very much less than enthusiastic – in fact, it was contemptuous, almost hostile, even. It was so bad that Mark tells us that Jesus could do very little there.
Today, John picks up the same theme on the shores of the Sea of Tiberias. The start of today’s lesson is the verse that ended last week’s – “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”
This statement, this bold, unambiguous assertion that he – Jesus – truly is God certainly makes an impact! But, as hard as it is for us to believe, it wasn’t exactly the impact we would expect.
There must have been some people from Nazareth there that day, because, just as Mark reports, they begin to murmur among themselves, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of that carpenter, Joseph? Don’t we know his father and mother? Where does he get the gall to tell us, of all people, that he ‘came down from heaven’?”
These folks had what you might call “a vision problem.”
The pages of history are strewn with the wreckage of decisions made by people who thought they knew for certain what some other person, or group, or nation was like; people who thought they knew with absolute certainty what the laws of nature dictated.
The parents of a young boy sat before the desk of the doctor they had consulted about their son. They were at their wit’s end – the boy was now four years old, and had yet to utter one single word! In most other respects, he seemed “normal,” but he simply would not communicate, and his parents, fearing the worst, tightly gripped each other’s hands as the doctor gave them his diagnosis. “Your son,” he said with sadness, “will probably have to be institutionalized.” Crushed and heartsick, they collected their son from another room, took him home, and began to prepare for what they knew they had to do…
…But then, after a time, their son did begin to talk! And he never stopped! And not just “talking,” but expressing himself in full, complete sentences, showing that he had a total grasp of language and human interaction. That boy went on to astound, not just his parents, but the entire world. In fact, our world today would simply not exist were it not for his breakthrough discoveries.
The boy’s name: Albert Einstein.
There was something very wrong with Charles. His family was worried sick about him. After several of his businesses failed, he’d become really ill with that form of chronic indigestion called dyspepsia, which severely weakened him physically. And now his family had begun to fear for his sanity, too. Some months ago, he’d become obsessed with something called “gum elastic,” and he’d ordered pot after pot of the stuff, which he’d then take into the back room of their hardware store and – well, they weren’t quite sure what he did with it, but whatever it was, it stank! He’d disappear for hours, completely ignoring the increasingly few customers who entered their shop. They really began to wonder what they were going to do with the poor man.
One day, Charles left a pot of gum elastic on the stove in that back room, and forgot about it. He was only reminded of his “experiment,” if that’s what it was, when smoke began to fill the building! He rushed back into the room, managed to remove the smoking pot from the stove, and doused it with water. After the smoke had cleared, Charles peered into the pot and saw a thick, solid, scorched-black mass of … something … stuck to the bottom. When he pried it out, he discovered that it was surprisingly light, strong, and flexible. He let out a shriek – not one of despair, but one of joy! Because there in the bottom of that pot was what he’d been trying to create all along – it’s something every one of us uses every day.
The man’s name: Charles Goodyear. The product: Vulcanized rubber, the basis for every tire rolling on the roads and runways and sidewalks of the world today.
T.E. Lawrence, better known to the world as “Lawrence of Arabia,” was a close personal friend of Thomas Hardy, the poet and novelist. Back when Lawrence was in the Royal Air Force, serving as an “aircraftman,” which is the lowest rank in that service, he would sometimes visit Hardy and his wife. One day, when he was visiting them, he happened to be in his uniform, his visit coincided with the visit a woman who was the current Mayoress of Dorchester. This woman was bitterly offended that she had to rub shoulders with a mere aircraftman! In French, she said to Hardy’s wife that, never in all her born days had she been obliged to have tea with a mere soldier. For a moment, no one said anything; and then Lawrence replied – in perfect French – “I beg your pardon, Madame, but can I be of any use as an interpreter? Mrs Hardy knows no French.”[1] Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of that room! A snobbish woman had made a massive mistake by judging on externals.
This is exactly what the doctor who misdiagnosed Einstein, the people who misjudged Charles Goodyear, and the people standing around that day muttering about Jesus were doing.
One of the books on software development I used to have was from Microsoft Press, with the title Debugging the Software Process. The one thing I remember from this book is this bit of sage advice from the author: “Don’t flip the Bozo Bit.” The author explains that even people we don’t respect, people we don’t like, people whose skills we question – people he collectively calls “bozos” – can still teach us something valuable. But if we “flip the bozo bit” on them – if we, in other words, simply ignore or dismiss out of hand anything they tell us, simply because we don’t like them, the messengers, we miss out on untold opportunities to learn and grow.
Those “townies” from Nazareth made the grave mistake of flipping the bozo bit on Jesus, and denied themselves a chance at, not only a better and more complete life in the here and now, but far worse, they rejected eternal life.
Instead, they argued with Jesus. They argued with each other. All of us, at one time or another, are so bound and determined to be right that it doesn’t even occur to us to listen. These people were so taken up with their own private arguments that it never occurred to them to refer the decision to God. They wanted everyone to know what they thought, but they were not in the least anxious to know what God thought.
Today, too, there are many parts of the Body of Christ around the world who want to be the brain, instead of a hand, or an ear, or an eye, or a foot. They’d rather do the thinking, the directing, and the managing.
But this goes deeper than just an attitude. Those folks standing there on that lakeshore were some of the luckiest people ever born, because they were physically in the presence of God; but they resisted being drawn to God.
Make no mistake – there’s nothing automatic about being faithful. People have choices; we have choices. We have the choice to accept that tug, that pull, of God toward him. Or we can reject it.
If we fall into the thinking of those people in the crowd, we flip the bozo bit. We resist God’s pull and reject Jesus.
So let’s try something that’s a lot harder than flipping the bozo bit – let’s suspend our normal ways of thinking and allow ourselves to really be drawn by God toward him who alone can save us.
Let’s open our hearts wide to allow the flame of the Spirit to burn more brightly within us – that, friends, is a kind of heartburn we need more of! Let’s open our ears to hear the Voice of Jesus calling us “o’er the tumult” of our daily existence.
Jesus is the Bread. Jesus offers us life abundant. Jesus is God, who has come to nourish us, to sustain us, to make us grow. With apologies to the makers of Coca-Cola, Jesus is the real “Real Thing.”
Let us not worry about how people perceive us when it comes to our faith. Let us not compromise. Let us instead grab hold of that Bread of Life, and let it enrich us and empower us so we can help usher in the Reign of God!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Quoted in Barclay, William, The Gospel of John, The New Daily Study Bible Series, Volume 1, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001