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August 11, 2024

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 78:23-29
John 6:22-35

Sermon Text:

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

When it comes to matters of faith, an understanding of what we seek and who we seek has developed over the centuries. In his Confessions, St Augustine (354-430) wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” In other words, our souls seek our creator and we’ll never be truly content unless we seek God out.

As human beings, we don’t always do that well. We seek other ways to try and calm that restlessness but they never quite work. And so we keep searching.

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is credited with the idea that we each have a “God-shaped vacuum” within ourselves that only the Divine can fill. Pascal described our attempts to fill that space with other things as having “disordered desires.”

In whatever way we describe it, each of us has a deep hunger and thirst for the divine, a tangible longing for nourishment that no amount of power or money, or job satisfaction, or dream home in your ideal neighborhood can satisfy.

It’s a soul-level hunger that nothing we ourselves as humans do or produce will ever be able to satiate. Only God, only Jesus, can do that.

 In John’s gospel, the way Jesus describes his ability to meet this need within us is through a series of “I Am” statements – declarations that reveal who he is. The one we’re spending time with these next few weeks is “I am the bread of life.”

 What these statements all come down to is that the real presence of Jesus nourishes our deepest needs like nothing else can – and no one else can.

[1]And by calling himself the “bread of life” in this first statement, Jesus identifies with basic food, actual sustenance needed for life. The basic food that is present in some form in every culture in the world. As one scholar puts it, not every culture has caviar or crème brûlée or pick your specialty dish, but they do have bread. So, to speak of God as bread is to speak of God’s most fundamental provision for us.

 And this brings up all sorts of questions: Are we hungry? If so, what are we hungry for? If not, what has made us full? What kinds of bread do we substitute for Jesus? Do we feel in our gut that Jesus is fundamental provision? Not an appetizer or dessert or an occasional supplement. But essential, everyday food without which we will starve and die?

 The people in the crowd who searched for Jesus after they’d been fed by the miracle of the loaves and fishes were hungry for literal bread: they were poor and food was scarce. They needed to feed themselves and their families.

So, for them, asking Jesus for more bread wasn’t only about meeting that need, it was also about security and safety and provision and protection. They were living with the fear of not having those needs met. And Jesus recognized that. There was nothing wrong or unspiritual about their need and hunger for those things.

But in that miracle, Jesus had revealed who he really was – that he could hold them steady in their fear, that he could calm their hearts and fill that space within them. So, he asked the crowd to search beyond their physical hunger to what they were hungry for in their soul – hunger that only the “bread of life” can satisfy.

To recognize him as the one who could nourish them at that deep level. And to trust that he would do it.

But the idea of that was so radically new that they couldn’t quite get there. And there are times when it’s hard for us to make that connection, too.

 Because as we think about all this today, it’s one thing to name our deep soul hunger for ourselves. But it’s another to trust Jesus with it, and to trust that he will satisfy it. Because that trust is built on relationship.

We’re really good at finding substitutes for relationship with God – being a workaholic, doomscrolling social media, bingeing the latest series on your favorite platform, eating too much chocolate, eating too much actual bread. You get the idea.

The problem with all of these things is that they’re temporary can’t sustain us for the long term. And God’s will for us is ongoing life. And in relationship with Jesus, we receive the bread that gives us ongoing – enduring – life.

So, what we have to ask ourselves is do we trust that Jesus is our bread? Our essential, fundamental sustenance? And a lot of times, the answer is, “No.” A lot of times, Jesus is an abstraction. Like a creed. A set of rituals that we complete on Sundays.

And that can be for any reason. Maybe it’s because we don’t come to him ravenous. Maybe we don’t recognize our daily, and even hourly, dependence on his generosity. Maybe we just don’t expect to be fed by him.

But those expectations are reshaped when we receive the bread of life. Because when we do, we discover that Jesus feeds us on a soul level.

Every hour of every day, he tends the hunger that we ourselves seek to satiate but can’t. Because it’s the hunger that’s only satisfied through our relationship with Jesus. That’s what gives us life that endures. Life that endures now, not just in the life to come.

Most tangibly, we receive this life in Communion. In every bite of bread and sip of wine or grape juice, we take in the presence of Jesus – the bread of life. And it feeds us on an essential level – that place in our soul where we need it.

And because it comes from Jesus, it goes with us and empowers us to share it with others who are then also nourished by the life it gives.

The bread of life we receive is shared in the quilts and care kits we send to LWR, the prayer shawls at the foot of people’s beds or around their shoulders. It’s shared in the prayers we pray for one another and when we check in on each other.

In all of this nourishment, the bread of life that is Jesus shapes our expectations of the world and reveals the true needs of others and ourselves. It helps us become the people, the community, that we need each other to be.

It calms our restless heart. It deepens our relationship with him and fills that God-shaped space within us.

It won’t make the distractions of our world go away. But it helps us remember that, though the distractions are real, they are temporary and they don’t give the enduring life that God wills for us.

That life comes from Jesus, the bread that nourishes our soul and endures always. Thanks be to God! Amen.

[1] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3086-deep-hungers