Sermon: Give Us This Bread Always
Texts: Deuteronomy 8:1-3, John 6:24-35
Date: November 8, 2009
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
How long does it take after you’ve enjoyed a meal before you’re hungry again? I know it depends on the meal, what you’ve eaten, how large the portions were, and so forth. For me it’s usually around four hours. I eat breakfast, and four hours later, give or take, I am quite ready to eat again. Hungry.
The crowd who is chasing Jesus across the lake like a gang Hollywood paparazzi was hungry. The day before, Jesus had fed them all from the lunchbox of a little boy whose mother had packed him five loaves and two fishes. You know that story. Five thousand eat from this meager but blessed beginning and there is such abundance that there are twelve baskets of leftovers.
Some of the crowd might have been able to stuff some leftovers in their pockets, but they were definitely hungry again by the time they caught up with Jesus again on the other side of the lake. It had been at least twenty-four hours since the loaves and fishes luncheon. Jesus had withdrawn from the crowd the day before, but he seemed willing enough to be found by them again. They launch a little small talk but Jesus is ready for Big Talk.
Jesus is rather direct with them. “You are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” He could see that they were hungry again, hungry still. Do you suppose that these folks thought that if they could just keep Jesus in their sights, they would never have to struggle for food again? He would just do that thing he did, and voila! Luncheon is served! If he could do it on Tuesday, why not also on Wednesday? They were hungry. And hopeful.
And I’m sure there were also some there who just wanted to see a miracle again. One of the commentaries I read on this crowd suggested they wanted to see a sign, but not necessarily in order to understand the meaning behind it. They simply wanted to see the miracle again, only slower. Like I might have wanted to see the magician I saw perform last spring make the bowling ball come out of the magic hat that had clearly been empty just a moment before once more—“Do it again, but slower this time.” Jesus was a curiosity to some in that chasing crowd. They were hungry, too. Hungry for a spectacle.
Jesus is no performing seal. He doesn’t do magic tricks on demand. The point of any of his signs, especially in John’s gospel, is not to astound an audience but to spark a dialogue. What he wants to talk about is not rye bread and sardines but the “food that endures for eternal life,” the “true bread from heaven.” He wants to get at the crowd’s other hunger, the underlying hunger that will endure through countless meals. The craving of their souls. The provision of bread at the lakeshore was a lure cast out at the end of a filament of grace. Jesus now wants to feed the people’s souls as well as their stomachs.
I doubt he would have regarded their physical hunger as somehow unimportant. The mission he proclaimed for himself in Luke’s gospel had to do with bringing good news to the poor. The sheep and goats parable in Matthew was crystal clear about the true disciples being those who gave food to the hungry and gave something to drink to the thirsty. Jesus would be the last one to say that the hungry poor are not his problem. It’s just that he has something to offer that feeds another kind of hunger as well. As the crowd gathers around in today’s scene, Jesus is trying to get people in touch with their soul hunger, which may be underground, unconscious.
Soul hunger can be disguised more easily than acute physical hunger. John Jewell wrote about meeting a youngster once whose hunger couldn’t be concealed. In his words, “Some years ago, I was riding with a sheriff's deputy who was a member of our church. He was called to an apartment building to investigate possible domestic violence. When we arrived at the apartment, there was a young woman and a small child about 18 months old. The woman (actually just a girl about 17 or 18 years old) said her boyfriend had been yelling at her during an argument and the neighbors had called the police. The place was filthy and smelled. The little girl wore diapers which had obviously been soiled for some time. She followed us around the apartment crying and clutching an empty, dirty bottle. The apartment was almost empty. There was an old couch in the living room, a mattress on the floor in the tiny bedroom. Cushions on the floor were likely the girl's bed. My friend went to the refrigerator and there was a single small jar of mustard and a plastic bread bag with two or three moldy pieces of bread. That was it. There was no other food or drink in the place. The deputy called human services and the child was taken to a foster home that night. My friend said to me the next day, ‘The poor thing was starved. The child welfare worker told me she ate for half the night!’” It’s a wrenching story, isn’t it?
As the crowd flocked around Jesus, clamoring for bread and miracles, I wonder if he didn’t look at them with the eyes of the heart and see into their souls, see an assembly of little ones like this baby, grimy and needful, clutching at an empty vessel of whatever had last given them comfort?
I wonder if that’s what the souls of any of us looks like? Or any of the people we know? We don’t have the kind of spiritual insight Jesus did, so it’s hard to know. But I think it would be safe to say that people in our corner of the world do show signs of spiritual hunger. It may well be masquerading as physical hunger. I was captivated a few weeks ago by a quotation in Harper’s Magazine by a French author who has recently published a kind of encyclopedia in which tries to explain the world through a series of lists. The lists are the author’s impressions of the qualities of various parts of the world. Here’s one of his paragraphs about Americans:
“They are a people without balconies. Yet they cannot help interfering in other people’s business, according to the Protestant custom. And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS. It is a country fascinated by lust.” [1]
So that’s interesting, probably true enough. But what really got my attention was this observation: “They eat all the time. What anguish must be theirs!” (Of course I am munching away on candy the whole time I was writing this into the sermon, as is my habit when I write.)
We might suspect that a country plagued with obesity as ours is just might be covering up another kind of hunger. We do seem rather insatiable as a people—eating, drinking, constantly seeking out entertainment and thrills. Almost as if we had morphed into a country of Augustus Gloops. Do you remember the Augustus Gloop character in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? In the children’s novel, when he is the first to win the Golden Ticket to get into the factory, his mother says to the press, “I just knew Augustus would find a Golden Ticket. He eats so many candy bars a day that it was almost impossible for him not to find one. Eating is his hobby, you know. That’s all he’s interested in. But still, that’s better than being a hooligan and shooting off zip guns and things like that in his spare time, isn’t it? And what I always say is, he wouldn’t go on eating like he does unless he needed nourishment, would he? It’s all vitamins, anyway…” [2] In the more recent movie version, Augustus is seen leaving the chocolate factory covered in chocolate because in his greediness he fell into Willie Wonka’s chocolate river. His mother says to him, “Augustus, please don’t eat your fingers.” Augustus, eagerly licking his fingers, replies, “But I taste so good!”
Even though Augustus was a German character, there is something that is just so comically and tragically American about his Gloop-ness. Eating, drinking, slurping up information and entertainment is kind of a hobby. Insatiability can lead so far that one might in essence, consume oneself in acts of obsessive self-indulgence. One thing Augustus’ mother said that was absolutely true was, “he wouldn’t go on eating like he does unless he needed nourishment, would he?” We need nourishment. We need it for our bodies, and we also need it for our souls. Our habits or lifestyles may project the image of Augustus Gloop but buried deep within that inflated being there may well be a malnourished, wailing babe following anyone who looks like they might be a source of help.
It is to those hungry souls, fragile and tender, that Jesus speaks. Back at the Sea of Galilee, he has connected with the crowd. He has spoken of the bread from heaven which gives life to the world, and they are intrigued. They have put lunch on the back burner, and they plead with Jesus, “Sir, give us this bread always.” They are hungry. And hopeful. And Jesus says to them… “I am the bread of life.”
The crowd sort of fades away at this point in chapter 6. Jesus keeps teaching, and at the end of his discourse, the crowd has disappeared. I find that a bit disappointing, because I want them to speak for me again. They have spoken for me when they went looking for Jesus, not sure what they were hungry for. They spoke for me when they voiced their deep desire that Jesus would give them the true bread of heaven always. Now on the other side of Jesus’ beautiful and enigmatic declaration that he is the Bread of Life, I want them to be there to say on my behalf, “Ummmmm…what’s that again?” And, “That’s lovely, am I supposed to eat you now?” I don’t think it’s altogether obvious how the hungry soul and the Bread of Life are supposed to get together.
A person can learn about Jesus, but that’s not quite the same thing as partaking of the Bread of Life. Merely learning about Jesus is like smelling the aroma of the bread or studying the recipe. It might entice you but it’s not the same as taking it in. Edward Hays has written a little riff on Jesus’ encounter with someone who has called him Teacher. When Jesus insists he is not a teacher, the man who has addressed him thus says, “If you are not a teacher, what are you?” Jesus grins and points at his own chest. “I am the lesson! Learn me, learn me by heart.” [3] He goes on to say, “Teachers only teach, but lessons lived are difficult to forget! My disciples are not to be students who memorize my every word. I call you as disciples to be lovers, not parrots. I am the map, you could say. If you are not on a journey, then you don’t need the map.” These metaphors help me understand how the Bread of Life feeds the hungry heart.
I think this is what Jesus was trying to say: If you want the bread of life, if you are hungry for it, you try to live the Jesus life. Learn Jesus by heart. You try to love as extravagantly as Jesus did. Forgive as he did. Act like you are good news to the poor and recovery of sight to the blind and liberation for the oppressed. Host an open table. Inspire generosity. Live in community, and withdraw from time to time to pray. Absorb the ancient scriptures and apply them imaginatively to new times. Befriend the weirdoes and outcasts. Speak truth to power. Demonstrate. Bless the children. Tell stories. Discuss spiritual issues as if they matter. Enjoy the hospitality of friends and strangers. Reform the old time religion. Live the Jesus life, and you will find that almost miraculously your aching hunger is being satisfied day by day.
The Bread of Life is obtainable—Jesus still freely gives himself to us. There’s no reason to hunger any longer. Yet many people do still seem hungry. It’s almost as if they have decided that soul hunger isn’t really real or isn’t important. There’s an old Nasrudin tale I’d like you to hear. Mulla Nasrudin bought a donkey. Someone told him that he would have to give it a certain amount of food every day. This he considered to be too much. He would experiment, he decided, to get it used to less food. Each day, therefore, he reduced its rations. Eventually, when the donkey was reduced to almost no food at all, it fell over and died. “Pity,” said the Mullah. “If I had had a little more time before it died I could have got it accustomed to living on nothing at all.” [4]
This is not stellar logic. Yet it seems that people too often apply this sort of logic to their spiritual lives. They don’t pray, or explore spiritual topics in a community of seekers, or worship regularly, or sing, or spend time in service to the poor, or practice hospitality on people outside their families, or learn scripture, or share what they have generously, or work at applying ancient truths to modern problems. As if, given enough time, one could accustom the soul to living on nothing at all. The end result is that they have the equivalent of a jar of mustard and a heel of moldy bread on hand to satisfy their spiritual hunger.
It’s sad. And so unnecessary. Do you share Jesus’ compassion for the hungry souls? If Christianity is, as D.T. Niles has written, “one beggar telling another where he found bread,” maybe you and I could help the hungry souls we encounter. Don’t be fooled or put off by the puffed-up persona of someone who seems intent on gobbling up the whole world. Look with the eyes of your heart at the little one deep within clutching at an empty vessel. Tell them. Tell them where you found bread.
[1] Dantzig, Charles Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, published in France last winter by Grasset &Fasquelle. Excerpted in May 2009 Harper’s Magazine
[2] Dahl, Roald Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Puffin Books, 1964, p. 27
[3] Hays, Edward The Gospel of Gabriel: A Life of Jesus the Christ Leavenworth, KS: Forest of Peace Publishing, 1996, p. 179
[4] Shah, Indries The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1972, p. 116