Proper 13, Year B 2018

Trinity Episcopal Church, Galveston
Gospel:  John 6:24-35
5 August 2018

From the Sealy Window at Trinity Episcopal
Church, Galveston.  As a rabbi, Jesus would
have been seated like this while teaching.

Every day I see signs the future will require less and less face-to-face interaction between people.  Have you noticed this?  How many of you still wait in the drive through line at the bank?  (Or, like your grandparents, actually go inside to interact with a teller in a bank lobby?)  Thanks to ATM's, and now smartphone applications, the bank teller role may soon disappear altogether.  Take another example: the day will come, (or has it already arrived somewhere?) when ordering pizza will involve taps on a cell phone, robots fulfilling the order, and driver-less delivery vehicles delivering to your curb.  My generation is a sort-of bridge between the old human interaction culture and a new artificial intelligence way of doing things that has already arrived at the doorstep.  Hold on to these thoughts while we look at the Gospel.

Today’s reading from the Gospel According to John is essentially a commentary on the Feeding of the 5,000, the story that was given in the lectionary for last Sunday.  Today, we see that some people (...people who ate the bread and fish and witnessed the 12 baskets full of leftovers, the same ones who subsequently tried to “crown” Jesus as their king)...these same people followed Jesus to the other side of the lake.  But, when they find Jesus, it’s clear he’s “on” to them.  He knows that they have followed him because of the free food without seeing what Jesus was teaching by multiplying the bread and fish.  Jesus was asking them to think about another kind of nourishment.  When we Episcopalians are asked how we’re nourished spiritually, how we are sustained to face what life throws at us, I guess the bread and wine of Holy Communion, along with prayer, scripture, and service would come to mind...but I imagine Communion would be first on the list.  I want to make several points about Holy Communion with today’s readings in mind and close with a “bonus” point.

The first point is something Holy Communion is not.  Our meal of bread and wine is not self-serve.  Circling back to the beginning of my sermon,  communion can't be ordered up on a phone app and delivered by a robot.  We always receive communion from the hand of another.  It might be easier just to place the meal on the table and have us each come up to eat and drink of it one by one….but that is not what communion is.  It reminds us that our relationship with God is not simply something private but it involves community.  We are taught that when two or three are gathered in prayer, Jesus will be in the midst of them.

The second point is also something Holy Communion is not.  When we come to the Communion rail, it’s not about the calories.  If your stomach is growling before you receive Communion, your stomach will still be growling after you receive.  In today’s Gospel reading, we learn that the people who followed Jesus across the lake had gotten it all wrong.  They thought it was all about the food.  Yes, eating is important….no question about that.  But, God endowed humanity from the beginning with the capacity to gather food, the intelligence to create food, and the compassion to feed those who are hungry.  The main thing was not the introduction of some kind of feeding ministry on steroids.  God was doing something new in Jesus, so “cutting edge” that we had to be to be taught about it with words, parables, actions, and, in the Gospel According to John, with signs like the feeding of the 5,000. The main thing, the new thing that God was doing, in fact, was and is Jesus of Nazareth.  In Jesus, the 2nd Person of the Trinity, the way God has of being God when God is made known to us, the God of all that is, the Holy One with no beginning and no end, omniscient and all powerful, the very ground of our being. The God by whom all was and is made, this One became a person, a full human being, in a particular place and time.  When you think of it like that, you know the main thing can’t be the fish sandwich….even if the food came from a miraculous all-you-can-eat fish and bread buffet!

Now to the third point: Communion is a gift that only nourishes if it is received. When the people asked Jesus, “What must we do to perform the works of God,” Jesus said the work was to believe in the one whom God sent. I can imagine that Jesus sat down (because rabbi’s sat when they were teaching) and said, “Look, here’s the deal. The only work that God requires is that you trust in me.  If you open your heart to me, I will feed your soul and, in this way, sustain that part of you which will never die or thirst or be hungry again.”  In Holy Communion Jesus is himself the bread from heaven which gives meaning and purpose to life and the strength to face the stuff life throws at us.

OK, here’s the bonus point.  In our reading from Exodus, the Israelites at first had no idea that the manna was food….this thin, flaky stuff scattered about the ground is going to keep us alive?  It makes sense that the Hebrew word for manna literally means “What is it?”  We can infer from the reading that the people might have walked over the manna and missed it, had Moses not pointed it out to them.  For Christians, the manna story serves as a kind of prefiguring of how God would feed us in Jesus.  There is nothing about ordinary bread and wine that necessarily makes those elements out to be food from God.  (I mean, it’s not even clear that the thin wafers are even bread.)  Like Moses, Jesus shows us what will sustain us.  God feeds us by entering into and dwelling with us when we participate with an open heart in the outward and visible sign known as Holy Communion. AMEN.