Lectionary Text:  John 6: 35, 41-51 (Proper 14B)

³⁵Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

⁴¹Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” ⁴²They 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’?” ⁴³Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. ⁴⁵It 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. ⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. ⁵¹I 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.”

Once a year my rather large extended family holds our annual Family Reunion and for more years than I can even remember, there has always been a story contest.   But in recent years, the stories began to get a little bit raunchier and a whole lot stupider.  So, a few years ago, when the year came for my branch of the family to be in charge of the reunion, we came up with something new.  Rather than trying to top each other with the raunchiest and most outlandish stories, we decided to tell stories about the past.  You see, in those years, we had lost most of those that were two generations ahead of me, those that could remember another time, those that knew the stories and even the members of our family that were part of settling the town of Katy and part of creating the foundations of what would become this rather large, diverse, chaotic and storied family.

We heard stories of learning to swim in rice wells, of my father’s generation growing up within a couple of miles and sometimes a couple of feet of nineteen first cousins, and of my great uncle handing out treasured silk stockings behind his grocery store during the rationing of World War II.   You see, most of us had never heard many of these stories.  I remember my great-grandmother’s large Victorian house in downtown Katy when it was next to the Methodist church but I don’t remember it when it had a chicken coop with fresh eggs or a cow grazing next to the sanctuary.  By the time I came along, the upstairs had long been closed off and my brother and I used to beg my grandmother to take us into the un-air conditioned upstairs when we visited there.  The house now sits in an historic park in old town Katy.

You see, all of this is part of us.  It is part of who we are as a family and who we are as individuals.  And even though they are not our experiences, they are indeed our memories.  We recollect them and make them part of our lives and part of who we are.  It’s called anamnesis, [Greek for] remembering.  But we don’t have a good translation of that.  It’s more than that, more than merely remembering something that happened to you, but rather recollecting something that made you who you are, acknowledging our connective past and our mutually-embraced future.  We do it every time we participate in the Eucharist.  We do this in remembrance.  The past becomes our present.  The two are so intertwined that they cannot be disconnected.

But the future is no different.  It is not out there, removed, sitting and waiting for us to pursue it.  It is already part of us.  The past and the present and the future cannot really be separated. Revelation is ongoing. One thing builds on another.  Life is not a straight road, but rather a multi-dimensional pathway taking all that it encounters unto itself.

I think that’s what Jesus was trying to get across.  But, not unlike us, those first century hearers just didn’t get it.  After all, they had God all figured out—what God expected, what God promised, what God wanted (and, in particular, what one had to do or be to be accepted by this God).  This was a God that would supply their needs and someday reward them with the promise of life.  And, on some level, this was a God that was removed from them, “out there”, waiting for them to do the right thing or worship the right way.  This God was holy and sacred, but almost untouchable.

And yet, here was Jesus, speaking things that did not make sense, things that did not fit with the idea of God that they held.  Here he was, this son of Joseph, the lowly carpenter, the one who they had known as a child, the one that they had seen playing with the other kids in Nazareth, perhaps getting in trouble when he didn’t come in for dinner when Mary called him, and the one sitting at the feet of the Rabbi’s listening to stories, now spouting utter nonsense.  In fact, refresh my memory—wasn’t he the one that got lost in Jerusalem when he was about twelve or thirteen and worried his parents so much?  And now here he is, claiming to be the bread of life, claiming to be capable of showing us the pathway to eternal life.  Who did he think he was?  This was blasphemous.  This was wrong.  And they became angry.  After all, he was one of us and how could one of us dare to know God, dare to approach this somewhat unapproachable God of theirs, the one whose name could not be uttered?

The truth was that they had limited their idea of God.  They had made God manageable, pulling this image of God into something that only they had experienced, affirming how they lived their lives, how they worshipped, what they believed.  Righteousness and living rightly was what was expected.  Righteousness, in their minds, is what would bring them to God.  And heaven?  Heaven was out there somewhere, waiting.  Heaven would come later.

But these words of Jesus did not reflect that at all.  “I am…”  It’s present tense.  It’s not talking about a God of their experience or a God of their ancestors.  And it doesn’t depict a God out there in the future, still waiting to be claimed.  Jesus’ words shook them to their core.  “I am the bread of life.”  No longer are we talking about rules or rewards or even righteousness.  God is here; God is now, drawing us in, into a story that has been in place long before us and that will continue beyond what we know.  But we are still called to remember it. 

The word that is translated here as “drawn” can also be translated as “dragged”.  That’s a little more intense, this idea of God dragging us toward the Divine, somehow compelling us to become that very image of God that we were created to be.  It is an image of a God that rather than watching us from afar and judging what we’re doing, is here with us, working with us, drawing us or dragging us into the story.  It is the very image of heaven spilling into the earth, into our lives. 

Now for a little high school English refresher:  Life is not limited to past and present and future.  Do you remember those pesky perfect tenses?  In English, the word “perfect” literally means “made complete” or “completely done.”  (Interestingly enough, that’s close to what it meant for John Wesley when he talked about going on to perfection, going on to completion, not necessarily unblemished but the way it was meant to be.) So, future perfect tense is completed with respect to the future, like the phrases “I will have seen it,” or “I will have known it.”  But it refers to something that has already happened.  Our faith is the same way. Eternity is not something that will happen to us someday; rather, we are living it now.  Its COMPLETION will come in the future.

Edna St. Vincent Millay once said that “[Humanity] has not invented God but rather developed a faith to meet a God already there.”   Look around.  God is here.  The Divine is always pouring into our lives.  “I am the bread of life.”; “I am the bread.”; “I am.” 

You see, we cannot limit ourselves to only the part of the story that we know.  There is so much out there that God is offering.  We are in this very Presence of God swept into the past, the present, and the future.  But it’s all right here, already a part of us.  I think that’s the reason that Jesus used the notion of bread.  So, why bread?  Why not potatoes? Or blueberries?  Or filet mignon? I mean, bread is a ridiculously common food.  Breadmaking has happened throughout the world for probably as long as humans have been around.  In fact, there is evidence from 30,000 years ago in Europe and Australia that revealed a starchy residue on flat rocks used for pounding plants.  It is possible that certain starchy plants, such as cattails and ferns and maybe even mosses, was spread on the rock, placed on a fire and cooked into a sort of flatbread.  Bread is a part of our life.  It always had been.  There’s nothing out of this world about it—a little flour, a little salt, a little water, sometimes a little yeast—the land, the sea, the air, and even some fungal microorganisms.  So why use something so ordinary, so organic?  Because it’s here.  Because it’s part of our lives.  Because it’s accessible.  It’s all here, right under our noses; And eternity is the same.  Here, now…right now…not something beyond this world or up ahead, but here…no waiting, no wondering, just something that requires that we step out of where we are.

In the 19^th century, Soren Kierkegaard once told a parable of a community of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher.  The duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly.  With these wings, there was nowhere the ducks could not go.  With those wings, they could soar.  Shouts of “Amen!” were quacked throughout the whole duck congregation.  At the conclusion of the service, the ducks left, commenting on the message, and waddled back home.  But they never flew.

We need to learn to fly.  Patrick Overton once said, “when you have come to the edge of all you know and you are about to drop off into the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen:  There will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught how to fly.”  Eat this bread.  Eat it now.  Immerse yourself in the life that God is offering you.  You will be amazed at what will happen if you only let God draw you or drag you or in whatever way it takes to compel you into life.  Eat this bread.  Jesus said “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”  Eat this bread.  It is here; it is now.

Begin where you are…Live this present moment, this present hour…keep up a silent prayer, “Open Thou my life.  Guide my thoughts…Thy will be done.”  Walk on the streets and chat with your friends.  But every moment behind the scenes be in prayer…internal continuous prayer.   (Thomas R. Kelly)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli