10 Pentecost B
Text: John 6:24-35
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
August 1, 2021
Bread
I am always curious when someone tells me they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I always want to know more about what that means. Where has that relationship led you, I want to ask. What difference does that personal relationship make? Has it led to new knowledge of yourself and the nature of the world around you, study of the scriptures, knowledge of the faith, witnessing with your life to the advent of the kingdom of God? Surely the relationship means more than simply the having of it. A personal relationship has consequences!
And yet, when it all comes down to it, while the Christian faith may be more than this, it is not less than this – a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is never less than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Surely that is at least one of the insights provided by this lesson from that enigmatic Gospel of John. Last week in our Gospel lesson Jesus fed the multitude, creating a controversy. Where did this man get so much bread? How does he have this miraculous power to perform such a sign?
Yet all this comes to a head when Jesus pronounces: You want to be fully satisfied, satisfied for all eternity? Then feed on me. I am bread.
The crowds clamoring after Jesus want bread. He gives them bread that is more than bread. He offers them himself. The crowd wants to get their hungers satisfied. He urges them to cultivate a hunger for him. I am bread.
Wouldn’t it have been a bit more comfortable for smart, well-educated 21st-century Americans if Jesus had said to them, “Now that you have eaten your fill of my miraculous bread, let me give you a lecture on the essential beliefs of the Christian faith: A, B, C. and so on.” He doesn’t do that. He says eat me, feed on me. Take me, the same way you would take a good meal.
The great Roman Catholic writer John Henry Newman delivered a sermon once, a hundred and sixty years ago, entitled Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth. Newman noted that most people are persuaded in religious matters not by “garrulous reason,” as he called it, a term that I love. Most people are persuaded not by arguments found in books and systems of thought, but rather by other people.
Newman writes, “[People] persuade themselves, with little difficulty, to scoff at principles, to ridicule books …. It is holiness embodied in personal form which they cannot steadily confront and bear down.” Holiness embodied in personal form: that’s the witness that cannot be denied.
You know how this works. If you ask somebody who is a member of a profession, a teacher, maybe, or a coach; ask them how they got into what they do for a living now, and you won’t hear a story about how they studied the matter and found it interesting. No; nine times out of ten you will hear a story about a person, a role model and mentor, somebody they admired. “She was a big influence on me,” you’ll hear; “She made me want to do what she did.”
The faith, says Newman, is taught in the same way. It’s not so much a matter of conceptual understanding that teaches the faith, he says, which is a big thing coming from somebody who was himself a college professor. Teaching the faith is a matter of personal relationship.
That’s why, when we recruit teachers for the Sunday School and people tell us, almost always, I don’t know enough about the faith to be a teacher, we reply: It’s not what you know that is the really important thing. That you can learn, every week, as you prepare your lesson; that part’s easy. The important thing is that you are there, every week, modeling learning, yes, but also modeling by your manner and by your commitment to the kids everything else about the faith. More than anything else, that’s how they’ll learn it.
And by the way, Pastor Wiegert tells me there are still a couple of openings for Sunday School and Confirmation class teachers for this coming fall, so if you would like to grow in your faith in this way – and you will, I guarantee you – you are invited to contact us. Your faith will become enfleshed in you – will become real in your body – in wonderful new ways.
A pastor acquaintance of mine wrote a wonderful little meditation recently on why pandemic lockdown was especially hard on Christians. She remembers some twenty years ago, she writes, when email first came into such common use, and she wrote an article then about how Christians must mightily resist the tendency toward email because we are a religion of the incarnation. We believe that God has come in the flesh, among us. So we are big on bodies. We don’t believe there can be any true communication worthy of the name, no communion, no community, without bodies. Pandemic lockdown hit the churches in all the places where we are actually pretty good: relationship; one-to-one meeting; making music together; community; incarnation; bodiliness. We like bodies. We like our relationships personal and incarnate, following the model of the God who has become personal and incarnate for us.
This gospel lesson is a reminder that the Christian faith is more than a set of beliefs, a list of intellectual propositions. It is a matter of being encountered by a person, Jesus, a matter of God getting personal with us, engaging us, taking over our lives, possessing us. For those who want merely to fill their stomachs with a little bit o’ Jesus, or to have a pleasant discussion about spiritual matters, Jesus says to them, “It’s about a whole lot more than that, my friend. It’s about something as personal, as intimate, and as all-consuming as I am the bread of life. Feed on me.”
I know someone who has spent almost all of her adult life trying to figure out whether or not she is a Christian. She is a very intellectual sort of person, very smart. She had real troubles with various Christian beliefs. Saying the Creed on Sundays was often a painful experience for her.
Then a few years ago she said to me, “Well, I’ve just decided to stop thinking about Jesus and just live with Jesus. I’ve been living with him anyway, all this time I’ve been struggling with him; I’ve been going to church, reading the Gospels to find out more about him, serving others to follow his way. Since I’ve been living with him anyway – co-habiting! – I decided we might as well get married and make it an honest relationship. I’ve decided that, though there is so much that mystifies and troubles me about what I don’t know about Jesus, I need to go with what I do know, which is Jesus.”
We move in just a few minutes now in our worship to the celebration of Holy Communion. “I am the bread of life,” indeed. I hope, as you receive the bread and the wine, for us, the very body and blood of Christ, that for you the faith will become personal, the word will become flesh, that Jesus will mystically penetrate every fiber of your being, and that your personal relationship with Christ will be nurtured, fed, and strengthened. He is the bread of life. Come, then, to the Lord’s table.