The following sermon was preached on Sunday August 11, 2024 at St Matthew’s Maryland Anglican Church. St Matt’s has been a welcoming place for me to land now that I’m not working as a parish priest and is a wonderful example of a church that is willing to innovate and change to be responsive to the needs of the community. Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Many Christian churches, including this one, use a cycle of readings called the lectionary to determine which parts of scripture we will read every Sunday. On the whole I find it to be a very helpful practice, but sometimes the choices made by the people who put together the lectionary confuse me.
Every three years the creators of the lectionary decide that we should dive into John 6 for 5 straight weeks. We sometimes call it the Bread of Life discourses. 5 weeks on Jesus as the bread of life.
It’s a lot.
In today’s gospel selection, the compilers also make some unusual choices about which verses to read. Our first verse, is verse 35, and then we just skip a whole bunch of verses and pick back up again at verse 41.
That’s not obvious if you’re just listening to those verses being read out loud, but that is what’s happening.
So first, for a little bit of context, earlier in this same chapter, Jesus has miraculously fed 5000 people.
This miracle has gotten people’s attention. Some people think Jesus is a prophet, some want to make him their king, others aren’t sure what to think. (15)
Today’s gospel reading begins with Jesus telling a crowd that, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (35)
It doesn’t go over well with the crowd who grumble amongst themselves saying basically, “who does this kid – whose diapers we changed – think he is?” (41)
I mean it’s one thing for Jesus to claim to be a prophet of God, but to claim to be God? Mary and Joseph’s kid? No way.
And what does it mean to be the “bread of life” anyway?
Jesus is making a reference to the manna that the people ate in the wilderness after they left Egypt.
The stories about manna are found in the book of Exodus in the Hebrew scriptures. The people have been freed from slavery and are wandering in the wilderness.
And then one day they wake up and they see that a layer of dew has covered the camp and then it dries into flakes that look like frost.
The people ask, “What is it?”
That phrase in Hebrew sounds a lot like, “manna,” which is what they decide to call this strange substance.
So what is manna?
Manna had very specific properties. You could trust that it would arrive every day and that everyone would have enough to eat.
If you had a hard time trusting, and what ordinary human being doesn’t, if you leaned into a scarcity mentality and tried to gather extra manna to save for a rainy day, it didn’t work. Any extra you gathered, rotted.
It smelled bad too, so everyone around you would know you’d taken more than you needed.
There was one exception to this process – manna did not fall from the sky on the Sabbath. So the day before, you could gather up enough manna for that day and the Sabbath day and it would not rot.
So the issue wasn’t a short shelf life. Manna could last longer than one day. It just didn’t.
Daniel Erlander describes this time in the wilderness as a school, and manna as one of God’s most important lessons.
Manna taught the people that everything they had was actually God’s, and that God could be trusted to give them their daily bread.
It taught them the value of working together as a community. Everyone helped to collect the manna and everyone always had enough to eat. There weren’t some rich people who were eating their fill while others starved.
It taught them to slowly leave behind their scarcity mentality, and to lean into God’s abundance.
When Jesus fed the crowd, it had a lot of similarities to eating manna in the wilderness. That food was a gift from God and everyone had enough to eat. No one went hungry.
But Jesus is taking these memories – the stories of their ancestors, their experiences of that miraculous meal – and Jesus is saying there is more.
Well actually not there is more, but I am more. Jesus is more. More than manna, more than a prophet. Jesus is living bread from heaven. He says:
Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I 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.” (49-51)
Which, as I’ve already mentioned, was hard for the people who knew his parents and had watched him grow up to believe.
They’re hard things for me to believe as well, I’ve just heard them so many times I think I forget just how weird it would be to hear a man I had known my whole life say that he was the bread of life that came down from heaven and that if I ate his flesh – his flesh – I would live forever.
I mean, who says things like that?
Knowledge is a good thing. But like any good thing it can have a shadow side. Sometimes the things we know help us to see more clearly, and sometimes they can limit us from seeing clearly.
These people know the stories of their ancestors about the gift of manna, they know about the promises God has made to the people, but they also know that Jesus comes from Nazareth. They know his parents. They saw him grow up and this knowledge makes it really hard from them to see Jesus as God.
A prophet like Moses, sure… maybe. But God? Actually God?
No way.
They know too much to believe that.
Knowledge is a good thing, but I wonder what my own knowledge might be helping me to see, and what it might be obscuring.
When Jesus was telling the crowds that he was the bread of life from heaven he was asking them to think in new ways, to believe in new ways.
And I think Jesus continues to ask this of us as well.
If we are open to it, Jesus constantly invites us to think in new ways. To challenge our assumptions, to see things in different ways.
There are ways that Jesus challenges us to think in new ways in our own individual lives. Right now, for example, my garden is producing way more food than I can possibly eat, while I have neighbours that are going hungry.
Do I store up all those cucumbers for myself? Or do I learn to share? Do my neighbours living in tents by the river really want a huge basket of cucumbers?
And what about the things I have an abundance of that aren’t as perishable as cucumbers- my money, my stuff. Am I being a good steward of those things? Am I trusting in God’s abundance?
All good questions.
There are also ways that Jesus invites us to think in new ways in our shared life as the body of Christ.
Church buildings are not exactly manna in the wilderness. They are a lot more permanent than bread that is good today and rotten tomorrow.
But having manna in the wilderness taught the people of God a lot of things, about trust, about equality, about abundance, and I wonder what might happen if we adopted more of a manna way of thinking about the things that God has given us as well.
What if we regularly reminded ourselves and each other than none of this will last forever?
I can’t know for sure, but I imagine that when the people who first dreamed up the idea for this church building began making their plans, they could not have imagined what this space would look like today.
I hope, that they would be pleasantly surprised. I hope that they’d be able to see that although it is used in very different ways than when it was first built, this is still a place where people encounter God and care for each other.
And I hope that if we were to come back to this space in 100 years we’ll also be pleasantly surprised by what is happening here as well.
One of my wise teachers was known to say that the principle way you know that God is at work in your life is that you are pleasantly surprised by what is happening because the fact that you are surprised means you couldn’t have thought up this outcome on your own.
Manna taught the people that everything they had was actually God’s, and that God could be trusted to give them their daily bread.
It taught them to hold things loosely. There was no point in trying to store up extra manna, so they didn’t.
It taught them the value of working together as a community. Everyone helped to collect the manna and everyone always had enough to eat. There weren’t some rich people who were eating their fill while others starved.
It taught them to slowly leave behind their scarcity mentality, and to lean into God’s abundance.
I can see many examples of this manna way of thinking here at St Matthew’s – from the ways you care for each other, to the ways the building is being used, to the ways you are innovating a number of your other structures and ways of doing things as well.
You could easily have turned this space into a museum honouring the way things used to be. But you didn’t.
As you continue to change and grow right now you could easily say this has never been done before so it can’t be done. But you don’t.
And you could very easily say we don’t have very much so we should hold as tightly as possible to what little we have.
And you’re not.
I hope you will continue to hold things loosely and keep living into this manna way of thinking.
And I hope that as you seek to follow Jesus you will continue to be pleasantly surprised by what you discover.
In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity. Amen.