Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston

August 1, 2021

Lectionary Readings

When I was at my last church, there was a Men’s Discussion Group that met every Wednesday morning at 8:30. They’d make a couple of pots of coffee, and sit together around a table in the parish library, and read the gospel reading for that week off the little lectionary handouts to discuss. They were mostly retired scientists and engineers and lawyers, and they always ended up with some fascinating and often esoteric discussion. But I remember one Wednesday morning, just a few weeks after I’d arrived at the church, when someone read the gospel reading for the upcoming Sunday, and everyone kind of sat in silence for a minute or so, and then someone said, “Wasn’t this last week’s reading?” And, after a few mumbles and a few nods, they turned to the Old Testament instead. And I know that that Wednesday morning was almost exactly three years ago, because here we are, back in John chapter 6.

Every three years, in the depth of summer, our lectionary switches from reading through the Gospel of Mark to carefully study most of this chapter of John, beginning with the miracle of the loaves and fishes and continuing through the long and meandering sermon that we call “The Bread of Life Discourse.” Even more than the rest of the Gospel of John, this material can get a little tedious. Jesus repeats the same themes and claims in verse after verse, a winding exposition of the theme: “I am the bread of life,” with many variations. (John 6:35)

So I’ll be going on vacation soon.

No, I feel bad joking, because this is the way that priests and parishioners alike sometimes experience these five weeks on the Bread of Life. They can feel as tedious and uninspiring as they are repetitive and circuitous. In a way, it’s remarkably similar to the Eucharist itself: week after week, we say and do the most unusual things, but because we say and do them week after week we start to tune them out. Sunday after Sunday, I stand and the altar and repeat Jesus’ words over bread and wine: “This is my Body. This is my Blood.” That’s an extraordinary thing for him to say! And it’s extraordinary that two thousand years later, after a hundred thousand Sundays worth of Eucharists, we’re still doing it. And yet we almost take it for granted. Most people, on most Sundays, are not at the altar rail in the most pious state of mind: we come distracted by anxiety or boredom, by the sound of our child’s cry from the nursery or a new water stain on the ceiling, by our frustration with the preacher’s sermon or our readiness to get out of here and have some lunch. Of course that’s not all the time. But it’s sometimes. And I’m not saying this to wag a finger at you. I’m saying it to recognize that this is how human brains work: Do something once, and it’s amazing and novel; do it twice, and it becomes passé.

So four times in the next month, Jesus will say some variation on “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the bread of heaven.” (John 6:35, 41, 48, 51) And by the third or fourth time, most of us will stand through the gospel thinking, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn’t this last week’s reading?”

Or maybe we’ll hear it differently this year. Three years ago today, when this gospel was last read, anyone in the world could walk into a church on any given Sunday morning and receive the Body of Christ, the living bread that came down from heaven. Two years ago, the same was true. One year ago today, though, things were wildly different. None of us had received that bread of heaven in four months; and it would be four more before we began to celebrate the Eucharist again. So I wonder whether all this talk of the bread of life and the manna from heaven will seem a little fresher after a year in which we were cut off from it.

There’s a sense, of course, in which Jesus isn’t talking about the Eucharist at all, at least not as we know it. He’s talking about himself through the metaphor of bread. And he’s talking about the miraculous meal they’ve just had, in which five thousand people were fed with five loaves and two fish. The crowd are unimpressed. “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert,” they say; God gave them each day their daily bread for free, and all they had to do was gather it up off the ground, where it had fallen like dew in the morning. What’s one meal, once in our lives—they say—compared to that? But Jesus turns their objection on its head. The manna itself, he says, is just a foreshadowing of him: “I am the true bread from heaven…For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:32-33) The manna sustained your ancestor’s life as they wandered through the desert; but I am the food that will sustain you for eternal life at the end of all your wanderings through this world.

In another sense, Jesus really is talking about the Eucharist. At the very end of the discourse Jesus will tell the crowd that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” and the crowd will be scandalized, because that’s disgusting. (John 6:54) Many of those who follow him will turn away. And this was likely the experience of the early Christians as well, as they spread their newborn faith. At first, people were excited to hear news of the coming of the long-awaited Messiah, then disappointed and confused to hear that he’d died and risen again and then disappeared. And then they were disgusted when they heard about the consolation prize: “He died, and he rose, and he ascended into heaven, so here’s not here now. But don’t worry, he is still with us, because every week we eat his flesh and drink his blood!” Come on. We can admit it here, right? That’s a really weird elevator pitch.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says. (John 6:35) But when we try to pin down precisely what he means, we tend to ask the wrong questions. The crowd following him around certainly did, more than once. After the loaves and fishes, after all, Jesus walks four miles across the sea without a boat, and when the crowd who’ve been searching for him finally find him, they ask the least interesting question in the world: “Rabbi, when’d you get here?” (John 6:25) “When?” What about “How!?” He tries to explain again and again what’s going on, and they say to him, “What sign are you going to give us? …What work are you performing?” (6:30) As if they hadn’t seen the miracles he’d just done.

We, too, tend to ask the wrong questions about “the bread of life.” I don’t mean to minimize some very important sixteenth-century theological debates, but most arguments about the Eucharist are something like asking, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus reaches out his hands to us to feed us with himself, with his very own life, with the true bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, and we ask— Okay, but in what sense is it you, and in what sense is it bread? What are we talking here… Transubstantiation? Consubstantiation? Spiritual presence? Symbolic memorialism? Instrumentalism? Parallelism? (I’m not making any of this up.) Is Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine a real presence or a spiritual presence, or only a reminder of what the Lord has done for us? If it’s a real presence, then is the substance of Christ’s body present in place of the substance of bread, while the accidents remain unchanged; or is Christ’s body present in, with, and under the species of bread, and that’s all we can say for sure because it’s really not appropriate to import the Aristotelian categories of medieval term logic into theology in such a reified way?

If none of that made any sense to you, you may well be on the right spiritual track. Again, I don’t really mean to make fun. Theology’s certainly interesting. It can be important. And if you think Eucharistic theology is interesting and important, feel free to talk to me about it at Lemonade Hour! (And actually, I think Doug Heim and Alice Krapf both volunteered during our Wardens’ Meeting on Tuesday, as well.) But let’s not forget what Jesus says when they ask him for a sign: “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to them when they ask him for a sign, “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” (6:27) You are not here because you were rationally convinced. You are not here because you understand intellectually what happens at the altar, because you can articulate a doctrinally-coherent description of the sense in which Jesus is bread or vice versa. You are here because you came to Jesus and were fed.

It’s true for each one of us. In some sense, something once fed us, and we were filled. And we come here, week by week, to look for more. Maybe it’s a satisfying meal. I hope to be a decent-enough cook. But it’s not my meal to serve, in the end. The people ask Jesus, “What should we do to do the works of God?” (6:28) And he answers, “This is the work of God: that you believe.” (6:29)

It’s an ambiguous phrase. We ordinarily translate it this way: “This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (6:29) In other words, this is all the work you need to do that pertains to God: simply to have faith. We don’t need to understand what’s going on at the altar or analyze it in the right philosophical terms. We just need to be here together, faithfully sharing this holy meal.

But the same New Testament Greek phrase could just as well be translated: “This is the work of God, so that you may believe…” (6:29) And that’s a different sort of thing entirely. This, all this, is the work of God, so that we may believe. This bread of life that comes down from heaven is not our reward for believing. It’s our spiritual food. It’s not what we get if we believe. It’s what feeds us so that we have the strength to believe.

Most of us spent most of a year cut off from the Body of Christ made present in the Eucharistic bread. But we were not cut off from Jesus, the Bread of Life himself. In a thousand different ways, he came to us, and fed us, despite it all; and we seek him, not because we saw signs, but because we ate and were filled. We have tasted “the food that endures for eternal life,” (John 6:27) and we have come back again and again looking for more, hungering for the peace of God, praying with the crowd who follow Jesus: “Lord, give us this bread always.” (John 6:34) Amen.

There’s a certain kind of official photograph that’s popular no matter who the president is: the White House Situation Room candid. You may know the most famous example, from the night of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011: Obama sits, hunched forward in an open-collared shirt and tie; across the table, Hillary Clinton pensively analyzes the situation; to Obama’s right, Joe Biden looks like he’s seen it all. It’s not hard to find other examples: George W. Bush sitting casually around the table with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice to hear the latest updates on Iraq; Clinton leaned back with his arms over the chest while he’s briefed on Bosnia; Trump and a team of decorated generals sitting up very straight and starting straight ahead as they watch the mission to capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These images project everything a president wants to be: serious, commanding, and in control, and maybe—if you’re Bill Clinton—cool, in more than one sense of the word. When the commander-in-chief sits in the White House Situation Room, he can, with the mere word and the click of a button, deploy the full might of the greatest superpower in history anywhere in the world. Ironically, this is the exact opposite what a leader would want his subject’s to picture him doing for most of history. An ancient leader would have shown his strength by leading from the front, not by staying at home in a secure room.

So the way the narrator tells this story about David in our first reading today is intentional. Like any great ancient king, David was first and foremost a warrior. His rise to power hadn’t begun with a rousing speech or a brilliant policy plan; he was the one out there with a rock in his sling, fighting the giant Goliath. But now, his long decline from greatness has begun, and you can see it in the first sentence: “In the spring of the year, when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel… But David remained at Jerusalem.” (2 Samuel 11:1) And not only has he stayed behind; he’s sleeping in. The story happens “late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof.” (11:2) His men are at war, risking their lives, and David’s at loose ends.

And unsurprisingly, he gets up to no good. In quick succession, he sees his neighbor’s wife Bathsheba bathing on the roof, sends for her, and sleeps with her; and soon enough, it turns out she’s pregnant. David tries to cover it up. He sends for his neighbor Uriah to come home from the war, thinking that perhaps if he returns soon enough, nobody will even know whose child it really is. But Uriah, unlike David, chooses solidarity and integrity; while his men are out in the fields, he won’t sleep at home. So David covers his tracks another way instead. He writes a letter to his general Joab, and puts it in Uriah’s own hand to deliver, with the grim message to send him to his death. David is in control. David is in command. David has all the power in the world—and he uses it in the worst way imaginable.

It may be the case that our presidents look strong when they lead from home, and David looks weak. But in a more important way, they have something in common: they want to be in control. The presidents want to project a public image of being in command, so they pose for photos surrounded by generals and advisors, or choose to publish the perfect candid shot. David just wants to be in control of everything, all the time. He sends for Bathsheba, and she comes to him. He sends for Uriah, and he comes to him. But human beings, it turns out, aren’t quite pieces on a chessboard. He can’t, ultimately, make Uriah go along with the cover-up; and so he makes a much worse plan instead.

Few of us have David’s power. Most of us don’t even have David’s temptations. But many of us have that same desire for control. Wouldn’t it be easier at work, or in a relationship, at church or in our country, if people would just do what you wanted when you wanted? Most of us, after all, think that we’re right, most of the time. When others disagree, most of us wish that they would just want the same things that we want and do the things we want them to do. We have plans in our heads for the way things should work, and it would be so much easier if everyone else would just go along with it—wouldn’t it? We constantly struggle for control over the situation, and when someone else gets their way, or even just refuses to go along with the plan, we get really mad.

(Or maybe I’m just projecting. I do have a three-year-old.)

So it’s a refreshing contrast to see Jesus’ surprising behavior in our gospel this morning. He’s been traveling around Galilee, doing signs and wonders, healing people and multiplying loaves and fishes, and now they want to come and “make him king.” (John 6:15) But he retreats. He’s spent his whole ministry proclaiming the coming kingdom of God, recruiting lieutenants and gathering a crowd of supporters, but the very moment that they try to put him on the throne, he runs away. He gives up control, he gives up the opportunity to seize power and enact his agenda; instead, he chooses weakness, and he’ll stay weak until the very end. David’s plan to stay in control ends with him sending an innocent man to his death, but Jesus’ plan is just the opposite; he himself will be the one to die.

And yet, strangely, this will be the greatest victory yet. Jesus turns away from earthly power because he’s got bigger fish to fry. He’s not waging war on Herod or on Rome, but on some stronger celestial force, on all the stormy powers of darkness and chaos through which he walks calmly. David’s weakness in staying behind when the army goes out to fight is just weakness, and it highlights his greater weakness of willpower and character. But Jesus’ weakness is a kind of strength. By going to the front, but refusing to fight, he somehow, mysteriously, wins the battle against death itself.

This isn’t a kind of moralistic tale: “Be like Jesus, don’t be like David.” You should try to be a little more like Jesus and a little less like David. But that’s actually not the point. Yes, we struggle with our own desires for control. Yes, we struggle with our various other temptations. Jesus has already won the final victory for us, but we still struggle in this life and so, as Paul writes, he sends the Spirit “that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power…and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” (Eph. 3:14) In the daily struggle to be a better version of yourself, God is there, strengthening you along the way. But Christianity is not, primarily, about whether we live up to that measure of perfection, whether our love for one another really approaches the purity of the love shown to us by the Christ who dwells in our hearts.

It’s about the strange juxtaposition of our imperfection and God’s grace. It’s about this contrast: We are, for the most part, like David: good in many ways, sometimes even great, but always flawed, one way or another. And yet always loved even more deeply than our flaws, even more deeply than we can imagine. Paul has to pray for the Ephesians that they “may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth” of Christ’s love for them, (Eph. 3:18) because God’s love for us, however imperfect we are, is more powerful than we could possibly understand without God’s help.

King David and our presidents want to project and image of power, of calm, of control. And so do we. We want to look and feel competent and in control of our lives. But we’re not. We’re not in control of the situations around us, or the things that we feel. Many of us lose control, from time to time, of the things that we say and do, and come to regret them. But whenever we lose control, whenever our imperfections show, whenever we do something we ought not to have done, or leave undone some thing we ought to have done, whenever we see what we have done and feel regret, God is already there, dwelling in our hearts, forgiving us and loving us beyond our wildest imaginings. And all we need to do is to accept it. So I pray, with Paul, “that you may have the power to comprehend…what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:18) Amen.