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After the the feeding of the multitude, Jesus and his disciples went away to
the other side of the lake. And the crowds went looking for him. And when they found him again, Jesus said to
them, “You don't seek me because of who I am, but because I gave you all the bread you wanted to eat, and all
you want is another meal. But I tell you, you're searching for the wrong thing. Don't work for food that
perishes. Don't work for things that give you satisfaction for the moment, but that don't satisfy your deeper
hunger. Instead, work for food that endures, for that which can feed you for life.”
Much of our lives is the story of seeking. We seek in our childhood games, in hide-and-seek and find
the button. We seek through the heroes of fairy tale and legend who go out to find their fortune or a golden
fleece or the holy grail. We seek through supermarket magazines while waiting at the checkout counter, through
self-help books, through classified ads, singles bars, and universities, even through the Bible. All our lives
we seek, first through one thing, then another.
Do we know what we seek? Or is it that most of the time we are like those sad people we see searching
through trash baskets on the street. They gather up a cigarette butt now, then an old newspaper, now an
aluminum can or two. Or like the lonely street person at Thrift House one day, who gathered up an old skillet,
a cookie tin, and three plastic toys from the nickel box to keep company with the other baubles that hung on
his back pack. But these are not the real objects of their search, anymore than a different job or a new house
or a new car or the latest computer are the real objects of ours. They search for what they cannot name, for
something that would be the answer to questions they could not even ask, questions that perhaps none of us can
ask as such but that our lives themselves silently frame, the questions that church, of course, is especially
all about, the questions that took those people long ago to Capernaum and that bring us here today, seeking
Jesus.
And Jesus says to us, “Be sure to search for the right things. Be sure to search for food that
satisfies for life, and beyond. I suspect,” he says, “that you've come looking for the wrong things, looking
for just another meal, for another fix. I suspect that you’re just like your fathers and mothers on their way
out of Egypt, that you’re just looking for more quail to drop from the sky and more bread to appear with the
morning dew. But if that's all you've come for, it won't last. In only a matter of hours your bellies will
call for still more of that kind of food. Work, instead, for that which endures, for that which satisfies for
a lifetime and beyond, for eternity.”
We know, don't we, that Jesus is speaking to us. We know that there is a hunger of the heart that
calls for something more than perishable food. We know who we are -- derelicts, really -- like those sad
people we see searching through the trash baskets, gathering up now a different job or a different spouse, now
a new car or a new dress, then a cabin in the mountains and another perk at the office, all the while hoping
that somewhere, sometime soon, we'll find what we really need, that which will feed us for more than the time
it takes to move on to tomorrow’s newspaper ads or web sites.
Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote about us in his book When All You Ever Wanted Isn't Enough. But the Bible
carried the same story long before. And maybe that’s what that story we heard today is all about, the one
about the hungry people in the desert. Maybe it's what the whole Bible is all about. About when all you ever
wanted isn’t enough.
The litany of all the things we've ever wanted is long indeed: bread, success, health, knowledge,
wealth, power, fame, being Number One, being popular, being right. But we know, deep down, that in themselves
not one of these things, and not even all of them all together, is enough. Not one of them endures. Not one
of them can satisfy for a lifetime, and beyond. “Enough is just a little more than I have now” is what John
D. Rockefeller once said when he was asked when he would have enough money. And I wonder, today, what a Bill
Gates would say, or a Ted Turner, or a Warren Buffett. Or what you and I who sit here in our pews this morning
with full stomachs would say. For it is always the same with perishable food. If, in our lives, our seeking
stops there, with food that perishes, then no matter how much of it we ever have, “all we ever wanted” will
always be just a little more than we have now.
“Don't set your hearts on the gifts, but on the Giver,” warns Jesus. “I am the bread of life, the
bread which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. No one who comes to me will ever hunger. No
one who puts his trust in me and draws near to me will ever thirst.”
Jesus had indeed fed them with perishable food, with fish and bread, just as God had fed them in the
desert with manna and quail. And since that satisfied them for the moment, they failed to see, or even to
care, that Jesus was really giving them a sign of something much more important, a sign of himself, a sign of
the source of all gifts, a sign of life itself, and of meaning and purpose and hope, which is found only in the
One who gives it.
There is an old Hasidic story about a rabbi’s son who came in one day from a game of hide-and-seek he
had been playing with some neighborhood playmates. The boy was drenched in tears, and his father asked him
what was the matter. And the little boy told him that he had hidden as he was supposed to, but that no one had
bothered to seek him. And the rabbi took his son in his arms and told him that now perhaps he could for the
first time understand how it is with God, how God also hides himself in order to be sought, and how God is
still waiting sadly for men and women to seek him.
Why are our hearts restless? They are restless, as St. Augustine knew, because they have not found
their rest in the Giver who longs for us to seek him, who longs for us to seek him not for what he can do for
us, but for who he is, who longs for us to seek not for food that perishes but for the presence and love he
desires to give us for eternity.
Our hearts are restless because they hunger for meaningful relationship, for fellowship with the
eternal, for meaning and purpose and hope. And when we try to feed our hearts with something less, with junk
food that perishes, the hunger returns again and again and again.
How can I get rich? How can I get enough horsepower, or enough RAM or megabytes? How can I get enough
thrills or security or reputation? How can I be a success? God gives us the Scriptures and Jesus in order to
lead us to ask better questions than these. Because the deepest questions that lie in our hearts don't have to
do with success or money or power or cars or houses or computers or horses or golf clubs, or with any of the
other things we use to feed ourselves for a time. We are anxious about these things, our hearts are restless
about them, because our real distress is on a deeper level we dare not even face.
Because he is the one who made us, God knows what he is talking about when he reminds us that “man does
not live by bread alone.” Or, as Bill Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, puts it in the
language of today to those seeking the perishable “bread” of drugs: “We must either find some spiritual basis
for living, or else we die,” which is what Jesus meant when he said that we will not be satisfied unless we
search for food that will endure for life. And each of us has to work for this spiritual food, adds Jesus. It
doesn’t just drop from heaven like manna and quail.
And that, friends, is what church and Sunday School and youth group and the Bible and God and Jesus and
all that are all about. They’re about life and death. About real life, life that endures. And about the
spiritual work it requires.
For the real questions of life are the questions of what it all means. If it all means. The real
questions of life are the questions raised when we don’t achieve the success we seek, or don’t get the wealth
we want, or a good complexion or a healthy body or a long life. The real questions of life are raised when a
baby is born without legs, or without a brain. Or when a little five-year-old girl is killed riding her
bicycle. The real questions of life are raised when a young man hears he has a brain tumor, or when a mother
and father hear that their child has a mental illness that will change his life forever, or when the biological
clock begins to run down and there’s no more winding it up the doctor can do for you. The real questions of
life are raised when a change in President or Bishop, or a change in laws or Church canons or rites, does not
bring paradise, but only more decisions. The real questions of life are raised when finding Saddam Hussein
does not bring resolution, but only more searching, when war does not bring peace, but only more violence. The
real questions of life are raised when millions live in unspeakable slums while a few live in comfort, and
sometimes in luxury.
These are not only questions in today’s newspapers, which hawk superficial political answers that do
not satisfy; these are also the questions of the Bible, which encourages profound relationship that
endures.
The real questions of life are raised by sin and grace: Why does sin grip us so strongly that we do
not live as God created us to live? This question and others like it are the questions of real life, real
questions all of us have about who we are, and why we are, and why we seek, and how we love, and how we are to
live with each other, and why we suffer and die. And what it all means. If it all means.
These are the questions of our hearts that bring us here today, seeking Jesus. These are the questions
that bring us here, to Jesus’ Table, for the same reason a toddler returns to his mother’s skirt or to her
father’s hand. For something about Jesus calls us to him as it called those in Capernaum to him as well.
Something about Jesus feeds us, and reassures and sustains us, in ways nothing else does, because he speaks to
the questions of our real lives, questions so deep we don't even know how to ask them.
But if the deep questions of life are not asked, then the reason Jesus is the answer will not be found,
and our search will be just an empty rummaging through the trash baskets and magazine ads of life, a search for
food that perishes.
Why do we return to church today, and to Sunday School and youth group and all that? Sometimes we
return for the same reason the prodigal returned home, with mixed reasons, or for no better purpose than to use
dad as a meal ticket. Sometimes we come for the same reason the crowd followed Jesus to Capernaum, to look for
food that perishes, for no greater purpose than to use Jesus as a meal ticket.
But the good news is that when the crowd shows up, Jesus feeds. He feeds us manna and quail, bread and
wine, which will satisfy for a time. If we seek Jesus for the bread and wine, Jesus does not turn us away,
just as the prodigal’s father did not turn his son away because he sought less than his father wanted to give
him.
But the father did insist, as Jesus insists, that we face the real reason for our journey and our
search, that we ask ourselves if manna and quail is all we really want. The father told his son he welcomed
him home, not as a laborer who might earn from him enough for room and board, but as a son and companion. He
welcomed him home not to feed at the trough, but to share a life. “What do you seek for eternity?” he
asks.
We come here to Jesus’ Table today, and every day, as the hungry. And all are welcome to feed on the
bread of life. Not just to feed at the trough, but to feed on Jesus as companions who share a search and a
life. We come to be nourished by a spiritual response to the deeper questions that wake us up at night: Why?
Where is God when everything goes wrong with the world, and with us? What are our responsibilities toward one
another? Where is God when everything is right with the world? Is God anyway? What does it all mean? If it
all means. How is it possible, regardless of circumstance -- regardless of President or party or law,
regardless of Bishop or General Convention decisions, regardless of rights, regardless even of righteousness
-- how is it possible for us to love one another the way Jesus loved us?
Oh, it's true, you can search for God on the golf course or a mountain trail or at all kinds of fast
food places, both secular and religious, and maybe find food for a time. But it's here, in a shared search
with each other, in relationship with God at his Table together with his gathered people, it is here that we
find food unlike food we find anywhere else and answers unlike answers we hear anywhere else.
And that's because, if we want food that endures for a lifetime and beyond, then we've simply got to
sit at the foot of the Cross, at the source of the food and drink of sacrificial love, at the source of a love
that does not stand upon rights and does not depend upon circumstance, or even upon righteousness.
This is no meal to be taken on the run, with a Big Mac in one hand and fries and a coke on the seat
beside you while trying to steer the car with your knee. For food that endures for life, we've got to sit with
our brothers and sisters at the Table where real food is found, and where real questions are asked, and where
we linger for more than a perishable fix of a few spiritual calories. I don't know why that is true. I just
know that it is true, because that's the way God made it.
Jesus is the bread of life, food that endures. Something about him tells us that this is true and
draws us to his Table to be fed by him.
It's a kind of pot-luck. We bring the ordinary, perishable things of life, because that is all we have
to contribute. We bring bread and wine. We bring our hopes and our fears and our anxieties. We bring our
sins. We bring our flimsy truths and our feeble righteousness. We bring our perishable bodies that labor in
suffering and anxiety and in anticipation of death. And Jesus supplies the rest. We bring the lives we have,
trusting that these ordinary, perishable lives we bring, when broken and blessed and shared in a communion
sacrifice with Christ, somehow, by God's grace, yield the enduring bread of heaven.
Lord, give us this bread always.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |