The Bread of Life is Not Hollow Audio

Here is the audio of the sermon I preached on John 6.35, 41-51.

Click to download an MP3.

The Bread of Life is Not Hollow

The Rev. Joseph P. Mathews
12 August 2012
Proper 14, B
John 6.31,41-51
Christ Church, Portola Valley, CA

As an undergraduate I spent a lot of time with the same people. College life pre-makes friends for you; people start out new together and finish together. During the four (or more) years it takes, you have to eat, so you may as well eat with people you like.

Our time together didn’t usually end when we’d finished eating, though. We would go to our college ministry’s building and watch TV, do homework, or engage in Bible study. Often we would spend from lunch until time for bed with one another.

Far too often, though, we found ourselves in the kitchen between meals.

Despite how much we may have eaten in the Saga – the campus dining hall – or how much pizza from Hungry Howie’s we ate, we were hungry again a few hours later.

In time we came to have a term for describing the food more than the subsequent hunger: hollow. Hungry Howie’s was hollow. Saga was hollow. A friend at another campus ministry’s lasagna was hollow.

There was a lot on the outside, but there didn’t seem to be anything on the inside. The food was hollow and we were hungry again.

In today’s Gospel text, Jesus is offering an alternative to hollow food: the Bread of Heaven, his very flesh.

Two weeks ago we heard of Jesus feeding the five thousand. After he left them, they followed him and went looking for him.

Jesus said to them last week, “You are only following because you’re hungry, not because you actually believe in me. Don’t work for chase and gorge yourselves on hollow food. Find the food that lasts forever.”

They listen to him and ask him to give it to them always and he replies by telling them that he is the bread of life, and whoever comes to him will never be hungry or thirsty.

And today he amps it up: He is the bread of life, and not only will those who eat him not be hungry, but they will live forever. While his initial hearers may have recoiled at the idea of eating Jesus’ flesh, John’s community didn’t.

As Taylor Burton-Edwards points out, Jesus is the bread of heaven. Jesus – the incarnate Word living and breathing among them – is clearly flesh. He is the bread who in giving of himself gives flesh for a feast.

Following Jesus, these early Christians – and we today – presented themselves in the bread and wine.

Following Jesus means following him to the end, which he starts to foreshadow today.

Jesus’ saying, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” is John’s community reminding itself that Jesus gave up himself.

He placed us first, and following Jesus means giving ourselves up to God and for one another.

When we make Eucharist together we model this and remind ourselves of it.

We offer ourselves to God and to one another.

About the Eucharist St. Augustine said, “Be what you see, and receive what you are.”

The bread and wine we present to God are somehow transformed by grace into Christ’s Body and Blood. The earliest Christians didn’t try to explain how it happened, they just believed it as they gathered, having been transformed by grace in their baptisms, into Christ’s Body.

As Christ’s body in the world we live now meeting needs – physical and spiritual – just like Jesus did.

In living now, we look for the age to come, but don’t wait for it as the world around us crumbles. The crowd Jesus is talking to in our passage followed him because he’d fed their hunger.

Jesus’ promise to never be hungry is an offer for a fuller life dependent on him and relying less on ourselves as we continually give ourselves to God and of ourselves to those around us, in meeting needs of stranger and friend without though or expectation of payment or reciprocation.

As Derek Webb prays for his fans, may the bread on our tongues leave a trail of crumbs that brings the hungry back to this place that we are from.

This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die…whoever eats this bread will live forever.

Sermon Notes: John 6.35-38

A requirement of our Preaching 1 class at General is to deliver two extemporaneous homilies.  You get a passage and thirty minutes to prepare.  You decide when to use those thirty minutes, and it's on the honor system, but I think it's pretty well followed.  These are my notes from my prep work, and all of this didn't get into the sermon (a comment on that below).

• +
• Here we are, more of John 6.  Probably summer year B, ~6 weeks of bread of Life
• How we read this is probably different from how our Reformed sisters and brothers read it
• Jesus is present however we read it
• Jesus doesn't drive away anyone who comes to him
• No conditions on coming to God.  Difficult to say "If they do or don't do this (like support health care reform), they're not Christian."
• But, belief should produce action; there should be an amendment of life, and that's a life-long process.
• At the font we're incorporated into Christ, at the table we're strengthened to speak for those w/o voice for systemic change, not quick, temporary fixes
• At the table we're strengthened to love, being nice, coming to the table (regardless of the example some primates set by not coming to the table)
• When we feast on the Bread of Life we are filled, and we are called to the of the one who sends us.

"If you leave something out, consider that the Spirit didn't let you remember it." - Mo. Mitties

Raymond Brown on Orthodoxy

"When the charge of heresy is raised in Christian communities today, there is a tendency to associate that stigma with wild-eyed radicals proposing new ideas. IN Christian history, however, some of the most significant heresies have been conservative rather than radical -- the tendency to hold on to old theological answers when new questions have caused the main body of Christians to move on to new answers. The Jewish Christians, as we detect their presence in John and know their presence in the second century, were holding on to oder and more primitive views on such subjects as Christology, the eucharist, and relations to Judaism, views that were widely held early in the first century but were now no longer deemed to be adequate expressions of truth. At the Council of Nicea ([325 CE]) the lower Christology of Arius was more primitive than the higher Christology of Athanasius. Arius was content with the scriptural formulations of Jesus' identity, e.g., 'In the beginning was the Word,' which meant for him that the Word had a beginning. Athanasius had to persuade the Council to accept newer, non-Scriptural formulas, e.g., true God of true God, coeternal with the Father. But he did this with insight: The Scripture answers were no longer adequate because now a question was being asked that had not been asked in [New Testament] times, and the new answers he proposed were true to to the direction of the Scriptures. "Orthodoxy," then is not always the possession of those who try to hold on to the past. One may find a truer criterion in the direction toward which Christian though has been tending, even if that direction suggests that past formulations of truth have to be considered inadequate to answer new questions." (Bold emphasis added, italics in original)

pp.80-81, The Community of the Beloved Disciple by Raymond Brown.

The Community of the Beloved Disciple

"The exalted Johannine christology is not some abstract test of orthodoxy that has nothing to do with community living. If it is crucial to believe that Jesus is the pre-existen Word of God who has come from God and is of God, it is because then we know what God is really like --- He really is a God of love who so love the world that He was willing to give of Himself, in His Son (3.16;I John 4.8-9), and not merely send someone else. And such an understanding of God and of Jesus demands that the Johannine Christian, who is the child of God, behave in a way worth of his Father and of Jesus his Brother: 'By this will all identify you as my disciples -- by the love you have for one another' (John 13.35)."

pp.60-61The Community of the Beloved Disciple, by Raymond Brown.