Feed Me Till I Want No More

A sermon for the tenth Sunday after Pentecost given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on August 5, 2012.

Exodus 16:2-15, John 6:24-35

One of my favorite hymns begins:

Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,
pilgrim through this barren land.
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
hold me with thy powerful hand.
Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.

In today’s gospel the focus is bread.  Particularly the bread of heaven.  I think we can all relate to the people who are talking with Jesus.  They long for a connection to God, they long for visible sign that would give them hope and satisfy their longing for meaning.  We may say it in different words but I think we all have in our hearts this longing expressed in the hymn:  “Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.”
When the people ask for Jesus to give them manna just like Moses gave to the people of Israel, Jesus stops them right there.
“It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
We pray in the Lord’s prayer, give us this day our daily bread.
And this is a practical prayer.  God, feed us today.  You are the sustainer of all living things and to you we turn our hearts daily for our provision.
But I think there’s more in this prayer than just wheat, pumpernickel, or rye.
Here we are asking with the trust of a child for our God to daily renew us in life.
And Jesus is helping the people to see that their request for bread is the wrong question.  Because... they could get bread, and they may marvel at the miracle, but what they really need is the source of all life, the bread of heaven.
Moses was a middleman between the people of Israel and their God.  He prayed to God and God provided manna.  And since it was Moses that they could see, since it was Moses that they could read about, it is easy to see why Moses was seen as the one who had given the bread.  But Jesus tries to correct this misunderstanding:  “It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.”
We look to the material, the tangible, the controllable to sustain us.  We trust in our bank accounts (or freak out if we can’t).  We put absolute faith in the technologies of science to sustain us.  We’re a little like the people who want Jesus to rain down manna for them.  We demand something more when all we need is right in front of us.
Because we need bread of earth to live, but we need the bread of heaven to be satisfied.
As it is written in the book of Deuteronomy:  “one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
Now this is not to divide the spiritual from the physical like some have tried to do and say that this body is nothing and only the soul matters.  
Rather it’s to say this body is a gift and what’s more that gift is given by the giver of all life.  So bread may nourish my body, but what’s more grace nourishes my soul to live life to the fullest.
“Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.”
This is what Jesus is trying to push the people to see.  Jesus wants them to see that they should set their trust higher than Moses, higher than miraculous signs, and put their trust in God.
Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthian church, “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
And its the eternal that we are made for.  It’s union with God, fellowship with the source of our being that is our true longing.  And only that will last.
So when we pray give us this day our daily bread -- we long not just for the manna, but for communion with the giver of the manna.  And that is what will truly satisfy.
But our culture has got us addicted to manna.  It’s manna that will satisfy, buy more manna.  It’s the new, the next, the bigger, the better.  But all of that is in the words of the wise teacher, “chasing after the wind.”
“Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more.”
How do we get there?  How do we find that communion with God, that bread that satisfies?
Well, in the words of the apostle “we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
Our faith and covenant tells us, “We are united in striving to know the will of God as taught in the holy Scriptures.”
The scriptures are a lot like manna.  We didn’t make them, we’ve just received them.  We believe that God’s Spirit inspired living human beings at different times in different places under different circumstances to write the words that have been handed down to us over the generations.
But these scriptures and the human beings that composed them cannot be confused with the God who inspired them.  
Just as, “it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven,” it is not Isaiah and Mark and Paul that give us truth, but God who shines truth through these individuals, these texts.  
The Bible points to God, the Bible is not God.  
But God speaks to us through the scriptures.  We believe that if we look to these texts that have been given to us, we will find a word for our lives, we will be lead to worship and trust the God of life.  
The difficult thing is, that these texts were written by people who are very different from us, in times that are very different from ours.  We open the Bible and read a long genealogy of foreign sounding names and we give up.  Irrelevant! We cry and go and grab the remote control for some tastier food than that strange manna.
Manna by the way means in Hebrew, “what is it?”
How often we open the Bible and read a name like Mahershalalhashbaz and we scratch our head, wrinkle our nose, cross our eyes and say “what is it?”
And I can say as one who does this every week to have a subject to preach on, it’s not easy to open the Bible and listen to God’s voice through the text.  
But folks, it’s there.  I am convinced that God is still speaking, still relevant to our world.  And the Holy Spirit longs to show us a higher way of living, a wholeness, a spirituality that you can’t find in late night TV.  But it requires patience, it requires humility, it requires reading things that offend us and confuse us but seeking to hear what God is saying through these strange and confusing stories or teachings.  Because as any teacher knows, boredom in the classroom is 90% lack of understanding.  If we endure, we learn that there is a beauty there that we couldn’t see at first.  An acquired taste so to speak.
We begin to see that we had the wrong expectations.  We expected that the words in themselves would flash some glorious meaning and purpose, but what we should expect is that God will flash meaning and truth as we seek to patiently listen to what is there for us to hear.
This is why we read scripture together, because we all contribute in conversation to teasing out the eternal in the temporal.  Bible study, the gathering, sermons, all attempt to do this.  To point beyond the manna to the giver of bread.  TO point beyond the scriptures to the redemption story that we are all involved in.  
It requires attention, it requires patience.  But believe me, it’s worth it.  The result is Christ.  The scriptures point to the one who showed us God’s unconditional love for all human beings and who started something that has changed, is changing, will forever change the world one relationship at a time.
I invite you to come to God, the eternal source of joy and beauty, to taste of God and enjoy God.  The banquet is ready, trust in God’s provision, and eat of the food that God has given.  Because the Spirit longs to reveal to us the true bread of heaven which will fill us in our souls and not leave us hungry.
As you journey through this barren land, may you find God’s guiding voice in the voices of this book, and may they lead you by the Spirit to nourishment of the bread that’s eternal, God’s own self.