Sermon: Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, John 6:24-35

“More Than a Good Lunch”

Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church, Pastor Jonathan Linman

Each of us has our own reasons for participating in the life of the church. And not all of those reasons are purely spiritual or religious. Isn’t that true?

When I was a kid, I felt a sense of belonging at church and got a lot of positive, loving attention from many “grandparently” elders. Church offered the peaceful, stable version of extended family life I didn’t consistently receive at home. So, I had my own personal, not very religious, reasons for wanting to go to church. The specifically spiritual motivations for being part of the church came later in life.

You have your own reasons for being here, too. And if you’re honest with yourselves, not all of those reasons are strictly religious. For LGBTQIA folk, it may be a sense of welcome and inclusion you haven’t gotten anywhere else. For others church is a place to see friends you’ve known for years. For still others church is way of honoring family tradition. Then there are the cultural and ethnic reasons for church attendance. For me, Scandinavian versions of Lutheranism have been a big draw. For folk at the 11:00 am service, it’s Mexican culture. Then there’s the great music and good liturgy. There’s also a sense of community that church provides, a rare gift in our increasingly isolated and lonely world. And don’t forget good food – C Time and Convivio are great. We eat well here at Faith-La Fe. In short, we often get a good lunch here! But these motivations are not necessarily directly or specifically spiritual or religious. 

Jesus confronted the same realities in his day. He had just fed the 5000, and the next day the crowds came back for more. That’s where today’s gospel reading begins. The crowds were so eager to get another good lunch that they traveled by boat across the Sea of Galilee looking for Jesus. When the throngs of people found him, seeing right through their less than spiritual motivation, Jesus knowingly replied: “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw [heavenly] signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” (John 6:26)

There’s a problem when our motivations for coming here fall short of the spiritual and transcendent: we want church on our own terms. Sometimes in our life together, when we don’t get exactly what we want, we find the exit door and leave. That’s what Moses had to deal with in today’s passage from Exodus: “The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’” (Exodus 16:2-3)

Such is the human condition. Our religious motivations are not always particularly religious, and then we rebel when we don’t get our way. And our rebellion diminishes our life together, distracting us from the truly transcendent realities that we encounter here. When we want church on our own terms, that’s when we tend to reduce church to a social club, or a chaplaincy for our own ideologies. And people who really have spiritual hungers may not find a home in our churches.

And yet, God continues to feed us as God’s people. As we heard in Exodus, God provided quails as meat along with manna from heaven, that flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground – not unlike the hosts we use for Holy Communion! Likewise, Jesus fed the people and they ate their fill and were satisfied. It was indeed a good lunch, and yet it was so much more. 

Thus, Jesus was not satisfied with leaving people where they started from when they focused only on filling their stomachs. Which is to say, Jesus offered a challenge to the desirous crowds for them to aspire to more transcendent heights: “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures, [that remains] for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” (John 6:27a)

But in our human finitude and shortsightedness, we tend to think we have to do something to earn this holy food that God provides through Jesus. We fall back on various versions of “works righteousness” and conclude that “there is no free lunch.” “What must we do to perform the works of God [so that we can be fed]?” we ask, just as the crowds did in Jesus’ day.

But Jesus as usual sets the record straight. He says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one whom God has sent.” Which is to say, the work of God, which I read as the work that God does through and with us, is simply believing in, trusting in Jesus, whom God sent. Faith, trust in God, is the only prerequisite to receiving the gift of the food that endures for eternal life. Or as Lutherans love to say, “sola fide,” faith alone. Or as Luther writes in his Small Catechism about who is worthy to receive the sacrament: “a person who has faith in these words, ‘given for you’ and ‘shed for you for the forgiveness of sin,’ is really worthy and well prepared” to receive the sacrament. In short, there’s no work we need to do to earn a place at the table. 

Still, we humans seek a sign to help us believe just as the crowds did. But when it’s all said and done, the only sign given is Jesus himself. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus tells the crowds and continues to tell us as his voice, his words continue to echo through the centuries.

And Christ feeds us with his very self. Which is to say, when we eat the bread and drink from the cup at this table, we’re getting much more than a good lunch!

Here in summary are the gifts we receive when we eat the bread and drink from the cup:

• “Forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation,” as Luther says in the Small Catechism

• A living, real connection to Jesus’ earthly ministry of teaching and healing centuries ago, a sharing in the Last Supper, history coming to life in our midst, joining us to Christ’s death and resurrection 

• Communion with all the saints, those who have gone before us through the centuries

• A foretaste of the feast to come, taste of heaven and eternity and the completeness of God’s promised reign

• Communion with all creation and the cosmos through bread and wine

• Becoming Christ’s body, the church, to be broken for the sake of the world – God’s work, our hands

• Strength to do the work God has entrusted to us in furthering Christ’s feeding ministry today

• Regeneration and renewal of our faith

• And more. In short, at this table, we receive all that Christ was, is, and ever shall be. 

All of this so much more than a good lunch! And yet, here’s the thing: this table also leads to some actual lunches at C-Time, Convivio, and our various soup suppers and fellowship events and parties. So, we get a good lunch out of it, too!

We leave this table satisfied in so very many ways, our faith renewed. We leave fed so that we may feed the world physically and spiritually through our ministries. And we leave this table with a greater appreciation for the truly religious and spiritual reasons for being part of the church, building on the perhaps less spiritual reasons that got us in the door in the first place. In short, we now do our work for the food that endures for eternal life.

And what is that work? We learn that in today’s second reading where we read that each of us is given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Some of us are apostles, some prophets; others are evangelists, pastors and teachers (cf. Ephesians 4:7a, 11). 

In this holy meal, God in Christ “equips [us,] the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:12-13) And we learn to “speak the truth in love” to each other and to the world as we “grow up in every way into the one who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:15)

So, you see, this modest meal of bread and the fruit of the vine is far, far more than simply a good lunch!

Next week’s sermon title and topic is this: “Heavenly Bread in the Flesh.” But for now, come once again to eat your fill at this table, that you may be fed with the food that endures for eternal life, the true bread from heaven, the bread of life, who is Jesus, Son of Man, and Son of God. Amen.