Sermon onJohn 6:51-69

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

We’ve been reading from John chapter 6 for over a month now. Jesus fed the 5,000, walked on water, the crowd chased him down looking for more food, and he explained to them that he had bread from heaven to give them instead and that his own flesh and blood was what would give them eternal life.

This was more than the crowds could handle:

·       from the religious authorities (problematically called simply “the Jews” in the Gospel of John) who questioned Jesus’ credentials

·       to many of Jesus’ own loyal disciples who started to have cold feet.

Jesus’ reputation was not doing well that day. The crowds who had wanted to make him king turned on him.

Perhaps Jesus expected this: our reading says, “For Jesus knew from the beginning who were the ones who did not believe and who was the one who would betray him.”

But it still couldn’t have been easy to have so many people abandon him all at once.

Jesus turned to his closest twelve disciples and asked, “Do you also want to go away?” I wonder if the words caught in his throat, if he was afraid to ask.

But Peter, whose foot was often in his mouth and who would indeed abandon Jesus later on before repenting, spoke for the group:

“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

The ones who had traveled with him and knew him best didn’t turn away at the first teaching that was hard to accept.

They grasped that following Jesus wasn’t about free food and that he had a community and a way of life to offer that was far more powerful than being made an earthly king by the crowds.

Jesus was far more than simply a teacher or a provider of free food.

Still, his teachings can be hard—for them and for us.

Even Jesus’ most basic teachings, rooted in the Hebrew Bible:

Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself

are so hard to follow.

Love God and love your neighbor should be pretty intuitive. It’s not terribly controversial or off-putting, compared to Jesus’ teachings in our reading today, talking about eating flesh and drinking blood.Even if it were purely metaphorical, it’s a pretty gross image. I don’t blame folks for being troubled by it and maybe not wanting to follow this guy around anymore. A free lunch is a lot more appetizing than cannibalism.

And still, it’s hard to follow even Jesus’ most basic teachings like love God and love your neighbor.

Instead of loving God with everything we have, it’s so much easier to go about our daily lives, ignoring God until something bad happens and only then asking for help. It’s easier to keep God on the periphery of our lives instead of letting love for God inhabit every aspect of our being.

And instead of loving our neighbors, it’s easier to gravitate toward people who are like us and not risk being vulnerable with people who have different perspectives, backgrounds, or ways of life.

If we do encounter people who are different from us, we can protect ourselves by making it clear that we are helping them and are not in the same category. Or that they are from a different political party and we are obviously nothing like them.

It’s way harder to look another human in the eyes and admit that we are at the same time infinitely the same and infinitely different from each other.

We are created in the image of the same God, we live on the same planet, and yet we have unique experiences, ways of living, and things to teach one another.

It’s easier to keep people who are different from us on the periphery of our lives and not let love for every person we encounter move us.

It’s safer and more comfortable to keep people at an arm’s distance. But that’s not what we’re called to.

C.S. Lewis said this in his book The Four Loves:

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, air-less—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?

But Lewis has a point. When we insulate ourselves from vulnerability, from the risks of love, it becomes harder for us to feel anything at all.We lose our relationships, because relationships deepen from vulnerability, and we ultimately lose ourselves. We confine ourselves to Hell on Earth.

God is calling us to the opposite of that. Jesus gave even his body for love of us.

When Christ’s flesh and blood is flowing through our veins, animating our bodies, pumping our hearts, love is both the cause and the result.

It is God’s love that allows us to love God and love our neighbors.

That can hurt—sometimes hurt more than we think we can bear.

This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?

But that is the price of love—a price Jesus knows very well. And out of that life-giving love, Jesus calls us to love, too.

So, this week, talk to someone who is different from you. If you’re going to Crittenton today, you’ll have the opportunity in the next couple hours. If not, learn something about someone you don’t talk to much. Let your love for them grow. Feel your heart soften and expand.That is the life Jesus offers us.

To whom else can we go?

Sermon on John 6:35-51

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

For a couple weeks now, we’ve been talking about people not really getting what was going on or what Jesus was telling them.

The disciples were stressed out by Jesus’ command to feed the crowd of thousands of people and then scared by Jesus’ ability to walk on water.

Then the crowds, who seemed to understand that something amazing was happening, because they wanted to make Jesus king, still were mostly interested in Jesus for the free food. They chased him across the sea to try to get him to feed them again.

Today’s reading zooms in on a specific subset of the crowds that were following Jesus. Remember that whenever the Gospel of John says “the Jews” it doesn’t mean all the Jewish people in that area. That would include Jesus and his disciples and would be confusing. 

“The Jews” is the term the Gospel of John uses to refer to the group of religious leaders who were threatened by Jesus’ popularity and wanted to maintain the status quo. This terminology has, unfortunately, contributed to centuries of antisemitism. This is one of the many reasons why we read the Bible carefully, look at the context to give us clues about what it means, and consider how our interpretation affects our neighbors.

In our readings so far over the past few weeks, Jesus has either been talking to his closest disciples or addressing the crowds as a whole. But once Jesus finishes his explanation of what it means that he is the bread of life, it says that “the Jews” (or the religious leaders) “began to complain about him.”

It seems they were happy enough to hang around, hear Jesus talk, and eat some free food, but when he started talking about being the bread of life and coming down from heaven, they got suspicious.

They questioned him about how he could be from heaven if they knew his parents. He didn’t miraculously appear—they knew his family!

They didn’t see what Jesus was offering them, so they complained among themselves.

Granted, much like Jesus’ conversations with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well before this in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ explanations are confusing: what do you mean “born from above”? What do you mean “living water”? Or in this case, what do you mean “bread of life”?

Jesus spoke in metaphor, parable, imagery—rhetorical devices that lose their power when categorized, labeled, poked, and prodded.

Still, what might it mean to be the “bread of life”?

Bread was a staple—it wasn’t the fluffy French bread you can get in the grocery store. It was dense, heavy, and filling. It sustained people’s life.

I had a Taiwanese classmate in seminary who talked about Jesus as “the rice of life,” because that was the staple she was used to. I’ve also heard Jesus described as “the tortilla of life.”

Jesus isn’t a nice side dish or a dessert, much to the disappointment of my sweet tooth. Jesus is a staple, an everyday life source, nourishing and filling.

Jesus described himself as the “bread that comes down from heaven,” the manna that God sent to the starving Israelites in the wilderness. Jesus is God’s way of saving us from death and assuring us of God’s provision and faithfulness. Whatever wilderness we are in, God does not abandon us there. God feeds us and cares for us.

And as we talked about last week, the feeding of the 5,000 functions like communion in the Gospel of John. Since this Gospel focuses on Jesus washing his disciples’ feet on the night in which he was betrayed, this is the moment when Jesus took bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples and the larger community of Jesus followers.

Eating the bread that Jesus gave them united them. They sat on the grass, eating together. They bonded and formed community, united in Jesus.

Jesus will go on in next week’s Gospel reading to describe his flesh and blood as bringing eternal life to those who eat and drink it.

Communion is a promise of eternal life in the Reign of God, a sneak peek of the never-ending banquet of the Beloved Community. Through it, we are united with Christ and each other and all the Jesus followers throughout time and space. It is miraculous and mysterious.

And yet, it can also become routine and lose its meaning. When we come to this table every week, eating the same wafers and drinking the same grape juice, we can forget the mystery.

We can, perhaps, forget the gravity of our first communion, whether when we were children, teens, or adults.

We can forget the longing for communion we had during COVID, when we had to navigate new ways of being the Body of Christ without being together in one room.

We can also forget that Christ meets us in every meal and not just here on Sunday mornings. Just like every drop of water can help us recall our baptism, every meal can remind us of our unity in Christ, whether at this table, your kitchen table, or in our parking lot on Tuesday nights.

Some of the most meaningful experiences of communion I have had would not be officially recognized as communion.

The nonprofit I worked for before seminary was the Orange County Conservation Corps. They serve at-risk young adults who get work experience doing environmental projects around the county while finishing their high school diplomas.

On the last day of work before Thanksgiving, when the corpsmembers would come back from their work sites, there would be a Thanksgiving meal waiting for them. We staff members would pile their plates high with turkey, stuffing, and the works. Then, we would serve each other and join them at long tables with plastic tablecloths in the warehouse that still smelled of disinfectant.

It was a humble meal, but a glorious celebration. We were equals at those tables, united in gratitude, laughter, and bellies full of Costco pie.

It certainly was not what most people picture when they think of communion, but among the staples of turkey and potatoes, hierarchies were erased, aching muscles forgotten, laughter and community abundant. If that’s not a foretaste of what heaven will be like, I don’t know what is.

Communion can be found in surprising places.

The bread of life, rice of life, tortilla of life meets us where we are. Jesus sustains our life and connects us with each other.

Proverbs 15:17 says:

“Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is
    than a fatted ox and hatred with it.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a dinner of vegetables. But we can take this proverb’s meaning to be: it’s better to have a simple meal with people who love each other than a lavish feast with people who are acting hatefully toward each other.

Hopefully, that’s what communion is each week: a wafer and tiny cup of grape juice among people who love each other.

That is our manna in the wilderness. That is our feeding of the 5,000. That is our Thanksgiving meal in a warehouse. That is our bread and rice and tortilla of life.

It strengthens and unites us for today and points toward the lavish feast with Love that will never end.

You’re all invited—come and eat.

Sermon on John 6:22-35

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

God has a history of feeding people: from providing fruit-filled trees in Eden, to manna in the wilderness, to a sustaining meal for Elijah in our first reading, to Jesus feeding the 5,000 with a little kid’s lunch,there are a ton of examples of God taking care of people’s physical needs.

But the crowds who ate that little kid’s lunch in last week’s Gospel story didn’t seem to realize what they experienced was something different from what their ancestors experienced.

They did realize something miraculous happened—I mean, they tried to make Jesus king afterward. But they seemed to be missing something.

Jesus escaped the overeager crowd, and arrived in Capernaum before they were able to chase him down.

The people looked for Jesus, and they found him.They started interrogating him,but Jesus kept redirecting their questions, pointing them again and again to something more important than their grumbling stomachs.

Still, they asked him for another act of power. “After all,” they said. “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness…”

They thought they know what they were looking for:“Feed us, Jesus! Feed us again! Then, we’ll really know you’re from God.”

They thought they knew what they were looking for…

I’d like to share with you the story of someone who didn’t know what she was looking for, but found it anyway.

Sara Miles grew up an atheist. She worked in restaurant kitchens and as a journalist in war zones in Central America. Later, she made a home in San Francisco with her young daughter and her girlfriend.

“One morning,” she writes in her book Take this Bread. “I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian—or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut. But on other long walks, I’d passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity.”

She describes the beauty of the space,             and the awkwardness of singing with these strangers.

Then, something took Sara Miles completely by surprise:

She writes, “I still can’t explain my first communion. It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind. The disconnect between what I thought was happening—I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening—the piece of bread was the “body” of “Christ,” a patently untrue or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening—God, namely “Christ” or “Jesus,” was real, and in my mouth—utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry.”

Sara Miles did not chase Jesus like the crowds had. But he fed her anyway.

And the crowds that chased Jesus? He had already fed them in much the same way, though they didn’t realize it.

The Gospel of John doesn’t record the Last Supper in the way the other Gospels do. The part about Jesus taking the bread, giving thanks for it, breaking it, and giving it to his disciples? In the Gospel of John, that doesn’t happen on the night in which Jesus was betrayed.Instead, on that night it focuses on Jesus washing his disciples’ feet—another meaningful act of service.

But, listen again to what we read in last week’s Gospel:

“Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.”

Jesus took bread, he gave thanks, he distributed it.Sound familiar?

The story of the feeding of the 5,000 functions like communion for the Gospel of John.

It makes sense that the crowds didn’t completely understand the significance of that at the time. They didn’t have the Gospels to compare or the knowledge of Jesus’ death and resurrection to be able to put those pieces together and see that symbolism.

They did get that something miraculous had happened, though, and they wanted more of it.

So did Sara Miles. She knew that something miraculous had happened, and she wanted more of it.

She writes, “I couldn’t reconcile the experience with anything I knew or had been told. But neither could I go away: For some inexplicable reason, I wanted that bread again. I wanted it all the next day after my first communion, and the next week, and the next. It was a sensation as urgent as physical hunger, pulling me back to the table at St. Gregory’s through my fear and confusion.”

Sara Miles was like the crowds: she wanted that bread again. And again, and again.

This was such a significant experience for her that she continued going to St. Gregory’s, and she started a food pantry there, so that she could feed others. You can read more about it in her book Take this Bread—it’s really a fantastic story.

The nourishment she received strengthened her for her faith journey and for serving others.

Communion does this for us every week we receive it.

Jesus, the bread of life, still feeds us. We receive that mystery of bread and wine, body and blood, and it fills us and nourishes us and leaves a surplus, just like the twelve baskets of leftover bread after the crowds ate their fill.

That’s where we get the spiritual energy as a faith community to continue to feed people body and soul. Our mission is feeding people, because that’s what Jesus did. Jesus feeds us, and we feed others around us.Caring Hands is an extension of the meal we receive on Sunday mornings and a sneak peak of the banquet table of the Reign of God that will never end, where people of all sorts feast together and delight in God.

Even if youaren’t able to volunteer in the pantry, you are part of this mission and this community, just the same as the people who volunteer in the pantry but who are elsewhere on Sunday mornings. We are in this together, joined in this meal and this mission.

Our God, who has a history of feeding people, will never stop feeding us.

So, when we eat of that bread and drink of that cup in a few minutes, we can hold onto the promise that it will never run out. It is nutritious and life-giving. Let that life flow through you, and see where it takes you.

As we go forward, both individually and as a faith community, feeding people body and soul, remember that it is Jesus who feeds us and strengthens us. Jesus gives us himself, the bread of life, always.