Text — John 6:27-34

Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”  28 Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?”  29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  30 So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?  31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ”  32 Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.  33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  34 They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Last week, my sermon title was “The Food that Perishes.”  And my point was, there are many things that we want, many things we need, like food, but also recognition, a role to play in the world, a sense of belonging, friends, and so on.

But these are all things that we lose in the end, including very often our mental and physical capacities before the end.  We “die in the gutter” to use Bob Dutcher’s vivid phrase. 

The questions for today is, “Is there any food that doesn’t perish?  Is there any food that endures?  Is there anything in this life, anything we can have, anything we can know, anything we can really count on? 

I know that when you sit in church and listen to a sermon, there are certain things you expect the preacher to say.  Here I’ve raised this question, “Is there any food, is there anything we can have or know, that we can really count on?”  I know you expect me to say, “Yes, there is.”  But just for fun, I wonder what you expect me to say that “something” is.  What do you expect me to say is the one thing we can truly count on?

(Most of the responses from the congregation are “God.”  A few others are “faith”, “death,” and “family.”)

The answer I expected that you expect is “God.  I’m not exactly going to disagree with that.  But let’s think about that answer for just a moment.  What is God?  What does the word God refer to?

Recently, on a morning when I didn’t need to get out of bed early, I was watching the various morning news programs and surfing around a bit during commercials when I came upon a guy I’ll call the breakfast table preacher.  He sits there in his blue jeans, in a plaid shirt, in his country kitchen, with his coffee mug and Bible open on the table, and he chats about God with someone who appears to be his next-door-neighbor.  It’s very folksy.  It’s set-up to make you, the viewer, feel that you are sitting right there with your own coffee mug and doughnut.

What struck me as I was watching this was that for these men, talking about God or talking with God is really a lot like talking with another neighbor, like the one next door on the other side.  It’s very cozy.  God tells the breakfast table preacher, in a lot of detail, what God is up to, what God is going to do, what God wants him, the preacher to do, what the result will be, and even what will happen in the course of human history, or cosmic history.

This could make me jealous, not just because he’s on television and I’m not.  I’m jealous in the sense that part of me wishes I had that much detailed information.  I have a lot of conviction, but it’s rather lean on details — which probably explains, at least in part, why I’m not on television. 

But I’m really not jealous for this reason: Is “God” really that straight-forward and simple?

If you look “God” up in the dictionary you’ll find several definitions, but what they boil down to is that God is a being, a supreme being, an all powerful, all knowing, infinite being. 

This may shock you to hear me say this, but this definition of God raises some serious problems.  The main problem is: Is that definition really intelligible?  What is an “infinite being”?  How could a “being” be infinite?  Is God an entity of any kind, supreme or otherwise?  After all, a being, or an entity, implies some boundary or limit to that being or entity — something that is not that entity.  Does God have boundaries?  Would this still be God?

Here’s another way of putting this same problem.  You have probably had a conversation with someone about the question, “Does God exist?”  I know this will sound a bit like our former President who said to a grand jury on one famous day, “It depends on what the definition of “is” is?  But what is the definition of the word “exist”?

According to the dictionary, it means to “have being” or to be present somewhere, or to occur.  Does God occupy some space, and have some location in the universe?  How does God occur?  We say “God is in heaven” but then, what is heaven?  Where is heaven?  Are heaven and God located in our minds?  But where are our minds?  Our minds aren’t the same things as our brains.  You can’t look in a brain and find a memory, a feeling, or a thought.

This is all very complicated, and you don’t need to understand or follow any of this, really.  The point is, there is very little agreement, even in the church, about who or what God is, or what the word means. 

If we’re going to count on something, it seems to me that we’re under some obligation to say what that something is.  If God is in heaven, means that God is beyond our reach, that more modest answer helps us understand our gospel text, in which Jesus says, “I am the bread of life that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.” 

Down from heaven means to us, on our level.  I think it means that Jesus brings us, offers us, something fairly tangible, something more tangible than “God in heaven”, something we can count on.

Jesus, after all, knew our situation, our general uncertainty.  Jesus said, “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”  (The phrase “Son of Man” refers both to Jesus and to humans in general.)  We have no place to lay our heads, no resting place, no absolutely solid foundation in this world.  Jesus himself died a violent death. 

In a sermon last spring, I made the point that we’re all like the people who jumped from the twin towers, holding hands.  We’re falling through space.  There is nothing really fixed and solid to hang on to. 

What Jesus gives is a way to live even without certainty, to live with trust anyway, and to hold on to the people who are falling with us.  (Just what it means to “hold hands” in the Christian sense will be the subject of next week’s sermon.)

Jesus didn’t spend his life agonizing about who or what God is.  He just trusted.  He prayed to “Abba”.  This is how he teaches us to live — to pray, to trust, to love God (whatever God is) to love each other, to be together, to be the church, to hold hands, as we fall into what looks (from a purely human perspective) like a really bad end

Even Jesus doesn’t give us the kind of certainty we think we would like.  He doesn’t give me the kind of certainty the breakfast table preacher seems to have.

What Jesus gives me is a way to live without certainty, but with hope and conviction that our lives exist and are held eternally — in heaven — that is, in something beyond us, bigger, more complicated, more mysterious, that what we can see or know with certainty.

That’s all we get.  But the good news is, that’s enough.  In fact, as I get older, I think more and more that it’s just right. 

Jesus is the bread that comes down from heaven to show us how to live in a world where there seems to be nothing we can count on.  But that way of living is something we can count on and trust.

What do you think?  What do you count on?