Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 3, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

"I am the bread of life." That of course is the best known line from the Gospel lesson we just heard. It was not , however, the thing that most struck me when I read that lesson in preparation for preaching this morning. The line that kept grabbing my attention was: "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life...." John 6:27 That line, however, seems to raise more questions than it answers. What does it mean, and why should we take it to heart? What does Jesus mean by food? Is he talking literally about food, the stuff we eat? It of course perishes, but don’t we need it? Don’t we have to work to obtain it? I don’t think Jesus was denying that we do.

But what does he mean by food that does not perish but rather "endures for eternal life"? It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, that Jesus here is not talking about actual food. I think even the most die-hard literalist would concede that Jesus here is using the word food as a metaphor. John is famous as the spiritual Gospel, and clearly Jesus here is talking about spiritual food. He is saying, I think, that our primary concern in this life should be that which feeds us spiritually, not that which feeds merely the perishable body but not the imperishable soul.

This is a teaching that American culture today desperately needs to hear and to follow. As I told some of you just the other day, I am convinced that our country today is experiencing a profound spiritual crisis and that all of our myriad social problems can be traced directly to that spiritual crisis. What is that crisis? It is, I think, that primarily as a result of the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the scientific materialism that is our culture’s view of reality, we have, collectively, lost our sense of connection with ultimate reality, with the realm of Spirit, that is, with God. In other words, we have become alienated from God, not because of anything God has done but because of what we have done. We have so narrowed our understanding of what is real that we have shut ourselves off from the transcendent, spiritual dimension of reality, and our collective soul has been gravely wounded as a result. Because we have alienated ourselves from God we can find no meaning in our lives. Because we have alienated ourselves from God we are alienated from each other and even from our own true selves as well.

The consequences of our alienation are all the social ills from which we suffer-an epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction, astronomical divorce rates, tragic rates of teenage suicide, and on and on. Because we have alienated ourselves from the true God we go whoring after idols, the idols of consumerism, prestige, success, power. Because we do not life our lives in communion with the true symbols of ultimate reality we worship the symbols of finite reality-idols with feet of clay, nations that let us down and cannot sustain us in times of true crisis, massive vehicles that give us a completely false sense of security, gated communities that we delude ourselves can shelter us from the world around us, and on and on. All of these things are the food that perishes. In a spiritual sense they give us the illusion of sustenance but spoil and rot out from under us, leaving us empty, unfulfilled, and hungering for true nourishment.

They leave us hungering for the food the endures for eternal life. That food is communion with the true God, the ultimate reality of existence, our source and our goal, our hope and our strength. Our Christian faith is not the only true food, but it is true food nonetheless. It connects us in the most powerful way with God. It does that through its stories, its symbols, its worship, its prayers. It does it most powerfully, I believe, through actual food, the bread and wine of the Eucharist. That food is of course symbolic. It’s hardly a full meal. But that’s all right because it isn’t intended as the food that perishes, food that sustains the body but not the soul. It is intended as the food that endures for eternal life. It is the bread of life. Jesus is the bread of life, and we say that the elements of the sacrament are his body and blood. Again, we mean that symbolically. In the symbols of bread and wine we take Jesus, the bread of life, into our lives, into our very beings.

And in a physical, corporeal way we then take Him back out into the world with us. Here we feast on the bread of life. It nourishes our souls. It renews and strengthens our connection to the ground of our being, that is, to God. The bread of life that we receive here renews our spirits, giving us hope, strength, courage, joy, and peace. In doing that, it truly endures for eternal life, life with God here and now as well as hereafter. Thanks be to God. Amen.