Sermons

How to Serve Man

Aaron Doll                                       Third Presbyterian Church  August 3, 2003                                                 John 6:24-35

The Gospel message this morning comes from the 6th Chapter of the Gospel of John, following the miracle of the feeding of the 5000. Let us Hear God’s Word. This is the word of the Lord.

I took the title of this message from a Twilight Zone episode of the same name, and I want to share this as an illustration because it shows a humorous picture of how efforts for perfection in this world, without God, end up in some other direction than we intended. I don’t know if many of you remember that episode, but in short:

A race of extremely nice and cuddly aliens come to earth, appear at the United Nations, and announce that they have come to help humankind to overcome all of the problems that the human race has. Some people are suspicious of the aliens, especially the two main characters, but most people go along with it.

After hunger and war are erased, there is peace in the world, and everyone is well taken care of. And most people, of course, end their suspicions. Later the two characters find a book by the aliens entitled How to Serve Man, which also puts their mind at ease, despite it being written in the language of the aliens on the inside.

The aliens later set up an exchange program with the humans, bringing people by the tens of thousands to their home world, and bringing many aliens to earth. The show ends with a neat punch line. The two main characters are getting on the alien ship, and the one looks to the other, and says he has finally been able to translate the rest of the book, How to Serve Man. It was, as some of you guessed, a cook book. Of course the aliens wanted us nice and plump and safe. Better eating that way!

By our own powers, strengths, abilities, humankind has routinely tried to better life on earth, to enact a form of earthly salvation. Whenever we rely on our own power and strength and own agenda to do so, we end up either losing our determination or leading others into death behind us. Sometimes we trust in others. Others whom we shouldn’t trust in the slightest, and like in that fictional tale, those roads lead to death also.

One real example of that took place at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

There, moved by what they called the zeit geist, or Spirit of the Times, philosophers and theologians decided to throw out Christianity as it was received, and re-invent thought under the belief that modern man has evolved now to the pinnacle of what we can do.

We are smarter, better, stronger than Jesus, and others of that ancient time, and we can remake society in a humanistic idea of perfection in body and in thought. From this, we got the Nazi’s, who took purity of race and thought to mean the obliteration of all others. This was extreme, but it wasn’t new, nor the last of such thinking, and from all time, whenever individuals, or indeed more complex systems of human society like corporations or governments strives of its own power, and trusts in its own depraved intellect and ability, efforts that lead to suicide bombings and various other forms of death.

A third choice is given to us in the Sixth Chapter of John’s Gospel by those who follow Jesus wrongly. Hey, they followed him. They followed him physically around the Sea of Galilee to Capernaum. But Jesus takes one of his frequent opportunities in the Gospel of John to speak a hard truth to them. He says that their attempts to follow him are worthless because they don’t recognize him for who he is, and they followed him for the wrong reasons.

There are two scandals in the Gospel reading from this morning, both having a bearing on each other, and on us as we, as Christians, seek to understand our abilities for service and our connection with our creator. So far, in the first lesson in this “scandalous” chapter, we have seen, to the modern mind, the scandal of the miraculous, and the scandal of Jesus’ words not fitting into the grids which we lay down for him to fit into, versus our needs to accept Him at His word for who He is, and not who we want Him to be.

The crowd asked Christ two questions: 28. What may we do that we may work the works of God? 30. What sign do you do that we may see and believe you? And actually, I would like to look at them in reverse order. The first thing the question in verse 30 probably brought to your mind when you hear them ask “what sign do you do” is the same first thing that it brings to my mind.

DUH…Weren’t you there yesterday when all this stuff went down??

Weren’t you there and weren’t you the ones who had your bellies filled by the loaves and fish?? And the answer is, of course yes. So what was it that they were asking and implying, and what does that tell us about ourselves.

First, this is part of the constant comparison with Moses that permeates this chapter. Moses, at least according to the people here, fed the Israelites. Millions of them for 40 years. If Christ is better than Moses, then certainly he can do better miracles, maybe feed them better food for much longer period of time??? In all of this they are thinking with their stomachs.

Christ rebukes their point on several counts. First of all, Moses didn’t do anything, but rather it was God’s action (which is clearly one of the themes of this chapter.) God performed the miracle, says Christ, which fed the people temporarily and gave them life, and then God sent Him, Jesus, to be the true food for the people, the one food that brings life eternal.

Second, Christ sees through their sin, and he refuses to respect those who have come to him, because they have come on their own terms. Here he also refuses to grant their request, because even in granting their request for a sign, it would not provide them the proper food for true faith. It would reinforce their focus on earthly power and gratification.

So, to go back to verse 28. Here the people ask “What must we do to be doing the works of God.” In the Greek line here you have “doing” emphasized 3 times. In a sense, they are asking “What must we be doing to be doing the doings of God?” They are thinking that it all depends on their doings, their works. Jesus answers them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the One whom God has sent.” Well that takes us aback a bit. Here we are already rolling up our sleeves and ready to get dirty and what is Christ’s answer? The Work of God is to believe? We were hoping for something a little more tangible there Jesus! What about feeding the hungry, or clothing the naked, or offering the shelter of our church to the homeless, or tutoring at school #6 or working for the common good?

I’m sure all of these things Jesus would not have taken offense to. On another occasion He would indeed ask us to do these very things. In this moment he has another lesson to teach us this morning. There is a lesson of service that this crowd is already well along in learning. They know that to follow Christ involves getting up and DOING something. There is an eternal sense of being that is hard for them (and for us) to grasp however.

To use Paul’s words in Ephesians; An inner being that is meant to empower and sustain us. He is telling them here not to trust in their own selves, in their own efforts to fulfill the calling of compassion. We are not employees working FOR God’s kingdom. We are not to be striving for the benefits in themselves that these works, these doings will bring to our community. Indeed there is a temporal sense to salvation and God’s Kingdom is being born among us - but it will not happen through our own efforts. For by merely putting our nose to the grindstone we might miss out on what wondrous and unexpected thing Christ might do through us. Working or serving to earn God’s love or human approval will not sustain us in the difficult uphill battles we face as members of a human and sinful nation and a human and sinful Church.

In answering both questions of the crowd, Jesus turns to the image of food. There is physical nourishment that sustains our bodies and our minds and our emotions that are all tied up in this physical shell for a time. But there is also food that quenches a deeper hunger, and a deeper thirst down in our souls. The deeper lesson that Christ is calling us to learn is about eternal things, and a salvation that goes beyond earthly situations - it deals with restoring and sustaining our ultimate relationship with our creator.

Works are insufficient for pleasing God, because God cannot be pleased with us any more than God already is.

The breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love for us is infinite. The act of exploring our relationship with God develops understanding and grows our love. Exploring the breadth and length and height and depth of god’s love for us will sustain us as the fullness of God’s nature is born and dwells within us.

Gratitude is more authentic than guilt; Love overflowing into joy is more powerful than human determination. The crowd murmured at Jesus because He said “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” They said is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know. How can He now say “I have come down from heaven.” This is another of the great scandals of this chapter, which centers on the divinity of Jesus. Those of you who have read Marcus Borg or Jack Spong’s works with the Adult Ed Classes or Men’s Group or Sister’s in Spirit are familiar with this great mystery of faith and our modern issues with it.

There is no way for human reason to ever reach the conclusion that God became human. That’s something that just lies beyond the realm of human reason alone. It goes beyond sense experience and scientific experimentation. In other words, if Jesus, as he came to earth in the incarnation, were to walk into this sanctuary, and you were to conduct scientific experiments on him, measuring him, testing him with our senses, there would be nothing about him which would indicate that He is THE GOD, the creator of the universe. He would be in form, just like you and me.

So, on the one hand the fact that Christ is God tells us the very limits of our own intellect and our own common sense. On the other hand the scandal of God becoming human also humiliates us, for as food is consumed the bread of heaven must be broken to save us.

Because our sinful nature so often tends to lead us to believe that we can save our society and ourselves with a little help from our divine friend. In other words, if we have better education, if we have better legislation, transportation, if we just run our government more wisely, then everything we really need deep down will be provided.

But the Gospel goes a lot farther. It says, “NO!” You can’t save yourselves; in fact you can’t even save yourselves with God just helping you. God became human not just to help you, instruct you, to guide you, but the only way for you to receive the bread of life is for God to become a human being, that you can relate to and who can share every aspect of your experience, including death. He has to die because our sin has so corrupted us that there is no possibility of us saving ourselves, there is no possibility of our even working a deal that God will come down and make the teachings a little clearer, so that we can work a little harder and save our community or ourselves.

It isn't a 50/50 proposition. God has to do everything and before we can even begin to do a single work that fulfils the divine plan, God has to completely fill us with God’s own life and power. So when verse 29 says “This is the work of God that you believe in Him, whom God has sent”, recognize that there are implications to this belief. Believe means it must become our life.

It must become our life that God took on human form to die and rise and pour out God’s Spirit - to completely give a new nature. God’s own nature. Anything less just won’t do.

And that is insulting. It is an insult to the intelligence to say that this 33 year old Palestinian Jew, this Galilean, is the eternal all powerful creator and sustainer of the universe. It is a slap across the face to our intellect and any claim our minds may have of sufficiency in and of themselves.

But then to make matters worse, to add insult to injury, the Lord says, it is not enough for me simply to become one of you, you need to tear me to shreds. I have to let you crucify me. And even then, you will not realize what you are doing. “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” “On your own, you are incapable of doing what I made you for.” You are not really going to be saved until I fill you with my nature, not just in a spiritual, ethereal misty sort of way, but it isn’t until you are done eating my flesh and drinking my blood that you will be sufficiently filled with my nature for you to finally be filled with the power to be my salvation for the world around you and at home in my love. But in Christ, who lived through all the life that we lived through, we are given a new nature. In Christ, we are born, not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will or of humankind, or our will, or our efforts, but of God’s will! We are born into Christ’s nature. We become partakers of his Body and Blood. There is nothing special about the bread and juice that we share this morning. However it is sanctified by our intention for it in these moments. I would describe something magic in the symbol of what it represents and Christ the true vine and true bread is indeed present.

As we come to His table this morning, we seek Christ, not as the crowd sought him on their terms, for their ends, but we follow and obey, that we may receive and be partakers of His flesh and blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and that our souls may be washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us that our souls might be washed over with power and joy in God’s love. Amen.