The Bread of Life

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John 6:35-51
August 16, 2009

Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They were saying, ‘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”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

Back in December of 1946, a businessman named Stuart Luhan checked into the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Luhan regularly made trips there, and his custom was to get a room on the 10th floor so that he could be away from the street noises. Settling in for the night he looked forward to a good night’s rest before doing business the next day. So off he went to sleep.

Sometime in the early morning hours he woke up and saw a red glow out the window. Something was wrong. He heard a commotion outside his door and opened it to find the hallway thick with black smoke. Shutting the door he began to panic. He opened the window to see if there was a way down, but looking down from ten stories only increased his panic. What should he do? He couldn’t go into the hallway, and he couldn’t jump. Not knowing what else to do he retreated to the center of his room and tried to practice something he had been doing every morning for years, which is to calm himself and pray.

Seeking God’s help he said, “God, I put myself into your care and keeping. Let your presence be my fortress. I await your instructions on how to get out of this crisis.” He felt calm, despite the fact that the other voices in the hotel were becoming more frantic. Soon, he sensed a voice, a presence, telling him to calmly get dressed. Then he was to make a rope out of the sheets, blanket, and bedspread. He was getting ready to tie it to the center post on the window and throw the rope down, but from the same presence he sensed, “No. Not yet. Trust me.” He waited. Panic clutched at him, trying to get him to give in, but he stayed calm. After what seemed like forever he sensed the voice saying, “Now! Put the rope out the window and climb out.” As he did, Luhan recited words from the psalms: “God is my life and my salvation. I shall not fear. God is my life and salvation. I shall not fear.”

Climbing down he only reached the eighth floor. There was nowhere to go. Then he saw a fireman extending his ladder to the eighth floor, but it was too far away. Climbing up the ladder, the fireman saw Luhan, signaled him, and swung a rope hanging from the window above. He swung it once, and Luhan missed. Again he swung it, but it was just out of his reach. Finally a third time he swung it, and Luhan caught it. Twisting it around his right hand, he let go of his homemade rope and swung to the fireman, who caught him. Looking back he noticed that his homemade rope had caught fire and was now falling toward the earth. Luhan realized that if he had gone out too soon, he would have hung there to the point at which he couldn’t hold on any longer. He would have died. If he had waited, his own rope would have burned, causing him to fall and die. The timing was absolutely perfect.

I don’t know what you make of a story like this, but I think it explains a lot about what Jesus tried to say in our passage. When you hear him refer to himself as the “bread of life,” what does that term mean to you? Is it just something that you hear me say when I’m doing the words of institution during communion? Does it mean something more? To me it means that when we let Christ into our lives, he comes alive within us.

Jesus was trying to teach the people of the time an insight that they weren’t ready for. He was teaching that he could come alive in each and every one of us, if we choose to let him. He got into a lot of trouble for saying that he was the bread of life. He got into trouble because the Jews didn’t understand what he meant, and because they knew that he was somehow saying that God was in him and working through him. That was blasphemy. Also, they knew Mary and Joseph. They wondered how Jesus could say that he was from God if it was apparent who his parents were.

What they failed to understand, and what many modern Christians and non-Christians fail to comprehend, is that both in our passage and throughout all of John’s Gospel, Jesus was trying to teach people a whole new way of seeing our relationship with God. I didn’t understand this new way of seeing God and Christ until I read a book by the Quaker mystic, Thomas Kelly, in 1990. Reading this quote opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing Christ. Until then I had always seen God as distant and in heaven, and Jesus as distant and in the past. But Kelly opened me to the possibility that I could find Jesus somewhere else. He said, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.”

What he is saying is that we don’t find Christ merely in the past and in scripture. We find Christ in our hearts, in our souls, and that we can live a life that allows that life of Christ, that presence, to grow within us. He is saying that Christ is within us, but that we have to take the initiative to let him come alive.

Stuart Luhan experience that bread of life within. I’ve also experienced how openness to Jesus can be like the bread of life within us. I think I’ve told this story before, but I truly experienced Christ within when it came to writing and publishing my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. I had a dramatic experience of Christ at work. The book has to do with my whole vision for how to do church, a vision based on creating a church grounded in prayer that teaches members how to learn to rely on God’s guidance both in the church and in our personal lives. I felt called to write this book before I came to Calvin Church—for over nine years—but I always sensed that the timing wasn’t right.

Even though I had the vision for writing the book, I also knew that I wasn’t ready to do so until I had been here at Calvin Church for a while. So every year for five years I would pray and ask God if was time. At least three times a year I prayed, and each time I sensed God saying, “not yet.” So I wrote other books on the spiritual life, books such as Paradoxes for Living and Discovering the Narrow Path.

Then in January of 2003 I prayed, and I was surprised to I sense that God was saying “yes.” It was a strange moment because for all those previous years I had kept hearing in my heart, “not yet.” When I finally sensed God saying “yes” I had to keep coming back to God over the next few weeks to make sure that it wasn’t just me saying yes. By the way, I often hear God speaking to me, but not in a loud, audible voice. Generally I sense God speaking to me deep in my soul, through gentle tuggings or impressions. I’ve also learned to test that voice over time because I’m very aware of how easy it is to substitute my own desires for what God wants. Anyway, over the course of the next year I wrote the book, and throughout the writing actively sensed God’s hand on my shoulder, and almost, at times, God’s voice whispering in my ear. I wrote the book, having no idea who would publish it. I finished writing the book in late January of 2004.

A week after finishing it, I received a telephone call in my office at the church. On the line was an editor, Beth Gaede, from The Alban Institute, an organization devoted to helping congregations become healthier. Beth had heard from someone else that I had some interesting ideas about another topic, and wanted to know if I was interested in turning those ideas into a book. I told her that those ideas were more suitable for an article, not a whole book. Pausing, I figured that I might as well as tell her about the book I had just written. I told her that I had just written another book on another topic, a book titled Becoming the Blessed Church. I asked her if she was interested in hearing about it. She said yes, so I described the book.

When I finished describing the book to Beth, I heard nothing but silence on the other end. After almost ten seconds of silence, ten seconds during which I was wondering, “Wow, she must hate the idea,” she said, “Sorry for the silence. I just had chills go up my spine and I’m shaking a little bit. I just got out of a meeting with our director of publishing an hour ago. We had been talking about how we needed to change the direction of our books and move away from books on church growth and conflict management, and into books on bringing spirituality in to the church. We then outlined a particular book that we felt we needed to find someone to write. The problem is that we didn’t know who to ask. For the last fifteen minutes you’ve been describing the very book that we had outlined. And you’ve already written it!”

We are told that we are what we eat. If we eat crap we’ll feel like crap. If we eat what’s good, we’ll feel good. What Jesus teaches is similar. If our spiritual life is crap, our life will be crap. But if we are open to Christ in our hearts, Christ’s life will work through us to make a difference in the world. What he’s talking about is a life where wonderful things happen simply because we are open to them. He’s talking about a life full of coincidences, of providences.

I see this stuff happening all over the place in this church. Let me give you an example of this kind of providential grace here at Calvin Church. A number of years ago we were in the process of trying to put together a church website. The problem was that we really didn’t have anyone in the congregation who could do it, and we also didn’t have much money to spend on it. So we decided to wait and trust that God would provide.

A few months after deciding this, a new member of Calvin Church, Kathy Yaeger, approached me and said, “Graham, for the first time in twenty years I’m not working. And I noticed that you do not have a website for the church. Would you mind if I started one?” Of course I said an immediate and enthusiastic, “Yes, please. I’ll get you whatever you need.”

A year later, Kathy got a job and said to me, “I think I need to step down from managing the website. I seem to have less and less time with my new job.” Again, we decided to pray and see what God would do. About two days later, Jack Haubach approached me. He had joined the church in the previous year. He said, “Graham, I was wondering if it would be possible for me help out on the website. I just finished a class on website design, and I’d love to tinker with our website. I don’t want to get in Kathy’s way or step on her toes, but I’d love to at least share some of my ideas with her.” I laughed and said to Jack, ‘Well, as God would have it, Kathy can’t do the website any longer. How would you like to just take over the whole thing?” And Jack did.

About a year-and-a-half ago Jack moved to South Carolina, but before he did David Sloat came forward and said that he would like to help with the website. Today Jack still helps from South Carolina, even though he’s involved in another church now, but David runs most of the site.

The point is that when we are open to Christ at work within us, whether within us as individuals or as a church, wonderful things happen. And this is true not just for people in regards to the church, but for every walk of life. It all starts with wanting Christ to awaken in us, and then wanting to do Christ’s will in whatever we do. For example, I think this applies to work. Very few of us work in careers that don’t serve God in one way or another. The question is whether we can turn what we do into service to God, and let Christ become incarnated in our work. I don’t mean that we should proselytize. I’m talking about taking a prayerful approach to work where we simply ask Christ to guide us, bless us, and take care of us in whatever we do.

There’s a wonderful life ready to grow in us, but to let it grow we have to make a choice by asking, will I awaken the slumbering Christ within me? Will I let that Divine light within shine through me? Will I let a peace live in my soul by letting Christ live in my soul?

Amen.