In Person: GOD (No IVRs Allowed)
John 6:1-21 + July 30, 2006
When was the last time you tried to call your insurance company, your credit card company, your utility company, or your doctor, and got a real live person? It's one thing to get an answering machine or voice mail when someone is temporarily unavailable. But now we get this pleasant but dispassionate electronic voice inviting us to spend the next hour or so trapped in a kind of electronic purgatory. Welcome to IVR. IVR stands for "interactive voice response." IVR drives me nuts. I hate it. Depending on my mood, I have been known to talk back to these voices with the same fake inflections they're programmed to use to talk to me. That's really cynical, I know, but I'm not alone. There is a website (paulenglish.com) that gives special "secret codes" to connect directly with a real live person.
One of the many things I appreciate about Holy Cross is that when people call during office hours, 90% of the time they get a real person. One of the reasons I publish my cell phone number is because I want you to connect directly with a real live person if it's after office hours. I keep the cell phone with me at all times; it gets charged up right next to my bed at night.
When we need something badly we want to talk directly to the person who can get it for us rather than following the path of most resistance through a maze of menus. There's no substitute for someone who will really listen and respond. And I appreciate so much that I can trust you with my cell phone number. In a year and three quarters only once has someone abused this and called me at an inconvenient time for an unimportant reason -- and that was someone who called at 10:30 on a Saturday night and lied about both his relationship with Holy Cross and his need. But the risk is worth it for me. I rest better knowing that if someone needs to reach me, they can -- as long as my cell phone is working, and I have to admit there have been a couple of times when it didn't work.
In a church, a community of Christ, especially, it's critical that people in any need have access to a person. That's the whole point of Christian faith. God -- in Jesus -- comes to us as a person. Today in the cycle of lessons we call our lectionary, we switch from Gospel readings from the Gospel of Mark to a stretch of readings from the Gospel of John. Starting today and for the next five weeks, our Gospel readings will not only come from the Gospel of John, but from one chapter from the Gospel of John -- chapter 6. The entire Gospel of John is all about God coming to us in person, and that the person of Jesus is God. It is John who gives us that beautiful poetry we hear at Christmas time, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God, ? and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." And it is the Gospel of John that gives us all of those famous "I AM" sayings. These sayings connect Jesus to Moses. God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM!" and "Tell them "I AM" has sent you. And so in John, we hear Jesus say, "I am the good shepherd. I am the light of the world. I am the true vine. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the living water. I am the resurrection and the life. Before Abraham was, I am." And for the next five weeks, we're going to hear variations on this theme over and over again: "I am the Bread of Life. I am the Bread that came down from heaven. I am the living Bread that came down from heaven."
There seems to be a method to John's madness. As he tells the story of Jesus, he affirms and re-affirms again and again two major themes:
Last week we said farewell to Andy and Wendy Amstutz and their children. One of the things I forgot to mention but I heard YOU say to them, was to thank Andy for sharing his Jewish heritage with us by putting on a Passover Seder during Holy Week. They helped us deepen our understanding of Holy Communion by helping us actively connect our sacrament with its origins in the Jewish Passover meal and in the story of the Exodus. Today John does the same thing. It's no coincidence that John tells these two stories in our reading today -- the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus' walking on water -- in the context of Passover. "Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near," John says in verse 4, just before he begins. And then these early Christians would hear two stories that for them would obviously connect Jesus to the God of Judaism. The loaves and fish are multiplied, and the hungry on the mountain are fed like God fed the hungry Israelites with manna in the wilderness. Jesus walks on the water and the same power of God is demonstrated as when the Israelites fled Egypt by crossing the Red Sea. New Testament translators have Jesus saying to the terrified disciples, "It is I, do not be afraid." But in a more apt translation Jesus simply says, "I AM. Do not be afraid." Once again, more than a hint is there. This is not just a magical prophet or miracle worker in our midst. This is GOD! GOD in a person. Imagine that! In this Jesus -- access to the very God. This must not be simply a mortal human being's power at work here. There are too many obvious connections. This must be GOD's power.
If you were a member of John's community, one of these early, struggling Christians, you would make some more connections when you heard these stories. Certain images would jump right out at you. Bread and fish would remind you of the poor in Galilee. Bread and fish made up the basic diet of the poor. You would be reminded of a "God in person" who spent time and energy on the poor. You would be reminded of actions performed every day by your Jewish forefathers. Every day these fathers took the bread into their hands, thanked God for the gift of food, broke the loaf, and gave each person present a piece to eat. You would be reminded of a family meal.
But mostly you would be reminded of another kind of family meal. When you heard the words, "He took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them?" they would sound very much like the words that go with the story of the Last Supper. And of course you would be reminded of the daily Christian ritual of the breaking of bread. This was the practice that reminded you of the promise of the future with God. It was a reminder you needed to hear often and do often. And when you heard the story of Jesus' walking on the water, you would recall the water of baptism, the bath that brought you new life even as the crossing of the Red Sea marked the beginning of a new life for your ancestors. So here is God -- in -- person. God in Jesus, making himself known in a meal of abundance where once there was scarcity, in water where the power of God conquers fear. Baptism. Holy Communion. The sacraments of the church. The means of grace.
We always say in Bible Study that the Gospel of John is different than the other three. And indeed it is. The story of the feeding of the 5,000 is the only story besides the accounts of Jesus' death and resurrection that appears in all four Gospels. In fact, it appears six times in the New Testament in one form or another. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, it comes as another miracle story. In John, it's not called a miracle, but a "sign." A sign that points not so much to what Jesus did, but a sign that gets our attention, like a teaser, or a billboard. The crowds see magic. And they want to make Jesus king. When they react like this, it's as though Jesus says, "Darn," and snaps his fingers in frustration. "They didn't get it. I'm going to have to get back to them. I've got to think about this." So he withdraws by himself. Then, after yet another sign -- walking on the water -- he goes into teaching mode, so they can learn more about who Jesus is and not just react to what he did..
And that is exactly what we will do these next four weeks. These two stories set the stage for Jesus to go into what we call the "Bread of Life Discourse." We will learn in some depth about Jesus through the lens of this metaphor of the "Bread of Life". And we will learn more about how Jesus comes to us -- in person -- as the bread of life in Holy Communion. We will learn that it is HIS meal. We do not define it. HE hosts it, he determines the guest list, the menu, and the benefits of this meal. Hopefully our understanding of this Holy Meal will be deepened and so our experience of God -- in person -- will be strengthened as we meet him in bread and wine, water and word, and in one another, in person -- week in and week out. And hopefully when we leave here we will be empowered to personalize our increasingly depersonalized world with the love of the One who first loves us -- in all of our interactions, and especially in those in which it would be just as easy to use a programmed response. There's no IVR at this table. AMEN.
Pastor Dana Runestad
Holy Cross Lutheran Church
Livonia, Michigan
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
30 July 2006
Sources:
"Jesus Doesn't Use IVR!" in Homiletics, July 2006, pp. 42-46.
Adele Stiles Resmer, "Eighth Sunday After Pentecost" in New Proclamation Year B, 2006 Easter through
Pentecost, 2006, Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, pp. 151-157.
"John's Reason for Writing: Handpicked Incidents That Prove a Point," in The New Student Study Bible NRSV,
1990, Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, p. 1109.
Tom Wright, John for Everyone Part One (Chapters 1-10) Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, pp.
70-81.
"Encountering John" in Pulpit Resource http://www.logosproductions.com/pr_online.php?action=view&site-uidl=9832&hallway_...
"The apostle Paul clearly sees the exodus as a prototype for Holy Baptism and the Eucharist (I Corinthians 10:1-5)."
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