I have a few liberal Christian friends who’ve started to talk about this being the end of the world. I resist the urge to tell them they sound like some of our more conservative siblings assertions that we are “in the end times.” Same argument, different evidence, I guess. When I told them my PhD welcome letter says my program begins September 1, 2024 and ends August 31, 2030, one said, “if any of us are still around by then.”
I have been pondering for weeks why this is so unsettling to me.
Then yesterday I read an article asking, why aren't people having kids? The surface answers people give are things like worries about the climate crisis or over population, or less stable finances, or fewer supportive structures than previous generations. But the deeper reason, researchers found, is actually about meaning and purpose.
These researchers concluded that when people are unsure about the purpose of their own life, they can’t see a reason to bring new humans into the mix. The researchers named “deep existential worries with no guidance to what is a good life,” and said “old frameworks have fallen away and the new ones provide hardly any answers at all.” In other words, a lot of modern people are really struggling to answer, What is a good life, and how do we live it?
“If people are going to have children,” they said, “they need more than a hunch that human life is valuable. ‘It is not just the possibility of goodness but its actuality that fuels our deepest longing to ensure a human future.’”
The article goes on further to state that to claim joy or pleasure in the prospect of parenting can seem distasteful. The researchers say, "'To assert the goodness of one’s own life is to risk coming across as privileged, or just hopelessly naive.'"
Both of these perspectives are working with a certain view of the future, of God, and mostly of human beings and our role here.
If having joy, or peace, or seeing life as good is to be greedy or out of touch with reality, we seem to believe that joy is a limited commodity, that peace is something people might hoard, that life is entirely ours to produce or uphold. Do we believe that rational, aware people must maintain a constant state of anxious worry, and face the future with foreboding?
Are we afraid to taste hope? Afraid to consume joy lest we use it all up like fossil fuels or the ozone? We are hungry for meaning. Hungry for purpose. Hungry to know what a good life is and how to live it. We are ravenous for some hope and starving for joy.
This dear crowd of people in our scripture today, who have managed to track down Jesus, they’re hungry too. Even though they’ve just come from experiencing the feeding of 5000 people with just a few loaves and fishes. Jesus calls them out, saying they came looking for him because they wanted more – what? Spectacle and excitement? Proximity to power? Free food and good feelings? More sense that, at least for the moment, things are going to be ok? In any case, it was not because they recognized in the experience any deeper meaning from God, or sensed a higher purpose drawing them in.
So when they ask, “How can we do the work of God?” they don’t like the answer they get. Because Jesus says, “The work of God is to believe in the one whom God sent.”
Pause the conversation, because this will be important for our discussion:
This word, believe, or have faith, means literally, entrust yourself to an entity with complete confidence. It’s not belief as intellectual agreement or faith as the capacity to hold firm. It’s utter yielding trust, surrendering to the one who holds firmly to us. Like a baby going limp in in the safety of your arms, the work of God we are called to is to let go and be, because Jesus has got you.
But who wants to be told to surrender? To just trust and stop striving? That what’s ours to do is live the one life we have been given joyfully and to die in assurance of grace? Frankly, that seems hopelessly out of touch and dangerously naive.
Resuming the conversation, as though the crowd didn’t just eat till they were full at the miracle picnic with leftovers galore, they ask Jesus what sign he’s going to give them to persuade them to believe, “like manna in the wilderness,” they suggest.
So, Jesus reminds them it wasn’t Moses who provided that manna to their ancestors, but God. They knew this story. But when we’re feeling worried, insecure or grasping for some control, it’s easy to forget what we know.
More than just food where there was none, manna taught the Israelites to entrust themselves into God’s care. Under Pharoah’s rule their identity was as property, their purpose was to toil for their survival, and their lives were only as valuable as what they could produce for the empire. Freed, in the wilderness, they were fed and cared for. They were learning how to rest from a God who rests--and who, by the way, thinks life is so great that, in the act of creating it, God kept pausing just to enjoy it, and to declare to Godself how very good each new thing is. By eating manna, their ancestors practiced being loved, being valued, being treasured by God who claims them as beloved children.
By eating the manna every day, they were learning trust, year after year, and gradually, they began to believe that maybe they didn’t have to scramble for their safety, or labor for their life, or ensure their own longevity, or direct their own future. Because by giving them manna, God was saying I will provide for your needs. Surrender into my care. As civil rights leader and Baptist pastor Ralph Abernathy famously said, “I may not know what the future holds but I know who holds the future.” This is what manna taught the Israelites.
Then Jesus pulls out of the past into the present tense and says, “God gives bread from heaven for the life of the world.”
“Sir, give us this bread always!” They cry.
Jesus answers, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
And they have no idea what to do with that statement. This uncomfortable exchange goes on for a ton more verses, at one point the disciples themselves saying, This is such a hard teaching, who can accept it? Finally, the eager crowd, who’d been so intent on finding Jesus, eventually gives up and wanders off. They were not ready for what Jesus was saying, but who among us is?
When Jesus says I am, he is invoking the very identity of God- the name, YHWH, means I AM, but in a simultaneously transcending time and entering time kind of way - compressing past, present and future into the present, right now, I am. Always now, I am who I will be, and who I was, I’m being, even Beingness itself.
So when Jesus says, I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the true vine, he is saying that beneath our deepest hungers, and up against our greatest fears, and inside the worst suffering or the haziest future, right now the very ground of being is being with and for us and calling us right now into being.
When we are lost, I am the way. When we without guidance or drowning in darkness, I am the light. When we’re tangled up in lies, I am the truth. When we’re terrified of death, I am the resurrection. When we dodge own vulnerability and weakness, I am the good shepherd who looks after his sheep. When we can’t seem to find meaning and purpose, and we question the fundamental value of human existence, I am the life. And when we are hungry, deeply longing to be filled, I am the bread of life, manna itself.
When Martin Luther was asked what he would do if the world was ending tomorrow, his answer was, “Plant an apple tree.” In other words, the future isn’t ours to control. Our job is to trust and obey. Right now.
And the models Jesus gives us for this way of living? Birds of the air and lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin, infants who can’t do anything but be adored and cared for, branches attached to a strong vine, wandering sheep who recognize the shepherd’s voice, and need the shepherd to keep them safe.
Jesus is not just the possibility of goodness but the actuality. I AM came into human life and human death right here with us, making the act of living itself a holy task. The precious, poignant reality that we get to be – in these specific bodies, on this remarkable planet, for this one blip of time in all the universe, alongside all these other beings made in the image of beingness itself? Astonishing.
Believe in me – this is the work of God that we can do. Entrust the world to me. Entrust yourself to me. Surrender into my life and my love. Let the manna feed you. Let the perpetually-present bread of life nourish you. Do the two things Jesus says are the sum of all God’s commands: Love God and love your neighbor. In other words, be human, be, right now. That’s your role.
Live the one life we’ve each been given - as unselfconsciously as flowers, as bombastically as birds, as unhesitatingly as infants, as vulnerably as sheep, as inseparably as branches drawing life from and expressing the life of the vine itself. And in this living, we can expect to be fed manna. We can assume our purpose is to give and receive love. We can practice the belonging that can’t be broken. We can follow our creator in walking around every day declaring life good. We can welcome ourselves and others into the deeper meaning that already holds us all. We can practice living in freedom and rest. And we can anticipate with confidence that the culmination of it all is complete wholeness for all of creation, that we get to joyfully join its coming, right now.
We know this story. But when we’re feeling worried, insecure, or grasping for some control, it’s easy to forget what we know.
But when we entrust it all - ourselves, our beloved, and this fragile world - into the care of I AM, we are doing the great act of faith, and in believing we participate in the AM-ness at work- the right now life of God healing the world, practicing peace and joy, and claiming the future for hope.
Amen.
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