Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Get ready for campaign 2000! The first casualty of war is always truth -- and that applies to political wars as well as to battlefield wars. Democrats will promise us happiness, lots of money and things, by micro-managing society so that everyone will get enough but no one too much. Republicans will promise happiness, lots of money and things, by keeping business and the economy healthy and letting the market have its way. ("A rising tide lifts all boats," they will say.) But nobody will tell us the hard truth: that money and things don't bring happiness. They only lead us to want more money and things, which is the quintessence of our perversity -- which is why politicians (and their promises) will always be around.

There is more to this life than meets the eye. Seeable, touchable, tangible things are not all there is. Many are the mysteries. For example, Jesus said, "…my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." We cannot understand that is the same way we understand a road map or the anatomy of a cow. (At this place in his Bible John Wesley wrote a note in the margin: "Meat, drink indeed -- with which (Jesus' body and blood) -- with which the soul of a believer is as truly fed as his body with meat and drink." We understand bodies. We're not too savvy about souls. A modern translation of Jesus' words goes like this: "My flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink….the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me." There is food and then there is food.

Anyone who would speak of spiritual food in today's world would be an odd voice, like someone singing off key. Because all our learning sets us up to believe that reality exists only in the objective physical world, or in the way I perceive that world. The rules of the game leave no room for spiritual things, for the kind of knowledge that is revealed, that comes perpendicular down from above, that is neither of this world nor of our imaginings. In such a time, what shall we do with Jesus when he says, "I am the true bread that came down from heaven?" "My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. What could that possibly mean in what we so confidently call "the real world?"

When Jesus said he was the true bread come down from heaven, that ticked off the Jewish leaders in the worst kind of way, because, first of all, they knew who Jesus was. (We know this kid! He didn't come from heaven. He came from Mary and Joseph!) No room for spiritual truth! More than that, the rabbis thought they knew all there was to know about bread from heaven. Heavenly bread was, and would always be, the manna with which God fed the Hebrew children in the dessert. And in response to that thought, Jesus angered them even more by saying, "O.K., but the people who ate that bread died -- eventually. My bread is better than Moses'. For the bread that I am, the bread that comes from heaven, feeds people forever, so they never die." No wonder they fussed and fumed!

In Russia there is an old tradition that the orthodox priests, when they visit their parishioners in the hospital, take a loaf of bread with them. Many years ago it was a practical matter. Hospitals in old Russia had no food service, and if the patient had no family or friends to bring food, he or she would go hungry. (It is still that way in many developing countries.) But always over the years, and much more important, bringing the loaf into the hospital was a symbol of bringing in Jesus who was "the bread of life." The communists banned the practice, saying that priests could visit but could not bring food, since, after all, those living in the "people's republic" could not possibly be hungry -- which was a lie, of course. But the real reason for the ban was that the communists did not know how to deal with Jesus, the bread of life. Even if they had provided every material need, which they hadn't, even then there would be spiritual hunger -- for which Marx and Lenin had nothing to offer. That little engine inside us needs fuel. We need to feed our souls. And for that, Jesus' flesh and blood hit the spot.

If we must say something nice about the French, we will admit that they are good cooks. They have a proverb that says, "A good meal ought to begin with hunger." It seems to me that we have to be hungry, sometimes terribly hungry, disastrously hungry, before we turn to Jesus, "the bread of life," and "make a meal" of him. It's not an easy thing to do. There is a natural reluctance to admit any need. Moreover we've spent a century denying the existence of spiritual things, so how can anyone be spiritually hungry? We live in this wonderful world of things, a world we think we created ourselves, and we revel in our genus for creativity and invention. We say, in so many words (as the communists said), "how could anyone possibly be hungry in a wonderful world like this?" But the hunger that Christ's satisfies is spiritual hunger, and in that regard many of us (in this wonderful world) are anorexic. Our sinfulness (all those things that make us less than God, all that which makes our world less than the Garden of Eden) -- our sinfulness entraps us. We cannot will our way out of it. All the creativity and invention in the world does not take away our isolation from God, that empty feeling, does not fill the God-hole in us.

We have arrived at this point by reducing everything to our perception of it, and thus making ourselves centers of the universe. What is religion? Well, religion is our mind projecting its wishes onto life. That's what Freud said. (We would like there to be a loving God, so we create one. God is a figment.) What is art? It's just colors and lines. We create the beauty in our minds. What is music? Merely vibrations in the air. We make it beautiful, or not beautiful, according to our tastes. For both beauty and ugliness exist only in our minds. What does the Bible say? Whatever you want it to say. What is truth, then? Whatever we want to be true. How do we know what is right or wrong? We determine that by "getting in touch with our feelings" about it. See how we internalize everything? For many people today there is no external truth, nothing that is revealed, nothing that stands over against us, or comes in upon us. Everything comes from us. So we have a terrible time with spiritual things, with a Jesus who calls himself "the true bread which came down from heaven." What's that all about? If it didn't come from us, it doesn't exist.

But the very point of John's Gospel is that an outside reality, one that doesn't depend on us to understand it or interpret it, has arrived. There has been an invasion, John tells us. God's perfect truth has invaded this lying world -- it happened when Jesus came. And its coming causes us to re-think everything. This is a deeper view of the incarnation: not just that Jesus came. That would be interesting history, but that he came and stayed, and still ministers to our needs. That's a spiritual claim, and in the spiritual world we talk in metaphors. So John tells us that Jesus is bread, feeding our hunger. He is a door, opening into God's presence. He is the vine, nourishing us who are the branches. He is a shepherd taking care of us. And all that has been revealed, simply revealed, not put up for discussion, in Jesus Christ. It is true whether we believe it or not. It's not up to us. It doesn't matter what we think or how we feel about it. You can't break the Ten Commandments -- you can only break yourself against them. They are revealed truth. They don't admit to fads. They don't come and go according to our whims.

Now and then, for me, the spiritual world (Jesus called it the Kingdom of God), with its own unique ways of thinking and seeing and talking, breaks through. Most of the time I am engaged in the physical world. But those spiritual break-throughs are like earthquakes, and I can never look at my life in the same way after they occur. It is true inside of me, just as it was true for the world. Once I saw the face of God, in Jesus, once the world saw God in him, nothing could ever be the same. That's how Jesus makes us new: he gives us a glimpse of a different and better world, on earth and in heaven, (a topsy-turvy world where the poor are rich and the rich poor, where spiritual realities prevail and spiritual food is served) and once we have seen that world, even if only for a moment, we are new men and women, and can never be the same as we were. You cannot unring the bell. Thank God!