Manna (Proper 13B)

Manna

Proper 13B
5 August 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When Elena and I were living in China, we would occasionally come back to the U.S.to reconnect.  At times we would be asked how many meals we had to eat each day, since, “a half hour after you eat Chinese food, you’re hungry again.”   We would politely smile and say gently that we had become accustomed to food there, and found it every bit as satisfying as western food.  “We eat more rice with our Chinese meals than you probably do here.   Staple foods, whether rice or bread, fill you up and stay with you.” 

Sustenance!  Sustenance with staying power!  This is what we all need.  Because of this, hunger has become a metaphor for all human needs and desires.  Bruce Springsteen sings of having a “hungry heart.”  Van Morrison sings “I’m hungry for your love.”  We say that a particularly well-staged production here in this village of theater and music is a “feast for eye and ear.” A person ready to do a job with vigor and advance her career is described as “hungry.”

We speak of “comfort food,” revealing an uncomfortable fact that sometimes we transfer our needs and discomfort from other areas in life to food and eating.  So some of us alas, become fat due to neediness we seek to satisfy as if it were hunger.

Similarly, we often experience simple physical hunger, especially when coupled with exhaustion, as overwhelming and larger spiritual need.   That is one of the reasons that fasting is such a prevalent spiritual practice in many traditions. 

Sometimes, it is hard to sort out all the various needs we feel. 

Abraham Maslow talks about a hierarchy of needs:  at the bottom are the physiological needs.  Then there are the basic needs for safety and security, followed by love and belonging. A need for esteem comes next.  This is followed by self-actualization and transcendence.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the heart of every human being.  Addressing God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.”   In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy.  There is a hole in the middle of each human heart, and that hole has the shape of God. 

This most basic and important need in traditional Christian teaching can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses through God’s indwelling spirit here and now.  This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist enlightenment and nirvana.  But where in Buddhism, enlightenment comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any need, in Christianity the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire.   The presence of God both satisfies and feeds our hungers. 

The idea is expressed well in a line in one of my favorite hymns:

Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.

... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.

Today’s Gospel talks about various kinds of hunger, various kinds of need.  In it, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me and partakes will never be hungry again, will never be thirsty again.” 

He is speaking to people who have been trying to catch up with him ever since he fed the 5,000, which we read about last week.  Remember, Jesus has to flee after he had fed the 5,000 because the people wanted to make him their king.  He secretly walks across the sea to escape them.  When they finally find Jesus, he cuts to the heart of the matter, “You are chasing after me not because I showed you marvels from God pointing to hidden truth, but because you filled your bellies with the loaves I gave you,” (John 6:26).  He adds, “Do not work hard for the food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts into timelessness” (John 6:27).

Jesus’ marvelous acts serve a two-fold purpose, addressing different needs and hungers.  At a concrete level, they set people free from tangible burdens such as illness, social isolation, physical disabilities, mental illness, and physical hunger.   But as signs, they point to things beyond themselves. They put God’s love and power on display, and thus reveal God’s reign, and give a glimpse of the beatific vision.  Jesus’ healing and awesome acts of feeding those in need point to the truth that, indeed, the Reign of God is in our midst, and that God is, here and now, fully in charge.

Jesus scolds the people who have been chasing him because they can’t see beyond his satisfying their lower needs to see the glimpse of true glory that offers in these acts.  

Do we have eyes to see glimpses of God’s glory and ears to hear whispers and echoes of God’s voice when these are offered us?

If we don’t, our relationship with Jesus by definition is manipulative and exploitive.   We are using Jesus to obtain whatever it is that we feel we acutely need.  In so doing, we shun any authentic relationship with Jesus, and miss “finding our rest in God,” as Augustine put it.  We settle for satisfying only our simplest needs, and thus sell ourselves cheap.  We chase after Jesus because he fed us loaves and not because he showed us a glimpse of God at work.  

It’s not that these lesser needs and hungers are unimportant.  It’s just that chasing after them, as if it is all that is important, misses the crucial piece of what God is up to in sending us Jesus.   

“Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts forever” (John 6:27), says Jesus.  He is thinking of the story of the manna in Exodus, where the bread from heaven spoils each evening, requiring the Israelites to gather it each day excepting Sabbaths.   “The bread that lasts forever” is for Jesus that which satisfies the deepest needs as well as the shallowest.  “I am that bread,” he says.

What’s curious here is this—this bread too must be gathered each day, though it lasts forever.  The problem is not that this bread spoils, but that this is living bread, and to nurture and foster anything living, you need to be constantly attentive.  

 

That is why the Lord’s Prayer in Luke says, “give us each day our daily bread,” or, better, “our bread for the coming day, for the morrow.”

The paradox here results from the intersection of the timeless, ever present Beatific Vision and our day-to-day, hand-to-mouth experience of it within time.  Remember the angels in the city of God in that hymn I quoted, “Still they joy and weary never, More and more desiring ever”? 

The idea is that the contemplation of the Divine Beauty is not simple satisfaction of a hunger, once felt and now managed, not simple rest found in God after restlessness apart from God.  In the timelessness of the Eternal presence, our need and our satisfaction are experienced at the same, eternally present moment.  Our hunger and our being fully satisfied are experienced as two aspects of enjoying the Beatific Vision.  It is an experience of being in the present moment, lost in timeless beauty.  And it is an experience of joy. 

Translating that into the here and now of our daily experience in time, it means that though the sustenance this bread gives lasts forever, we must be constantly feeding on it.  Otherwise, this bread is not living, and we have mistaken the Bread of Life for mere Bakery Goods.

Scots poet and minister George MacDonald wrote the following: 

“In holy things may be unholy greed.

Thou giv’st a glimpse of many a lovely thing,

Not to be stored for use in any mind,

But only for the present spiritual need.

The holiest bread, if hoarded, soon will breed

The mammon-moth, the having-pride, I find.”

Sisters and Brothers, we live in a world awash with need, inundated with hunger, and begging for our help.  We ourselves are conflicted messes of competing desires and hungers.  The very fact that we continue to have all our various needs and hungers, whether in a hierarchy or not, tells us that we are living in enemy-occupied territory.  And so the glimpse of glory, the dim hint of the Beatific Vision we gain through our experience of Jesus in the here and now, is very important. 

 

We must follow Jesus in trying to make the Reign of God present.  We must follow Jesus in trying to meet human hunger and need of all types. 

But, we must also be confident that satisfying want is not all there is. 

 

In offering himself to us as “bread from heaven,” living bread that must be partaken each and every day, Jesus offers us all his Father’s richest satisfaction of all needs and hungers.  

 

But our experience of this here and now is by definition partial, and can only hint at the glory to come.  But it is sufficient.  St. Julian of Norwich said of Jesus’ promise to feed us, and sustain us, the following: “He did not say, You will never have a rough passage, you will never be over-strained, you will never feel uncomfortable, but he did say You will never be overcome.”

In the coming week, I invite us all to do a spiritual exercise, a thought experiment to try to discover our motives.  Why do you come to Church, why do you pray, why do you serve, why do you try to resist temptation or avoid doing bad things, why do you give offerings and alms?  Why do you seek Jesus?   Identify this as best you can, and then label it as “filling my belly with loaves.”  Then image you are standing face to face with Jesus, who says, “You are seeking me not because you saw signs from God pointing to greater things, deeper needs met, but because I met this specific need for you.”    And then try to imagine him simply holding you in his arms, and saying, “But that’s all right.  I have much more to offer.  Let me show you the way.”    

In the name of Christ, Amen.