Hungry?

Isaiah 55, John 6:24-35

August 6, 2006

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Never was Jesus faced with a crowd so obsessed with work as that group who had been fed on the hillside and followed him over to Capernaum. They’d already gone to great effort to track him down after he left in the night and then they begged him to tell them what work they could do for God. When he gave them a cryptic reply, they asked him to do some more work for them. Now remember he had just organized supper for 5000 the night before, but they wanted something more, maybe something bigger. There was an old tagline on UCC bumper stickers that would have appealed to these people: “To do is to be, to be is to do.” This crowd knew what they wanted: they wanted to know what they had to do to please God and they wanted Jesus to be doing stuff to prove to them he was from God.

But that day in Capernaum, Jesus urged them to want something else, to hunger and thirst after something other than works, either theirs or his. He urged them to be hungry for a relationship with God, in this case, through Jesus. The Greek words are “ego eimi,” “I am.” We start and finish with that truth. God is. In us, for us, with us, and that changes everything about how we live and work and be and do in this world. If we forget that in our being and doing, the center does not hold and all the being and doing expends enormous energy for little gain, we become like soft clay when the wheel spins too fast and we become misshapen, like a child swinging around at the end of parent’s arms who gradually lets go. Stop, then, and remember. Eigo eimi: I am.

Then, “I am the bread of life,” he said. That day in Capernaum, Jesus offered the crowd something different from what they were expecting. He wanted them to ask for something, but not like the meal he had provided the day before. He invited them to ask not for some thing from God at all, but to consciously dwell in the presence of God at all times, to be constantly fed by being one with God, the way bread becomes part of our bodies in nourishment when we eat it, to open room in their lives for a hunger that they would not seek to satisfy with work or stuff or lobster bisque. He invited them to be hungry for God’s love, for God’s word, for God’s vision for them and for the world. He wanted them to recognize the hunger within them and then turn to Jesus to find a different kind of food.

It’s the same hope we find in God’s words through the prophet Isaiah to a people in exile. Did you hear what words came over and over in that reading? Come…Listen…Seek…Eat. These words are to a people frantically hungry for and working on getting back home, back to their land. “Forget the land and your homes a minute,” God said, “there’s something you need more than that, and if you don’t get it, all the land in the world will not satisfy you.” The words are full of invitation and yearning and promises of joy and peace. Come, listen, seek, eat.

There is a table set here today. I have some invitations to share with you about this meal. To those of you here who work very hard all week, I invite you to stop, not just your body, but your thinking about what comes next. Breathe. God wants to feed you.

To those of you here who are passionate about trying to discover how you can serve God wherever you are and who seek diligently to give God delight; stop, for God wants to ground and root you in the joy and peace that will generate greater things in you than you have yet attempted.

To those of you here who live with an inner nagging worry that whatever you do it is not good enough for God, or anyone else for that matter, to those of you here who feel guilty that you have not done enough for your family, your colleagues, the community around you, for peace on earth, or for God; stop, for God invites you just to be in the presence of one who desperately loves you and can remove your worries, who is the alpha and the omega and doesn’t need you to be that for any one or any cause. Receive forgiveness for your guilt, and free up all that energy for something wonderful.

To those of you here who are tired of trying or feel alone in your effort, to those of you here who may have been burned by some religious past that makes the notion of being close to God either fearful or unbelievable; stop, for God is up to something new in you, speaking in a new way to you, waiting to hear you laugh, to hear you sing, to touch the skeptical or fearful places in you gently with peace, challenge and anticipation.

To those of you here just beginning the search for what Jesus or God is all about anyway, to you I repeat God’s invitation. Come, listen, seek, eat. Begin a voyage of discovery that will include both the miraculous and the mundane, but a journey you need not take alone or in fear. “Ego eimi,” says Jesus, “I am.”

Bread. For you. For all. Hungry? Amen.