Learning

I am often learning great new insights from the sermons of Doug and Desiree. To learn you need to have your attention attracted so, I’ll share a little attention grabber from Mark Twain. “If your son wishes to bring a cat home carrying it by the tail, let him; that experience will teach him more than a thousand words of warning.” There’s also a need to be willing to be interested in learning in the first place.

An important thing I learned in my career as a flying instructor was that the best education, growth and understanding doesn’t come from books or video streaming. The best development happens when there’s strong personal contact. We are all different and we go about our lives in our different ways. Some people are shy, and others are more confident.

I think we all understand that it is necessary to have good relationships with other people in our family or whatever organisations or clubs we belong to. “Not so good” relationships cause stress. Perhaps, the most important question for us as Christians is “do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” When it all comes down to the basics, (or dare I say, the fundamentals), a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is the heart of Christianity.

Service to others in need, the study of the scriptures, a knowledge of the faith, boldly witnessing to the coming of the kingdom of God; all those things are noble and good. But Christianity so often gets dragged down by issues about “church” (services, music, parish decisions, bishops and priests). We can miss the point that it’s all about Jesus; Christianity IS about getting personal with Jesus.

When we are going out to some significant function, most of us are a little uneasy until we get to know the host. Isn’t it amazing that we hope to spend eternity at the heavenly banquet, in the presence of Jesus, and yet there doesn’t seem to be an urgent sense of really needing to know Jesus well (to have a personal relationship with him) before we arrive at the banquet?

Well, how do we know Jesus? How are we to understand him? “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John. That doesn’t make much sense if you try to take it literally. Bread is bread (crust & dough), and a man is a man. They just can never be the same thing.

That’s the way the people in the story were thinking when Jesus said this to them. When he said that he had come down from heaven, they murmured to one another in their literal-minded confusion; “Hey, isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know so well? How can he now say, I have come down from heaven?” Not for the first time, the people find what Jesus says hard to swallow (pun intended).

Jesus spoke about being the Bread of Life intending to stir the imagination, to touch the hearts of people, to teach them more than just intellectual knowledge. But, because Jesus’ words fell upon the stony ears of people with no imagination or no great willingness to learn, his lesson caused only confusion, anger, and disrespect.

What do we find these days? People hear of Jesus and feel compelled to question what they hear. They say, “How did he do all those miraculous things? Surely, he was just a man; no one could walk on water, no one could feed five thousand people with a few scraps of food. The authors of the Bible must be exaggerating; the story of Jesus reveals more myth than man. These church goers are all self-deluded!” Knockers jump to conclusions about the Bible often without reading it. But what does it actually say and how are we to understand it? Listening to Desiree and Doug, I learn a great deal and find there’s a lot more for me to discover.

Military instructors found it very hard to keep their students interested and motivated in the early 1960s. However, when young fellows like me started to find ourselves being posted into danger in Vietnam, suddenly, we became very serious about our study. So maybe it’s a good thing that our Bible knowledge is challenged; it may well give some people more motivation to study their Bible.

The more you read the Bible, the more you find how it all marvelously fits together. There is a great example today. In the First Testament reading from 1 Kings 19, Elijah is scrambling to get away from the vicious Jezebel and when he gives up and wants to die, he is told by God’s angel to “Get up and eat.” Another reminder that God provides the nourishment necessary for life.

Then in our Gospel reading Jesus (who has provided food for the multitude) is telling those who follow him to eat more. Jesus invites them to experience God’s life-giving food. He had startled them by saying Moses didn’t give their ancestors real bread from heaven in the wilderness when they were hungry. Now he really shakes them up by saying that HE was the bread the Father had sent down from heaven, the only permanent satisfaction for hunger. It had been the same for the woman at the well in Samaria. Jesus told her that the water he would give her would become a spring gushing up to Eternal Life.

So, what are we to think of Jesus? When Jesus says he is the heavenly bread of life, he gives us plenty of clues. Bread is something we eat. Bread nourishes us. Bread sustains us and, at some points in our lives, it even makes us grow. Maybe that's who Jesus is; God come to us to nourish us, to sustain us, and to make us grow.

Something to keep in mind. Maybe, just like bread, Jesus must be consumed to do us any good!

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. If this is true, what does it mean? I believe it means that your soul will never be satisfied with the things that just fill your belly. No food, no loved one, no job, no wealth, no success, no fulfilment, will ever properly satisfy us.

Today’s gospel is a reminder to us that the Christian faith is more than a set of beliefs, a list of intellectual propositions or a rule of life.

Our Christianity is a matter of being encountered by a person, Jesus. Our Christianity is a matter of God getting personal with us, engaging us, taking over our lives, possessing us. To those in the crowd who are hungry and want to fill their stomachs; to those who want to have a pleasant discussion about spiritual matters, Jesus controversially says, “I am the bread of life. Feed on me.”

That’s the symbolism behind our celebration of Holy Communion!  Today, I hope that, as you receive the bread and the wine, which is for us the very body and blood of Christ, that for you, faith will become personal, the word will become flesh, that Jesus will mystically penetrate every fibre of your being, and that your personal relationship with Christ will be nurtured, fed and strengthened.

We are invited to the Lord’s table.  A little tasting platter to excite us and enthuse us as we anticipate the heavenly banquet to come.