O God, light of the minds that know you, life of the souls that love you, and strength of the thoughts that seek you, bless the words of this sermon and the meditations of our hearts.  Amen

If you haven’t noticed already, the Gospel of John is different from the others. And what makes it even more interesting is that for the first Christians there was no NT as we know it today.

After the resurrection, the stories about Jesus were told by those who had lived with and known him and retold by those who heard the original stories.

The earliest Gospel that was written down was the Gospel of Mark, the others followed, with John being the last one that we call a Gospel.

So, for some congregations, if there were any reading of the lessons, it would have been only from one of the Gospels, because they did not know about the others… 

It was not until some 300 years after Easter, that we got the 27 books that make up the NT as we know it today.

Those who had only John as their Gospel had no Christmas stories, no Parables, no retelling of the Lord’s Supper at Passover.

They never new the name of the woman that gave birth to Jesus.

Instead of Miracles as the Gospels named them, John calls them signs.

In John, the miracle of Jesus, in not that he is born of a virgin, but that he is from God.

John tells us that Jesus is the living bread that came down from heaven.

What makes this story all the more interesting, is that all those people who had been following Jesus around for the past three Sundays  (we have one more Sunday to go, before we get back to the readings from Mark’s Gospel) -  were ready, at one point, to make him King.

That was two weeks ago… since that time the mood had changed. Like a losing gambler they now turn on him, or a sunlit sky gradually becoming overcast.

The bread that Jesus gave them was not coming as quickly as it had before…

If you have ever listened to Joel Osteen and others who preach a prosperity gospel, you will know that they, like the crowds in these stories, have nothing to say about Jesus as the bread of life, the bread of materialism yes, the bread of life, no.

Their Jesus is the Jesus of feeding with caviar and Champaign and the big house on the hill.

From the Old Testament we hear of a Prophet who ended up feeling sorry for himself.

While running from Jezebel, Elijah tells God to take away his life. He lies down under a broom tree, whatever that is, and goes to sleep hoping to end it all or that all will end -

like those wandering nomads with Moses as their leader, who complained that they had it better as slaves in Egypt than out there in nowhere… 

So instead of fire and brimstone, or at least a strong reprimand – God rains down manna from Heaven. I’m reminded of the Parable of the Prodigal.

The younger asked his father for his inheritance and then left for “the far country”.  Far country is a code word for a place without God, as the older brother angrily noted when the younger returned.

After losing it all, the boy decides that things were better on the family farm and he decides to go home… maybe dad will hire me on as one of his servants. You know the rest of the story, don’t you?

The son comes home, his father welcomes him back no questions asked and throws a big party! God doesn’t hold grudges!

So here God sends an angel, not once but twice, who gently wakes Elijah with a tap on the shoulder and breakfast in bed -- pancakes and a glass of cold water.

Water in the wilderness. It doesn’t get any better than that! And off the Prophet goes with food in the belly to last him forty days and forty nights…. and an angel as a waiter.

The God of the Bible doesn’t seem to know that it is human nature to take advantage of free breakfasts and unconditional love. Free picnics and enough left over to fill up twelve baskets…

What kind of God is this that rewards whining and complaining?

So back to Jesus and the crowds.

The picnic on the hillside was great but food only lasts so long…

If you happened to come to the Family Promise Full Moon Cruise Wednesday and ended up with orange tickets like I did, you probably went home hungry because the folk with the pink tickets ate all the food while the rest of us where left with rice, and even that was cold.

So with all of the bread lying around why are the people turning on Jesus?

John tells us “The Jews began to complain about him because he said, 'I am the bread that came down from heaven.'”

As a church we have a terrible track record when it comes to the treatment of Jews. I was born in a country that killed six million Jews.

I don’t know why that happened in a country that also produced an Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer and a Mozart and a Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Just to name a few of the world's greats…

So, let me set the record straight, Jesus was a Jew.

By the time John's Gospel was written, some sixty years after his birth, Christianity was no longer a Jewish thing, but had become a force in its own right.

The Jews of the Synagogue and the Jews of Christianity were in the process of parting ways.

The People of the Way, as the early Christians called themselves, were no longer welcomed by the Jews of the Synagogue.

So by the time John wrote his version of the Gospel the detractors became those who said “Hey, we know this guy! We know his parents … What was his dad’s name again? Wasn’t it Joseph?”

Somewhere else in the Gospels Jesus is run out of town and He comments that a prophet is not welcome in his hometown, and to this day that is the way it is.

“Hey we know her… isn’t her mother the one who went away for awhile and then came back with a baby?”

John shows us a Jesus who becomes the food that gives life… I don’t believe that we are cannibals when we come to communion.

To be a Christian is to embody the love of Christ.

In many ancient cultures it was believed that by eating the flesh of a great king or warrior you would somehow then embody the greatness of that person.

The writer of John believed that in communion, the communicant received the substance of Jesus…

Paul in today’s second lesson makes this even more real.

When a sentence begin with “So then…”

We ask so then what?  The “what” comes in the verses that precede vs. 25, where Paul tells us that when we are baptized we become one with Jesus.

And being one with Jesus we begin to act, feel, think and live as he did, therefore….

“So then, putting away all falsehood, let us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; (don’t hold a grudge).

Thieves must stop stealing, rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.”

What Jesus is about, is a paradigm change… and look how this lesson ends!

“Therefore,” there is that word again….

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”. Ephesians 5.1.

Christianity is a way of life where Jesus is not an object of devotion, like we might set up a shrine of our ancestors or a great military or cultural hero.

What John is saying is that in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine we are renewed, re-claimed and forgiven to do God’s work, indeed to become imitators of God.

If you still have an identity crisis, start by feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and divesting yourself of some of the stuff that clutters up your life.

If you can do that, this sermon will make a whole lot more sense… amen.