Sermon for 8.12.12

Scriptures for today are Here

I love the Olympics: I love the competitions, the drama, the fresh-faced athletes doing remarkable feats: the Michael Phelpses, the Missy Franklins, the US women’s soccer team.  And I love the non-US athletes too – like Katie Taylor, the Irish gold medalist in women’s boxing, and Usain Bolt, the fastest man alive, and Oskar Pistorius, the double amputee who sprints on two prosthetic legs. 

You look at those incredibly well-trained bodies and the things they do seem almost impossible, and yet you know that the moment of glory atop the medal stand is not the real story of their lives – the real story is what got them there.  These are folks who have spent almost every waking hour for years and years, doing the same things over and over and over, trying and failing and trying again – because that’s what it takes to become the best at a sport.

And yet there’s more to it than just practicing – these are people who have physical gifts, of strength and speed and flexibility, that you and I don’t have.  I read an article recently that said that many professional dancers have two genes that are different than the genes that most people have – there is something in their genetic makeup that means they were truly “born to dance.”  And I’m sure the same can be said of world-class gymnasts and swimmers and runners too – not to mention world-class writers, musicians, physicists, doctors, and so on.  Something in each of us makes us uniquely talented to do the things we are best at: because it begins with natural gifts, long before the years of work.

The fresh-faced, bubbly, incredibly poised winner of the women’s all-around gymnastics gold medal, Gabby Douglas, said after she won, “I give all the glory to God. It’s kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to him and the blessings fall down on me.” 

Some athletes who thank God for big wins seem to think it was God’s will to hand them the victory (and hand their opponents the loss).  But it seems to me that Gabby has more advanced wisdom: she seems to understand that God gave her the gifts she needed to become a great gymnast, and that everything she does to develop that gift, and delight in it, and give delight to others through it, gives glory back to God.  She understands her talent as a gift that came first to her, that she gives back.

That movement, of a gift that comes from God and then goes back to God, is what we can see in our scriptures today.  In the gospel, we read today the continuation of a story that we have been following for several weeks now.  Jesus is teaching in the wilderness, the crowds follow him, and when they get hungry, Jesus commands the disciples to feed them with a few loaves and fishes.  This is a vitally important story for Christians to know:  we can tell because unlike most stories, it appears in all four gospels.  So somehow this feeding story is a key to our faith, if we use it to unlock the right door, and understand what it is saying to us.

But where the other gospels leave that story for us to wonder about and marvel over, in John’s gospel, Jesus tell the disciples what this feeding means – essentially, he says that what he has done is, he has acted out a real-life parable.  A parable is something that surprises us, that opens our eyes to a deeper reality, that gives us layers of meaning to explore and experience.  Often parables are stories Jesus tells – there once was a man who had two sons, there once was a vineyard whose owner went away to a far country, etc.  In John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t tell parables so much as he acts them out, in the miracles he performs.  The miracles are signs that point us to what God is doing through Jesus – symbols that open our eyes to a deeper reality.

So Jesus doesn’t just feed the crowds just to prevent them from starving, or even to get ooh’s and aah’s because he’s a miracle worker.  He very carefully shows how this miracle explains what God is doing through him, by reminding his Jewish audience of the most important story of their history, when Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, across the wilderness of Sinai to the Promised Land.

During their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, they got hungry and started complaining against Moses, the same way the people in today’s story start complaining – and God sends them bread to eat – manna in wilderness, bread in the desert that saves their life and sustains them on journey to freedom.  This bread they eat becomes the sign of the most important gift God gave to the Jewish people – the gift of freedom in the Promised Land.  They still eat the bread of freedom today, in the Passover matzoh that helps them remember the journey from slavery to freedom.

Over a thousand years later, Jesus acts out this ancient story by giving the people bread in the wilderness once more – then he turns the story on its head by saying something astonishing: he says, I am the Bread of Life.  Jesus takes manna story a step further: he says he is not only our Bread of Freedom, but also our Bread of Life.  Jesus is the manna that God has given us to eat, the bread that keeps us alive in our life’s deserts, the bread that means we will never be hungry again, the gift that ensures that we will never die.

So Jesus is more than someone one who satisfies our physical hunger: he is soul food, spiritual food, food that fills our true emptiness, the emptiness we experience in our spirits if we try to live a life without God.  He is the one God has sent to fill what French mathematician Blaise Pascal called the God-shaped hole in our hearts. 

Pascal talked about the emptiness and longing that most humans feel at some point.  Pascal said: "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in us a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This we try in vain to fill with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."

The achievements, the possessions, the entertainments and pleasures that we work so hard for are ultimately empty – they will not fill the hole in our hearts.  Jesus is the gift that God has given us before we worked for the gift, before we deserved the gift, before we even knew we needed a gift.  Jesus is the food that satisfies our emptiness and our longing.

And in a sense, the Olympic athlete this gift reminds me of is not Gabby Douglas so much as Lopez Lomong, the US track team member who ran the 5,000 meters yesterday.  He finished in 10^th place, so he won’t be taking any medals home, but the race he won started long before this Olympics.  If you don’t know his story, look it up – it’s amazing.  Born in South Sudan in a tiny village without running water or electricity, he lived in one-room hut with his family, helped his parents grow subsistence crops without even a plow.

At age 6, he was in church one day when armed soldiers broke in, kidnapped him and the other children present, took them to a camp to become child soldiers, where they were starved and mistreated.  Three older boys befriended him, and one night, the four of them escaped from the camp and started running.  They ran without stopping for three days and three nights, in a journey he tells about in his book, Running for My Life, until they found their way to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he stayed for a number of years.

One day someone in the refugee camp said, the Olympics are on TV, let’s go watch.  Lopez didn’t know what the Olympics were, but he walked five miles to watch on a black and white TV, saw Michael Johnson of the US win the gold medal, saw him standing on medal stand with tears running down his face – and never forgot that moment.

Years later, he had the chance to come to the US as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan admitted as a refugee.  He was adopted by an American family, started running track, went to college, and in 2007 became a US citizen.  In 2008 he was selected as a member of the US Olympic team, and in Beijing was chosen to carry the US flag in the opening ceremonies – the biggest honor of his life. 

For Lopez Lomong, he received the gift of new life before he deserved it, a gift he never knew was possible – all his work of training and running for his adopted country came afterwards, out of gratitude for the new life he had been given.

For us, the amazing thing is that God gives us the gift of life long before we deserve it, for no other discernible reason than that God loves us.  Jesus says today, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws them.”  That means that every single person who is here today is here because God wanted you here, drew you here to this place of new life.  You may think you are here for other reasons – you like the people, or you want something for your children, or someone else made you come.

And you may think that something in you doesn’t deserve to be here, doesn’t deserve to be forgiven and loved and cherished by God.  And you may wonder what God wants from you, and whether you have time or energy to include God in your life.

But the truth is, every person who comes to God is here because God hungered for us.  God is empty without us, just as we are without God.  God wanted us here, drew us here.  God gave us the gift of eternal life.  God loved us so much that God was willing to give the life of his Son for us. 

God is not something we add to our lives in order to make us better people, to help us stand atop our own medal stands in life.  God is the ground of our being, the giver of all gifts, the one who makes everything in our lives possible.

So as you come to the altar today, to share in the bread of life – remember that this bread is a sign that points us to the deepest truth of all.  God has given us all the gifts we need.  And God, through this gift, is drawing us deeply into God’s eternal life.