Sheryl Puderbaugh, M.Div.
Director of Adult Education & Mission Central Presbyterian Church
The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost August 22, 2021
Who Can Accept This?
John 6
Our Scripture lesson this morning is the last from the readings in our lectionary on the 6th Chapter of John. This is a power packed chapter. The first part the Chapter contains the great stories of Jesus feeding the multitude and walking on water, but this later part of the chapter, quite frankly, seems at times a bit much. Jesus keeps talking about this bread thing and about people who eat the bread that he provides. When they do this, he says, they are “eating” him.
When the Jesus’ followers heard these strange teachings, they did not know what to make of it.
Many of us struggle with it as well. “This teaching is difficult” they said, “who can accept it”.
That indeed is the question. Perhaps they were thinking that he had gone too far. Perhaps, they thought, he was just plain crazy. Who can, and how can one understand this teaching? And more important, if one does understand it, can one really accept it? This truly is the question.
Perhaps the issue involved is in what one is looking for or expecting to find. Jesus had been traveling around doing miracle after miracle. All of the Gospels contain the stories of the multiple things that Jesus did, things that only God could do. Jesus, was not only to be a “good deed doer”, doing things like healing and driving out demons, but rather, demonstrating,
providing solid evidence, that Jesus was indeed God incarnate. The goal seems to be that people would recognize his identity and then hopefully pay attention to his teaching about the Kingdom of God. But people, being people, only wanted more miracles. They wanted free meals. Are we like the people in the time of Jesus, always demanding signs and wonders in order to believe?
Jesus points out to the people, in verse 26 of this chapter, that he was popular with them only because he was a miracle worker, who filled their physical bellies and cured their physical ills.
But when Jesus went deeper, and started talking about bread from heaven, eating and drinking his flesh and blood, and being raised up on the last day, well, that was a bit difficult to accept. He was no longer putting on the show they wanted or saying the words that pleased them. This was not practical or useful to them. They saw no reason to hang around.
What are we expecting to find in Jesus? What are we expecting to find on Sunday morning when we come to church? What might cause us to become offended and turn away from Christ, from the Church, from this church? Dr. Fred Craddock, a legendary pastor and preacher, with a folksy, downhome style, like Andy Griffith, shares a story about expectations. He tells the story of a time when he was the dean at Phillips Seminary in Tulsa Oklahoma. During his time there, a woman from the community came to see him. She asked him to come out to the parking lot.
Well, this made him a little nervous, but he went. She opened the back door of her car, and there, slumped in the back seat, was her brother. He had been a senior at the University of Oklahoma, but had been in a bad car accident and had been in a coma for eight months. She had quit her job as a teacher to take care of him. By now, almost all of her resources were exhausted. She opened the door and said, “I would like for you to heal him.” What would you say? What would you do? Fred Craddock said, “Well, I can pray for him. And I can pray with you. But I do not have the gift of healing.” The woman was clearly annoyed. She got behind the wheel and said to him,
“Then what in the world do you do?” And she drove off. She took offense and left. Why did she take offense? Clearly, she had different assumptions and expectations from those of Dr.
Craddock, on what a minister should be doing or able to do. How many people do you know who have expectations about what Christ can or should do for them? How many people do you
know who have expectations about what the church should be or do for them? Our scripture today says that when Jesus finished speaking about all this “weird” confusing stuff, many of those who had been his “fan club”, “his crowd” who had been following him all over, in order to see the show or receive the “goodies” Jesus provided, they turned back and no longer went with him. We might suspect that those who turned back and walked away from Jesus did so because Jesus was not performing according to their expectations. He was not working out the way they assumed and expected he would. What are our expectations of Jesus, of the church, of our faith?
It seems to me that people have a variety of expectations of Jesus, of the church and of the Christian faith. It seems to me that people have a variety of reasons why they choose walk away from Jesus, from the church and from the Christian faith. Perhaps the most classic is the crisis of faith that occurs when one experiences loss and suffering. Why we ask. Why did God not answer my prayer to heal my loved one, to prevent death, to save my business or my crop, to help me get the job, or grade or person that I wanted to marry? After all, we prayed didn’t we.
Isn’t it God’s job to answer our prayers, to give us what we pray for? There is a prosperity gospel out there today that says if you love Jesus and Jesus loves you, your problems are over.
Or how about the bumper sticker that reads: “if God is your partner, make your plans big”? The distraught woman wanted Fred Craddock, the agent of Christ, because he was a minister and therefore had more power or could pray better, to heal her brother. When he said he could not, well, what was he good for then? The tragedy of this situation is painful to hear about. We understand this woman. We feel her pain and so does God. But to use the words of the country western song, none of us were ever promised a rose garden. Not Job, Not the apostles and not us. Everyone suffers. It is inescapable. Some more than others. Some unjustly. Some
unbearably. And no one suffered more than Christ, who bears our burdens and sorrows with us, understands our pain more than is humanly possible and carries and sustains us through every walk through the valley of the shadow. Today, our popular understanding is that suffering is not just bad, it is awful and must be stopped at all costs. Our grandparents never expected a world without trials and suffering. But somewhere, particularly after our technology and scientific understanding exploded, people came to feel that there should be a cure for suffering. It simply shouldn’t exist. Misunderstandings of our faith lead to the belief that God should be the cure-all for suffering. And if God doesn’t work, we will turn to science or to pleasures or to substances.
But as we all know, no matter how much we have or how much we know, sorrow and sadness comes to us all. When the expectations are incorrect, people walk away from Jesus. But to where or to whom do they walk? “Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?”
“Simon Peter answered him, Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life”.
Expectations have to do with what we think we should “get out of Jesus”, or “get out of church” or “get out of the sermon”. How many people do you know, or perhaps you are one of them, who speak about going to church to “fill up one’s batteries for the week”. “I need a message to inspire me, to make me feel good, to encourage me” many say. There is no doubt that our faith is a deep reservoir that we all draw upon to sustain our lives. But did you notice how many times I used the word “me” in those sentences of expectation. Is there anything there about coming into the presence of an amazing, all powerful, indescribable, omniscient,
omnipresent, God? The ancient Hebrews trembled in the presence of God. They prostrated their faces to the earth in the presence of the tabernacle. What has happened to our expectations of God?
Has anyone here, who has flown on a plane, ever had a talkative fellow traveler in the seat next to you. If you have, you know that most of the time, people exchange information about where they are going, where they live and what they do for a living. Pastors hate this because they know that if they say they are a pastor, they can be almost certain that they will spend the next 3.5 hours either listening to someone’s life story and problems, or they will spend the entire time defending the faith to someone who just wants to poke holes in it. Pastor Rollie Martinson, a Lutheran pastor, was caught in this situation. He tells a story about a time when during the meal, he and the man seated next to him, politely introduced themselves. After a few minutes into the conversation, Pastor Rollie, asked the man, “So” he said, “do you go to church?” The man responded, “You know, funny you should ask. We have all of our lives, but we just
quit.” The man goes on to tell Rollie how six weeks earlier, his family had returned home from church, and they sat down together and asked, “What happened this morning? What did we do? Did it matter? Did it have any impact on our life?” And they discovered, as they listened to one another, that very little of significance happened. They learned that church really wasn’t engaging them. The church seemed to speak in a language they didn’t understand and it just didn’t seem to make any difference. And in light of all the other things going on, that they felt did impact their life, they wondered why they continued to go to church. So they quit.
Does this story sound like anyone you know? Does it sound like what you are feeling? Well, the first thing it should tell us is that, if people stop coming to church, we need to enquire after them. We should care, as Jesus would care, and not just consider that their decision is their business and that our decisions are ours. That is not how the body of Christ behaves. And we need to listen to what they say. I asked a younger family with several children, who I know attend a very large church here in the Des Moines area, why they choose to attend there. They
related that they used to attend a small Lutheran Church. But they said, the people did not know or care that they were there. If they were not in church, no one asked them why or sought to know anything about what was going on in their lives. So they left.
Many times Churches do need to make changes that will improve both the spiritual and community environment of the church. But that does not necessarily mean recreating the worship style, or music, or preaching, in an effort to make it “relevant”. A praise band will not bring in more people than an organ and a screen will not cause people to enter or to return to a church. Possibly the problem with the family, in Pastor Rollie’s story, that chose to leave, had more to do with what the family had “expected” of church, or worship, or their faith, than with something that was missing or needed. The church is not a competitor with secular events. If the church tries to become like them, it will lose. What our faith has are the words of eternal life.
What could be more important? How are we proclaiming them, how are we sharing them.
Perhaps we are not proclaiming them with a fervency that draws others to want what we have in Christ.
Secular life and spiritual life frequently seem to be in conflict. We respond all too frequently by trying to make spiritual life more like that of the secular world. Worldly life always tempts us to try to change the teachings and words of Jesus. This teaching is too difficult we think. We need to make it more relevant. We need to make living the Christian life seem easier. We need to change what we say we believe to fit with the times. In the earlier part of the 20th century, there was a very serious crisis within the Christian church, most prominently in the Presbyterian church and also in the Baptists. Some pastors and theologians were saying, we can’t sell the old doctrine anymore. We live in the scientific age. We now have evolution and sociology and psychology and anthropology to explain the world and it seems to conflict with Christian teaching. So some
pastors threw out the basic beliefs of the faith, like the resurrection, the Trinity, and the idea that Jesus was completely God and completely human. Jesus became just a model for moral behavior, love and perfect worship, and we should be like him and do works of kindness. Well, this “new”
church did not grow, but what did happen was the fundamentalist movement, which has grown.
We do not have to agree with the theology of fundamentalism in order to see that attempting to make the Christian faith conform to secular expectations does not bring people into the church or keep them here.
This teaching is too hard. It is too difficult. Perhaps what was going on with the family who said “We have gone to church all of our lives, but we just quit.”, was that they were just going through the motions, engaging in the forms of worship, partaking of the sacraments without understanding and belief. There is the story of the Three pastors who regularly gathered at the local coffee shop, perhaps at Caribou Coffee down the street. Their three churches sat on the same city block, kind of like Plymouth, St. Augustin’s and Central, and all of the churches had the same problem- bats in their churches. One said, “We just don’t know what to do next. The exterminator has been out and the entire church has been sprayed and the bats are still there”. Another of the pastors said, “I know how you feel. We’ve tried everything too. We have used noisemakers, and filled in all of the holes where they could come in, and put those things in that allow bats to exit but not reenter the building, and the bats are still there”. Finally the third pastor said, “We solved the bat problem. We caught them all, baptized them and confirmed them . We haven’t seen them since.” When our faith becomes only routine, only ritual, when the sacraments are no longer are signs and seals of God’s grace and Word, but rather quaint traditional rituals that have lost their
“life”, then why bother. This is all too hard. It cannot compete with the demands of secular life.
We will take the kids to Sunday school and make them go through Confirmation, but then its up
to them. They can go to church if they want, but no big deal if they don’t. These words are too hard. What our Christian faith demands is more than the time and effort that we have to give. And what is it doing for me? What Jesus is asking of us takes up too much of our busy schedule and we don’t see how anything that he has to say changes or affects our lives.
Jesus cared passionately for the people who came to hear him. He loved them, He came to give himself for their sin and our sin. He cared that they walked away. He was fully human. How must he have felt to watch them leave?. Because he cared for so them, he spoke the truth instead of speaking what was pleasing to them, what they wanted to hear. He did not try to talk unwilling disciples into staying with him, nor did he try to make things easier so that they would reconsider their relationship to him. Christ wants followers who choose to follow. “You have the words of eternal life” said Peter. The disciples, who continued on with Jesus might not have completely understood what Jesus was saying or doing, just like sometimes we can sometimes be confused and uncomfortable. But we are intrigued by what Jesus says, what we see in the lives and words of other Christians, and what we experience in worship and prayer and fellowship with one another. In the Bible, faith is a verb. It is an action by which we consent and act. It is also a process.
Peter and the others, like us, need it to grow stronger. So we stay with Jesus, we listen to his words of life, we join together in worship and praise, we serve one another and those to whom Christ calls us to serve. “Lord, to whom else can we go. You have the words of eternal life”.
