John 6

I often think I hear colleagues asking, “How could we attract nuns to our church?” Actually they’re talking about “the nones,” of course. One of the clearest findings of the Pew Forum’s new religious landscape study is that fewer and fewer people have any religious affiliation at all. Catholics and mainline Protestants show the biggest drop. 

I feel pretty conflicted about all of this.

These Gospel stories can seem so familiar. But sit with the disciples in the little wooden boat, and Jesus' power will render you speechless.

Offering the elements to the unbaptized can be seen as a development and not a revolution, but it is a significant change. Is it a good one?

Offering the elements to the unbaptized can be seen as a development and not a revolution, but it is a significant change. Is it a good one?

This year, as many years before, I planned my summer vacation schedule with this stretch of lectionary readings from John 6 in mind. I suspect I am not alone. Five straight weeks of chewing on the bread of life is just a little more than most of us Protestants can stomach. I’m not sure I have that many sermons on the subject in me. So please take my reflections here with a grain of salt. I’ll share with you what I can, but then I’m off to the airport.

The lectionary has focused our attention on bread for a very long time. One might think that five barley loaves transformed into a feast plus baskets full of leftovers would be news enough, but Jesus goes on to talk about the bread for another 36 verses. He would be a dream interview for today's 24-hour news shows, with their incessant need for commentary on the latest attention-grabbing headline.

Perhaps we should not be too hard on the people who ate their fill on the mountain and chased Jesus down on the other side.

Perhaps we should not be too hard on the people who ate their fill on the mountain and chased Jesus down on the other side.

Jesus offers signs of life in the midst of death.

Jesus and Elisha perform great miracles. What do we modern westerners do with this?

It’s possible you come from a church background in which the obvious takeaway is to pray for God to do the same thing in our lives here and now. Or maybe you believe such events are still possible, but less probable.

In any case, most of us preachers want to avoid suggesting that the difference between then and now is our lack of faith.

Reconciliation requires relocation. To see the effects of our food choices, we have to get close to the land.

“There is the danger of protecting ourselves from God by striving to be passive. The ‘I’ is very active in its attempt to surrender.”

The symbol of the fish resounds throughout scripture, and it splashes well beyond the pages.

Which would you rather do, contemplate belief or consume the flesh and blood of Jesus?

It made a lot of sense for Jesus to use the metaphor of animal sacrifice—at least, it did in the first century.