Wallace W. Bubar

I don’t know about you, but I find it challenging to preach on non-narrative texts. It’s easy to make a good story from the Gospels or the Old Testament come alive in a sermon. It’s a lot harder to do that with a theological treatise, so I tend to neglect preaching on the epistles.

My childhood church used offering envelopes with six checkboxes on them, a sort of spiritual scorecard. When I finally met James, hiding behind Paul, I proudly showed him my envelope. He laughed.

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.

What was Jesus thinking? He had such a great following before he spoke. He’d just fed 5,000 people, and they were ready to sign up to become disciples....