LOVE by: George Herbert (1593-1632) LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lack'd anything. 'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:' Love said, 'You shall be he.' 'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee.' Love took my hand and smiling did reply, 'Who made the eyes but I?' 'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve.' 'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?' 'My dear, then I will serve.' 'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.' So I did sit and eat. During the month of August in the Lectionary year known as Year B, we who come to church regardless of the season, are confronted with five weeks of “Bread of Life” stories.For five consecutive weeks we get what on the surface seems to the same old story.This is the third of these weeks by the way.All of these readings come from the 6th chapter of John.This week and next week I am going to try to tie these teachings together.If you would like to explore these teachings with me then take this third chapter of John and the poem I just read by George Herbert and read them together each day this week.I am going to do the same.Perhaps we will find in our prayer and our meditation an invitation open our deepest needs and fears to the healing power of God, to eat and drink deeply of God’s Love and abundance, to become aware of the blessings of God’s Grace, to understand on both a guttural and a rational level what it means to reaffirm our baptismal covenant as we will do in just a few minutes.So this sermon today will be the first part of a two part homily that God willing we will complete next week. In the Gospel of John we hear over and over about people coming to Jesus and asking questions, they come looking first for some kind of indication of who he is and secondly they come wanting to know where he comes from.John’s repetitiveness in this Bread of Life image means that the response of Jesus is first of all important, but also that what he says to us, how he describes himself and his relationship to God and to us is a really difficult concept.When Jesus calls tells us that he is the Bread of Life he is not talking about flour and water and oil.Over and over he tells us that he is talking about something that comes down from heaven – food from heaven, manna, sustenance. The Gospel of John answers these two central questions, who Jesus is and where he comes from explicitly with stories of miracles, teachings, and theophanies.And yet there is no document in our canon that is more confusing, more difficult for me to identify with than the Gospel of John.Sometimes the images here are just plain repelling.The crowds that come to see Jesus and to try to understand Him bring their best tools – their traditions and laws, the Torah, the evidence of some extra-human skills of abilities – miracles we call them.But the miracles they see, the way Jesus uses the Torah to teach, the ways in which he overturns the laws and traditions over and over, his seeming blasphemy in the claiming of his identity – these “signs” which might be sought to bring clarity - instead bring confusion, dismay, and even hostility from those who find Truth and Love in Jesus and those who cannot believe that he is the Messiah, the one for whom they have waited. Our lessons says “Then they began to complain about him because he said…”I am the Bread of Life that came down from heaven.”At the very core of the controversy we hear in the opening lines of this lesson is the question of authority.Who has it and who does not.What Jesus is claiming, no doubt, sounds blasphemous to the complainers from the Temple.He is claiming that his authority is God’s authority and that his authority supercedes human authority.So the complainers argue that he is a known quantity – the son of Joseph and Mary – the kid from down the street who used to pick up the wood scraps for his dad and take out the trash for his mom.Jesus’ implausible claim to be the source of nurture and sustenance is earth-shaking – life changing for both the insiders in the Temple (those whom John calls the Jews) and the Jesus believers outside the Temple.The complainers try with all their might to make Jesus a known familial quantity – to familiarize him.But Jesus will have none of that.In one of his homilies on the Gospel of John, St Augustine has this to say about the complainers: “They had weak jaws of the heart, they were deaf with open ears, they saw and stood blind, for indeed this Bread searches out the hunger of the interior.” In this 6th chapter of John we hear Jesus tell us of the bountiful love of God and how God transforms even the smallest gift we offer into food sufficient to feed the multitude, then we experience the power of Jesus to come to us in the tumult of our lives, walking across the waves of doubt and anger and selfishness to bring calm and peace into our lives and now today we hear him tell us the He is the source of this sustenance, this peace, this love and that if we place our hope and faith with him that we will know the gift of eternal life. For those of us who struggle to believe, the hurdles seem insurmountable, but Jesus turns to us and says that it is not by our own capacity that we will be made worthy of God, but rather it is the unimaginable gift of a loving and gracious Creator who offers the best of self in Jesus and through Grace draws us in.I think that if I had been one of the Lectionary composers I might have chosen the first chapter of Paul’s second letter to the Corintians as the text for today.Those of you who come to Bible study know that I have a great love for an interpretative translation known as the Message.I read from that interpretation…In it Paul says: “26 Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. 27 Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, 28 chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? 29 That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. 30 Everything that we have - right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start - comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.” None of us will find our way to eternal life by blowing our own horn not even the most spiritually gifted among us.No message I preach will ever be the irresistible draw that pulls someone to God.Likewise no Sunday School program, pot-luck supper, prelude or postlude or even the most generous outreach program on the planet.None of us will resonate with the Love of God through our own actions.It is through Grace that we are drawn to God and through Grace that we are made whole.And it is through Grace that we gain the strength to do the work of God in the world. God, True Love, calls us but we draw back – and God asks why, what is the reason for our hestancy?What is missing? 'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:' Love said, 'You shall be he.' 'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee.' Love took my hand and smiling did reply, 'Who made the eyes but I?' We human beings with our high vaulted ceiling churches and steeples and our altars set off at a safe distance want a God who is high up somewhere in a place called heaven.But Jesus does not desire to be separate or apart from any of us.And there is deep within us, a hunger, a desire, a longing for something to fill the empty, isolated spaces of our lives.Modern spiritual life is like having lunch at the A-1 deli with way too many choices and an abundance of treats that may comfort us in the short run, but have little lasting value.We often find that there is something missing in our feeble efforts to find meaning in our lives.Is it possible that the sustenance we need – the bread, the wine, the hopes, the dreams for wholeness stand before us in this son of Mary and Joseph who claims to be the Bread of Life? Is it true that God has come to be with us, to live and die as one of us, to be for us the very source of life?The poet acknowledges that God is Creator and that what God has created is good and worthy, but spoiled by his own sin and God answers him with the image of the one who was crucified and died that the poet himself might live. 'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve.' 'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?' To be continued…