Asking for More with our Mouths Full

I am delighted to be here with you today. I have been involved with All Saints' since last month, but if you do not recognize me consider yourself blessed since I have only been making hospital visits during Fr. Kunz's sabbatical. As the new chaplain at The Episcopal Church at Princeton I am very eager to build stronger ties between the University community and this lively parish. So, thank you for having me here today.

The other day someone asked me what my title and text were going to be for this sermon. Well, the text part was easy – it had to be the gospel of John with its comfortable, challenging, mystifying, and unsettling discourse on the difference between bread that leaves us unsatisfied and the bread of life that comes from God through Jesus. As for the title, I could not give an answer at the time. But as I meditated on today's gospel and asked God's guidance, a title came to me that I considered a little too cute and flip. The title I came up with was "Asking for More with our Mouths Full." See what I mean? Too cute. Too flip. But of course, in a way, that's exactly what this gospel is about. And that's exactly what our lives are about in this time and in this place – asking for more with our mouths full.

A basic objective of John's gospel is to explain the theology of who Jesus really is. And a basic tenet of John's gospel is that signs and wonders are not quite sufficient as grounding for our faith. Rather, we must go deeper and understand what the signs mean.

The sign that concerns us this morning, of course, is one that we see six times throughout the gospels and in all four of them, namely, the feeding of the thousands with less food than you can carry in one plastic McCaffery's bag. Now, you would think that John would consider this enough grounding for our faith without elaboration. As the Florida humorist Gambrel Rogers used to say, "When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt." But John wants to make sure we see the real meaning of this sign, so he has Jesus giving his second great discourse of his gospel from which I read to you a few moments ago.

So, what is the meaning of this sign? How are we to understand what it means in relation to the identity of Jesus? The Church helps us arrive at the answer to these questions with other scripture passages appointed for this week that have preceded the reading of the gospel today. For example, in Deuteronomy we get this breathless description of the promised land from Moses:

You know, if I didn't know better, I'd think old Moses was talking about Princeton. He might have said:

And in the psalm for Morning Prayer this past Wednesday we had the first part of Psalm 78 that recalls the Exodus story in which God feeds the people in the desert with manna from heaven. Listen to these two verses:

So, now you have pinpointed the exact moment when my sermon title came to me: Wednesday morning! What an amazing image is in these two verses: begging for more with your mouth filled. It's gross and disgusting, isn't it? But at the same time it's so like us. So American. So Princeton! Orson Welles is supposed to have once said, "My doctor has advised me to give up those intimate little dinners for 4, unless, of course, there are 3 other people eating with me."

We have more than most people in the world can imagine, yet we are not satisfied. We dream about the next car we will buy, we fret over a dip on the NASDAQ, we thumb through the endless array of catalogs and turn down all the pages that have things we must have. We acquire more stock options and more jewelry, and more golf clubs and electronic gear for our boats. Yet we are not satisfied; we are not fulfilled. Yet, we ask for more with our mouths full. I do it; you do it; we all do it, all the time.

I think this is exactly where John wants to focus our attention. So he has Jesus telling the people that just as their ancestors were not satisfied with the manna God gave them, they are not satisfied with their full bellies. Indeed, having a full belly will never satisfy us.

Jesus is telling us that which we know in our hearts already. There's something missing in our lives that a shopping trip with lunch at Palmer Square won't satisfy. Jesus is telling us that he is the bread that will give us life and fill us up forever. He told the Samaritan woman at the well the same thing, that he could give her water that would satisfy her thirst forever. But the water he was speaking of wasn't in the well. It wasn't where you would expect to find it.

So what do we do about this? How do we get some of this water that will truly and forever quench our thirst and this bread that will satisfy our hunger? Another way of asking the question, of course, is to ask how we will make Jesus the center of our lives. I suppose the first thing we need to do is to intend to make Jesus the center of our lives, to be intentional and mindful about it. It's amazing what we can do when we set our minds to it. Intending to place Jesus at the center of our lives will have some interesting consequences. It's a kind of zero sum game where there is a winner and a loser. If Jesus is, so to speak, the winner and is at the center of our lives, then other things and pursuits cannot be central to our lives.

By adopting a firm intention to make Jesus the center of our lives we will have to choose to make other things and pursuits peripheral. These other things are not necessarily bad in themselves. It's just a question of what we make central and what we make peripheral. The things that will be central will be a focus on relationships and the practice of simplicity and of giving our time and treasures away to others who need them more than we do.

If we want to make Jesus the center of our lives so that we can have the bread that will never leave us craving for more, we will pray. We will come to the Eucharistic table to give thanks to God and to share the bread of heaven, the Body of Christ. We will make prayer a part of our daily routine, so much so that we will find that we are constantly praying and everything we do becomes a prayer – an ongoing conversation with God. Making a regular time and place for prayer will begin to reorder our lives so that Jesus is at the center and we begin to feel a profound satisfaction that all the treasures of Palmer Square, and Charles Schwab, and Marketfare cannot give us.

The Israelites in the desert clamored for food and God gave it to them, yet they craved more. Jesus fed the multitudes, yet they wanted more, though they weren't quite sure what it was they did want. Jesus is the answer to our craving. Through a deep relationship with Jesus, our friend and brother, we will enjoy the bread of life forever. We are reminded of that reality every time we take communion at this table.

The story is told that when Admiral Horatio Nelson – the famous British Admiral at the time of the Napoleonic Wars – was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, his sailors lifted his casket over their shoulders and carried his body into the cathedral. His coffin was draped with a magnificent Union Jack. After the service, they carried his body to the grave in the crypt. An observer of this funeral wrote these words:

"With reverence and with efficiency they lowered the body of the world's greatest admiral into its tomb. Then as though answering to a sharp order from the quarterdeck, they all seized the Union Jack with which the coffin had been covered and tore it to fragments, and each took his souvenir of the illustrious dead."

A swath of colored cloth as a memento. It would forever remind them of the admiral they had loved. "I've got a piece of him," they said, "and I'll never forget him."

As you leave this morning you can take not a piece, but the wholeness of Christ with you in your hearts. Never forget Him whom you love and who loves you, the Bread of Life.

Amen.