St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes, Vicar
Year B/Proper 13: John 6:24-35
August 1, 2021
I have always been the pet whisperer in my family. After having many pets with short life spans, and presiding over many burials in the backyard, at the ripe old age of 7 years old, I campaigned for a pet that with a long, life expectancy. I intentionally use the word “campaigned” because my mother said, no cats ever. My slogan, for months, became, “No kitten, no Christmas!” One day, my mother took me to the SPCA where there were about four kittens in a pen. I immediately ran to pick up the kitten I had always wanted—all black with white paws and bright blue eyes.
The nurse approached me with a skinny, ugly cat, and said, “Here’s your new friend.” Unbeknownst to me, my mother mandated that the kitten be a male. I protested, and my mother said, “This is the only male available. You get this one or nothing.” I was so disappointed. This kitten was a striped silver tabby, with green eyes. There was nothing particularly striking about Tigger; he was an ordinary kitten—not at all what I had prayed for. Tigger was, however, exactly what my seven-year-old self needed—a BFF for 17 years. Tigger was an unexpected blessing that enriched, and still enriches, my soul through precious memories of our life together. I had sought a kitten, and so much more, was indeed found. Life was enriched by the love of a skinny, ordinary cat who became fat and fabulous.
I share this Tigger story because we all need reminding that God’s blessings often come in unexpected, and sometimes unattractive, packaging—a regular brown paper bag, if you will, and not the striking aqua blue Tiffany box. Our work of faith is to believe that, through Christ, God answers prayers, and to seek His heavenly responses wrapped in the mundane, brown paper bags of this earthly life.
Speaking of food and its connection with plain, brown paper bags, our gospel passage, in the sixth chapter of John, took place the day after Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the 5,000. Last week, the text indicated that the crowd had been initially following Jesus seeking healing, not food. This time the crowd tracked Jesus down seeking a repeat feeding. Because we, the readers of scripture, know who Jesus is, this dialogue between Jesus and the crowd can be described as a classic example of seeking, finding and not recognizing that which has already been found.
Knowing that the people were not really grasping what he was saying to them, Jesus started dropping “bread crumbs” (pun intended) specifically about his identity in order to help them to connect the dots and to lead them to an understanding about the work of God. This work, Jesus said, was belief in the one whom God had sent, the one on whom God had set his seal, and marked with God’s identity.
The crowd did not understand, and responded with the demand for a sign; they needed Jesus to show them something spectacular so that they might see it and believe the truth about Jesus’ identity. Ironically, Jesus, through the mass feeding, had already given the crowd the sign, just the day before, that they were now demanding. That sign caused the crowd to proclaim, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (v.14). That sign ignited a hunger for the feeding miracle to be recreated, on demand, according to their bodily needs.
The source of daily bread, which the crowd now sought, had also been found, but they did not recognize Jesus as the true bread of heaven, because it was packaged in the person of Jesus—a human being who looked like them, and but for the signs he was known to perform, and his public ministries, could be perceived as ordinary. The crowd’s expectation of what a sign would look like, certainly was not ordinary, and was influenced by their collective memory of their ancestors who had been miraculously fed by God with manna descended from heaven. Of course, they said to Jesus, “What work are you performing? Can you do what Moses did?” In other words, “We will believe you, but we need to see the black kitten, with the white paws and the blue eyes in order to recognize the sign.” In seeking the spectacular, the people had not perceived the miracle that the previous day’s mass feeding had been; it was a heavenly sign brought forth out of the everyday, necessary earthly activities—feeding and eating.
Continuing to drop bread crumbs for understanding, Jesus said, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life” (v. 27). In order to access the imperishable food, the people needed to believe in him. The people needed to make the connection that just as God sent the manna down from heaven to feed the physical bodies of the Israelites, so, too, did God send His only Son, the living manna, down from heaven to feed the souls of humankind and to give eternal life.
People of faith are not immune to blindness to God’s life-giving blessings. When we anticipate a predetermined manifestation of God’s response to our prayers, we set ourselves up for disappointment. We set ourselves up for walking away with an ugly kitten and an ungrateful heart. And because what has been received is so ordinary, we dismiss it, waiting for something spectacular, when the sign we had asked God for has already been given—the miraculous springing forth from the mundane.
Through Jesus’ death on the cross, those who are baptized into his death and resurrection, and believe in him as Savior, eat of the living bread, that is Jesus, in the created, earthly sacraments of bread and wine. And, we are fed by the imperishable living bread who transcends the decay and death of this world; the living bread, in whom, hunger has been vanquished once for all.
Let us resist the false belief that God has not answered our prayers because we were looking for the Tiffany box (or whatever packing excites you) and nothing has shown up that remotely looks like that. Instead, seek signs of Jesus’ daily presence in your life, not in the rare, extraordinary, sensational events, but in the everyday, unremarkable, brown paper bags of this mundane human experience.
In the intentional seeking of the miraculous in the mundane, may we seek, find and recognize the presence of Jesus, who is at once the living bread and the giver of the bread, for the nourishment of the body and the soul. May we wait with hopeful expectation, and gratefully receive, the extraordinary and abundant blessings sent down from heaven, packaged in the ordinary, brown paper bag.
Amen.
