Not living in the past

This sermon refers to both the gospel text for yesterday and the 1st lesson.

I have noticed in talking to people that time is relevant; the distant past for some was just yesterday for others. This often happens to me in church work.

When I started my internship and was focusing a bit of my energy on youth, I can’t even begin to tell you the number of people who wanted to reinstate Luther League. Meanwhile I had no clue what Luther League was, I had never heard of it before.

And as it was described to me by various adults who either participated in Luther League as teenagers or their children had participated, I realized that while the concept was good and still exist in many churches throughout the country today, the name had to go and the structure would have to be slightly different to account for current trends.

However it seemed like to many of the people who discussed Luther League with me, they would only be satisfied with a youth program if it was called Luther League and looked exactly like the Luther League of their past.

These people were living in the past. They were so focused on what the church was like over 30 or so years ago, and therefore how God was present in their lives then, that they could not see how Christ was currently active in both their lives and their church presently.

That is what the crowd was doing to Jesus in today’s gospel text. They were so focused on Moses and the manna in the wilderness and how prophets in the past had shown signs to attest that they were from God, that they seem to fail to realized that Jesus had just feed 5000 of them with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.

The crowd was looking to the past, and not just their own personal past, but the distant past by anyone’s standards, they were looking over a thousand years into the past, to Moses and the Israelites wandering in the wilderness.

We have all been there, heard someone, whether a parent, a grandparent, or teacher talk about “Well back in my day…” And we have probably even made a few of those statements ourselves and sometimes we are shocked that those words just came out of our mouths.

Yes we want to celebrate the past, give thanks for what God has done in our lives, for the memories we have shared and the things we have learned and experienced. We do this individually when we look at old pictures and recollect our childhood.

We do this as a society, when we commemorate the deaths of celebrities like Walter Cronkite and Michael Jackson or when we “throw” stone wash jeans and garbage pal kids cards to our friends on Facebook.

And we do this as a church. As the church universal we commemorate the lives of saints, artist, theologians and reformers in our prayers and as this church, as the people of Bethlehem Lutheran Church we do this when we continue to celebrate and give thanks for the first 101 years of this congregation being in God’s grace.

But the danger arises when we spend so much time thinking about the past, thinking that those were the golden years that we are no longer able to fully live in the present. Imagine if I came to church wearing a hyper-color shirt tied in a knot at the waist, a slap bracelets and my hair in a side ponytail. Yeah that was cool in the early 90’s but I think we can all be grateful that fashions have changed.

And when you live in the past you loose grip on the present. It becomes difficult to realize that your family and friends have grown older, that the kid you once bounced on your knee as a child is now driving or is married or has kids of his own. When you live in the past, it becomes difficult to see what is happening in front of you. To see who your friends currently are because you too busy recalling what your old friends once did.

But living in the past is also safe. There is no anxiety about what is going to happen, because it has already happened. We also tend to romanticize the past, remembering things as better than they really were, or only remembering the good parts. And we end up giving undeserved credit to the “heroes” of our past.

And that is what the crowd was doing when they demand manna from Jesus. They were remembering the story of the manna and giving the credit to Moses and not to God. They did not seem to recall the complaining of the Israelites (who were also glorifying the past) that they would have been better living in Egypt. The past was distorted, and filtered through a thousand year old lens.

But Jesus reminds them, or maybe even corrects them that it was not Moses who fed the Israelites in the dessert but God. He then tells them it is not the past that they should be concerned about but the present. He says “It is my father who GIVES you the true bread from heaven.” Present tense. The bread that God gave to the crowd was not happening in the past with the Israelites in the wilderness but it was currently happening to them in the present.

And the same is true for us today. God is currently giving us bread from heaven and Jesus is the bread of life. This bread is not in the form of manna in the wilderness or five barley loaves that fed 5000. No the bread from heaven that we receive is in the form of the bread and wine of communion. It is the body and blood of Jesus that is continually given to us today and each day. The bread from heaven, the bread of life, is given to us in each and every morsel of food that we eat which strengthens our bodies and allows us to do God’s work in the world.

It is not about what has been done in the past, but what is being done now in the present. It is about how God is currently active in our lives today. It is about Jesus being present in our lives in the form of family, friends and even strangers, who care for us, who love us even when we do not deserve it, who act neighborly towards us. This is how God is present in our lives today. This is how God’s grace is poured out upon us and this is how we will continue to live in faith.

If our faith lives are not active, are not currently engaged with society as it is, with what is going on now in our hearts and minds then it is not truly faith, but a story, a memory that we may hold on to dearly, but it is not faith. Because faith is alive, active and here in this room and in this world. For Jesus is the Bread of Life, here and now.