The Bread of the Day

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Matthew 6:11; Isaiah 25:6-10; Revelation 19:6-10: 21:1-7

Being a minister, I get to go to more than my fair share of wedding feasts, except we like to call them receptions these days.  I have to say that I’ve never been disappointed.  They are always joyous and plenty of fun.  The food is the complete opposite of what we read there in Isaiah.  We don’t eat death.  We eat prime rib or some kind of chicken cooked to perfection.  The deserts are to die for.    The festivities, the toasts are always a hoot.  And then there’s the company.  It’s a rare wedding feast that I know the people I’m sitting with.  It’s sink or swim and sometimes like pulling teeth to get people to talk especially when they realize they’re sitting with the minister.  There’s no worse dinner party Hell than having to sit with a minister.  There’s hardly a worse punishment on earth than being seated with a minister.  But I jest.  Even when seated with people I don’t know, we’ve managed to become friends.  

When we sit together at table for a wedding feast, it is not just a party.  It’s a special meal at which we should take a moment to consider what we’re celebrating. Wedding feasts are special because we’re celebrating what is one of the foundational stones of human community – a union of persons and of families, the hope of a life of growing together, children, a celebration of the very goodness that is steadfast love and faithfulness, a celebration of God’s faithfulness.  

Marriage and the wedding feast are also primary biblical images to help us understand the nature of the relationship between Jesus and the Church.  That relationship is like marriage – steadfast love and fidelity through plenty and want, joy and sorrow, sickness and health.  Ephesians 5:21 and following speaking of spouses says: Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.  Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord…. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her…”.  One of Jesus most used metaphors for what the Kingdom of God is like is a wedding and the wedding feast.  As we see in Revelation, when Jesus returns it is for his wedding to the church and there will be a feast – the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.  On that Day, the old Creation, the sin-sick, dying creation ends and the New/renewed Creation begins with a wedding feast.

Moreover, Jesus ate a lot of meals in the course of his ministry and those meals pointed forward to that big, wedding feast coming.  Jesus frequently taught during meals.  Let’s not forget those two times when he fed crowds in excess of 15,000 and 12,000 people with just a few loaves of bread and several fish.  Those two meals pointed towards that big wedding feast when he returns.  In the early church, disciples gathered in homes on Sunday evenings, the Lord’s Day known as the Eighth Day of Creation which meant the first day of the New Creation.  When gathered, they worshipped and shared a meal which included communion and it was in a sense a rehearsal and a partaking of that wedding feast coming.  Early Christians appear to have believed that the meals they shared were a small taste of that future feast breaking into our time nurturing us for that Day coming, the Day of the Lord, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.  It was in a sense, “give us today our bread of The Day” (capital D).

…and that, my friends, is how I and many other students of the Scriptures believe that we should translate Matthew 6:11 as opposed to: “Give us today our daily bread.”  The Lord’s Prayer we’ve learned to pray is a Middle Ages adaptation of it that turns it into just a daily prayer as opposed to the prayer Jesus gave to his disciple to pray in longing for the end to come, for Jesus to come, and put things right.  We’ve learned it as a daily prayer as opposed to a prayer focused on the kingdom of God coming to earth, breaking into our reality from the future.  I don’t know if that makes any sense.  We’re not just praying here, “Lord, give me the food and the things that I need for today.”  We’re praying for God to give us the bread of the meal of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb.  

The word we translate as “daily” is tricky.  In fact, we don’t really know for sure what it means because the only known use of it is from Jesus’ mouth here in the Lord’s Prayer as if he coined it.  The word is “epiousios”.  Epi means across or over or above.  Ousios means substance or being.  We could make it mean daily bread, but in essence it’s more like “Give us the bread that’s of the above stuff that’s from across, over there.”  It’s more like “feed us the real bread”.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus gave a very long discourse just after he fed the crowd of 5,000 men which would likely have been more that 15,000 if we included women and children.  The subject of the talk was the bread of heaven.  A bit of the discussion included talk about “manna”, the stuff that God daily fed the Israelites with during their wilderness wandering.  But Jesus takes it one step further and calls himself the “Bread of Life” and explains that following him in relationship to him filled with the Holy Spirit is true life that will last to eternity.  Jesus is the daily bread, the bread of the Day, the bread that’s of the above stuff from across, over there.  In him together we are at the feast.

I heard a woman recently talking about the breadsticks they served at the chain of restaurants called The Olive Garden.  The Olive Garden was famous for their breadsticks.  At the beginning of the meal, they brought you a basket of breadsticks which you ate while you looked over the menu and ordered your dinner.  The menus had pictures and everything just looked mouth-watering good and you ordered and you just couldn’t wait to get your meal.  But those breadsticks…those breadsticks were just so amazingly good.  You can’t stop yourself from eating them.  Soon, you don’t want your food anymore because the breadsticks were a good enough meal.  You wish you hadn’t ordered anything because the breadsticks are amazingly more than enough.  Then, the food arrives but you don’t want it yet you try to eat it anyway all the while eating more breadsticks and you wind up miserable because you should have just let the breadsticks be enough.

Jesus, the bread of life, is like those breadsticks.  Once you’ve had a taste of him, the peacefulness of his presence, the rest, his faithfulness towards you, his working in your life to strengthen and heal you, when he speaks words of assurance to you – Don’t be afraid. I am with you.  When you get a hold of Jesus and he gets a hold of you, you don’t want the flashy, overpriced stuff from the menu of life that you ordered thinking it would satisfy you and make you happy.  You just want him; to spend time with him in prayer, studying Scriptures and listening for a word from him.  You just want to share the love that he's made you feel by his faithfulness to you. 

Jesus himself is the bread we are praying for in the Lord’s Prayer.  He is daily at all times with us.  He is the life from above, across, over there, life filled with the Presence of God.  Sitting here at the table of life Jesus is all we need.  When we pray, “Give us today our daily bread” be mindful that it is Jesus that we are praying for.  We aren’t just praying for the food and stuff that we need for daily existence.  We are asking to be filled with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, the life that comes to us from the future healing of all things.  Amen.

All Things Made New

Isaiah 65:17-25, Revelation21:1-7, 1 Corinthians 15:19-26
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I have to admit that I get pretty excited about new discoveries in the world of physics.  For example, in 2012 when CERN produced a Higgs Boson with its Large Hadron Collider I preached a sermon on it – professional faux pas.  The Higgs Boson is the elementary or sub-atomic particle that gives stuff mass.  Sub-atomic reality consists of fields of little blips of different kinds of energy – fermions and bosons – so that we are swimming in as well as consisting of a lake of different kinds of energies and don’t know it.  One of those fields consists of Higgs Bosons.  When fermions interact with the Higgs Bosons they get mass – they get heavy and slow down and start to stick together to make the particles that make atoms.  Without the Higgs Boson everything would just be tiny, little, sub-atomic blips of energy zipping about at the speed of light and we wouldn’t be here.  The Higgs is affectionately known as the “God Particle” because everything that “is” depends on it.  Back in 1964 a man named Peter Higgs predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson, but it wasn’t until this last decade that we had particle colliders that could produce enough energy to smash one into revealing itself.  The Higgs Boson – predicted in theory, but now seen.

In February of 2016 scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory measured a gravitational wave proving something Einstein had predicted nearly a hundred years earlier; that when massive things in the universe start mixing it up the very fabric of space-time ripples like throwing a rock into a pond and unseen and unfelt by us every subatomic particle we are made of does a ride-a-wave thing.  The Gravitational Wave – predicted in theory, but now seen.

The oldest light we can see in the universe is a form of heat known as Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.  It was discovered in the mid-1960’s but lately with newer telescopes they’ve been mapping the universe with it.  It’s 13.82 billion years old and originated about 378,000 years after the Bing Bang.  If you want to see this light you can hear it if you listen to static generated by a television.  4-8% of that noise is the sound of the first measurable remnants of the Big Bang; i.e. of Creation itself.  The Bing Bang – predicted in theory but now seen or rather heard.

Wednesday a week ago a group of scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope produced a picture of a super-massive black hole that is 6,000 times the size of our sun and located at the center of a nearby galaxy 40 million light years away.  Black holes happen when too much stuff gets together and becomes a mass so dense that the force of gravity becomes so strong that not even light can escape from it.  Black holes are like death.  The moment something passes the event horizon of a black hole we have no idea what happens to it.  This picture of a black hole is important because it is the evidence that black holes really exist.  Before, we knew them only in theory and math, and they even look like what we expected.  Black Holes – predicted in theory, but now seen.

Well, it’s Easter and for me when I think about Jesus’ resurrection I have to put it into the context the real stuff of real science.  As Christians we cannot with any integrity continue this charade of saying that Jesus resurrection from the dead is simply a spiritual matter which a person can chose to believe or not.  Rather, the Church professes that God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised Jesus, God the Son incarnate, from the dead and it was a bodily resurrection.  This means that Jesus’ resurrection body brought back anew from the “black hole” of Death must still have a physical connection to this Creation that God Big Banged into existence roughly 14.1 billion years ago.  For Jesus to have been able to be touched by his disciples and to have sat and eaten with them after being raised from the dead he had to be made of real stuff.  Therefore what his resurrected body was made of must still interact with Higgs Bosons and have mass.  He is just as real as the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson, gravitational waves, Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and black holes.  Since Jesus resurrected is still human we also have to add him into the categories of reality that we call life, consciousness, and sentience (which includes intelligence, relationability, emotion, reason, wonder, creativity) and we also have to add the highest category: that of knowing and relating to God.   

Jesus resurrection is an act of New Creation.  Jesus resurrected is everything we are yet he has gone through the black hole of death and come out the other side as New Creation.  In fact, he is the beginning of the whole Creation being made new. 

Since God raised Jesus from the dead everything in God’s good and wonderful Creation has begun to change.  New Testament scholar N.T. Wright often says that when God raised Jesus from the dead a shockwave went out through all of created existence.  Things are now somehow different.  I hear that and I think that a gravitational wave makes a good analogy.  We can’t see or feel them but when they come through, the space-time fabric of our very existence is part of it.  So it is with the effect of the Resurrection of Jesus.  We may not be aware that we are experiencing it, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are.

Just as science predicted the Higgs Boson, gravitational waves, the Big Bang, and black holes so also God has predicted this New Creation that he has begun with the resurrection of Jesus.  God spoke to Isaiah and said he was making a new heavens and a new earth.  The picture he gives us of it isn’t of a non-physical, simply spiritual heavenly reality.  In the New Creation, life – real and physical – continues on.  Children are born.  People grow old.  We build houses and there make our homes.  We plant and we eat.  There are vineyards so that means wine.  Work is productive and rewarding.  There is joy and delight and lasting blessing.  No more will there be weeping and cries of distress.  No more futility or premature death.  No more losing everything that you’ve worked for.  No more children needlessly dying.  It even seems that predation in the animal kingdom will cease.  Our relationship with God will be such that we know God hears us before we even speak as opposed to this sense that we often have of just bouncing prayers off the ceiling not knowing whether God hears or cares.

The Book of Revelation also shows us a creation made new, a new heaven and a new earth where God is knowably present rather than hidden yet present.  It is a Creation healed of Sin, sickness, grief, and Death where God tenderly comforts all who sorrow.  Please notice that the New Jerusalem comes from heaven to earth.  God does not destroy earth so that we can all go to heaven.  In the New Creation heaven and earth open to each other.  Heaven is no longer hidden.

This New Creation that God himself has predicted is taking effect in us this very moment through the workings of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit calls us to come and be Jesus disciples and as we together as the body of Christ and focus more on the task of being Jesus’ disciples, the more we find ourselves being made new, being made to be more and more like Jesus.  By communion with the Holy Spirit we are partakers of Jesus’ resurrected life and this will culminate when at the end of this age Jesus returns and we, like him, are bodily raised from the dead and all things are made new and there will be no more Sin or Death or evil powers or chaos.  All will be made alive in Christ and God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).  The earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the see (Is. 11:9).

Lastly, God the Father himself is the one who has made this prediction.  He said to Isaiah “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.”  In the Revelation he said to John (and this is the only time God the Father from his throne speaks in the whole Book), “See, I am making all things new.”  In the world of physics a prediction is not like Nostradamus staring into a bowl or Jimmy the Greek predicting the Super Bowl winner.  Instead, in physics a prediction is something that will in time come about because it is the only way things add up.  Peter Higgs predicted the Higgs Boson knowing that there had to be an elementary particle mechanism that made things have mass.  We have found one.  Einstein predicted gravitational waves and black holes simply because the math said they have to exist.  We have found them.  The Big Bang had to have happened because that is the only way we can have Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.  The Big bang happened.  Likewise, God is making all things new.  This New Creation started with Jesus’ resurrection.  It is being worked in us now by the presence and working of the Holy Spirit.  But, the God-predicted Day will come when all things will finally be made new.  Resurrection and New Creation are as real and predictable as the Big Bang, Higgs Bosons, Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and black holes.  Just wait and see.  It will happen.  Amen.

The New Jerusalem

Revelation21:1-6
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One afternoon while coming out of the Jerusalem temple one of Jesus’ disciples remarked how beautiful the temple was saying, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!"  And then Jesus dropped a bomb.  He prophesied saying, "Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."  In 70 AD that prophecy came to pass. 

Flavius Josephus was a Jewish historian in the first century AD.  In his book The Jewish Wars he recounts how the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70 AD.  He writes: “Now as soon as the army had no more people to slay or to plunder, because there remained none to be the objects of their fury, Titus Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and Temple, but should leave the towers standing as they were of the greatest eminence as well as the wall on the west side…in order to demonstrate to posterity what kind of city it was, and how well fortified, which the Roman valour had subdued; but for all the rest of the wall surrounding Jerusalem, it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came there believe Jerusalem had ever been inhabited.  This was the end which Jerusalem came to; a city otherwise of great magnificence, and of mighty fame among all mankind.”

Josephus claims that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege, of which the majority were Jews, and that 97,000 were captured, enslaved, and most were made gladiators.  The Jews that were left mostly fled to areas around the Mediterranean. Josephus reported that Titus refused to accept a wreath of victory for his routing of Jerusalem, as there is "no merit in vanquishing a people forsaken by their own God". 

Building further on that note, the God forsaken note, the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem on the last day of the Jewish month of Av (our July), a day Jews call the Day of Five Calamities.  On that same date in 586 BC, the Babylonians destroyed the first temple, the temple Solomon built.  In those days the prophet Ezekiel had a vision in which he saw the glory of the Lord leaving the temple in Jerusalem and heading east to be with the exiles in Babylon.  A very touching message proclaiming that God had not abandoned his people even though he had cast them off of the land.  Seventy years later when a remnant returned none of the prophets in that day claim a vision of the glory of the Lord ever returning to the temple.  In fact, Isaiah 65:1 which dates to this time indicates that God didn’t want to live in a temple anymore.  God said to Isaiah,  “Heaven is my throne, earth is my footstool.  What is this house that you would build for me?”  The Lord God did not return to the temple.  It was not until Jesus that the presence of the LORD God of Israel again dwells among his people.

It is into this context of Jerusalem’s destruction that we must place this climatic vision of John’s in the Book of Revelation.  He saw a new creation, a new Heaven and a new Earth.  The old had passed.  Jerusalem and the Temple, the centerpieces of the identity of the people of God, were gone, never to be again.  The old was gone yet the new had come.  There in the midst of this utterly new creation where heaven and earth are openly now joined as one, where it finally is on earth as it is in heaven, John sees the New Jerusalem coming from God from Heaven to Earth.  The heart of John the Jew must have leapt for joy.

As John watches the New Jerusalem descend, he hears a voice.  For the very first time in the Revelation a voice comes from the throne of God saying that God himself is with his people and he himself will comfort them.  Not only would a new esteem be given to his people, Jew and Gentile alike, but God would once again be with his people and this time personally.  He was going to intimately involve himself with each of his people to heal and comfort them.  God himself will wipe away their tears.  Moreover, death will be no more and mourning, crying out, and toilsome suffering will be no more.

Then, God himself speaks, the one seated on the throne declares, “Behold, I am making all things new.  Write this down.  It is trustworthy and the Truth.”  This is the most important word spoken in the entire book, indeed in history.  God is making all things new.  Time in the Book of Revelation is two faceted.  John sees what is and what is to be.  Sometimes, it’s skewed to one side more than the other, but in this passage John is seeing both what God is doing now and what will be in the future.  In this world that is a mess, God is presently working to make all things new until the day comes when the old is utterly gone and everything is made utterly new with the glory of God.  It may not seem like it to us, but behind the scenes of history God is making all things new.  That’s the Truth; capital “T”.

Then God speaks directly to John and it is a message for John to give to his churches in Turkey who are about to undergo great persecution for refusing to call Emperor Domitian Lord as if he were a god.  God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” This means the buck stops with God.  God has the final word in every matter and his final word is that all things are being made new; all things on earth will be as they are in heaven.  He says to those Christians about to suffer and some even to be martyred that the one who conquers, which means who keeps the faith even unto death, will be given freely of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Living Water.

Well, breaking into the code-like imagery of the Book of Revelation, the New Jerusalem, the new heaven and new earth are not things we should simply ascribe to the future and forget them until they come about.   The new heaven and the new earth are as much present realities as they are future.  As God has made us alive in Christ Jesus by giving the Holy Spirit to dwell in us we experience heaven and earth now being made new as if they are the new heaven and the new earth.

Moreover, since God dwells in us now what we are as the church is the New Jerusalem.  Ever since Pentecost the New Jerusalem has been coming from God from heaven to earth.  God has come to dwell with his people.  We are the New Jerusalem you and I, this congregation, all congregations, the church all over the world is the New Jerusalem.  Yet, don't think about it in terms of the institution called the church.  Think of it in terms of a relational network, of people's bonded together in the new humanity in Jesus Christ formed by means of the “communioning” work of the Hoy Spirit.  The glory of God shines through us, through our relational bond.  The light of Christ shines through us.  The light of God-glorifying, other-centered, self-sacrificing love shines through us.  No matter how small and insignificant we may appear we are the New Jerusalem coming from God from heaven to earth.  In us and among us is the place on earth where God dwells among the nations, where he wipes away every tear.

For now, we, the church, the New Jerusalem, are a signpost of God’s working to make all things new.  Love one another.  Comfort one another in grief.   It’s important.  It proves God is making all things new.  Feed the hungry. Give drink to the thirsty.  Give home to the homeless.  Clothe the naked.  Visit the prisoner.  Care for the orphaned and the widowed.  Make things just and beautiful.  These things prove God is making all things new.  We are a vital part of what God is doing to heal his Creation of sin and death and to make it here on earth as it is in heaven.   We are the New Jerusalem. Amen.