To be in the presence of Jesus is to be in the presence of salvation.  We celebrate the Lord’s Supper on the first Sunday.  There is no special reason why.  There was a time, some may remember it, when Communion was celebrated four times a year.  John Calvin, because of whom we are here rather than at St. John the Apostle Catholic Church, Calvin thought that Communion, as in the Catholic church, should be celebrated every Sunday.  That hasn’t happened among us yet.

To be in the presence of Jesus is to be in the presence of salvation.  As we gather in worship, Jesus is with us, among us, through the Holy Spirit.  Gathered together, we are in the presence of salvation: take a moment to let that sink in.  This bread and this juice before us are reminders, signs of salvation, of Christ Jesus.  As part of our observance of this holy ordinance, we pray that, through the Spirit and the faith-working power of the Spirit in us, the bread and the juice would be for us the body and blood of Christ, and that we would be in communion with God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  What happens here today is amazing, wonderful, vast and deep, cosmic and personal, sacred.  To those outside the faith, what we do here today is an oddity.  A little bread, a little juice.  So what?

In today’s reading, our Lord says that seeing is one thing, perceiving quite another.  While he was alive in the body here, working wonders, healing every sick person who so much as touched the hem of his garment, feeding thousands when there was no indication, no hope, no expectation that there would be any food, while Jesus walked among those people daily, many saw him.  Many saw what he did.  Many believed, blessed be God!  Many did not believe.  Now that Jesus is no longer physically on earth, we read about these great signs of power, and many believe, and many do not.  What we affirm, here, today, in an especially physical, tactile way, is that to be in the presence of Christ, Word of God, Lamb of God, is to be in the presence of salvation.

Only what does that mean, salvation?  Oh, well, to be saved.  Saved?  From what?  I’m not in danger.  And that’s how so many live, beloved.  Now, those who have faith in Christ Jesus, faith in his power to save, faith that they are saved in him, aren’t in any danger.  You will often hear from me that beautiful sentence that the Austrian architect, engineer, mathematician, and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, that to be a Christian is to know that you are safe, no matter what happens.  And Wittgenstein, who thought about Christianity with depth and appreciation, was not a Christian.  He understood that much of the message, though.  Beloved, what cannot happen to us in this life?  Only this: in Christ Jesus, we cannot be separated from the love of God (Rom 8:38-39).  Amid all the things that can and do happen to our bodies in this life, our lives are safe: we have a heavenly reward, an eternal heavenly reward.  These twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred years are a true mixed bag, but after them comes a timeless place of pure, uninterrupted, undiluted blessing.  Too good to be true?  Not on your life!

Now, one of the best ways to draw a crowd is to give away free stuff, free food.  Free pizza!  Who wants some?  The crowds initially pursued Jesus because people were being miraculously healed.  Miraculous?  As though it were a surprise, a shock?  Where Jesus touches us, we are healed.  Do you know the healing of Jesus?  Is there some wound in you that he hasn’t touched yet?  Will you let him?  Will you let him come near, let him look into that wound, too?  Then, when they are miraculously fed, the crowds pursue him because of that: “Hey! Some dude over there is giving away free meals!”  I’d want to check that out.  Maybe, though, you’ve heard the old saying, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.  Pardon the poor grammar; it’s a true saying.  Everything comes at a cost.  What the Father does in the Son comes at a cost, and it costs us something, too—will you give up every thing in order to obtain everything?

Healing, feeding—these are signs, pointers to something much greater, someone much greater.  If we get caught up in the signs, if the signs are as far as our interest goes, we’re missing the point.  Jesus challenges those people pursuing him.  Do you know that Jesus is challenging you?  If you don’t feel challenged by Jesus . . . well, come and see me, and let’s talk it over.  “Do not work for food that spoils” (6:27), he says to them.  For what are you working?  To what are you directing your energies, labors, your dreaming and hoping?  Toward what?  That’s not putting it the right way.  Toward whom are we directing our lives?  If your aim in your work is yourself, you’re going the wrong direction.  If you aim at your family, you’re going the wrong direction.  Friends?  Wrong direction.  Your party or nation?  Wrong direction.  When you expend your life for any of these, your life is spent and not gained.

You work yourselves hard, exhaust and expend yourselves for the sake of acquiring perishable things.  We work ourselves to death; worse, we kill each other over perishable things.  Salvation?  From what?  From that!  Do you subject yourself to the news?  All the poverty and despair, the aimlessness and the suicide, the uglinesses great and small, the avid pursuit of trash and the sickness that comes with it.  All symptoms of a deeper problem, a dark cell from which we do not have the power to escape.  Salvation, rescue, freedom from that!

Isaiah ‘twas foretold it: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?  Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.  Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live” (Is 55:2-3).  This is what Jesus is saying to all those who have pursued him because they have seen.  They have seen, but they have not perceived.  John records Jesus using two different verbs for seeing.  It’s like the difference between saying I see and I see.  I see the bread; I take the bread.  But to receive, we must perceive.  This is what Jesus is saying to them.  This is what Jesus is saying to us.  We see and we take.  We take, and we are not filled.  We take, and we are not healed, not fed.  Because we see and we take.  We use our eyes, our sight, to do our will, and think nothing of it.  Jesus is inviting us now to think.

Jesus does not refer to Isaiah, yet, as Jesus talks to these crowds about food that perishes and food that gives abundant life, these words from that ancient prophet come to me: “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that He may have mercy on them, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.  For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Is 55:6-9).

We need rescue from our ways, our thoughts, because these are not God’s ways and thoughts.  How do we know God’s ways?  How do we know God’s thoughts?  Turn your eyes upon Jesus.  Turn your mind and your heart and your will to God’s Word.  That’s work.  That requires effort.  What requires no effort is to follow my own thoughts, my own ways.  What requires even less is to follow the world’s ways.  The Church stumbles here, because here is where the work is, here is where the real effort is, the real challenge.  We set ourselves many challenges—injustice, poverty, homelessness, hunger, greed, xenophobia, homophobia—and we enjoy tackling such challenges, but the challenges we set are mired in this world.  We set ourselves no divine challenge.  Only God can do that.  In Christ Jesus He does.  And we stumble.  In Christ we stumble upon holiness; we stumble over holiness.  And we no more know what to do with that than we know what to do with this bread or this juice.

Through Isaiah, God says about His chosen people that they “draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote” (Is 29:13).  The Gospel accounts are as much a record of how we challenged, rejected, and scorned Jesus, as they are a record of what God offers us in Christ.

The people ask Jesus what they must do in order to obtain this bread from heaven, the true bread, true bread for true life.  They are looking for a checklist: do this, don’t do that.  Our performance, outward actions.  Eager to oppose the things they don’t like, anyway.  Jesus tells them what they must “do”: “believe in the one [God] sent” (6:29).  Believe?  Strange.  If it were a hard thing, we would surely do it, but this . . . just . . . believe?  St. Paul reminds the believers in Rome, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9).  How do we get to the bread?  Wrong question, again.  How can the bread get to us?  Not our deeds, not our doing, but belief: the heart, the mind, the whole life.  Have you ever heard someone talk about putting yourself into your work?  How much we do—how much I have done!—without much thought or interest!  It’s when we put ourselves into our work, though, that we discover satisfaction, and joy.

This bread from heaven, this bread of life, is Christ, who put himself into this work of his Father in heaven, through whose work there is true satisfaction and true joy.  When Jesus tells people to believe in the one God has sent, they challenge him: “What miracle will you perform so that we may see it and believe you?” (6:30).  Indeed!  This is just what John and Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, aim to show us, to tell us!

This bread and this juice are reminders and signs of the miracle Christ performs.  To be in the presence of Jesus is to be in the presence of salvation.  What does salvation look like?  Water from the baptismal font, trickling down, cool and quick, over our faces?  No.  What does salvation look like?  This fresh bread and this sweet juice?  No.  What does salvation look like, that cross behind me?  No.  What, then?  What does salvation look like?  Beloved, salvation looks like faith, the faith God has worked in you, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit.  And, in that faith, and in that faith only, then, yes, that water from that font, and that cross set at the head of all we do here, and yes, this bread, and this juice, all and only through faith, look like salvation.  “For the bread that God gives is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (6:33).

Don’t merely see and take.  That avails you nothing.  That is the world’s way.  If you wish to receive, perceive.  Believe.  In Christ, you are safe, despite all that has happened, is happening, despite all that will happen.  Safe.  Your very life is safe, in Christ.  Jesus will never drive you away.  Jesus will never reject you.  Jesus opens his arms wide for you, for all who come to him.  He will lose none of us.  He will raise us up.

What God wants, is that “all who see the Son and believe in him should have eternal life” (6:40).  Jesus assures us: “I will raise them to life on the last day” (6:40).  Yearn for that life, with me, brothers and sisters.  Yearn for that Savior.  Long for him; shed silent, private tears for him; live for him; work for him; put yourself into your work for him, and, above all, put Christ into your life, first and best and most.

Here, you can.  Through this Word, read and proclaimed, by this font, by this bread and this juice, in our sacred fellowship in Christ.  To be in the presence of Jesus, as we are, right now, is to be in the presence of salvation.  Praise God.  Bless His holy name.

          Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.