Year B
 Exodus 16:2-4,9-15
 Psalm 78:23-29
 Ephesians 4:1-16
 John 6:24-35

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

In the opening prayer of our Eucharist…  called the Sursum Corda…  we lift up our hearts to God…   we open our hearts to Mystery…  but generally speaking…  we prefer to know everything precisely…  to have everything nailed down…   ]  and science tells us that it can prove things to be true…  except when it can’t…  and we’re back to mystery…  like dark matter…  curved space… or a forgiving heart…

While in the mysticism which encompasses both the Eastern church…  and Hindu and Buddhist practices…  there is much greater comfort with mystery than we find in the West…  Eastern Christianity is known for its embrace of mystery in its theological and liturgical practices… ] when it comes to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity…  the Eastern church acknowledges that human reason cannot fully comprehend its nature…  but emphasizes the importance of experiencing and encountering this mystery through worship…  prayer…  and the sacramental life… ]  when it comes to the Eucharist…  men like Thomas Aquinas sought to reconcile faith with reason…  offering clear and logical explanations of theological concepts…  like how the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood…  while the Eastern church teaches that this transformation is beyond human understanding…  ] and when it comes to God… the Eastern church finds it easier to talk about who and what God is not…  rather than who and what God is…   it underscores the mystery of God’s nature…  and promotes a sense of reverence and humility in the face of the Divine…

Again and again…  Jesus invites us into deeper relationship with the Divine…  with our True Source…  and both East and West offer comparable practices…  in the West…  we can pray with icons…  which are understood as windows to the Divine…  or with Anglican prayer beads and Roman Catholic rosaries…  we can practice Centering Prayer…  in the East…  there is praying with sacred images called murtis…  there are prayer beads called japa mala…  and there is yoga and various forms of meditation…  and all help to develop what we could call enlightenment…  or established in Being…

In the West…  there have been Christian mystics who were said to be able to levitate…  notably the Italian Franciscan Joseph of Cupertino…  whose levitations were so frequent and well-documented…  that they were investigated by the Catholic Church…  which later canonized him as a saint…  and St. Teresa…  who reported experiences of levitation during her deep states of prayer and ecstasy…  in his book Autobiography of a Yogi…  Paramahansa Yogananda describes yogis who exhibited various spiritual powers that included levitation…  but such abilities are wholly incidental…   compared to the state of consciousness…  out of which those abilities arise…

Now in our reading from Exodus…  the Israelites grumble about being hungry…  and they may have been hungry for food…  but I think they were hungry for more…  and God gives them manna…  now the word itself…  means…  what is it…  and Moses explained that it was the bread that God gave them to eat… ] manna…  a food that crosses the gap between divine and mundane realms…  falling from heaven to be consumed on earth…  ]  in Jewish mysticism…  in a commentary on the Kabbala…  manna is presented as something which granted the Israelites a direct and embodied experience…  ]  knowledge of God…

Dr. Raj Nadella…  a professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary…  writes…  in this morning’s passage from Exodus…  the Israelites are experiencing an “idealized and selective memory” of life under Pharaoh…  they are caught between a dehumanizing past…  and an uncertain future…  and they choose to idealize the past…  and God responds to their hunger…  not with the food of enslavement to which they had become accustomed…  but instead offers a new recipe for freedom…  rather than the meat of empire…  God offers them wild quail…  rather than bread made from grain in storehouses…  God offers ephemeral manna…  which offered a deeper experience of the Holy…

In Matthew 4:3-4…  in response to the Tempter’s command to turn stones into loaves of bread…  Jesus said…  One does not live by bread alone…  but by every word that comes from the mouth of God…  ]  Jesus tries… offers one example after another…  to get the people to shift their awareness from the surface level of things…  to the spiritual depth of things…  in John 2:19…  Jesus says…  Destroy this temple…  and in three days I will raise it up…  he was talking about the Temple of his body…  but those with whom he was speaking thought he meant the Temple which had been under construction for forty years…  in John 3:3…  Jesus tells Nicodemus that no one can see the kingdom of God…  without being born from above…  and Nicodemus asks…  how can anyone be born again after having grown old…  in John 4:5-30…  Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well…  and says that…  Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again…  but those who drink of the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life…  and the woman thinks he’s talking about H₂O and fewer trips to the well…

The Gospel of John is a veritable symphony of incomprehension…  the crowds in today’s story…  who clamor after Jesus…  don’t get it either…  and of course…  neither do those who are closest to Jesus…  and the crowds are attracted to Jesus…  not for any of the reasons he wants them to be…  but only for his miraculous works…  Jesus even says it out loud…  that the crowds were looking for him…  not because they saw signs…  not because his actions revealed a thin place between the divine and the mundane…  into which they were invited…  but because they ate their fill of loaves…

We heard some of this last week when the crowds were about to take Jesus by force…  and make him king…  because of the food he provided…  and so the reaction of the crowds…  is a clear indication of how widespread the popular misconception of Jesus is …  they hear Jesus talk about bread…  and they think he’s talking about sourdough loaves…  and not the spiritual food that satisfies our deepest longings…  their thinking is too small…  too narrow…  because what he’s offering is access to divinity itself…  to the field of all possibilities…

We are a modern people who believe that we have a democratic right to comprehend…  an inalienable right to understand everything…   but what if the kingdom we seek is not of this world…  what if it’s beyond our comprehension…  but not our experience…  what are we asking for when we ask for this bread always…  what are we imaging that this is going to be like…  after 2,000 years…  we’re only still on the cusp…  and it may be that the truth we’re after is not something we can apprehend through our own intellectual or mental effort…  because it is a truth that must be given as gift…  and in the last verse of this morning’s Gospel…  the gift that Jesus offers…  is his own boundlessness…

The church in the United States is at a crossroads…  caught between a past that’s often been captive to wealth…  a caste-like system of racism and oppression…  and transphobia and heterosexism…  ]  and a future with God lived at the margins…  God is responding to the church’s anxiety about the future…  but what we’re being offered will be quite different going forward…  Christianity is a religion of transformation…  and if we’re not transformed…  both individually and collectively…  if we don’t think we need to be…  then we have sold a diamond…  at the price of spinach…