Are You Hungry? 1/10/43

Scripture: John 6: 27-40a

Text: John 6: 35 “I am the Bread of Life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”

Some of us are a bit hungry for things to which we have been used, or would like. We are limited by rationing, and we are to be further limited by more rationing. Our mild discomfort is still sheer luxury in the light of the lot that falls to whole nations of people elsewhere in this troubled world.

Our physical wants are not serious - are not really more than mild annoyance. Nor are they likely to be truly serious in the near future. And yet, there are areas of hunger which we do experience and which I will discuss for a few minutes this morning.

More than one person is like the young woman in another state, who said to her pastor: “This winter I am going to be busier than ever. The only way to avoid being unhappy is to have no time to think.” The same restlessness is expressed in the hearts of many people. A man feels that he could be satisfied if he could just get his hands on another $100.00. Or a woman feels that she could be happy if she could just have a new dress. Or a nation says “Just one more colony.” “This is our last demand and then we shall be satisfied.”

So we go rushing off for more money, new clothes, greater empires - only to become conscious of the same driving restlessness a sort time later. For even if the money be obtained, the dress purchased, the colony gained; it is still the same man, the same woman, the same nation. The need is not in the outward things that may, or may not, come. The need is within ourselves. We have an inner voice crying out for what no material thing can satisfy!

Some thoughtful soul has ventured the opinion that night clubs are maintained by those who are trying to “keep from growing up,” and that “juke boxes” are maintained by those who are trying to keep from hearing themselves. Having pushed aside the inner self in the morning, ignored it all day, sought to escape it in the evening, one picks the noisiest record and puts a nickel in the slot to keep from hearing himself!

It is to such people - in some sense to all of us- that Isaiah said: “Wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread? -- Eat that which satisfieth.” [Isaiah 55: 2].

It is fitting, in this season between the Advent of Christ and His Passion and resurrection, and in this year of solemn and stern effort, that we think of the Bread which alone can satisfy us all. Herbert Doran has pointed out three of four characteristics of our human hunger:

1) The human spirit has a hunger for an understanding of itself. Man alone among the creatures tries to understand himself. The kitten, tangling the thread or climbing the curtain may be a problem to us, but it is not a problem to itself. Only man bothers with the eternal question: “Who am I? - a bubble that will burst tomorrow? a machine without choice? an ape that has taken a turn for the worse?” Lacking a satisfactory answer, man is ill at ease and unsatisfied.

2) In the second place, Doran says that we hunger for something to which we can give allegiance. We like to belong to something greater than ourselves. And so we wear the Boy Scout or Girl Scout pin, or the American Legion overseas cap, or the emblem of our lodge or fraternity.

Two years after the Worlds Fair in Chicago, a man in a country district was still observed to wear in his lapel a button which read, “I attended the Century of Progress.” Well, he didn’t have much that was tangible left to belong to. But something had happened to him. For a brief moment, he had been taken out of the humdrum monotony of being a farmer’s hired hand and had been lifted up to where he could see his part in the onward march of man. And after that, feeding pigs was never again the same.

This is why people will tolerate, or even welcome, dictatorships. Men and women hunger to give allegiance to something bigger than themselves. We grow restless trying to find what we would like to do. We may long for someone who will tell us where we can fit in. We are not afraid of “blood and sweat and tears,” for they feed our courage. We want to give allegiance to something greater than ourselves.

3) We have a third hunger - a hunger for a new start. We long for a spring that will bring out new leaves. We long to shed our mistakes of the past, and our wrong choices, like a snake sheds its skin. We want to be different, we want to be better. We are hungry for a new start.

4) There is another hunger in the human heart, says Doran. Not only do we want to understand ourselves, not only do we hunger for that to which we can give allegiance, not only do we long for a new start, but we have also a hunger for a fellowship with that which brings completion to our incompleteness. We are like some jig-saw puzzle with missing pieces that can never show its complete picture until all of the pieces are found. Part of our lack is filled by the fellowship of friends and loved ones. But we still long for what a poet has called “a central peace.” Like ears listening for a song, our spirits yearn for a fellowship that will bring completion to our incompleteness.

These are some of the hungers of the human spirit. Unsatisfied, they keep gnawing away. Lacking the only food that will supply them, we try like the hungry children of Europe and China, to feed upon roots and bark and dry grass; inadequate, unpalatable and un-nourishing, which only increases our distress.

Addressing himself to our restlessness, the prophet Isaiah still asks, “Wherefore do you spend money for that which is not bread? Eat that which satisfieth.” What is there that can satisfy these hungers of the human spirit?

The voice of Another speaks with the same assurance that has been his for two millennia, “I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” [John 6: 35]. (1) Here is the only Bread which can satisfy our hunger for understanding of ourselves. We think of Christ as a revelation of what God is like. He is also a revelation of what man is!

You say, “well, man is a pretty sorry spectacle, Look at what he is doing to himself and his fellows now.” Have you heard a fiddle squawking out the lively rhythm for a barn dance? It may be pep, but it is usually an unsatisfactory source of music. But if you have ever heard Fritz Kreissler draw a bow across violin strings, with precision, brilliance and beauty of tone, you know what the music of a violin can be. We watch our own fumbling efforts and remain unsatisfied. We look to God and then we know what God meant man to be! Only one who had seen God in Christ could have written: “Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him.” [I John 3: 2].

2) And what of our allegiance? In one of the best statements of the causes of war, James says, “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of the lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not; ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not --- submit yourselves therefore to God.” [James 4: 1-2, 7]. Only as we have an allegiance to something greater than ourselves of the things of man, can we find the tangled threads of our life woven into a single strong cord. Most of our allegiances are too small.

E. Stanley Jones reminds us that fascism is supreme allegiance to the state; the Nazis’ supreme allegiance is to the race; the Soviet communists supreme allegiance is to the class. All of these, and some of our allegiances (to the power of production, for instance), are too small. They bring us into violent conflict and divisions.

Only One is great enough for our supreme allegiance.

“I saw the conquerors riding by

with cruel lips faces wan;

Musing on Kingdoms sacked and burned

There rode the Mongol Ghenghis Khan;

And Alexander, like a God,

Who sought to weld the world in one;

And Caesar with his laurel wreath;

And like a thing from hell, the Hun;

And leading like a star, the van,

Heedless of upstretched arm and groan,

Inscrutable Napoleon went,

Dreaming of Empire and alone ...

Then all they perished from the earth,

As fleeting shadows from a glass,

And conquering down the centuries,

Came Christ, the Swordless, on an ass.

(Harry Kemp)

3) And what can satisfy the hunger for a new start? The Christian gospel is the good news of the second chance. “Repent and be baptized.” Though scarred, we may be forgiven. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” is a promise to the repentant. Christ is the only Bread of Life that can feed and satisfy our desire for a new start.

4) And our longing for completion? The Psalmist knew our restlessness. “Why are thou cast down, O my soul, and shy art thou disquieted within me?” [Psalm 42: 5]. He also knew for what he hungered. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.” [Psalm 42: 1].

At length there came, and remained, One who could say “He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” [John 14: 9]. “Thou hast made us for Thyself,” prayed Augustine, “and we are restless until we find our rest in Thee.”

A novelist (James Hilton in “Random Harvest) has made human restlessness the theme of a story in which a man, because of shell shock, lost all his memory of what had gone before. In his new life, he meets his wife but does not recognize her. He falls in love with her and marries her. He becomes successful in business. But he is always haunted by the unremembered past. Vague outlines of forgotten memories drift before his eyes and fade before he can grasp them. At last, on a Christmas morning, visiting (by strange impulse) the town where he had lived before, and climbing a half-remembered hill, “he finds waiting for him his wife, whom he now recognizes as the one whom he had ‘loved long since and lost awhile.’”

In such a moment you and I, and perchance our torn and bleeding world may, in a Judean village, or on a hill outside a Palestinian city, or on our own mount of transfiguration, find Him who sent his message in the spirit and flesh of his son, who said “I am the Bread of Life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”

[John 6: 35].

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dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, January 10, 1943