Being Fed

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.02.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 6:24-35

The year was 1972, and an NIH researcher by the name of John B. Calhoun was conducting an experiment.

That experiment was simple: build paradise.  Utopian societies are kind of hard to create, or so human beings have found out, so Mr. Calhoun chose instead to go simpler.  He chose to build a utopia for mice.  Mice would seem to have lower standards for paradise, as they generally don’t require jet packs and fairy castles, roller coasters and small independent brewpubs and a nationally ranked school in convenient walking distance for the kids.

Calhoun figured that what mice wanted was simple.  First, no predators.  So mouse utopia was entirely catless, which seems a good first step.  Second, there was ample space.  Calhoun’s mouse utopia was a large space with many chambers, plenty of room for the mice to live and make more mice, which mice seem to enjoy doing.  The habitat included space for well over thousand mice, with ample bedding material that was constantly replenished.  Articles about the experiment make no mention of whether there was a tiny little mouse IKEA nearby, but there may well have been.   Third, no disease.  Every mouse selected as part of the experiment was carefully vetted and illness-free.

And finally, Calhoun made absolutely sure that there was always as much food and drink as the mice could ever need.  This wasn’t a Malthusian exercise, in which the mice would reproduce until there were too many mice and not enough food.  Instead, it was like being on a rodent Carnival cruise, with open buffets 24 hours a day, all the food you can eat, whenever you want it.  No matter how many mice there were, there would always be enough food.  There would never be starvation or thirst in Mouse Utopia.

He named that space Universe 25, because, well, he’d done this before.

And then he set eight mice--four males, and four females--into that world, and watched.  For a while, all was well.  There was plenty, enough for all, and mice did what mice do.  Eight became eighty, then eight hundred.  Still, there was enough food, plenty for all.  Eight hundred became a thousand, then two thousand, and though the world grew crowded, there was still plenty of food and drink for all.  At five hundred days, the mouse-paradise reached a population of two-thousand two-hundred, nowhere near the theoretical carrying capacity of the habitat.

Then things came apart. Meaning, what makes mice mice, what gives them their mouseness when they live together? That came apart. Mouse society collapsed. Males stopped defending territory, and lost interest in reproduction. Most of the others, stripped of their usual social roles and without any purpose, became alternately listless or hyperviolent.  Some of the males became what Calhoun called “beautiful ones,” only interested in grooming, sleeping, and eating.  Females abandoned their young, fleeing off by themselves to empty habitat areas.  Universe 25 never recovered, and within months, all the mice were dead.  Even though there was still space, and even though the buffet was still open and stocked.  Just having plenty, it seems, was not enough.

Living creatures, even such simple ones as mice, need more.  We human beings need considerably more.  

The “more” that we need is written all over the passage we heard from John’s Gospel this morning, although while it’s written in terms that are simple, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to grasp.    

John’s Gospel is easily the richest and most spiritual of the Gospels.  It speaks most directly to the relationship Jesus has with God, to his identity, and to the purpose of his life.  It is also the Gospel that speaks most potently to the presence and nature of the Holy Spirit, God’s transforming presence in and among us.

The purpose of Christ’s time among us is laid out in John, more often than not in statements about Christ’s nature that are cast in “I am”  statements.  Using these, Jesus presents his identity in language rich in metaphor and symbolism.  This particular portion of John’s Gospel, lays out imagery that is powerfully eucharistic.  Eucharist, the combination of “good” and “gift,” that peculiar word we use to describe the meal we Christians all are asked to share.  Here, John’s Gospel tells us the story of the purpose of communion.

It is a purpose, we hear, that goes well beyond food.  John’s Gospel has just told us a story about food, that “feeding of the five thousand” tale again, and that event has gotten people as excited as they are about free donuts on national donut day.  That’ll be June 3, 2016, folks.  Be sure to mark your calendars.  The crowds pile into boats, and chase after Jesus, filled with excitement at the prospect of the encounter.

But when they find him, he’s a little less than welcoming.  He doesn’t work the crowd.  He responds to their pursuit with a slightly cynical attitude.  You’re not really here because of what I truly represent.  You’re here because you ate bread.

That stings a little, and so from the crowd comes a genuine question: What should we do?  Tell us what to do!

Jesus has described himself using the phrase “I am the bread of life.”  He talks about bread that comes from heaven, evoking the ancient story of manna in the wilderness. That story, of receiving what was needed at a time of hunger, is usually understood as being about sustaining the lives of the Israelites as they wandered through the wilderness.  It’s the story of avoiding starvation, and of God’s material providence.  It’s God the Father, pulling the family minivan into a drivethrough that has miraculously appeared just as the situation had gotten unworkably dire.

But as with so much of what Jesus did, he pressed his listeners to move beyond their understanding of that text, and deeper into understanding the purpose of what he was doing in the world.  What he was offering was not about food, not about drink.  It was more.

The essence of what Jesus is teaching here has to do with both incarnation and the Spirit.  What he is telling us has to do with the nature of our participation in who he was, and his participation in who we are.

It is a statement of spirit, and a statement of purpose, because it is purpose that Jesus brings.  What is offered up by Jesus, in his whole person, is meaning.

Jesus, a person who made flesh and taught what it meant to live according to God’s best and most gracious intent, was himself the nourishment.  We partake of him by believing, meaning not that we agree to a set of propositions or arguments, but that we turn our whole lives towards the goal he established.

This is the point of faith, the reason we have faith, and why faith is so important for all human beings.  What faith does is give us both ground to stand on, and a goal, and in that, it does so much more than food.

Not that we don’t need food to maintain the processes of our lives.  We do.  But without any sense of purpose, any goals, anything to guide us, food itself is not enough.  Just sustaining our lives is not enough.

And sure, yeah, we’re not mice, and the great belching cornucopia of global capitalism isn’t Universe 26.  Hopefully.  But it’s hard not to see parallels.  Here, we are blessed to live in a society where there is more than enough food to meet the needs of all.  Water is clean and freely accessible.  There are more than enough living spaces for every human being to stay warm and dry.

By all rights, the world we live in should be utopia.  And yet in the absence of a sense of meaning, of a clearly lived out purpose, we struggle.

In the meal we will soon share, and in the life we’re called to live in response to Jesus, find that purpose.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.