The Bread of God Through the Ages | Rev. Malcolm G. Smith

Good morning and welcome to this adult service.

Today, Holy Supper will be offered as part of the service.

Our first reading is taken from the Gospel of John, chapter 6, and earlier in the chapter than we're going to read, the Lord fed five thousand people miraculously.

John 6 · chapter mention

And then the people followed him, coming for more food, and the Lord talks to them.

Jesus answered them and said, Amen, Amen, I say to you, you seek me not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the bread and were satisfied.

Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for the Father, God, has put his seal on him.

Then they said to him, What shall we do that we may work the works of God?

Jesus answered and said to them, This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he sent.

Therefore they said to him, What sign do you perform then that we may see and believe you?

What work will you do?

Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness, as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.

Then Jesus said to them, Amen, Amen, I say to you, It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my father gives you the true bread from heaven, for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

Then they said to him, Lord, give us this bread always.

And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life, he who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.

The Jews then murmured about him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven, and they said, Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?

How then does he say, I came down from heaven?

Then Jesus answered and said to them, Do not murmur among yourselves.

It is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught by God.

Every one therefore who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.

Amen.

Reading further from the Lord's Word and the teachings for the New Church, from the book Arcana Celestia.

Celestial food consists in every good thing of love and charity received from the Lord, while spiritual food consists in every truth of faith.

These are the kinds of food angels live on.

From these comes the food of a lower angelic degree that angelic spirits live on, and from this again comes celestial and spiritual food of a still lower degree, which has to do with reason and therefore with factual knowledge.

This is the food that good spirits live on.

Last of all comes food for the body, which is the proper food for people while we live in the body.

All these foods correspond to one another in a miraculous way.

Amen.

Here end our lessons from the Lord's Word.

Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.

Amen.

Let's talk about things that are delicious at different levels.

The passage we read in our lessons from the teachings for the New Church started at the highest and worked its way down to the lowest.

We're going to do the opposite.

The lowest level of thing that is delicious is physical food.

Mm-mm, yummy.

The Lord created food to be delightful, delicious to us.

He wants us to enjoy eating food so that we care for our bodies and our bodies can do higher things.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.

The next level up of delicious thing is knowledge.

Think of how delightful it is to learn something new that you really wanted to know.

Learning some more details or facts about a topic you're fascinated by, or learning how to do something new in a hobby that you have or with a piece of equipment that you have.

Mmm, delicious.

When it's something we really have an appetite for, we would happily consume lots and lots and lots of knowledge about that thing.

The next level above that of delicious thing is reasoning.

That's the ability to take the things that we know and do something with them.

It's the ability to think things through, to make connections between the things we know that we didn't see before, and use them for a purpose.

And sometimes we experience the delight of reasoning when someone else makes a really good point or put together a couple of ideas in a sequence that goes, oh yeah, now I see it.

That's really good.

So here's an example of that that I heard recently that may or may not be tasty to you because people like different flavors of reasoning.

But a man was arguing with his coworker about religion.

His coworker is an atheist, and his co-worker was making fun of the idea of the virgin birth.

He was saying, How does that make any sense that someone would be born to a virgin?

And the man replied, Well, a person being born to a virgin makes a lot more sense to me than everything in the whole universe being created from nothing.

Which is the bigger claim?

That's a good little bit of reasoning.

If you like arguments that support the idea of religion being a reasonable thing to believe in, that might be a tasty bit of reasoning for you.

Now, some more levels above reasoning is what the passage we read calls spiritual food, which consists in, quote, every truth of faith, and above that, celestial food, which consists in every good thing of love and charity received from the Lord.

The passage said, these are the kinds of food angels live on.

To eat and enjoy these foods is to really see, understand, and have internalized some truths about spiritual reality, about the Lord, about heaven, about other people and how they work and how to help them.

And not just the head side, but the heart side too, to love the Lord, to love our neighbor, to have mercy, patience, compassion for other people, to love to be genuinely helpful and useful to other people, to hunger and thirst for justice and to be filled by the Lord.

Those things also can be delicious to us, satisfying and delightful at the highest level and at the deepest level.

They fill our hearts.

But sometimes we human beings are only interested in the lower levels of food.

But then he left that place because he knew they were going to try to make him a king.

The guy who gives you food, you give him a crown, so he keeps giving you food.

And the people eventually caught up with him because they wanted more natural food.

And so the Lord said to them, Amen, Amen, I say to you, you seek me because you ate of the bread and were satisfied.

Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life.

Now it was certainly not just that group of people that had this problem of only being interested in lower kinds of food.

This has been a problem for the whole history of the human race, almost the whole history.

In the Garden of Eden, Jehovah God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, including the tree of life.

And briefly, eating from all those good trees corresponds to how the earliest people received all different kinds of goodness and truth from the Lord at all those levels.

But there was one tree in the garden that they were not meant to eat from, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Eating from it represented people wanting to just use their own knowledge and reason at the lower level to figure out how to live their lives instead of looking to the Lord to receive goodness and love and wisdom and truth from him to guide them.

They only had an appetite for that lower kind of food.

And so they ate what they shouldn't have and they were exiled from the garden.

Now, if we fast forward to much later in the story, we find the children of Israel in the wilderness.

They had been led out of slavery in Egypt and were theoretically on their way to a land flowing with milk and honey, but at that moment it seemed like there was nothing good to eat in the whole wilderness, and they longed to go back to the flesh pots of Egypt.

You might remember that the Lord provided them with miraculous food every single morning for the forty years that they ended up living in the wilderness.

But we get some idea of how they thought about and felt about this miraculous food from heaven by what they called it.

They called it manna, and in Hebrew, Hebrew it means what is it?

So let me ask you, do you want to eat some, what's that?

Or some whatnot, or whatever that is.

Mmm, delicious.

They didn't know what it was.

The Lord did help them see that they could take it and they couldn't eat it and it would sustain them, but they didn't really like it, and they had no idea about what it meant, what it corresponded to spiritually.

They had no clue that the manna in the wilderness represented, as one passage puts it, quote, love and charity together with the goods and truths of faith, which the Lord imparts to angels moment by moment, thus perpetually and eternally.

No.

They didn't know anything about that.

Their experience was more like, eh, I don't like it.

Not very good.

What a shame.

Now later on, when reminding people of what they'd gone through in their history, Moses tried to explain to people what was going on.

In Deuteronomy, he says this.

Jehovah humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of Jehovah.

But it doesn't seem like people understood it at that point either.

And so eventually the Lord came into the world himself to help people understand.

The story we read from our lessons is one of the times when the Lord was trying to explain this to people.

That life is about more than just natural food and knowledge, it's about turning to the source of higher goodness and truth, and that that source is himself the bread of God that comes down.

The bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

I am the bread of life.

He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.

Now, another time, Jesus' disciples were urging him to eat some natural food, and he said to them, I have food of which you do not know.

My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

The point of food, actually at any level, is to help us to be useful, to do the will of the one who sent us, and to work on things that he wants us to work on.

The teachings for the new church explain that the spiritual meaning of food is, quote, everything that has a useful purpose, because a person's entire knowledge, entire understanding and wisdom, and so entire will must have a useful purpose as its end in view.

That's the food, that's the point.

Take the stuff we've got and use it.

That's what will fill us up.

Now, some people, thanks to the Lord, eventually did understand what the Lord was talking about, and some did not.

And what ultimately makes someone able to understand this is whether they're willing to repent and turn to the Lord.

In the book of Revelation, the Lord sends letters to seven different churches in which he calls them to repent of their evils and offers them rewards if they do.

In his letter to the church in a place called Pergamos, he says this to him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna to eat.

And the teachings for the new church explain why it's called hidden manna.

It is called hidden manna because the delight of heavenly love, which people receive who are conjoined to the Lord through love, is wholly unknown to people that are in a love that's not heavenly.

And this heavenly delight no one is able to receive except a person that acknowledges the Lord's divine human.

For from this the delight proceeds.

Because this delight was unknown to the children of Israel in the wilderness, they called it manna, or what is it?

So, we are about to have a chance to take Holy Supper.

As we do, we are part of this immeasurably large group of people who have been fed by the Lord over the history of the human race.

Maybe, thanks to the teachings for the new church, we can understand and appreciate a bit more about the spiritual food the Lord is offering us while we're being offered natural bread and wine that correspond to those higher levels.

But at the same time, there is definitely still so much that we do not understand and do not fully appreciate about the heavenly food that the Lord is offering us.

There are undoubtedly still ways in which the food the Lord is offering us is hidden manna to us, something we do not fully understand and yet that feeds us at the deepest level if we're willing.

So, as you prepare to take Holy Supper, you are invited to think about what feeds you at all these different levels.

The delicious natural food that you get to eat, the things you delight in learning about, the things you enjoy figuring out, and then maybe pray to the Lord to help you to want the even better food, the food for your soul.

Ask him for the goodness that you need that you don't have yet.

Ask him for the love and wisdom that you need that you don't even really understand.

Ask him for the strength to repent and to follow through on using the food that he's given you to become more loving and more useful.

Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life.

And he who is the bread of God who came down from heaven will give you everything that you need.

Amen.