Sermon Tone Analysis
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! Introduction
You say you want a revolution \\ Well, you know \\ We all want to change the world.
\\ Jesus changed the world.
Jesus’ teaching was revolutionary.
He made statements that caused religious leaders to lash out to defend themselves.
He didn’t just challenge contemporary thought; He shattered the thoughts that held religious ideals together.
The text this morning is one of those statements.
~/I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood; you do not have life in you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.
My flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I remain in him.
Just as the Living Father sent me and I live through the Father, the one who feeds on me will live through me.~/ (Jn 6:53-57) That statement wasn’t just controversial to the religious leaders and “church goers.”
It was repulsive.
It was the kind of statement that would get you thrown out of church.
So why did Jesus make such a statement?
Why didn’t Jesus tone his teaching down so he wouldn’t be offensive?
Isn’t that what we would do?
We wouldn’t want to offend anyone.
The message isn’t good if no one will listen.
Look what happened after that lesson.
Scores of disciples quit following Jesus.
I wouldn’t get very high marks for a sermon if most of you got up and left.
In fact, I'd probaby get fired!
What was so important that Jesus needed to shock his hearers to get their attention?
The same thing that is so important this morning: spiritual truth.
Earthly wisdom conceals spiritual truth.
Things that sound preposterous to our earthly minds can make perfect sense with spiritual wisdom.
Jesus needed to shock his hearers past earthly wisdom.
We’re no different.
We get so accustomed to viewing life through earthly eyes that we try to interpret spiritual truth with earthly wisdom.
It’s kind of like the minister who visited a mental asylum and asked the Director what the criteria was which defined whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.
“Well,” the Director said, “we fill a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup, and a bucket to the patient and ask him to empty the bathtub.”
“Oh, I understand,” the minister said.
“A normal person would use the bucket because it’s bigger than the spoon or the teacup.”
“No,” said the Director.
“A normal person would pull the plug.
Would you like a bed near the window?”
If we aren’t challenged by spiritual truth, we’ll make decisions based on options that seem best, but fail to take God into consideration.
By the same token, Jesus’ words can shock us past earthly wisdom.
His words in John 6 sound repulsive.
They sound like cannibalism.
~/Eat my flesh and drink my blood.~/
How could Jesus make such a statement?
!
Discussion
It was gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida.
Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp.
The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket.
Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea.
But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life.
Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio.
Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean...
For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun.
They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts.
The largest raft was nine by five.
The biggest shark...ten feet long.
But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation.
Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water.
It would take a miracle to sustain them.
In Captain Eddie's own words, "Cherry," that was the B- 17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, "read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise.
There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat.
With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off."
\\ Now this is still Captain Rickenbacker talking..."Something landed on my head.
I knew that it was a sea gull.
I don't know how I knew, I just knew.
Everyone else knew too.
No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces.
They were staring at that gull.
The gull meant food...if I could catch it."
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Captain Eddie caught the gull.
Its flesh was eaten.
Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish.
The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice.
You know that Captain Eddie made it.
And now you also know...that he never forgot.
Because every Friday evening, about sunset...on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast...you could see an old man walking...white-haired, bushy-eye browed, slightly bent.
His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls...to remember that one which, on a day long past gave itself without a struggle...like manna in the wilderness.
Manna in the wilderness became a principal reminder to the Jews of God’s deliverance.
For 40 years, God provided manna every morning.. Asaph in Psalm 78 called it “the grain of heaven” and “bread of angels.”
In John 6, when the Jews challenged Jesus to provide a sign so they would believe, they said ~/our fathers ate manna in the wilderness.
Just as it is written, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
So what will you do?~/
What did you eat for breakfast this morning?
What are you going to have for lunch?
Americans spend one billion dollars every day eating out.
Every day.
One billion dollars.
50% of the world lives on less than $2 per day.
Our culture is obsessed with food.
Jesus knew exactly what he was doing when he used bread as a metaphor to explain his correlation to our existence.
In Jesus’ day, bread was the stable food item.
It was the least expensive and most readily available.
Bread could go with any meal, or it could be a meal all by itself.
There are some rocks in Palestine that look like loaves of bread.
I wonder if Jesus could see some of those rocks in the wilderness when the Devil tempted him after he had fasted for 40 days.
Bread was indispensible to the lives of the people of Palestine.
Without it, they would die.
So Jesus said, ~/I am the bread of life.
The bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.
I am the bread of life.
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