God Moving Through Ordinary Things

Here’s my sermon for August 12, 2018, the 12th Sunday after Pentecost in Year B, Ordinary 19, the third of the five weeks the lectionary spends in John 6 talking about Jesus as the bread of life. I found this column by David Lose from 2015 helpful in crafting this sermon. The Gospel text for this Sunday is John 6:35, 41-51. 

We also celebrated a baptism this morning, so that ties into the sermon as well. My favorite part of this baptism was Paisley, the 6-year-old sister, pouring the water into the font. She did a fantastic job!

How many of you had friends growing up with whom you’ve lost touch? Today with Facebook and social media it’s easier to keep track of people, but I can think of many friends from high school or college that I haven’t talked to in years. People move around, life takes us in different directions.

Or think of kids you know who’ve grown up and moved away. Sometimes when people come back, you look at them and think, “Wow, they haven’t changed at all.” Or, maybe they have changed, and you don’t even recognize them at first.

Now imagine someone you used to know comes back to town after being gone for a few years, and they claim they can do miracles. Imagine someone you know claiming to give out food that will stop you from ever being hungry again, or water that will make you never thirsty.

Pretty audacious claim, isn’t it? It’s one thing for parents to talk about their baby as a “gift from heaven.” It’s another thing for someone to go around saying I’ve come from heaven and to get to God, you need to believe in me.

That’s basically what’s going on in this story. Jesus makes this claim that he is the bread of life from heaven, and the people who know him, the neighbors who watched Jesus grow up, are questioning him, saying, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

It’s not that they don’t believe in God, or that they don’t expect God to send a savior. It’s that they know this guy. They know where he came from, his parents. He’s one of them. They’re not prepared to accept that this is the way God is working. It’s just too ordinary.

I suspect you and I are often the same way. When we cry out to God for help, in those times of desperation or distress, when someone is hurt, when we’re afraid, we want God to answer, right? We want to see God moving some mountains. We want the reassurance that something supernatural is happening, maybe a nice burning bush, or an angel with some food.

And yet, God rarely works that way. God answers prayer, but at least in my experience, it’s not usually through big, blatant miracles. I’m not saying God can’t work that way, but more often when God is on the move, it’s through more ordinary means.

Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard sometimes to notice God moving around us. We’re used to the world around us. We think we know how it works.

When someone is sick in the hospital, and we pray for them, we often fall into this trap of thinking we’re asking God to work in some strange, extraordinary way. Why bother to pray for the things that are already happening, for the things we can see? Why bother to pray for the doctors and the nurses and the machines and the pharmacists?

And yet, most often, that’s exactly how God brings healing. God’s normal means of healing is through the ordinary, human people who are willing to care for the sick. Sometimes it takes more, and sometimes God does provide miracles we can’t explain, but everyone who cares for another person is doing God’s work, whether they know it or not.

It’s hard to imagine God working through the normal systems of life around us. I understand why it was so hard for the people in the story to accept that the Son of God was their neighbor.

I don’t usually think of God moving through the people who collect my garbage, or clean the streets, or distribute the mail, or sell insurance, or harvest corn. And yet, as Christians, we believe God is at work in all those people too.

The primary reason we’ve been focusing on this idea that God is on the move is because it’s hard to see God at work. So often we react like those people around Jesus, assuming when we see God’s work happening that it can’t be God doing it. We don’t see God active in the people who give up their time to serve on the ambulance crew because we think, well, that’s just what they do. We don’t see God in the teachers in their classrooms because it’s just too ordinary.

After all, if God were to choose someone to work through, it would be someone special, right? Surely it would be someone much more faithful than you or me. If God were to show up, we’d notice, right? It’d be a dramatic cloud of smoke, or some thunder and lightning, maybe a booming voice. I mean, it’s God! And again, sometimes God shows up that way.

But most of the time, God works through ordinary things, through ordinary people like you and me. God works through prophets who get depressed and give up and ask to die, through criminals and the poor and the outcasts of society. God is on the move through exhausted parents and homebound shut-ins and little kids.

God is moving through you, through whatever it is you have to offer, through your ordinary skills and weaknesses and strengths and hopes and fears and dreams.

This is at the heart of our faith. We’re here today to worship the God of the universe, who came to live among us, not as a superhero, but as an ordinary human. The God who created the cosmos took on flesh, was born of a human mother, and died a human death.

This is the promise of the sacraments. In these earthly, mundane elements of bread and wine, Jesus gives us himself.

The little piece of bread I’m going to rip off for you—and I can’t even always rip it off into equal neat pieces—in faith, this little piece of bread becomes for us the bread of life, the very body of Jesus Christ, God with us.

This little sip of wine is for us in faith the blood of Jesus by which we are saved and given eternal life. It’s not where the world expects to find God, but it’s where God promises to show up. God is doing extraordinary work through ordinary things.

In a few minutes, I’m going to sprinkle a little bit of water over Hadley, not even enough to give her a bath. It’s not sacred holy water; it came out of the kitchen sink.

But because God is at work through it, this is the means by which Hadley is washed clean of her sin and adopted into God’s family. This is God on the move.

Our hymn of the day is Borning Cry, and I love this song because it talks about God be at work around us in all the stages of our lives. Pay attention to that.

Maybe it’s easy to see God in the bread and wine of communion, or in the water of baptism. Maybe even that is difficult to see and believe. That’s ok. God’s presence does not depend on our ability to notice or believe. Jesus, the son of Joseph, the one whose mother and father the people knew, was and is God in the flesh, even though they couldn’t see it.

I challenge you this week to look for God working around you in the ordinary things of life. Notice God moving in the places and people you don’t expect, in the people you’ve known your whole life, in the people you’d never expect God to be working in and through.

As you pray, pray that God would continue to be at work in the mundane things of life, in the people around you, and in you.
Amen