Sunday, August 11, 2024, Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
“How to Live Forever”
Psalm 34:1-8; 1 Kings 19:1-8; Ephesians 4:17- 5:2; John 6:35-51
Divine Service III, no Communion
Hymns: #545 “Word of God, Come Down On Earth”; #712 “Seek Ye First”; #561 “The Tree of Life, With Every Good”; #725 “Children of the Heavenly Father”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I’m calling this sermon, “How to live forever.” Crazy, isn’t it? Nobody lives forever. Nothing lasts forever. We all know that, right? One of the basic tenets of science is the principle of entropy. Entropy is defined as: “The natural tendency of a system to move from a state of order to a state of greater disorder over time.” All systems move from order to disorder. In any system, sooner or later everything breaks down, and things fall apart. The theory of entropy came originally from physics, but it applies to any other system you can name. In science, it applies to a universe, or to a sun or a star, or to a planet, an atom, a cell, or a molecule. In politics, it applies to empires and nations and political systems. “Nations rise and kingdoms fall.” When it comes to nature and living things, entropy applies to trees, or flowers, or a mouse or a dog or a cat… or a human being. The energy it takes to hold things together always dissipates as time goes on. To put it bluntly, entropy means that everything dies!
Scientists and researchers have been working for years to find a way to prolong human life; honestly with very little success. If you want to live forever, sort of, you could try cryogenics. That’s where they deep freeze your body, or maybe just your head, until they discover a way to thaw you out and wake you up again. The head of Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter of the Boston Red Sox, is frozen somewhere at a facility in Nevada, waiting to be reanimated. (Maybe then the Brewers could sign him for the pennant race!) The trouble is, the process and the preservation is expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the cryogenic researchers have no idea if or when they’ll ever be able to revive anyone.
Then there’s cloning, genetic engineering, and gene splicing. In current research, scientists are looking for the gene that causes aging, in hopes they can somehow turn it off. There’s research being done on brain chip implants, and on downloading the human brain to a computer, theoretically freeing the human mind from flesh and transferring it to a machine that won’t decay. (I’ll pass on that one! A little to “mark of the beast-y” for my taste). TV is full of ads for creams, pills, and miracle supplements that promise to stop or reverse the process of aging. Anti-aging remedies are a multi-billion-dollar growth industry, making big money for Big Pharma. After all, we all want to live.
What the scientists, researchers, and pill salesmen are up against, though, is that entropy was built into creation by God Himself. It was God Himself who put limits on human lifespan. Entropy is the direct result of human sin, caused by Adam and Eve when they disobeyed God in the garden. Before they fell into sin, our first parents were eternal. Sin is why every system in creation ends in death. Sin is why our bodies are fragile and subject to illness and injury and pain. Sin is why we have to die.
The Book of Genesis tells us that the Lord looked down on what sin had done to the world, and He saw that it was getting worse the longer men lived on. And He said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; from now on his days will be a hundred and twenty years." (People lived to be eight or nine hundred years old before the Great Flood came). And right after that God cleansed the world in the Flood.
And after the Flood, the world was changed, and that 120-year limit came to be the way things are, even today, all the efforts of science to prolong it or change it notwithstanding. The 90th Psalm says, “Lord, all our days pass away under Your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. The length of our days is seventy years - or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”
If some being or entity, which would have to be of great power, was able to be free of entropy - to not be subject to time or death or decay, that is, to be eternal - that entity, by definition, would be God. If such an entity or “god” was evil or malevolent, that would be a bad thing, wouldn’t it? A “god” with nothing but time and eternity to grow more evil, and do more evil things? Not good!
But the good news for us today is that we have a God who is good, a God who is love, and who loves us. We have a God who calls us to come to Him to have life; and not just to live, but to live forever. Our God offers us the promise of eternity, not by a scientific breakthrough or a computer or a magic pill, but by water and by blood. Science has spent all that time and effort, people have spent all that money, only to be defeated by time and death in the end anyway. But we Christians have had the answer all along. The answer to “how to live forever” is in the Word of God, and at the Baptismal font, and at the Communion table.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus had compassion for the people in those crowds who’d come to Him, because He loved them. He preached the Good News of God to them, and He healed all their diseases and ailments and sicknesses. And then He fed them all, 5000 men and their families, with five little loaves of bread and a few little fish (which was an act of reverse entropy, when you think about it). He cared for their needs both in body and in soul. And still they wouldn’t believe Him or acknowledge who He was. Instead they asked Him for more miracles, for more proof of who He was, and for more bread. They were living in a world ruled by entropy, after all, the same as us, a world where the bread you have today is consumed and goes away and disappears, and tomorrow you’ll have to find more. That was the only world they knew, and it’s still the world we’re living in.
So Jesus says to the crowd in our Gospel: "I am the Bread of Life. He who comes to Me will never go hungry, and he who believes in Me will never be thirsty.” Do you see what He’s promising here? The end of hopelessness, the end of the everlasting treadmill; the end of the fear that you’ll wake up one day and you won’t have enough; the end of being afraid of what will happen if you should die. “I am the Bread of Life,” Jesus says. Not the bread of the world that passes through and then passes away, but the Holy Bread, the Bread of faith, the Bread that will take you beyond this place - even if “The End” should sneak up on you, or finally catch up with you, which it surely will one day. The Bread Jesus offers us - which is His precious Word and His own body and blood - is the only answer to unholy entropy and the sin that’s the cause of it. The Bread of Jesus is the only way we’ll ever get to heaven, where there is no death or decay, and no “father time” to be our enemy anymore.
“But as I told you,” Jesus says, “you have seen Me and still you do not believe.” All that He’d done for them, and still they wouldn’t believe Him, same as our world today. We’re told to “trust the science,” to believe that the experts and scientists really are going to somehow solve the problem of death. They’re always just on the verge of “finding the answers” and a “scientific breakthrough,” so they tell us. So we spend the money, follow the miracle diets, and swallow the latest pill - when the answer to “how to live forever” is, and always has been, simply to put our trust in God and in His Son.
“All that the Father gives Me will come to Me,” says Jesus, “and whoever comes to Me I will never drive away.” It’s not that you have to somehow find Jesus; it’s Jesus who’ll come to find you. He’s the Good Shepherd coming to find His lost sheep. The Father of Mercy puts our precious souls in the hands of Jesus; and Jesus calls, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” And whoever comes to Him will be His forever, simple as that.
“For I have come down from heaven not to do My will,” Jesus says, “but to do the will of Him who sent Me. And this is the will of Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day.” Jesus came down from heaven to do His Father’s will. And His Father (and our Father’s) will, is that all of us should be free of the fear of death and dying, and that we’ll go from, “I hope I’ll somehow find a way” to “Jesus loves me, this I know.” “This is My beloved Son,” the Father says; “Listen to Him.” Believe in Him, put your faith in Him. Come and be Baptized in Him name. Come and eat His body and drink of His holy blood. Come and be born again – “born from above”, the original language says. Put on your “new self,” St. Paul says, “and live a life of love.” That means, come and live your life for Him for as long as that dissipating, dying body of yours should last. And in the end, life will be yours, and nothing can ever take it away from you. “Nothing can snatch you out of My Father’s hand,” Jesus says.
“At this the Jews began to grumble about Him,” says our Gospel, because He said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can He now say, 'I came down from heaven'?" They began to grumble about Him, because they couldn’t conceive of a God who would love us enough to send us His only Son, or picture a world without sin or disorder or death, or understand that the God who made the universe, the God of love, was standing right in front of them, holding out His hand, and offering them the greatest gift of all.
If you want to follow Jesus in this world, be prepared to be grumbled about; it goes with the territory. (Ask poor Elijah, running for his life from wicked Queen Jezebel, when all he’d done was try to do the right thing). We share this world with people who don’t believe that Jesus is God, or who don’t believe there even is a God, or who believe that science is God, and we’ll somehow find a way to save ourselves. When we tell them the answer is so simple – just a Word from Jesus added to a little water, His blood shed for us on a cross, and a little bit of faith – oh, they’ll doubt and they’ll laugh and they’ll mock – but no matter. We are who we are and we know what we know! Do pray for the people who don’t know Jesus yet. Put the good Word in their ears whenever you can, and pray to God to do the rest – and He’ll do it. And God will keep you safe; He cared for Elijah, and He’ll care for you, too.
Jesus says in our Gospel, "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise Him up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: 'They will all be taught by God.' Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from Him comes to Me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only He has seen the Father.” If you’re here in this Church today, you’re here because the heavenly Father and His good Holy Spirit have drawn you to this place. You’ve been led here by the Spirit of God in an act of love and mercy, to be “taught by God,” as Jesus says. That is, to listen to God’s Word, confess your sins, and receive God’s forgiving grace; and to rejoice in the Good News that your faith has saved you, and you can live your life in peace.
Because, “I tell you the truth,” Jesus says, “he who believes has everlasting life.” Did you catch the tense in that sentence? It’s in the present tense! Jesus doesn’t say that if you believe, you will have life one day, or that you might have, or that you could have. His promise isn’t a might be or a could be or a maybe (which is really all the scientific experts and pill salesmen have to offer us). The person who believes – that is, believes that Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of their sins, and that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that in His Resurrection is the promise and assurance of life - that person already has eternal life.You and I who believe – still subject to death and entropy though we may be at the moment - are nevertheless already immortal and destined to live forever, even as we’re sitting here. We Christian believers know what the world thinks about death is just wrong. We don’t go from being alive to being dead. Because of what Jesus has done for us, we only go from living to living on. “We pass from life to life, and from glory to glory,” St. Paul says (Take that, entropy!)
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says. “Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die.” A better translation of this passage is, “…that anyone may eat of it and not die.” “Anyone,” Jesus says. This is an open invitation to come and have life, no matter who you are or where you’ve been or what you may have done. All who are thirsty for forgiveness, come to the waters, Jesus says. All who are hungry for grace and life and peace, come and eat, without money and without cost.
Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” There it is! That’s how to live forever! “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your neighbor, tell the world! In Jesus’ name; Amen.