Are You Being Fed?
John 21: 1-19
Jim from B.C.
 

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble going a whole day without food. I’ve done so on occasion, but it’s very difficult. Going a whole day without food is unthinkable for some of us, yet many of us go without spiritual food for much longer than one day. Some people try to go without spiritual food for weeks on end, even years. Of course, they soon feel empty, listless, and weak.

Spiritual food is as much a necessity of life as bread or vegetables, or coffee (for Norwegians). By spiritual food, I mean anything that fulfills us spiritually, or heals us emotionally, or fuels us psychologically, or otherwise keeps us alive to God and to other people and to the creation around us. For instance, if you receive a personal affirmation from someone, or hear the words “I love you”—that’s spiritual food. Or receive a hug or a kiss. If you’ve been needing a hug for a while and you finally get one, it can make your day. When we feel the need for spiritual food, and it finally comes to us, we really lap it up.

A good book may be spiritual food, if it’s edifying or inspiring or satisfying to our heart. There are some wonderfully inspiring books available. It’s too bad so many people would rather watch TV than read; they’re missing out on some wonderful spiritual food.

Of course, when it comes to books, the Holy Bible is real meat. It is spiritual nectar. The writer of Psalm 119 says “[Lord,] how sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Regarding the Holy Scriptures, there is a wonderful prayer from the old Missouri Synod hymnal that I grew up with, that goes, “Grant, Lord, that we may. . . hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. . . .”

Daily devotions are a wonderful spiritual food also, and are best taken at a regular time each day.

And of course, whenever we open ourselves to God in prayer; whenever we set aside a quiet time to meditate, to speak to God and listen to God—that’s spiritual food. Even to sit in a beautiful garden and drink in the beauty of the flora and hear the birds singing—it can be very refreshing, spiritually.

Also, an important kind of spiritual food is to have a father confessor or a mother confessor: someone to whom you can tell anything, confidential or otherwise, who will listen sympathetically and non-judgmentally, and then who will communicate to you the forgiveness of your sins. That’s what priests were originally relied upon to do. Martin Luther thought Confession and Absolution was so important that he called it “the Third Sacrament”.

Of course, our main spiritual meal of the week ought to be Sunday worship. A good worship service ought to contain both the sacrificial and the sacramental. It should have not only sacrificial acts (things that we give to God, such as our praise and adoration and prayers and offerings), but it also should have sacramental acts (things that we receive from God, such as the word of Scripture, and the Gospel message in the sermon, the sharing of peace, the Lord’s supper, and the like). Anything that is sacramental in the worship service is spiritual food.

One reason people go church shopping is because they are spiritually hungry. Many people nowadays feel a tremendous emptiness within themselves, and they have a sense that they’re starving to death in some way. Unfortunately, some people search and search and can’t seem to find a church where they are fed spiritually.

According to the research, one of the most important kinds of spiritual food that people are looking for in a church is healthy friendships. And so, when I talk to people who on the search for a church, I encourage them to keep looking until they find one where they feel welcome and where they can potentially find friends.

Other people are uplifted by church music, and will go to a church because of the choir or the hymn-singing; others are looking for really rousing types of music, with lots of rhythm and clapping and body movement. Others are uplifted by extended periods of quiet, or directed meditation, and that, to them, is wonderful spiritual food.

In the latest edition of our Canada Lutheran magazine, there’s an article called “Hockey Mom”, in which a woman writes about her childhood experiences in the Lutheran church. She says she wishes she could reproduce them and have her children experience them. She also says that she has searched for a church, but having gone to this particular church for a year, she says she feels spiritually unsatisfied. So she’s been getting her spiritual food at the hockey arena.

As ridiculous as that sounds, I can’t say I blame her. It’s pathetic in a way, but she makes a good case for getting her spiritual food there. She obviously doesn’t want to starve to death, and among the teams and the coaches and the parents there’s evidently a cooperative spirit, reminiscent of her childhood, where people worked together joyfully and supported one another. But as I read the article, I couldn’t help thinking: she’s settling for junk food. Eventually she’s going to ruin her health, spiritually.

Some people, especially younger people, are seeking to fill their spiritual emptiness with New Age religion. This includes parapsychology and transcendental meditation techniques borrowed from Eastern religions. It includes trying to get in touch with the spirit world, or at least to gain spiritual power and energy through channeling or crystals or breath control exercises and so on. I just saw a notice yesterday at a Penticton coffee shop, where a woman is advertising something called “Breath Integration”—in brackets “Rebirthing”. The poster promises what I would call “personal salvation” through this technique. You can see how popular this New Age religion has become if you read a magazine like “Issues”, which is published here in Penticton.

It shows once again how many people are starving for spiritual food, and are seeking alternatives to the church, and will go to incredible lengths and strange places to find it.

The question I want to ask you today, on the basis of today’s Gospel Lesson, is: “Are you being fed?” Are you getting the nutrients you need to stay alive, spiritually?

In today’s Gospel Lesson, Jesus miraculously helped Peter and the others to find food. Earlier he had helped them to find bread, when he fed them and 5000 others; in this case it’s fish, a superabundance of fish. It’s clear that, just as in the Last Supper, Jesus is providing also spiritual food, in, with, and under the physical food.

Although the food is coming to them through Jesus, it is, of course, GOD who is supplying it. Jesus, as the Son of God, is the world-wide distributor of God’s spiritual food for the hungry masses.

And after Jesus feeds his disciples, he asks them to feed others. He says to Simon Peter, who represents all the disciples, “Feed my sheep.” This is so important that he says it three times. It’s an exhortation addressed also to us, and to all Jesus’ followers: “Feed my sheep.”

So the question arises: How can we expect to feed others if we haven’t been fed ourselves? How can we share bread with others (whether wheat-bread or monetary bread or spiritual riches), unless we have first received sufficient for ourselves and enough to share?

A wise man once said: In helping others on their spiritual journey, we can only take them as far as we have been ourselves.

So there must be a balance, within each of us, between input and output. Not enough spiritual input, and we will have nothing to give others. And if we try to keep giving and giving, without replenishing our supply, we’ll end up empty, or burn ourselves out, and we’ll be no good to anybody.

So it’s necessary for us, if we want to be people who help others, to take a break once in a while, if we’ve been working constantly and we’ve been under stress. It’s necessary to take time out to refresh ourselves spiritually.

Are you being fed?

Some of us become imbalanced in the opposite way: too much input and not enough output. Some of us fill up on the Word and the Sacraments and the spiritual strength of fellow Christians; we meditate and study literature that is good for our personal growth and development; we go to workshops at Naramata or other wonderful retreats, and in general we take good care of ourselves spiritually, and pamper ourselves until we glow with health. But we then we don’t share it! We don’t use those spiritual gifts in the service of others. Some of us selfishly keep all that to ourselves, and the Holy Spirit within us just seems to evaporate, dissipate, and go to waste.

Just as we must take in physical food to gain strength in order to exercise, so also we must exercise and work our muscles, or all that good food we take in will turn to fat! The same is true spiritually: there must be a balance within us. Which incidentally, is how wellness is defined nowadays: balanced living.

So I come back to the question: “Are you being fed?” According to today’s Gospel Lesson, there is plenty of spiritual food available. However, I notice that even after Jesus is risen, the disciples DOUBT that he can supply them. They don’t trust him. And they never stop being amazed when he comes through, and feeds them with more than enough. Likewise, we often doubt that God will provide, so we’re tempted to go elsewhere for our spiritual sustenance.

The best advice in this regard, comes, as usual, from Jesus himself. In Matthew chapter 6 he says: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you (Jesus says) who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Perhaps the most difficult life-lesson we have to learn, is that God will provide. No matter how abundantly God has provided in the past, when scarcity comes and we feel those spiritual hunger pangs, we seem to doubt that God will provide.

When we attempt to follow Christ, and do God’s will in our daily life, and feed the sheep that Christ has given us to feed, trouble will surely come. It always does. THIS time, let us dare to trust that God will provide.

God WILL provide the spiritual food we need. Amen.