Somewhere along the way, in the mid-80’s, my preaching changed.  Up until that time most of my preaching tended to be very idealistic.  In most sermons I took a very simple approach.  I would describe a dilemma that I was certain plagued most of my listeners and then, from scripture, spell out God’s easy answer to the dilemma.  It was all well intentioned if too often ill informed.  But, what changed as much as anything about my preaching was my attitude.

My early preaching years were shaped primarily by the notion that people came to church with their problems and the preacher would give them God’s answers to those problems from the pulpit.  Do you see the simplicity?  People have problems; preachers have answers.  Sometimes that’s true.  But, on a day I’ll never forget, I came to a point of personal crisis that made me aware that preachers come to church with problems, too.

The details of the story are too long and really irrelevant.  Suffice it to say, right in the middle of my doctoral work one semester, while on campus at Southwestern Seminary, I came face to face with my own humanity and my own inadequacies and with a desperate need to find God.  Here I was finishing my academic preparation for ministry yet feeling as out of touch with God as I had ever been.  I was so miserable I couldn’t study or sleep.  Simply sitting in class became unbearable.  It was one of those times when I knew that, until I dealt with whatever was going on in me spiritually, everything else in my life would be on hold.  So, I went to a phone booth and called my late friend, Glen Edwards who, at that time, was serving in Louisiana as a sort of minister to ministers.  He lived in Alexandria, some 340 miles from Ft. Worth.  I told him that I had to talk that day.  It was July 4, 1985.  He invited me to come and within the hour I was in my car making the six-hour drive to meet Glen at his office. 

For some two hours, he listened to my story.  I must have confessed every sin I could remember from childhood through adolescence up to the present day.  And, when I finished, he asked, “Is that all?”  I was almost incredulous.  I thought my stuff was much more serious than that.  But, immediately, I began to realize that those simple words were his way of saying that I had obviously learned how to take my sin more seriously than God’s grace.  I may have been converted at age eight but, in some ways, I think I was truly “saved” that day. 

From there, Glen invited me home.  He asked me if I was hungry and, for the first time in days, I was.  So, he made me a sandwich.  It was a simple ham sandwich on plain white bread but it was the best sandwich I’d ever had.  Have you ever noticed how it works that way?  The meal is only as good as the company.  If you are eating with someone you don’t like or with whom you just don’t feel comfortable, the meal tastes bland even if the food is the best.  But, in the presence of love, even peanut butter and jelly can be a feast.  That day, I had a feast on plain white bread.  It tasted like grace. 

After I’d eaten, he took me to his guest room and put me up for the night.  When I crawled into bed the sheets felt clean and fresh, almost pure.  For the first time in I don’t know how long, I slept through the night and felt the peace and loving presence of God I had so desperately tried to tell others they needed every Sunday.  The next day, I was able to smile again.  The sun shone brighter.  My senses of smell and taste were heightened.  In the truest sense of the word, I felt born again.  For the first time in my life I was personally aware that my past and my future were covered by God’s grace and that Jesus, whatever else he was, was a friend of sinners because he had befriended me.

That was on a Friday.  A very good Friday.  And, by the next Sunday, my preaching changed.  It changed because, this time, I went to the pulpit not as the answer man but as one confessing my brotherhood with those who also came to church with problems and the grief and the guilt that often accompany our human journey.  I also went into the pulpit as one who, for the first time in his adult life, knew that Jesus would never turn away any one who comes to him in faith.  I was coming to see what Jesus was trying to say to those folks we read about this morning who kept following him around thinking he would solve their problems when he wasn’t necessarily interested in doing that.

He had just fed the five thousand and then tried to slip away in a boat but they followed him.  Then they patronized him by calling him, “Rabbi.”  You know, if you need something from someone, there’s nothing like a little buttering up before you pop the question.  Sometimes Griffin will call the office and say, “Dad, I love you.”  My first question is always, “What do you want?”  When my fourteen year-old son, who can barely stand to be seen with me in public, calls me at work to tell me he loves me I know there is another agenda.  “Rabbi, when did you come here?” they asked.  But, Jesus would have none of this pretentiousness.  He knew what they wanted.  They were already hungry again and wanted some free groceries.  Underneath their spiritual veil was a very superficial appetite. 

Not unlike a lot of us.  We come to church under the guise of worship but, often, what we really want is for God to pay our bills or make our bills go away.  Or, to solve some problem for us or just make it go away.  We want to set the tone of the conversation.  We want to set the agenda.  We’ll call God any name we think will make him respond as we wish.  We’ll even tell him we love him.  But, Jesus’ words, as true now as then, rip to the heart of the matter.  Side-stepping the patronage, he says, “You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.  Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of God will give you.”

This is a side of Jesus we don’t often like to think about.  The Jesus too often proclaimed from modern pulpits is a one-dimensional Jesus, the heavenly problem solver, the one who will pay all our bills or heal our bodies or fix whatever is broken if we will just give him a little money or say the right prayer.  The Jesus revealed in this text isn’t interested in just solving what we think is our greatest problem.  Instead, he is very interested in talking to us about the danger of getting what we want at the expense of missing what we most need.  These folks had just eaten their fill and now they wanted another sandwich.  Like teenage boys who get up from the dinner table only to graze the refrigerator, they were bottomless pits of human need.  Jesus knows that, if he solves what they believe is their greatest problem by feeding them with “the food that perishes,” he won’t be meeting their greatest need which is to feed them with “the food that endures for eternal life.” 

It seems to work like this, then.  We tend to meet God most often when faced with one of two kinds of experiences.  Either when we are faced with a crisis so enormous it has stripped us bare of any pretension of adequacy.  Or, we meet God when we have just eaten our fill and find ourselves at a loss to understand how we could possibly still be so hungry.  So, when you read the whole Bible you find a God who sometimes solves people’s problems and who sometimes doesn’t.  But, what you also find is a God who knows, and wants us to know, that whatever we think we need from him, what we most need is grace to heal our sin-broken hearts and the presence of a friend who, though he may not take our loneliness away, at least comes to walk alongside us in it.  A friend who won’t turn us away even if we don’t know how to ask for what we need.

I was telling someone this past week that people tend to call the likes of Zig Ziglar or some other motivational speaker when they are on the way up.  It seems that I only get the phone call when people are on the way down.  Yet another friend called just a couple of weeks ago.  His finances have gone from bad to worse.  He can’t take one of his cars out of the garage because it will get repossessed.  The creditors are calling night and day.  And, just this week, he lost his office and will now have to work out of his home with a one and a three-year-old running at his feet while he tries to make business calls.  At a minimum, the next $200,000 he makes belongs to his creditors.  He’s had no choice but to file his second bankruptcy in as many years.  And, so, of all people, he calls me! 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should tell people like that when they call.  If I answered them as a preacher with a one-dimensional view of Jesus perhaps I would tell them they must have not been praying hard enough.  Or, I’d tell them that, if they would just change their attitude, their financial life would take off.  Or, I’d tell them that if they just read their Bible more that they wouldn’t have these kinds of problems in the first place.  Or, I’d tell them that, obviously, there must be some hidden sin in their lives and that God is punishing them for it.  But, when I reflect on it, I realize that not only do I not know those things for certain, I realize that these people aren’t calling me because I am a preacher.  They are calling me because I am a human being they happen to know has been somewhere near the territory they are now traveling.  And, what I think they want me to tell them is the truth. 

You know, that is what evangelism really is.  Evangelism in not sitting down with someone and explaining the whole truth of the Bible in a simple forty-five minute sales pitch format and asking them to make a life-changing decision.  Some people can do it that way and, it does seem, some people get into the Kingdom of God that way.  But, about the time my preaching changed, so did my understanding of evangelism.  I’ve come to believe that evangelism is simply telling people the truth as you know it from your own experience with the Christ revealed in scripture.

So, when these people call and want to know the truth, this is what I tell them.  I know a Jesus who is a friend of sinners and who never turns away anyone who comes to him in faith.  I tell them that one day, when I was very hungry, he fed me grace on plain white bread.  And, it was the best food I’ve ever eaten.  Not because all my problems were solved and that I’ve never had any since.  But, because, though I’ve been scared and hurt and wounded and worried, I’ve never known a greater joy than being forgiven and knowing that, no matter how lonely I may feel sometimes, in my heart of hearts, I know I’m not alone.  And, I try to tell them that I cannot imagine my life without Jesus.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the value of a good friendship as the greatest of life’s assets.  And, the older I get, the more I appreciate the friendship of Jesus as the greatest of all friendships.

Several years ago, after a worship service in which I served the Lord’s Supper, a young mother told me that her six-year-old saw the tray of bread pass in front of him and said, “The Lord sure doesn’t eat much!”  Yet, those who take that meal long enough come to learn, in time, that, no matter how simple the food, even if it’s on plain white bread, in the presence of Love and if you are hungry enough, it always tastes like grace. 

Amen.