All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

The most boring weekend of the football season can be the weekend your favorite pro team draws a bye. While all the other teams that you couldn’t care less about are playing, your team is on vacation. It can be a long two weeks when your team draws a bye. What do you do with all that down time in between?

At least as far as the Christian calendar is concerned, this is somewhat of an “off” Sunday. Not “off” in the sense that we drew a bye and don’t need to worship. But, “off” in terms of its timing. Especially since Thanksgiving came early this year, there is quite a drop off between the last Sunday of Thanksgiving and the first Sunday of Advent next Sunday, which is also the first Sunday of the Christian calendar. It’s an in-between time, in between all the wonderful joy that goes with family and Thanksgiving and all the wonderful times just ahead with family and Christmas. Since this is a make it or break time of year for them, merchants have no problem deciding what to do with this “down” time. I saw this year’s first Christmas tree in a department store in early September.

What should those who are seeking Jesus make of the down time, the in-between times in their lives? That question makes its home in this event recorded in John’s gospel for us. A little background would help. Jesus had been performing all kinds of miracles among the people who lived near the Sea of Galilee. The disciples had just seen Jesus walk on the water to rescue them from the storm at sea. Wherever he went, the larger and larger crowds kept following. Finally, having reached Capernaum, he had the people sit down. This is where what is known as the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 took place. After this mother of all buffets, Jesus again tries to slip away, to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus, too, needed to get to a place where he could be fed by his heavenly Father, not the one doing all the feeding. Yet, again, the crowds kept following him there. These people are not identified by the scripture as Christians or even as true followers of Jesus.

At best, they are curiosity seekers. Jesus decides to look beyond their self-centered behavior and speak to their need. As straightforward as always, he announces to the re-gathered crowd, “‘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 Man will give you.’”

It’s a timeless problem, of which we should all be aware. The temptation to measure God’s faithfulness to us by how good he makes us feel, not by how much truth he leads us to discover.

Again, this is an in-between time for all of us. It is in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It may be more than that. It may be a time for you in between jobs, in between careers, in between semesters, in between the security of a known financial structure and the fear of an announcement coming soon that you may not have your job. It may be in between, or, should we say, too long in between house payments and you may be one of millions facing the fear of foreclosure. It may be in between the time the doctor took the test and you have yet to hear the results. You may have once thought life was all settled and now something has changed and you find yourself in between the settled past and the unknown future. Just like the children of Israel demonstrated in the forty years in the wilderness, it is how we handle ourselves during the in-between times that is the truest test of our faith.

Here is one thing we should beware during the in the between time. We should beware the temptation to expect God to make us feel good. “You aren’t looking for me because I told you the truth,” Jesus said. “You are looking for me because you were hungry and I fed you; I made you feel good.”

By the way, there is nothing wrong with feeling good. God gave us our feelings and capacities to enjoy them just like he gave us everything else. Where we run into trouble is when we allow how good we feel as the standard of our faithfulness to God.

Here we go again looking to our ancestors for an example. The people wandering in the Wilderness for forty years were hardly perfect people. Jesus turned it around on them and told them, “‘Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’”

These people wanted to feel good, for Jesus to do something about their most obviously and apparent need. They were even willing to use the witness of their history as proof that Jesus should do something now. Jesus turned it around to remind them that whatever God gives us in this temporal world is only meant to point us toward the eternal world. Jesus’ work is still unfinished.

Whole generations have been raised to expect that the single greatest test of whether or not going to church on any given Sunday is a valuable use of their time is based on whether or not they were made to feel better, not whether or not what they heard was the truth. Yet, the real test for followers of Jesus is how much more like Jesus we are this year than we were this same time last year. Whole generations who were freed from captivity in Egypt never saw the Promised Land because they worshipped at the altar of feeling good and lost their historical and spiritual bearings.

Our own Ralph Gary, whose avocation is that of a scholar of Abraham Lincoln, reminded me this week that last Monday, November 19, was a very significant day in American history. It was the 144^th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address given by then President Lincoln. He delivered it on the very battleground where that world changing battle had been fought just four months before. He didn’t promise an end to the misery, only that the nation was on the right course, no matter what the cost.

Nancy and I saw that place this summer. It seems too serene, too quiet now for something so horrible and formative to have happened there. Yet, where would we be without those who remind us who we are, where we came from and how we were shaped? More than one difficult time in our nation’s history, great leaders have called us to remember our ancestors and the ways they sacrificed safety and comfort in order to guarantee freedom for those who would come behind.

The big tease is to follow those things, even religious experiences, that only make us feel good but do not tell us the truth. Jesus warned those who followed him across the water to beware, seeking Jesus only because it feels good without being aware of the cost of following him.

Now, Jesus confronts the second, timeless temptation that all those who might follow Jesus will face. The temptation, especially during the in between times, to ask of God, “What have you done for me lately?” The people wanted a sign. Get this! These are the same people who had seen Jesus perform miracles of healing. These are the same people who had shared in the fish and loaves banquet.

These are the same people now asking of Jesus, “What have you done for us lately?” Jesus’ response: “‘the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ They said to him, ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’ Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’”

Foretelling his own death, Jesus was saying that, “Like a single mother, he (would feed) his spiritual offspring from his own flesh and blood until all of his reserves were gone” (Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A memoir of faith, Harper, 2006, p. 47).

Jesus had used history, loaves of bread and promises of his own death to drive home this one point. Beware the big tease of lesser things that promise immediate fulfillment but only burn you out, dry you, drain you out, ultimately kill you for even seeking them. Living always happens from the inside out, not the outside in. Do you know when you will believe that? When, and only when, you are so thirsty you’d be willing to die to have what Jesus offers. This past summer when I was ill, the doctors put several tubes down my throat. Aside from the incredible strangeness of not being able to vocalize words my mind had formed. The worst experience was the incredible thirst. I was being hydrated through IV tubes. But, I wanted to feel the trickle of something cold and wet going down my throat. Two commercials kept playing over and over on the television. One was for Diet Coke, the other was for a new green beer. When I could talk, I told Nancy I’d given anything for either one of those drinks. Being a nurse, of course, she wasn’t about to allow alcohol in the room of a patient suffering liver failure! I don’t even like beer. But, I was so thirsty I would have bitten the top of the bottle of green beer with my bare teeth and drunk the bottle dry in one swig!

Is there a bigger tease than the one we get this time of year when we are teased into believing that if we just had all of this stuff our hunger and thirst would go away. Isn’t stuffing ourselves with all of these things something like being thirstier than you have ever been, taking a drink and only then discovering you’ve been offered a glass full of sand?

The most sacred power God gives any of us is the power to choose between his eternal food and lesser ones. How would you choose to use that power right now?