In one sense, what Jesus says in our Gospel reading today is a pretty easy saying. While the Jewish people 2000 years ago might have found the idea of Jesus being bread from Heaven which gives true life to be odd to say the least. To Christians with a Sacramental theology, the saying is tempered a bit... We believe that Jesus, somehow, is spiritually and physically present when we come to the altar and receive the gracious gift of Communion. This biweekly ritual is not merely the feeding of the body or a memorial act, but it truly unites us to each other, to all Christians throughout time, and to the Lord who is the source and sum of all love and life. Through God's grace in the Sacraments and at all times, we begin really living.

This saying of Jesus' can still be dumbfounding in our world though. We exist as creatures too often limited by external things: by what we can see and taste and touch, by our bodies' physiological impulses, and by philosophies that uphold the external in opposition to the internal senses. This is how we come to define what is really "life".

"Really living", we are informed by popular opinion, doesn't go very far beyond bread and water. When Jesus observes that the people came not because of Him but because of food, He was pointing out our limited idea of "living". Instead of seeking out these things that make our life worth living, we instead trouble ourselves only with the continuance of life itself. Rather than viewing our lives as a means to an end, we view it as an end unto itself. Nothing, we have been told, Is more important than our lives and security and material comfort and "freedom", and no cost is too high for other people to pay for our lives.

Is that really all there is to life? To toil, to indulge, to keep our bodies functioning, to perpetrate or support any injustice that allows us to continue to toil, indulge and function? Even if we've reached the height of affluence and comfort, is it really a different kind of life, or merely a different scale of it? Is the woman sitting in the corner office of the top floor of an oil tower any fundamentally different from the woman sitting in the alleyway between the towers?

Well, naturally you know my answer to that, otherwise this wouldn't be much of a sermon. If living is not simply to continue functioning, and if our PURPOSE isn't merely to keep functioning in greater and greater degrees of comfort, what is it? We've been given A life, but how do we actually LIVE it?

One of the greatest things anyone can learn in life is who they really are. I don't mean necessarily what you do for a living... Defining ourselves by our occupation is a peculiarly Western habit. This question of who you really are is a question of what do you believe? Why do you believe it? How do you act on those beliefs? What kind of a person are you? What does "love" and "hate" mean to you?... Not the kind of questions people ask you at cocktail parties. To truly know yourself means to have the presence of mind to look within yourself, to be deeply introspective, and to face the truth about who you are.

Sometimes - often - this can be painful. It certainly was for David, who covered another man's wife and orchestrated his murder to have her. David, of course, WASN'T being terribly introspective... There was some essential disconnect where he either did not or could not face the kind of person he was and had become. He lived with illusions, and therefore wasn't really living, even after acquiring the object of his affections (and I don't doubt that to him, Bathsheba was an object).

We are very much like King David... In our private and communal lives, we have been the rich man who takes the lamb of the poorer one. If you'll indulge yet more of my usual ranting ("Oh great, Cory's going on about that social justice stuff AGAIN!"), our society is one that has developed an amazing ability to turn a blind eye to what we're really like. Thinker Samuel P. Huntington once noted that "the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." In many online debates about the unprecedented media coverage of war during the recent and ongoing skirmishes in Iraq, it was asked if it was healthy for us to see so much of war on our television screens. The most sensible response I saw to that question was that there should be MORE transparency: we should see the full, bloody, tragic, horrifying results of war both on soldiers and civilians, so that we and our children can see exactly what kind of people we are without our self-delusions.

In environmental stewardship, Bruce Sterling, an author of dystopian science fiction, offers up the idea of product and marketing transparency as a solution to a great many of our problems. In a 1999 interview he stated "'Making the invisible visible' is an important design principle. Every time you hit a return key, there ought to be a puff of black coal smoke showing up on your monitor. That's the reality of today's energy market -- you're just never shown the truth about it." Of course I'm picking a couple major collective issues... How we as individuals live illusions that heap further suffering and injustice upon an already suffering and unjust world is something that each of us has to repent of on our own.

Not seeing his own sinfulness, God sent Nathan to give David the proverbial kick in the eye... To wake him up to the ugly truths about himself. If we were let alone to find our illusions, we never would. We would easily persist, even by choice, to continue in our ways, going about happily believing that our collective material blessings come from God rather than shrewd business dealings that exploit others or that our personal consistent sabotage of romances makes us a victim of love. Many of us, even when faced with it, will still persist. But God is inevitable, and eventually we accept the truth about ourselves. It was perhaps once David was made aware, once his illusions about being a "basically good person" were shattered, that he penned his great prayer of repentance that we know and recite as Psalm 51.

And believe it or not, this is when we truly start living: when we have searched the depths, when we have faced who we really are, when we have cried out for forgiveness, and when we have reached new heights with the loving message of God's forgiveness! This forgiveness is sweeter than any food or drink or material comfort. To know that we have done wrong by others and by God, but to know that we are loved and forgiven even when we don't love and can't forgive ourselves is nothing short of a new lease on life. It transforms us and makes us aspire to that which we can, in God's strength, be.

Being in touch more deeply with who we are, we learn what unique things we have to bring to the Body of Christ. For God is infinitely creative and makes us infinitely diverse, and loves our diversity with Her infinite love. Our individuality - being the unique person we were created to be - is pleasing to the Artist who fashioned us, and our joining our individuality together in community - not a homogeneous mass but a diverse, interdependent unity - is even more pleasing. We are single threads in a tapestry, a song from the animated film Prince of Egypt points out to us, but we all have a purpose and place in the grand design.

By knowing ourselves, we know if we have the gift of hospitality from God to give to all humanity, or the gift of ministry or music or craftsmanship or any of the infinite things God has placed before us to aid in making the world a better, more beautiful place. That is what they are for, after all... To build up the Body in love, and not to stop there. In building up this community here, right here at Trinity, we are helping to build up the world in love.

These gifts we have been given don't exist in a vacuum and they aren't mere insignificant trivia. Everything comes together for the good of all things in bringing about the Kingdom of God and the reconciliation of everyone to everyone and everything else. When we gather together for fellowship after our service here and break bread together, sharing our food and our lives with one another, we are truly making the world a better place. When we offer help and healing to friends and neighbors, to coworkers and to people on the street, we are making the world a better place. When we make sandwiches, when we spread the Good News with words, when we sing, when we build, when we plant gardens, we are making the world a better place by God's strength and love with the gifts God have given us to do this work.

And THIS is truly living. A healed, beautiful, reconciled world with people who live in love for one another. What simple material comfort, jealously held, can compare to this vision God has for His creation? What joy can the kingdoms of the world offer us that the Kingdom of God cannot transcend for all eternity? And it will last for all eternity, for love is eternal and when all things are finally reconciled, there will be nothing to hold us down to pain and death anymore.

But it all begins with knowing ourselves... Knowing those gifts that God has given us and releasing that which holds us back from using them and being the people we were meant to be. What do we have to fear? God is with us, every day and here at His Table offering Himself to us in spiritual food. He has promised us that whoever comes to Him will never be hungry and whoever believes in Him will never be thirsty. To come to Him and to believe in Him are themselves gifts he has so graciously given us.. No matter where you stand in your spiritual journey, no matter how big or how small you feel your faith to be, it comes from God and He will never take it back. He will always be with us, guiding us as He promised.

No matter how painful it may be, no matter how much change may have to happen, God abides by us and comforts us because She loves us. This pain is like birth, from which comes new life... It is being Born Again! All it requires is release: to trust and to have courage, both of which come from God. When we have given up our tight, jealous grasp of external things - of material comfort, and all the "freedom" and security that we are told day in and day out that we need - then can we truly begin to live.

Amen.