Biker Night at the Super 8

It was biker night at the Super 8. Arriving after a long day, I saw that motorcycles, many of them hitched to trailers, took up most of the places in the parking lot. With a night of paperwork ahead of me, I shook my head. “Oh great. They’ll be up all night partying.” But the next morning I awoke feeling refreshed. I’d gotten a good night’s sleep after all.

There was a buzz of conversation in the breakfast room. “Where ya’ from?” a man asked his neighbor in the coffee line. “Rode up from Virginia. You?” “Michigan.” Eager anticipation filled the air. I asked someone what was happening. “A rally at the Honda plant in Marysville. Bikers come in from all over. It’ll be a great day.”

A little while later I checked out of the Super 8, and as I walked outside I stopped in my tracks. The parking lot was filled with people standing over their bikes, tenderly shining them up for the day ahead. Now and then someone would glance over at his neighbor in the next space and they would nod and smile, then go back to their work, quietly, reverently.

As I watched, my field of vision expanded until the whole experience—the tender care, the joyous anticipation, the sense of community—were captured as one, in a moment of perfect peace. A glimpse of the kingdom of God. If you’ve had such an experience you will know that such moments come at otherwise ordinary times. When we have a glimpse of the kingdom the protections and preconceptions that cloud our inner and outer vision are peeled away until we stand, if only for an instant, in the presence of that which is ultimate.

The kingdom of God is a central focus of the teaching of Jesus. It is an expression of the unity and fulfillment of all creation under the reign of God. To have a glimpse of the kingdom is to experience a profound sense of the underlying interconnectedness of all things in God. To have a glimpse of the kingdom is to experience hope.

For the past few weeks the lectionary has walked us through the 6^th chapter of the gospel according to John. It’s the longest chapter in John’s gospel, beginning with the feeding of the 5,000 and ending with the poignant story that we heard today, a story in which the crowd of disciples who have been following Jesus around Judea and Galilee decide whether to stay with him or turn away. Most of them turn away.

They turn away because Jesus reveals who he really is. John tells us that at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry Andrew and others identify Jesus as the Messiah. As his fame spreads, the expectation grows that Jesus is the hoped-for Messiah who will be king—claiming earthly power and overturning the political order.

But Jesus is not this kind of Messiah. John tells us that after the feeding of the 5,000, “when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” When some of his disciples realize he is not on earth to be their political leader, their earthly king, they turn away.

Others are following Jesus because of his spectacular deeds. As word spreads about the changing of water to wine at Cana, the healings of the royal official’s son and the lame man by the pool, and the feeding of the multitudes from five loaves and two fish, crowds of disciples follow Jesus, wanting to see what he will do next.

            But Jesus tells the disciples that it is not what he does, but who he is, that’s the point. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

            When his disciples don’t seem to get it, he gets more explicit. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.”

Hearing this, many of the disciples are offended. What on earth is Jesus talking about?

Jesus is telling the disciples that those who come to him and believe in him will find new life born of flesh and spirit. This new life is not just about Jesus transforming the world of politics. And it is not just about Jesus transforming the natural order by changing water into wine and healing the sick.

This new life is about transforming them! It’s about each of them responding to God’s graceful initiative by opening themselves to a spiritual transformation in which they die to themselves and are born anew in Christ. It’s about turning the control of their lives over to someone greater than themselves. It’s about deciding what really counts.

This is not at all what many of those who had been following Jesus had bargained for. So, John says, they “turned back and no longer went about with him.”

There follows one of the most poignant questions in scripture. Turning to the twelve disciples who remain behind while throngs of former disciples go off into the distance, Jesus asks, “Do you also wish to go away?”

“Do you also wish to go away?” I don’t know about you, but sometimes I do wish to go away. I don’t like to admit it, but there are times that I deliberately close my eyes to what I don’t want to see in the world around me. There are times that I close my ears to voices that I don’t want to hear. There are times that I want to close off my heart and not care anymore. Sometimes, I do wish to go away.

But God never stops prodding me and luring me to choose new life. God does that with all of us, all of the time. We live constantly in the tension between divine initiative and human freedom. God initiates and we respond.

Every once in a while we have a glimpse of the kingdom—an experience that gives us hope and causes us to respond to God’s grace by moving forward with faith. In the words of Hebrews, “Faith gives substance to our hopes and convinces us of realities we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1, The Revised English Bible).

Jesus asks those who remain with him, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answers him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

“Lord, to whom can we go?” Peter’s question is a statement of hope.

When we speak of eternal life in Jesus Christ we aren’t really talking about what we think will happen in the future. We are talking about how that for which we hope relates to our lives today. The theologian Daniel Day Williams says this: “I am in part what I hope for; for what I am is what I am willing to commit myself to, and that depends upon what I believe finally counts.”

Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go?”

There are indeed many people to whom we may choose to go. But in the end, there is only One who finally counts.