Need

Scripture: The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 16), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus takes time to go off by Himself to pray. He climbs mountains, wanders deserts, sits amongst trees by night, and—perhaps most relatably for Minnesotans—He spends time in a boat on the lake. This habit actually reminds me of the Buddha, who used to spend three hours every day, and three months out of every year, off by himself in private meditation. The difference is that by and large people left the Buddha alone. But there is no peace for Jesus.

Wherever He goes, be it the wilderness or the villages or the Sea of Galilee, He is pursued by crowds desperate to hear His words and to feel His healing touch. He is overwhelmed all the time by the press of human need. Yet His response is never to send people away, never to rebuke them, to elude them, nor even to ask their patience until after He has taken a much-needed Sabbath rest. No. When confronted with great need, Jesus heals. Jesus acts. Jesus frees.

Here, then, in this story, we have the two great abysses of our existence: the bottomless chasm of human need, and the ceaseless font of God’s love.

The people in this story, they aren’t just desperate rubes looking for a faith healer. We might think that if they were like us, if they had our abundance of worldly goods and scientific knowledge, they would not so rashly pursue some Galilean rabbi. And it’s true that Jesus rebukes some in the crowd for chasing Him just because they want a free meal, as though He were but a wandering breadline. He still feeds them anyway, of course. But it becomes clear to us reading the Gospel that one Man’s ministry just isn’t going to cut it here.

Jesus can feed 5,000 families at every meal, and people will still be hungry. He can lay His hands upon suffering souls 10 dozen an hour, and people will still be ill. Humanity’s need is so much greater than we can express. We need more than three short years of preaching and teaching from Jesus, more than healings and feedings and wonders. We need all of Him, our desperation demands all of Him, and so He resolves not simply to give us bread but to become for us the Bread of Life. He resolves not simply to take away our wounds but to take our wounds forever upon Himself. He will give Himself over entirely to the needs of the world.

When we are young, our needs seem very basic. Apart from food and shelter, we need a stable home and loving parents. We need friends and family. Our world is small but warm, and while I don’t mean to romanticize it—childhood isn’t easy, after all—our horizons, if not our emotions, remain fairly manageable. Adulthood changes this. Our friendships grow more complex. Our needs start to involve forging an identity, finding our place in society, contributing something to humankind. We yearn for romance, adventure, partnership, commitment.

Life becomes less about our needs and more about the demands placed on us by the needs of others. I think it’s fair to say that this happens most dramatically upon having children. Suddenly you have no needs, or at least none you can afford to address. Now your world revolves around this little, trusting, completely dependent person, who needs you for everything. And I mean everything: eating, drinking, dressing, bathing, pooping, sleeping, and just not dying in general.

Your parents have new needs now. They’ve always provided for you, but now they’re dealing with aging and retirement, dealing with new struggles and new questions, celebrating freedoms but also suffering from an empty nest. Your parents need you: your support, your communication, your love and attention. And someday they will need you for the same things you needed them for: eating, drinking, dressing, bathing, pooping, sleeping, and just not dying in general.

Your spouse has new needs now, too. Remember when it was just the two of you, how exciting and joyful life was? Well, now you’re juggling two jobs and three kids and distant parents and lost friends and your wife hasn’t slept in eight years. She has a whole new set of needs, at just the same time when you have a whole new set for her. One of the greatest is for you both to remember who you are together.

All the world is full of need: desperate, gaping, drowning need. Rich or poor, young or old, famed or failure, it doesn’t matter. We all have needs. And we all have people who need us. And no matter where you go—up a mountain, out on a lake, or all the way to the northern tip of Iceland—those needs follow us all. You cannot avoid the bottomless depth of human need. You can only address it in love. Because at the end of the day, everyone is fighting just as hard as you are. Everyone gets just as burned out as you get. And that’s because we’re all looking to satisfy the same root need, the one need, from which all others stem: God.

You knew that’s where this was going, right? This is a sermon, after all. Of course I’m going to tell you that we need God. But it’s a little more complicated than just saying, “I need God, therefore I choose God.” It doesn’t quite work that way. See, God is not some finite object that we can hold in our mind and judge. We don’t choose God the way that we choose coffee or tea. He’s much too big for that, to fit inside our heads. The truth is that we can’t choose God. Or rather—we can’t not choose Him. Here’s what I mean.

When we talk about God, we’re not talking about Zeus or Thor. We’re talking about the Source of all Being, the Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier of everything. God is pure Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, so that whenever we see anything good or true or beautiful in this world, that is a reflection of God; it points to God. Even the most hardened atheist, when he seeks out goodness or truth or beauty or being or unity, he is, by definition, seeking out God, because he needs God. We all do. We were built to seek out and reflect and rejoice in Goodness and Truth and Beauty. We were built to need God.

Every choice we make, even the evil ones, are really misguided attempts to pursue goodness as we so dimly see it—selfishly, perhaps, goodness only for ourselves. But it’s still an expression of that impulse, that need for God. A thief steals because he wants possessions, and possessions are good. A drunkard overindulges in wine because wine is good. Even our basest passions, our fears and angers and lusts, are all good things when kept within proper bounds.

My point is that everything we do, on some level, is an expression of our need for God. Every choice we make is an attempt to grow closer to God. We screw things up—the sin of Adam and Eve was trying to define our relationship with God on our own terms rather than on His—but no matter how we turn, God is already there. I said that wherever we go, we can never escape the depth of human need. And that’s true. But the flipside is that wherever we go, we can never escape the love of God. If I ascend to the heavens, He is there; if I descend to the dead, He is there.

That’s why we can’t choose God, and we can’t not choose God. Every choice, even running from Him, is in some sense running towards Him. Wherever we go—up a mountain, out on a lake, even to the northernmost tip of Iceland—God is waiting for us before we get there. There may be no escape from need, but neither is there escape from love. That’s why the devil is always so damn angry.

People flock to Jesus because we have spent our entire lives, knowingly or unknowingly, groping about in the darkness, seeking God, needing God. Suddenly Jesus shows up—Jesus, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life—and all is clearly revealed. He is the Light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome Him. He is the Way for Man to return to God, for He is the Way in which God first comes to us as a Man. Jesus is the visible Image of the invisible God, revealed here to us at last as the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty Whom we have needed, Whom we have sought, all this long and desperate age.

That’s why we come to Him. That’s why we do not grant Him a moment’s peace. That’s why we follow, eagerly, hungrily, hoping just to touch the fringe of His cloak. He is the One, the Source, the Healer of our every need, and He has been all around us this entire time. We were just too blind to see.

The needs of the world overwhelm us, but it is precisely in our need that we find Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.