When I was a child, my mother dreaded to take me with her shopping. "Mama, can I have some candy? Mama, I want that. Please, please, Mama, I want …" Weary of my pleas, she would say, "I think your ‘want-er’ is stuck like a scratched, old record." She was right. As I have grown from stage to stage in life, I have continued to have wants. I do have a stuck "want-er." But I have discovered I am not alone.

Dr. William Power, who taught Old Testament when I was in seminary, is a first rate scholar who often uses his scholarship to retell familiar Bible stories so that the meanings of the Hebrew words and phrases are more clear. I remember him telling the story of creation that is found in the second chapter of Genesis. In that creation story the first human was molded—the way a potter molds clay—God breathed spirit into the "Dirt-man" (that is what Adam means). And when God did this, the dirt-man became well, the word for what Adam became does not have an exact English equivalent. Most translations say he became a living being or a living soul. Dr. Powers says the word in Hebrew has to do with a word picture of an open mouth, like a little bird in a nest, always hungry for more and more. And so, Dr. Power said, it might be more accurate to translate that Hebrew phrase by saying: "the dirt-man became a bundle of appetites."

I am not qualified to evaluate his translation of Hebrew, but after almost forty years of being a pastor, I am convinced that describing us humans as being "bundles of appetites" is quite accurate. We humans hunger for, desire, long for, lust after this, that and the other. To be human is to born with a stuck "want-er."

Sigmund Freud was convinced that of all the hungers and desires that motivate and drive us through life, the desire for pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, is the dominant one. There is a lot of evidence to support his view. Certainly the entertainment industry has discovered that sex sells movie tickets and raises TV ratings. And even a casual observer of human behavior is aware of the power of desire—not only sexual lust, but also that almost irresistible urge for one more piece of that delicious chocolate cake. The drive toward pleasure is powerful.

Alfred Adler did not deny that longing for pleasure is definitely one of the motivations of human behavior; however, he was convinced that our basic desire or hunger is for power; we want to be in control. Certainly, we all know what it is to want to be in control, and to feel not only uncomfortable but anxious, even fearful, when we are not. The hunger to be in charge and have our will done is a powerful drive. We see it at work in ourselves, and it is even easier for us to see it at work in others.

However, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, because of his experiences in a Nazi death camp, disagreed. He did not deny our human desire for pleasure and our longing to be in control. But when both of these were totally taken away in his experience in Auschwitz, he became convinced that the basic human hunger or the deepest drive within us is our deep longing for meaning and purpose. We want life and our lives to matter.

The question is where is meaning to be found? How shall we satisfy this deepest of hungers? Where we seek to feed this hunger and how we try to feed this hunger reflects what we worship—really worship. These days we can see in our behavior traces of ancient idol worship—only the style and lingo has changed.

For example, each day on the last pages of the sports section in the newspaper we can find advertisements for a variety of sanctuaries dedicated to the worship of Astarte, the goddess of erotic love. Then there is the worship of Baccus, the god of wine and good times. All over Austin are places for this idol worship. Some of the best known chapels with long altars are located on Sixth Street. Our hunger to be in control of destiny motivates many to become involved in contemporary versions of the ancient worship of the stars. Worship of astrology and magic are advertised on signs hanging outside houses, on large billboards beside the interstate, and on slick, TV info-mercials. Our hunger for power and control has even led some to participate in the relatively recent resurgence of witchcraft.

But for people like us gathered here, there are more socially acceptable forms of idol worship. For example, long ago people made great sacrifices to all sorts of gods in the hope of being made materially prosperous and important. In some of those ancient religions children were offered as sacrifices. This is what we do we offer our great sacrifices on the altar of our careers. Trying to be "somebody," we will move from work we really enjoy to a job that gives us less pleasure for the sake of status. After all, the extra money will enable us to live in the "right" neighborhood, have the "right" car, send our children to the "right" school, and enable us to afford doing what the "right" people are doing. God only knows how many of us invest the majority of the few years we have pursuing money, titles and trophies trying to satisfy our hunger for meaning.

But not all of us seek to make our lives worth living in this way. We recognize the need to earn our daily bread, but for us, what makes life worth the effort is the pleasure we can enjoy along the way. We are not into hedonistic pleasures, but we do worship at the various altars of socially acceptable entertainment, comfort and security, and there we make major offerings of money and time.

We humans want our lives to be worth living. We are hungry for something more than merely existing. As Dr. Power told the story in Genesis 2, we humans are a bundle of appetites.

In the passage we read from the Gospel of John, what Jesus said is certainly what we need to hear. "Do not work for the food that perishes …," Jesus said. Do not try to satisfy the deepest human hunger with junk food. Our worth, our value in life does not finally reside in the rewards of salary, status and trophies. We have been created to enjoy life, but our purpose in living is larger than the pursuit of pleasure. We have been given the ability to do a lot, but we are finally limited creatures who cannot control all of life.

"Do not work for the food that perishes," Jesus said. Work, instead, "… for the food that endures to eternal life." We are to put our effort into receiving the spiritual nourishment that will enable us to live lives marked by that which is eternal.

Understandably, the people to whom Jesus was speaking asked him: "How do we do this?" And the essence of Jesus’ response was: "Believe in me." The key is to believe in Jesus Christ; this is the way to the have our deepest hunger fed.

When Jesus spoke of believing in him, he was talking about much, much more than believing certain information about him or our agreeing with concepts he taught. Jesus was talking about believing IN him.

Some of you have heard the little poem I wrote some years ago dealing with the first three words of The Apostles Creed: "I believe in …"

Somewhere between down and up

where the air screams by the door,

men and women jump

for their lives

believing

not about

but in

parachutes.

To believe in Jesus is to give our lives to him as completely as one who jumps from an airplane gives her or his life to the parachute. To believe in Jesus is to place the whole weight of our living on him. Believing in Jesus is much, much more than merely having a lot of beliefs and opinions about him. It is much, much more than believing stories about him or even agreeing with the wisdom in his teachings. Believing in Jesus is believing IN Jesus—living with our focus on him, striving to have him live in and through us.

When we believe in him, we really do believe he is the incarnation of God’s grace, that in him and through him, God is reaching out to the world, not to condemn it for all that is wrong, but to redeem it so that we can become the persons God intends us to be. When we believe in him, we are really convinced in our hearts that we, each of us, are loved by God, that God knows each of us and that each of us matters. When we believe in him, our vision of life is his vision of life; he enables us to see the world as God’s creation and to see each person as God’s child, our brother or sister. When we believe in him, we really are committed to God and God’s will—even to the point of being willing to endure all sorts of crucifixions for the sake of making God’s loving will known. When we truly believe in him, we are convinced that the only way to live is to live giving of ourselves for the good of others. When we believe in him, we are convinced and motivated to love others as God in Christ has loved us.

When this is the way we view life and live life, we discover that our lives are meaningful, that we are fulfilled, that our deepest hunger is fed.

We humans have a deep hunger within our souls; it is a hunger for the soul food made available through Jesus Christ. It is this soul food we have come here to receive.

God, as we receive this sacrament, enable us to receive Christ so that we may live the fulfilled lives you intend us to live. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer:

God, as we come to receive this sacrament, help us be aware that in the ordinariness of this bread and juice we are both being nourished and confronted by the reality of Christ. As we come to this table enable us to be sensitive to the presence of Christ who offers us both the healing our wounded souls need as well as the rebuke our arrogant pride deserves. God, as we come to this table with others, some of whom are very different from us and others with whom we disagree and others with whom we are angry, help us be aware that what unites us is your grace made known in Christ and that by the grace in Christ, regardless of all that tends to divide us, we are made one by that which we hold in common—the bread of Christ’s body broken for each of us and the cup of his blood shed for the sake of the whole world. God, as we move through this service of Holy Communion enable us to do more than go through familiar, religious ritual; enable us to be in holy communion with you and because of that, to be in holy communion with one another. In the name of Christ, this we pray. Amen.