Duck Church
John 6:35, 41-51
A man is driving a pick-up truck down the road with a bunch of ducks standing in the back. A police officer pulls over the driver and informs him that he is speeding, and then asks him where he’s going with all those ducks. The driver says that the ducks are always around him, so when he got into his truck, so did the ducks. And while it was kind of fun at first, now he just doesn’t know what to do with them anymore. The officer says, “Look, there’s a zoo not far from here and that’s where you should take them. That should take care of your problem.” The man thanked the officer and drove off with the ducks.
The next day the officer again sees the pick-up truck once again speeding down the road. This time, though, all the ducks in the back are standing there wearing sunglasses. The officer pulls the driver over and says, “I thought I told you to take them to the zoo!” “I did that,” said the driver, “but now they want to go to the beach!”
There are days when many of us would like to be a duck – to have someone else get our friends together, so we could put on our sunglasses, and head to the beach for some fun in the sun. If it isn’t the beach, we know that there are other ways we can have fun with our friends, if someone will just take the lead.
The Westport area in Kansas City used to have a reputation of being very cosmopolitan. There were eclectic shops to visit, and little coffee shops and bistros to enjoy. On one corner you might find a juggler putting on a show, and on the next you might find a guitar player singing original songs. It was an entertaining place to visit, even if you had little or no money to spend.
That is why one afternoon several years ago, I took some of my friends with me to go walking around Westport. I was attending seminary in Kansas City at the time, as well as serving 4 little country churches. Between those churches, I was making a grand total of $300 a month – and out of that $300 I had to pay rent, tuition, books, food, gas, and a car payment. My entertainment choices were by necessity things that could be done cheaply or free.
After walking around for a while, we decided to take one of the alleys to get to another part of Westport. It was starting to get late, and the alley was unlit. About halfway between where we started and where we wanted to go, a man stepped out of the shadows and blocked our way. Even though it was summer, he was wearing several layers of clothing and a coat. It was quickly evident that neither his clothing nor he had been washed in some time. We were face-to-face with a homeless man, in a dark alley, where there were no witnesses.
Even though we could smell the alcohol on his breath, his words were clear: “Give me a buck.” As the son of an alcoholic, I was pretty sure that he would use that dollar to buy more alcohol. And as a seminary student, I knew that I was called to do good for the least of these.
I quickly came up with an answer that I thought would both prove my piety and help this homeless gentleman. So I said to him, “I will give you more than a buck. I will give you $5 and a ride to the City Union Mission. The $5 will pay for a couple of nights, and you can get fed, and cleaned up, and have a safe place to sleep.”
But instead of a “thank you,” the homeless man said, “Give me a buck.” I was under the impression that perhaps I had not made myself clear, so I again said, though this time a bit more slowly, “I will give you more than a buck. I will give you $5 and a ride to the City Union Mission. The $5 will pay for a couple of nights, and you can get fed, and cleaned up, and have a safe place to sleep.”
This time, I got a different reply, but it was not the one I expected. The man patted his coat and said, “I have a gun. Give me a buck.”
For whatever reason, I was pretty sure that he didn’t really have a gun. It felt more like dealing with an alcoholic doing the only thing he knew how to do, rather than dealing with a robber trying to get as much as he could from us. But something was still missing. We were still just standing there in the alley. I wasn’t helping, and he wasn’t listening.
It was then, in a God-moment, in a Spirit-led epiphany, I knew what I had to do. So I looked the gentleman in the eye, and I asked him his name. He looked back and, for perhaps the first time in a very long time, he saw something more than a hand that either had a dollar in it or didn’t. And instead of telling me to give him a buck, he told me his name.
I then told him my name, and then repeated my offer to help. This time, he said thank you. And I took him to the City Union Mission, gave him the $5, and prayed with him.
This was a person with a name. This was a person who had a mother and a father. This was a person who had friends at one time. This was a person who had a history, and a future. This was a person. And this person bore the image of God. It was a failure to see that image that helped put him on the streets. And it was seeing that image in him that made all the difference that day.
We sometimes have trouble seeing beyond the immediate appearance. We want to believe that what we see is what we get, that the truth is obvious and that anyone can see it, just as we see it. There is even a fairly famous expression that gets at this.
Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase that was later made famous by former CBS anchorman Dan Rather. Riley wrote, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” We hear this expression, or its sometimes earthier equivalents, when we are told that something is not what it appears to be, but it feels like they are lying to us.
This is the argument used by the people of Nazareth when they hear that Jesus is a healer, a prophet, and possibly the messiah. They know that if Jesus walks like a local boy, and he dresses like a local boy, and he has the accent of a local boy, then he must be a local boy. And as such, Jesus had no business thinking he was better than them, much less something as grand as the Bread of Life.
The people were put out with Jesus because that expression is not just an imaginative description – it is a grand claim. Bread was then considered a staple of life. You needed bread in order to live. So they hear Jesus saying that everyone needs Jesus in order to live. And they are pretty sure that they have been living just fine without Jesus while he has been away from Nazareth.
Their inability to see Jesus as anything other than a local boy was their version of the Relativity Theory. Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that the more you move at the same speed and move in the same direction as something else, the more likely it is that you will only have one way to measure the other object. So if we move at the same speed and in the same direction as another person, we are likely to have only one way to see that person. So, if we grow up and move away and become successful, when we return home we are still just someone’s child, someone’s kid brother, someone’s neighbor – as if nothing has changed about us at all.
John Wesley wrote that religion is “a renewal of our beings in the image of God, a recovery of the Divine likeness, a self-increasing conformity of heart and life to the pattern of our most holy redeemer.” Or, in other words, religion is about learning a new way to see, and having a new way to measure ourselves and others. Our new measure is the image of God, and growing in faith means learning to see this image of God in ourselves and in others.
That’s what it means to be faithful, to be religious. That’s what it should mean to be Christian. It begins by seeing in others what Jesus sees in each of us. And we grow in faith, we go on to perfection in love, when we help each other see the image of God in every person -- when we can see how God still comes to us, as Jesus said, “in the least of these my brothers and sisters.”
Yet, as a culture, we still are confused about what it means to be faithful, to be religious. Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish preacher, told a parable about a community of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher. The duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. With these wings, there was nowhere the ducks could not go. With those wings they could soar. Shouts of “Amen!” were quacked throughout the duck congregation. At the conclusion of the service, the ducks left commenting favorably on the message as they waddled back home. But they never flew.
It was enough for the ducks to know that they could soar, if they wanted to, but it did not lead them to actually soar. They were still measuring each other the way they had always measured themselves. If they walk like ducks and they swim like ducks and they quack like ducks, then what else can they really ever be except ducks who waddle through life? The duck preacher wasn’t helping, and the duck congregation wasn’t listening.
What the people in Nazareth needed, and what we need, is to have Jesus tell us his name again. This is Jesus, the Bread of Life. And Jesus has an offer for us that will clean us up, feed us, and enable us to rest in the glory of God. The invitation is still extended to all who will see Jesus as more than just the boy from Nazareth, or the healer, or the miracle worker. The invitation is extended to all who can see that Jesus is the Bread of Life.
D.T. Niles, a 20th century evangelist to Sri Lanka, defined evangelism as “one hungry person telling another hungry person where to find bread.” When we tell people about Jesus, we are telling them about the Bread come down from heaven. When we look for that image of God, perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, in each person we meet, we will find the Bread come down from heaven, and our souls will be fed.
The invitation is extended again! Come, sinners, to the gospel feast and receive the Bread of Life!
UM Hymnal 616 “Come, Sinners, to the Gospel Feast”