If you've ever driven across this great country of ours, you've undoubtedly heard of a place called Wall Drug Store. Not Wal-Mart Drug Store. Wall Drug Store.

Though located in Wall, South Dakota (pop. 800), this little business starts advertising its distant presence while you're at least a dozen states away. Especially on interstate 90 somewhere around Idaho to the West and Iowa to the East, strange little signs start popping up every couple hundred miles. "Only 2314 miles to Wall Drug." Or "Just 829 more miles and you'll be at Wall Drug." Even in remote areas like Canaan Valley, West Virginia, a sign is tacked up outside the local general store and gas station proclaiming that "Wall Drug" is only 2813 miles from where you stand. There is a Wall Drug sign at the South Pole and at the North Pole. There is even a sign in Hell (Michigan).

I have to admit I've never actually been to Wall Drug. But it sure isn't because of their lack of trying or a lack in advertising their existence. Over the course of several back-and-forth journeys form the east to west coast, I've probably read well over a hundred of the 3000 billboards and signs letting people like me know how close I had come to that roadside Mecca. These signs don't tell you why you should stop. You're supposed to stop and see the place just to say you have. You don't need anything at Wall Drug. You don't even know what Wall Drug has to offer. But anything that puts out that many signs must be worth checking out.

Or is it?

For some of us contrary souls, we'd rather starve to death, die of thirst, run completely out of gas in the middle of nowhere, rather than darken the door of such a cheesy, self-promoting, litter-the-landscape-with-tacky-signs tourist trap. Anything that needs to advertise itself so deliberately, so indiscriminately, must not be worth a second thought. The glut of signs fills some of us with suspicion, not eager anticipation.

Apparently the crowd of people who followed Jesus from one side of the Sea of Galilee to the other would have been great fans of Wall Drug. They had just been the recipients of one of Jesus' most astonishing miracles all five thousand of them had been fed to fullness with just five loaves and two fish. But come a new day, and they start clamoring for more signs or at least, more bread.

Jesus refuses to do more tricks for the crowd. Jesus declines to whip up a new batch of manna in the wilderness. He knows this crowd is looking only for signs they can hold in their hands and place in their mouths.

The problem is this crowd thinks the signs are the be-all and end-all. They forgot why God provided signs for their ancestors in the first place.

It was only after the people were moving out across the wilderness that God granted the guidance of the cloud of smoke by day, the pillar of fire by night. The Israelites had to step out in faith before the signs came on.

It was only when the Israelites are deep in the wilderness, cut of from all other peoples, from any other sources of sustenance, that God provided the morning manna and the evening quail to satisfy their hunger. As the hard and fast rules governing the gathering of this manna made explicit, this miraculous sign, this bread from heaven, is far more than food.

So they obediently gathered it day by day. They never hoarded it. They never saved it. They never wasted the mysterious bread. And slowly the people learned to have faith in God's care and providence. Manna was a Sabbath-school lesson and exercise, not just breakfast and lunch.

The more the people demand signs from Jesus, the more he tells them not to look for things, but to look for a person. The Son of Man will give them the gift that never spoils, is never wholly consumed and that never runs out the gift of eternal life. To receive this gift, Jesus reveals, doesn't require a sign. The only requirement is to be doing the work of God.

And what is this work? It's not any one activity, not any legal ordinance. The work God requires is a faithwork: believe in him whom [God] has sent (verse 29).

God's greatest sign, God's greatest miracle, isn't a symbol it's a person. Here is the work of God required of us all: are you in a believing, trusting, affirming relationship with this heaven-sent Son of Man, Jesus the Christ, the Son of God?

God's greatest gift to us was to stop sending signs and instead send us God's Son.

Maybe you're peering into a microscope to decipher the secret workings of intercellular mitochondria. Or, maybe you're gazing through a telescope out into the vast beyond penetrating expanses of galaxies and universes.

Signs and miracles are thick around us.

But there will never be enough signs until there is faith. And faith doesn't need signs because faith is based on a relationship, not on evidence. And that relationship is with Jesus, the Bread of Life. (Interestingly, John's gospel makes the most of Jesus as the Bread of Life, but John, alone among the gospel writers, doesn't tell the story of the Last Supper. John, the one who introduces us to Jesus as the Bread of Life, features the foot washing in the upper room, not the bread and wine.)

Will you crumble some bread of truth this week for a hungry world, a world still looking for signs but needing only the Son?

[You could end your sermon here, or shift gears along the following lines.]

Unless you've been hiding out in an unplugged concrete bunker for the last few years, you know that the newest ratings grabbers on television are so-called reality TV shows. America's newest favorite guilty pleasure is reality TV. There isn't a night left that you can't tune in a bachelor, a bachelorette, a wannabe millionaire dad, mom, a house-full of sleazoids, all trying to establish some kind of relationship with someone else.

It might be a love-connection, as in the matchmaking bachelor/bachelorette series. Or it might be a conniving alliance against someone else as in the Survivor or Big Brother shows. These shows, regardless of their plot, all revolve around who can establish the most successful relationships.

Dr. Phil everyone's favorite relationship guru spends all his time trying to teach relationship screw-ups how to fix the stunted, stymied, diseased relationships they inhabit. No matter how nauseating, mind-numbing, bizarre, or insulting we find these shows, the church needs to sit up and take notice of them for they are themselves signs of the times.

But the sign they're giving?

People are desperate not for more signs but for relationships.

We're a remote-controlled, security-fenced, internet-commuting, environmentally insulated society. We're increasingly cut off from genuine experiences and expressions of community. We're increasingly remote from real dynamic relationships. Our high divorce rates, our fractured families, our corporate superstructures and our let's-just-move mindset all evidence our failures at relationships. Even when we get into relationships we no longer understand how they're supposed to work, and what we're supposed to do to keep them healthy and alive.

Harvard public policy professor Robert Putnam wrote a critically-acclaimed book a few years ago called Bowling Alone (2000). In this expansion of his 1995 article in the Journal of Democracy Putnam argues that one of the most endangered resources in our world today is social capital. We're spending less and less free time with each other and more time trapped in prisons called automobiles (rush hour?), or in cubicles called paid jobs, or in Barca loungers watching blinking boxes.

Putnam's assertion that more and more people are bowling alone has a twin thesis: that there is in this culture a giant relationship famine. The very scarcity of social capital raises our hunger and thirst for relationship to famine levels.

Hence reality TV. Actually, a better name for reality TV is relationship TV. Not only are the contestants trying to establish a winning relationship according to their particular show's rules. But in most of these programs there is a huge call-in or log-on component that invites our interaction. Everyone who watches the on-screen struggles is invited to cast their vote, voice their opinion, involve themselves, in the relationships building process that is unfolding week-by-week. The on-screen relationships are fostering millions of off-screen relationships.

In a culture awash in false relationships, in a culture looking to Dr. Phil and Survivor to teach us how to do relationships, the church is needed more than ever to be a sign of true and authentic relationships. When Jesus spoke about the greatest sign God had given, the gift of the Son, the miracle of establishing a living, breathing, saving relationship with the one who offers us eternal life this was a relationship as basic and essential to living a true life as bread was to keeping the body alive.

No wonder Jesus called himself the Bread of Life. The relationship between the Son and the world is just as essential and life sustaining. Every culture has some sort of bread that represents the basic sustenance of life.

Whether it's with manna or a tortilla, pita-pockets or bowls of rice, breadfruit or Wonder Bread, naan, or challah-bread . . . .

Will you offer this world the sign of a Son? Will you crumble some bread of truth to a famished world this week? Will your life and lips introduce people to the Bread of Life?