08/09/2009 10th Sunday of Pentecost John 6:35-51 – By Pastor Mark Moore Older Sermons
I like bread a lot
It’s always a treat to set foot in the door of a bakery
and smell the aroma of yeast t t
garlic, of fragrant rosemary
and sweet, sweet, calorie-laden donuts
and any morning’s bound to look better
Whoever first called bread the staff of life was pretty savvy
A good loaf of artisan bread,
some extra virgin olive oil and spices,
a hunk of well-aged cheese,
and fresh fruit, and I am one happy camper
Humans have been breaking bread together
as mark of community and fellowship,
since the ancient Egyptians first baked raised loaves more than 4,000 years ago
The variety of breads found throughout the world is nothing short of astounding
Kurds share paper thin n nane silli,
Afghani women serve naan, a type of flat bread, with rich sauces,
a staple of most meals in the highlands of Ethiopia is injera,
a sour, spongy bread p;p;
fill hungry bellies as friends and families gather
My mind’s on bread because we are right in the middle
Lectionary’s bread basket
a month’s worth of texts from John’s gospel
I wonder, did the lectionary compilers think that lots of people are away in August,
so no one person will be in church to hear all five of them?
or looking toward the reading from 1 Kings
But wait! There’s bread there, too.
We can run
but we cannot hide e e
from the bread that’s been thrust upon us this season
as hearers, proclaimers, and bearers of the good news
There’s good reason for this emphasis on a simple food
that binds the world together r r r r r
from manna to loaves and fishes
to the body of our Lord.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said.
What kind of bread comes to mind when we hear “I am the bread of life”?
I was looking at all the bread at Central Market the other day.
A whole grocery store isle of different breads, hundreds of loaves of bread.
What is your usual bread, your first choice when your reach for a loaf?
I imagine that the most popular
or at least the most frequently eaten bread in America is sliced white bread. ;
We love it, don’t we.
It’s the perfect platform for peanut butter and jelly,
toasted it makes a good bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich,
and let’s not forget baloney.
One of the reasons we like it is precisely because it contributes so little
to our experience of food.
It doesn’t compete with other flavors.
Not much in the way of texture, we don’t have to work much to eat it.
It’s predictable.
In my survey of breads I came across Sunflower Bread,
purporting to be a golden loaf of complex texture and rich flavor,
made with: white flour, sunflower seeds, cracked wheat, oats, barley,
polenta, millet, buckwheat, flax seed, soy grits,
sesame seeds, water, malt, sea salt, and yeast.
That’s a lot of texture.
Then I think about communion bread.
Sometimes we use those little pressed wafers, ,
one of the Seminary professors observed
that it is easier to imagine the communion wafer as Christ’s body
than it is to imagine that it is bread.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus proclaims: “I am the bread of life.”
Earlier in the story of the feeding of the 5000,
many hungry people were fed with very little bread
Most of the time the focus of the telling of this story is on the miracle of the feeding,
and little attention is given to the bread itself f f
and what it might signify.
Similarly the proclamation in today’s lesson is usually focused on Jesus
and not on bread, but if we look at the e bread,
we may come to understand more of what Jesus was saying about himself.
This passage form John’s gospel is about abundance,
which is kind of difficult to associate with mass-produced white bread.
It makes a good carrier for other flavors but it doesn’t have much substance,
much “tooth” in itself.
Jesus spoke of himself as the bread of life.
Isn’t it possible to think that he was speaking of f richness,
of texture, of boldness and flavor?
Isn’t he inviting us to a greater feast in our life of faith
than plain white bread can offer.
was built on the foundation of many stories of feeding and being fed
In the reading from 1st Kings appointed for today,
Elijah sets out on a long journey sustained by the gift of food from an angel.
The angel commands him “get up and eat!”
and the bread that the angel gave him
sustained him for forty days and nights.
Jesus was also well aware of the Exodus story
and the tradition that God sustained the Israelites with manna for forty years,
bread from heaven.
We know hunger in the wilderness,
whether it’s in the desert or in our souls.
This theme from Exodus appears again and again in John’s gospel.
There is a contrast and a tension between the manna from heaven that fed the
people in the wilderness
and the Eucharistic bread that feeds us in the wilderness of our souls.
It is in that tension that we find the bread of life: not manna from God,
but the bread of life, the Bread that brings life.
Keep in mind that Jesus in not simple, not plain, not UN-demanding.
Our Lord is many-textured, multifaceted and complex in flavor.
He calls us to love, to forgive, to encourage, to get involved.
He showed us how to welcome, and to stand firm.
Our Lord was tender, he enjoyed meals with strangers and with disciples,
he rebuked the careless, taught in the temple, raised the dead to life,
challenged the complacent to really care,
wept at the death of a friend
and told stories.
He drank wine at a wedding. He washed filthy feet. He prayed.
When we hear Jesus proclaim: “I am the bread of life,” we should hear all these things
and more.
As we live our lives
and live our faith, let us be rich in texture, bold in flavor
and nourishing to the world.
On another isle in the grocery store there were some folks with their child.
He caught sight of some plastic action figures and reached out to grab one.
His mother chided him “not now, your birthday is coming soon.”
And the child protested loudly, “but I need it!”
There is often a big difference between what we want and what we need.
For example, it is often repeated that St. Augustine said that in each of us
there is a God shaped hole that can be filled only by a relationship with Christ.
Our problem is that we attempt to fill it with things that ultimately do not satisfy us.
Things can never make us permanently happy.
Things become our addictions
and we seek more and more of them in order to find satisfaction
Money, acquisition, food, power, fame, thrill-seeking
All call for more and more and give back less and less.
And we still feel empty.
Jesus tells us this in a passage similar to today’s lesson
In chapter four of John’s gospel,
Jesus tells the woman at the well that the water she draws from the well
will eventually leave her thirsty again, but the water that he offers
will continue to flow into eternal life.
The point is that the hunger we have cannot be satisfied
except by our relationship with Jesus.
[pause]
What is this bread that Jesus offers us?
It is love.
It is the love of the invisible God made visible and accessible
to our human experience in Jesus.
and the spirit of Jesus fills that God shaped hole,
that love begins to overflow to others.
D.T. Niles, a church leader in India many years ago, said that,
“evangelism, is one hungry person telling another hungry person
where to find bread.”
This is the mission of the church, to tell the world where love is to be found in Jesus.
[pause]
As I was researching today’s gospel lesson I came across an internet BLOG entry from an American living in Austria. I hope you’ll forgive my German pronunciation.
It reads: “I’m partial to sonnenblumenbrot,
imagine that, Austrian sunflower seed bread.
Just like Central Market
Bread in Austria, they wrote, is Food with a capital F.
It’s not some spongy filler or a vehicle for a spread;
It’s food with it’s own merits… the other day we were at the Merkur, a chain market… they have a bakery and had just put out a fresh batch of sonnenblumenbrot.
When I picked it up it was still warm. It held the warmth until we got it home
and when I sliced the end off, sunflower seeds scattered across the bread board.
I ate my fresh slice with a slab of butter. It was delicious and satisfying.”
So it is with our Lord, the Bread of Life.
So it should be with our life of faith: delicious and satisfying.
The bread that our Lord offers to the world is himself.
We come to the alter with outstretched hands,
desiring to be filled with Christ
and that our restless seeking would come to an end
We come believing that here is the place where the God shaped hole will be filled
We are filled when Christ lives in us and we in him.
It is in this moment that he becomes for us the living bread
that comes down from heaven.
[pause]
The prophet Elijah was weak from hunger,
but the angel of the Lord feeds him with a hearth cake and a jug of water
Elijah is no longer hungry,
but what is more important, strengthened by that food,
he walked forty days and forty nights.
There was work to do, a journey to be made,
and the food made it possible.
When Jesus talks about the bread that he is giving,
he compares it to manna,
which performed a role similar to Elijah’s food:
it enabled a journey to take place
(out of the desert and into the promised land)
not just to satisfy hunger
but also to make possible the accomplishment of a task,
the completion of a journey
In one sense,
this journey is on the road to salvation:
to bring us to our promised inheritance
Jesus has to have something else in mind also,
because he talks about not just feeding
but also becoming food:
the bread I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world.
We are to sacrifice ourselves,
as Jesus on the cross and in the Eucharist,
for the sake of the poor ones,
the lowly and the afflicted.
The Eucharist challenges us to become their food,
so that they may complete the journey to the mountain of God
“Christ handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering.”
Let us be Eucharist for one another
in the deserts of
our lives.
Let us “be kind to each other,
and compassionate,
forgiving one
another
as God has
forgiven
us in
Christ.”