The Bread of Life
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 8, 2021
1 Kings 19:4-8 • John 6:35, 41-51
You’ve met Stephen’s dog, Fudge. You met our dog Poppy a couple of weeks ago. Today I want you to meet Lily. Lily sits in a tall, clear glass jar, either bubbling enthusiastically on my kitchen counter, or resting quietly in the fridge. She is a sour-dough starter, and joined our family during the pandemic. Over the years I have tried unsuccessfully to persuade one of her kin to take up residence, but it took the enforced stay at home to allow me to pay enough attention to make Lily feel welcome, feel like she belonged, and want to stay.
She is a delightful member of our family. Perfectly happy to rest, but she always enjoying her weekly meal of flour and warm water: surging into sweet-smelling, bubbling activity. She gives, and gives, and gives. There is no limit to her joyful generosity. Generosity that enlivens other nutritious ingredients to work together to create delicious rounds of golden brown, aromatic loaves of bread. Nothing of Lily ever goes to waste: while she is appreciated in her active bubbling state, when quiet, she can create the most delicious waffles, or indeed be welcomed into any baking project, adding taste, digestibility, and texture wherever she goes.
Why am I telling you about Lily and making you salivate in your seats? Well, we have been hearing a lot about bread in our readings from scripture over the last couple of weeks, and today I wanted to focus on the vibrancy, the vitality of bread. It is not only the stuff of life, it is life itself. We are usually moving too fast to notice or appreciate anything more than the ordinariness of the bread – or of anything else that is activated by the powerfully creative energies in our world.
We are so used to the way the world works, and the power that is surging through us and around us, that we take so much of it for granted: it’s just the way things are.
The energy and abundance of Lily has been and continues to be a wonder to me. A simple wild yeast whose creative energies have been appreciated and used for at least 5,000 years, undoubtedly more, in both bread and beer making.
As I said last week, just because we can understand and explain something does not make it any less of a miracle. Indeed everything that we put in our mouths to nourish our bodies is the result of a miraculous process of creation in our beautiful, and so very alive world.
And in thinking about this ‘bread of life’, we also need to think about everything we consume: through our eyes, our ears, as well as our mouths! We can, after all, eat our words, bite off more than we can chew, be out to lunch, have our cake and eat it! And we have choices about what we consume: much is life-giving; not all is.
That in year two of our three year lectionary cycle, our readings focus on this bread of life for five weeks in a row, tells us something. This is something really important that we need to pay attention to.
In the prayer Jesus taught us, we have the line: give us today our daily bread. The Eucharist, one of the two holy sacraments given to us by Jesus, lies at the center of our corporate and personal faith life. In sharing the consecrated bread and wine together, we raise up the seemingly ordinary and say, ‘this is indeed holy’. This is life-giving food: life not only in the flesh, but also in the spirit. By sharing these gifts, we both remember and are enlivened by the bread which, like everything else, has always been so much more than ordinary and worthy of thought.
Of course, as Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel, we do have to make choices in what we consume. All ‘bread’, all that we consume through our ears, eyes, and mouths is not necessarily good for us. We need to be discerning. We are not being just being spoon-fed like babies. We have to choose the nutritious, both literal and metaphorical. And by making the right choices, we are choosing life itself.
As Jesus tells us, when we choose this bread of life, we will never, never be hungry. It is ours to find, raise up, and share with everyone. And there is enough.
The true bread of life gives and gives: its unlimited, joyful generosity enlivening us and all creation.