Bread for all kinds of hunger

My fourth-grade teacher was a young, enthusiastic and optimistic woman named Miss Johnson. She walked into our classroom having just come back from a stint in the Peace Corps—what a great idea! We were going to send people to the moon, why not send people around the world to make peace! In the Peace Corps, she taught in a little village school in a brand-new African nation called Botswana.

Miss Johnson wanted us to learn about how big and diverse, and yet how small and connected, our world is. So she organized an international festival that involved all the fourth grades, maybe the whole school. We learned about the cultures and music and art and geography from around the world. We wore costumes and made flags, we learned music and dances from around the globe.

And we baked bread. All kinds of bread: wheat breads, rice breads, corn breads, potato breads. You name it! She must have organized this with the mothers of the students because I remember my mother and I learning how to make a kind of rice bread that is known in the fishing villages of Hokaido in northern Japan, where my father had served in the Army after World War Two.

Why bread? Because everyone, everywhere eats bread! And being used to sliced, white bread in cellophane, it was a real eye-opener to learn about all the different kinds of bread there was from all over the world!

All over the word, bread is life and this morning we heard Jesus call himself “the Bread of Life.”

To understand what Jesus is saying, recall a world where food is scarce, where food can never be taken for granted. It was not so long ago where the idea of having a meal that consisted mainly of bread and something to drink, usually water, often wine or beer, was considered pretty normal. Meat was not an everyday occurrence, so people ate their bread with fruit or cheese or a vegetable. And people had to work—spend almost all their waking energy—to gather, make and prepare what they would eat.

Today, we walk into stories and choose from aisles full of food. We drive up to chain restaurants, talk into a box, and get what we want in abundance. And, unless you live in a so-called food desert where the only stores are bodegas and bars or live on food stamps and WIC, the problem in our culture is not starvation but obesity. We still think about food but the struggle today is think about it less. Our culture has turned food into entertainment—something to fend off the boredom.

But this is not the world Jesus was speaking to, and he did not call himself the bread of life by accident.

Of course, Jesus is not talking about food. He is talking about our deep down spiritual hunger and God’s satisfying, nourishing, spiritual food.

In the Gospel of John, when Jesus describes himself as God’s Messiah, as God with us, he says “I am” a lot. “I am the good shepherd.” “I am the light of the world.” “I am the way.” When he says “I AM living bread which comes down from heaven” and “I AM the bread of life,” he is talking about himself both as manna…the bread that God provided the pilgrim people of Israel during their journey in the wilderness between slavery and the Promised Land…and as ordinary, daily bread, baked every day the world over as the heart of everyday eating.

Bread reminds us that our relationship with God is not occasional but constant. God lives in us and with us. God inhabits us. Jesus is telling us that our connection with God is so immediate and so intimate that God inhabits the very fiber of our being.

It’s easy to forget when the communion wafer is so small, so simple, so plain, that what we are eating is bread not so different from all the different kinds of bread made all over the world. And in that little piece of unleavened bread has so much baked into it. Thomas Aquinas wrote a devotional poem that appears in our Hymnal:

O memorial wondrous of the Lord’s own death;

living Bread that givest all thy creatures breath,

grant my spirit ever by thy life may live,

to my taste thy sweetness never failing give.

Let’s think about two ways that Jesus feeds us.

Jesus feeds us because we are hungry. There are some Christian traditions that won’t let you receive until you have confessed all your sins and received forgiveness. They ask that your spiritual life be cleaned up before you can receive. And while the Apostle Paul does warn us against receiving Communion while we angry with our neighbor, I tend to think of the Sacrament as something we need precisely because we don’t have our spiritual act together. That’s why the Episcopal Church opens communion to all the baptized.

The Roman Catholic writer Nancy Mairs says: “I don’t partake (of the Eucharist) because I am good Catholic, holy and plain and sleek. I partake because I am a bad Catholic, riddled by doubt and anxiety and anger: fainting from severe hypoglycemia of the soul. I need food.”

Jesus feeds us because we are hungry.

And Jesus feeds us to make us become like him.

In many ways,  the old saying [and the cartoon in today’s bulletin] it right. “We are what we eat.” Jesus shows us that what feeds us is not just food but everything we take in—words, images, relationships, our knowledge, our surroundings, our music, our art, our science. And what really transforms us, what really makes us grow into the people God made us to be, comes from God.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said “In Holy Communion we have Christ under the appearance of bread. In our work we find him under the appearance of flesh and blood. It is the same Christ. ‘I was hungry. I was naked. I was sick. I was homeless’.”

Jesus feeds us on the most basic level and teaches us how to feed others. Jesus feeds us to make us like him.

So, what Miss Johnson said was true: everyone, everywhere eats bread. It comes in all kinds of shapes and forms just as we do. Jesus is the bread of life feeds us because we are deep-down hungry and he feeds us to make us become like him.

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Here is a link to the bulletin and to a video of the liturgy at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, Florida for Sunday, August 8, 2021

Here is a link to a video of the sermon for Sunday, August 8, 2021.

Here is a link for the propers for the day.