“Embodied Bread”

“Embodied Bread”

Psalm 51:1-12, Ephesians 4:1-16, John 6:24-35

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, August 4, 2024

First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho

Andy Kennaly, Pastor

The general public never seems satisfied but carries restlessness, and lots of time, effort, and money gets applied to try and fulfill this sense of feeling unsettled. As we look at biblical stories, we see this dynamic echoed throughout the ages. Here in John’s gospel, we have Jesus back in Capernaum. He’s just fed over 5,000 people with five barley loaves and two fish. The crowds that had sat on the ground in the grass wanted to take Jesus by force and make him king. Jesus knew this so he left, went to the mountain by himself, then after dark walked on water and caught up with the disciples in their boat and off they went to Capernaum.

But now the crowds have caught up with him again and they use coercion to try and extract more bread in ongoing ways. They pull the Tradition card, refer to Moses in the wilderness where the people are fed manna each day, bread from heaven. The very people who experienced a miracle of feeding are not satisfied, so they demand more signs and works to have Jesus prove to them that they should believe him.

The living Christ in their midst calls them to trust in the one who sent Christ, to have faith, and they want just the opposite of faith. The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. They want certitude that Jesus will be the bread guy, and they will find their fill not only on the grassy hill, but every day. But when Jesus says,

I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,

Jesus talks about more than a daily loaf, but the very presence of God, the “I am” who infuses and sustains each moment of life and calls created things into being.

There’s a figure I heard a while back that says 99 percent of all the life that has ever lived on the planet Earth is extinct. Only 1 percent of Earth life is currently alive on the planet (and that 1 percent happens to be in a mass extinction process right now). But for that 1 percent to have life at all, in the way we know it today, the 99 percent had to give of itself.

The very molecules that form the matter of our bodies are not unique to us, but we participate in a massive recycling of materials. Like a compost pile that suddenly sprouts a pumpkin vine, or a sunflower, or potatoes, we are what has grown from all the life that has come before us. The carbon in our cells, the nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elements, have lived prior lives in other forms. After each, they break down into their components to be taken up again. They may even change form, solid, liquid, gas, it’s all here. Through molecular exchange, our lives take up what is needed. As we live and when we die, we give it all back.

There’s an old saying,

You are what you eat.

This rings true because what we ingest for nourishment becomes the energy that sustains us, it becomes us. If we stop eating, or drinking, we die. A continuous flow of nutrients is needed, and every day we are humbled to receive it. Without these other things brought in from outside our bodies, we would perish. But by taking them in, we find life.

If this is true for the physical, this is even more true for the spiritual. We need food for the soul. This is what Jesus is talking about, this is what Paul the mystic refers to: Christ’s gift of Christ’s self, offered and taken up, a continuous outpouring of love and grace; a gift of Christ to all things such that there is tremendous unity through this bond of body, even among diversity of expression.

Jesus says,

I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

To believe is more than an intellectual idea, but it has to do with trust with our whole being. On one hand this sounds simple, but on the other hand, people are very complex, and we do have problems, deep hunger, emptiness. There is much in our world that we seek to use to fill this emptiness, feed this deep hunger, address our complex problems, and much of the time these distractions get our egos thinking that we're pretty good at this. We think we're righteous, and we are, but for different reasons.

Donna Schaper in her book, Stripping Down, the Art of Spiritual Restoration, reminds us of the reason we are righteous as she talks about stripping furniture. She says,

The first thing people do when restoring old chairs is strip – strip right down to the bare wood. They do this to see what the original might have looked like and to determine if the thing is worth doing over. They strip away all the years of grime, the garish coats of paint piled one on top of the other. They get rid of all the junk that's been tacked on through the years and try to find the solid, simple thing that's underneath.

Then she adds a reflection and says,

I'm like an old chair needing that stripping process. Every now and then I have to take a really hard look at the illusions I've built up in myself and my society, see what I've gotten myself into. Illusions? Yes, illusions; the excess baggage I carry around, the unnecessary, the socially expected, all that keeps me living off center too long. Stripping myself of all this is an intentional letting go of these illusions. It is a spiritual act of personal forgiveness. God lets us let go. It's hard to let God forgive me. I have to discover the original under all these coats I've added, strip away all the cynicism and anger I've built up, get rid of the junk I've taken on, defy my disappointments, and find what is real again.

(Donna Shaper, Stripping Down, San Diego: LuraMedia, 1991)

To follow Jesus is to find daily bread, to invite and allow a journey deeper into trust to shape us and form us, mind, body, and spirit. Just like food comes in and we are what we eat, so too as Christ enters, we become the body of Christ in this world. Indeed, Christ is already there, inside of us, in the still, calm center. This is righteousness that transforms us, and it’s no mistake that through the waters of baptism it is declared that we are marked as Christ’s own forever.

So too, in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Lord invites spiritual transformation and gives Christ as bread, renews us in the Holy Spirit, and not only calls us but sends us out to serve and be the people of God.

Thanks be to God for bread of heaven, soul-food for life. Amen.