Bread of Life

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Berryville, Arkansas on Sunday August 16, 2009, the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

In John’s gospel, Jesus says “I AM” twenty-four times.[1] In each of these phrases the text invokes something very special; each of these phrases uses the Greek version of the Holy Name of God. I was reminded last week that it was C. S. Lewis who said that it is foolish to believe that Jesus is a wonderful teacher, but not the Son of God and the Son of Man. Jesus declares that he is the Son of God and the Son of Man. He clearly says “I AM,” at least in John’s gospel. Lewis tells us that our choices are to believe that Jesus is either exactly who he says he is, or that he’s a complete and total whack job. It is foolish to believe that a man can be a wise teacher if he claims to be God and is not. This is eminently logical, but logic is not where we should be coming from today.

Logic and knowledge and interpretation were the wheelhouse of the Jewish leadership. Jesus says I am the living bread that came down from heaven…and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. The first thing that the temple leaders can think to say is “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Yes, of course it’s a good question. It’s a very good question especially from someone and for someone who is so locked up in the legal aspects of faith that mystical and metaphorical symbols have no other expression than those of their fathers and their fathers before them. This is probably what Jesus finds disappointing. These are leaders who are ordained to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love fail to exercise a grain of imagination. Well, actually I misspoke, that question comes from my ordination vows, not the Jewish leaders. Too, they are in the vows taken by all Presbyterian Elders.[2]

Jesus offers eternal life, life in Christ, life that is available not just in the future, but today too. Eternal life is connected to physical life; after all, Jesus existed in this world, he is the Word become flesh. But eternal life is more than physical life. Eternal life is life in Christ, life in God. Eternal life is life worth living. Very early on in John’s gospel we read this as it is written, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” In a very real way, John teaches that before the Word, before the life and the Word of Jesus how people lived wasn’t really life at all. Instead, at its best it was a step toward what life could be.

Some people lived well in that first step of life; David and his son Solomon were great examples of glorious lives lived in the Lord before Jesus lived. Our reading today demonstrates this showing that when the Lord asked Solomon what gift he wished to receive, Solomon was wise enough to ask for an understanding mind to govern the Lord’s people and the ability to discern between good and evil. It’s not too much of a leap to connect this request with our call to serve God’s people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.

Because Solomon sought wisdom instead of riches and power he received wisdom and was also given riches and power. Yet, neither David nor Solomon had the connection to the Lord that we have today. As from words of the Lord Jesus, “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.” As glorious and blessed as their lives were, they could not partake of God incarnate and live because of him, not in the way available to us through the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We participate in this action when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. It is in the supper that we celebrate our continuing to abide in Christ and that Christ abides in us. By abiding, our lives and our faith are nourished in the love of the Lord Jesus. According to John Calvin, with the participation of the Holy Spirit, faith is nourished and strengthened by the sacrament. He calls the Lord’s Supper “a secret too sublime for my mind to understand or words to express. I experience it rather than understand it.”[3]

It is this choice of Calvin’s that further invites us to experience that mystery rather than to try to pick it apart. Denominations have done this dissection for hundreds of years, but it is to no avail. Rather, let us know that Jesus said “this is my body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Let us know that his body, his very flesh to us is bread for life. Let us remember this as we partake of the supper together. This element of togetherness is too important. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes of coming together as the family of God together at the table which Christ invites us to share.

“The simple act of sitting down around a table is something a lot of people don't find particularly important - but for Christians, the shared supper is a vital aspect of spiritual life.

“‘The Scriptures speak of three kinds of table fellowship that Jesus keeps with his own: daily fellowship at table, the table fellowship of the Lord's Supper, and the final table fellowship in the kingdom of God. But in all three, the one thing that counts is that 'their eyes were opened, and they knew him.’

“‘The fellowship of the table teaches Christians that here they still eat the perishable bread of the earthly pilgrimage. But if they share this bread with one another, they shall also one day receive the imperishable bread together in the Father's house.’”[4]

We are called to eat the flesh, but we are to come together to eat it, not on the run like a holy sort of drive-thru window. We do this together because when we receive the Lord we receive one another too. Jesus came to be with the whole congress of creation, not just bits and pieces.

Thomas Merton wrote, “There is not one of us, individually, racially, socially, who is not fully complete in any sense of having in himself all the excellence of all humanity. And this excellence, this totality, is built up out of the contributions of the particular parts of it that we all can share with one another. I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of which I lack.”[5]

We come together because separately none of us are complete.

Barbara Williamson tells this story: “Each year at lambing time, there are lambs and ewes who do not make it. Inevitably, on one side of the field is a ewe whose lamb has died. The ewe is filled with ilk but will not nourish any lamb she does not recognize as her own. Inevitably, on the other side of the field is a lamb whose mother has died. That lamb will starve because no ewe will accept and nourish it. So the shepherd takes the dead lamb and slits its throat, and pours its blood over the body of the living lamb. Recognizing the blood, the ewe will now nurse and save the orphaned lamb. Through the gift of the blood of the lamb who has died, the living lamb is recognized and restored to the fold, nourished and saved. That is the Lamb of God.”[6]

By his stripes, by his blood, we are saved. The bread of life feeds us and allows us to be recognized by the Father…or as this illustration tells us, the mother. This is a paschal way to express the invitation we receive to come to the table.

The words of the Orthodox liturgy call us to the table this way:

Come, O faithful ones,
let us enjoy the Lord’s hospitality,
in the banquet of immortality
In the upper chamber, with minds uplifted,
let us learn the Word from the Word
whom we magnify.[7]

We are called to the table to share the bread of life. Another ancient word used for the bread of life is Eucharist. The words of the ancient church describe the Eucharist as “either by good grace, or by thanksgiving. And rightly, indeed it is to be called good grace, as well because it signifies eternal life, concerning which it has been written: The grace of God is eternal life, and also because it contains Christ the Lord, who is true grace and the fountain of all favors.”[8]

Consider these words from Paul Bernier: “If we understand Eucharist as the mystery of Christ’s continuing ability to feed his people, if we know that his bread is broken to be shared with the needy and the poor, this will form out attitude and lend the dynamism of faith too our efforts. We need a clear ideal of what kind of world we are striving to build and the ideal we take from the Lord’s table is that he has given us brothers and sisters the world over who have a claim on us because we accept the bread broken in order to be shared.”[9]

These favors, this life, nourished by the bread of life calls us to more than simply taking from the loaf; we are to offer the loaf just as the Lord offered it to us. As the author Flannery O’Connor wrote, “You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.”[10] In the words of Mother Teresa, “The Eucharist and the poor are but one love for me.”[11]

As bloody and as violent as some of these images of are; twentieth century theologian Karl Rahner reminds us that “The Lord gave himself to us precisely as food to be enjoyed.”[12] In a world that is often more focused on the suffering of Good Friday, we are called to be the people of Easter. Grace came to us violently, but Jesus went to it voluntarily so that we may enjoy him forever.

I know I have piled many, many images together. Sometimes the connection is well explained, sometimes the imagery opens us to new ways to taste and see that the Lord is good, and sometimes it’s just baffling. It is my hope that these images can help spark a new look at the bread of life for all of us, a new look at the great I AM and who HE IS. Jesus is the bread of life; it is by his flesh that we are fed with the gift of eternal life. He is the fountain of all favors and we are the fruit of his work.

But in a spiritual way, many live like the Dickens character Oliver Twist. We are orphans in a strange place, hoping for even a morsel of bread so that we may know life, and so that we may share this new life with others. It is our hope that we may eat of this bread and drink of this cup; and when we do, we should hunger and thirst for new life, holy life, life in Christ. It is my hope that we can all leave here with Twist’s words on our lips, begging to the Lord our God with anticipation of living life eternal; life with, by and through God. “Please sir, I want some more.”

[1] BibleWorks search for the Greek phrase “ego eimi,” the equivalent to the Hebrew Tetragrammaton.
[2] PC(USA) and Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Book of Occasional Services, pages 58 and 24.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin.
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 66.
[5] Eucharist, Liturgical Training Publications 18
[6] Eucharist
[7] Orthodox liturgy, Eucharist
[8] Eucharist
[9] Eucharist 86
[10] Eucharist 120
[11] Eucharist, 123
[12] Eucharist, 82