August 11, 2024 - The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Well, good morning, Epiphany. It’s good to be back in the pulpit with you today. Any children here this morning can head out now for children’s church; thank you to those who have volunteered to help care for our kids and – for those who read the Enotes email newsletter this week – thank you to those who signed up to volunteer this year at South Haven Public Schools. We also have a Backpack Blessing for kids coming up in two weeks... more on that during announcements.
Our gospel passage today starts abruptly, and thus so will our sermon: “Jesus said, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
I am the bread of life. Well, not me, Jesus is the bread of life... The bread of life.
Now for those who remember where we are in the lectionary, Jesus, in John chapter 6, is just coming off the feeding of the five thousand; it’s the only miracle recorded in all four gospels. Jesus deals with literal bread, five barley loaves, and two fish, and he miraculously feeds all who are gathered on a hill of green grass near the seaside to hear him. Last week’s gospel continued the story from there: those well-fed people have followed Jesus and the disciples across the small sea to Capernaum, and he kind of scolds them for doing it, saying they are only looking for him because he miraculously fed them... he then says, a bit cryptically, that they instead should be “working for the food that endures for eternal life.... the bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” He’s clearly teasing what he’s about to say...
Thankfully, Janet MacKenzie preached from the other lectionary texts last week, she didn’t hit that point or push into the resolution of Jesus’s teaser, and I’m glad she didn’t because it left me some room to talk about Jesus and bread this morning... also, Janet did wonderfully emphasize a point that we will circle around to again later: “It is our baptismal call to be part of the people called to do God’s work in the world.” The sermon was just so good, Janet, thank you.... but yes, let’s put it aside for a few minutes.
Back to the story... in today’s gospel reading, Jesus pulls out his big revelation in our first verse... The people gathered there should be working and looking for the food that endures for eternal life, the food that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, and... surprise! It’s not manna or some other form of raining bread... it’s Him. Jesus is that very bread of life that they are really seeking.
Jesus kicks off his metaphor of bread, not using a simile... which if you remember from middle school English class would go something like “I am like the bread of life.” No, he uses a straight metaphor here, and it begins with two words that would have distinct and powerful resonance for the people of Israel, for the Jews following him and gathered there to hear him: Jesus uses the two words “I AM.” Ego eimi in the Greek, Jesus uses that phrase I AM just seven times in the entire gospel of John, and each time, he uses it to describe a different aspect of himself, of his representation of the God who first self-identified as “I am who I am.” He’s giving us, some commentators believe, a detailed description of the creator God here too, not just himself. Some of Jesus’s uses will be familiar to us this morning: I am the light of the world, I am the door, I am the good shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the way the truth and the life, and I am the true vine.
But this use, this time that Jesus says “I am,” well, it’s the first time he’s done so in the entire gospel narrative. Jesus is announcing for the first time to the people gathered around who exactly he is and who he represents... and what does he say? I am bread.
You would think that in the Messiah’s first public identification, he might have said something like “I am the Savior of the World!” or “I am all-powerful and I am here for you!” or “I am the long-awaited descendant of David and so you can put your trust in me!” or even something as straightforward and as resonant for us here today as “I am welcoming and abundant love!” Nope. We get, “I am the bread of life.”
So why does Jesus first identify himself as bread? I know that in a churchy place such as this when you hear bread you likely first think of communion... and that’s good. All four gospel readings in August this year talk about Jesus as bread, and so we will sing about bread, and most of those songs connect bread to the table. Jesus (and John here in his gospel) helped shape that close connection between Jesus and bread well, and there’s much to be said about it, maybe even a few more sermons this month. (Ha.)
But outside of the church walls, most of us probably think of a bagged loaf of bread from the grocery store, white or wheat or sometimes rye, or the smell of fresh-baked bread at a bakery, or even if you’re lucky enough, at home. I think I can smell bread if I think hard enough about it; even for the gluten-free among us, I think it’s a welcome scent. I can feel the cracking of the crust on a fresh loaf, I’m a big fan of bread bowls... Bread is still a staple of life for many of us today, and for the common people of the first century, it was a daily provision, as common an element in their lives as there could be. It sustained them in their work, they broke it with their friends and families, they baked it in their homes.
Bread was life. And now Jesus, probably a little frustrated that they had hounded him across the sea to ask for more actual bread, Jesus is telling them they need to recognize what is right in front of their eyes... The bread of life that will not just fill their bellies but will sustain them and fundamentally change their lives is present and available to them now (just as it is to us today). When he told them, “whoever eats of this bread will not die, whoever eats of this bread will live forever, whoever comes to me will never be hungry, whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” they didn’t think he had a miracle food tucked away in a basket; the Jews present there that day connected Jesus’s I AM statement to the God who said “I am who I am,” and then heard that this miracle-producing representative of God sent down from heaven was most like bread, available to them now, common yet essential, and endlessly sustaining.
Now, that’s not what some of the Jews wanted to hear that day – they complained quite a bit about it, and we know how this story ends... if you don’t, definitely come back during Holy Week – but I would argue, that for us today, Jesus’s identification first as the very bread of life might be one of the most comforting and heartening parts of the entire gospel story. See, God was no longer among us on earth as a mysterious presence hidden behind expensive veils in a gold-plated ark in a lofty hilltop temple. Instead, God came incarnate as Jesus Christ, the always-available and sustaining bread of life, who in the breaking of his body on the cross tore down the veil in the temple and in the continued breaking of his body at our table might be available to sustain each and every one of us in the bread here today.
The bread that we break at communion here at Epiphany is baked by a group of people from within our own community, and that is such a rare and wonderful gift. As Episcopalians, we believe that communion is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” a sacrament “for the continual remembrance of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.” We won’t get into what all that means and we definitely won’t talk about transubstantiation here this morning... at the very, very least, I hope that we here at Epiphany will see communion as a regular encounter with Jesus, the bread of life that sustains us as Christians and forms us into, as Janet preached last week, into being the people who are called and equipped to do God’s work in the world.
But perhaps even more than in communion itself, I pray for us this morning that the lives that we live that imitate God – “living in love as Christ loved us,” as Paul put it in his beautiful passage in Ephesians this morning – I pray that those lives, of speaking truth, laboring honestly, sharing with the needy, building each other up, giving grace to those who hear us, forgiving one another... all powered by the sustaining bread of life, that those lives will themselves give life to the world around us.
Thankfully, we need never do that work alone. We have each other, and we have Jesus, the very bread of life, to sustain us for the journey... if only we would choose to eat. Amen.
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