Bread alone?

Proper 15

In the name of God: our source and our sustenance.  Amen.

The old adage is that one cannot live on bread alone.  But if you’ve been in church these past few weeks, you might think we’re teaching something different here.  This is the fourth out of five weeks in which the primary metaphor in the Gospel lesson is about bread.  It’s a problem I face every three years when this bread-heavy cycle comes around again - even with my two weeks off from having to preach about it this time, I still wonder just how much bread we can take!

It began three weeks ago.  The crowds following Jesus had human needs: they were hungry.  They were gathered in a field and their resources were scarce.  But somehow, with Jesus, they had their fill.  Then, after their immediate needs had been met, the people clamored around him.  He retreated from them, but they continued to follow him.

So in the lesson that we heard two weeks ago, he began to teach.

He knew that the crowds were following him because he had fed them with bread.  But he also knew that they needed more.  They could not live – at least not really live – on bread alone.

They had come to him in search of bread, so he met them where they were.  He taught them about bread.  They had eaten the bread of the earth – the toil of their hands.  They had had their fill.  But their hunger was more persistent than that bread could satisfy.  So he told them of the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

“Give us this bread always!”, they said.

And that’s when he springs it on them: “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

And that was it.  Like the cliffhanger at the end of a drama, we were left with that bold, unexplained statement.  ‘I am that bread of life.  Through me your needs will be met.’

So it’s understandable that we came back to the story for another look last week.  There’s bread that gives life to the world and he claims to be it?  Sure, he’s done some incredible things, but this might be pushing it.

And that’s right where we found the story last week.  Jesus has just given away the secret – in the terms at least most likely to make any kind of sense to this crowd – and they were shocked.  How can he claim to be some kind of magical bread from heaven that will give life to the world?  Then they remembered who he was.  ‘Is this not Jesus, whose father and mother we know?  He’s just this guy, and here he is claiming he can give life to the world…’  You can almost hear the crowds murmuring against him.

Jesus had certainly done well for himself.  He’d amassed a following, and there was the whole feeding of the five thousand thing.  But now they wondered if he was just taking it too far.  Maybe they thought that now he was taking a bit too much credit.

I have to admit.  As I was preparing to preach this week, I found this text pretty frustrating.  Not only was I frustrated to be hearing about bread again, but also it started to feel like the message was beginning to get lost in the metaphor.  With so much focus on bread, it felt like the story of Jesus was losing its focus.  I mean, I get it.  Jesus is like bread.  Through Christ we are nourished and sustained.  Without Christ we wander through the world with an insatiable hunger.  I get it!

So, I started looking for a way out.  I found myself thinking; maybe I’ll focus on one of the other texts and just mention the bread thing again.  In that desperation I stumbled on the line from the Letter to the Ephesians, and something clicked: “Do not get drunk with wine… but be filled with the Spirit!”

That’s what the bread talk is really all about: “Don’t get drunk with wine… but be filled with the Spirit.”  It’s not about drunkenness or wine – it’s about finding that balance between the world of the flesh and world of the Spirit.

We have earthly needs.  No one can deny that we need our daily bread.  But it’s easy to make the mistake of allowing those earthly needs to grow into something more: a kind of earthly drunkenness that distorts our vision of what is true.

I’m sure you know that I am an advocate for finding ways of bringing the church into new media and technology.  It’s almost hard to imagine now, but I’ve often told the story of when I was first ordained: how an actual debate was happening about whether or not it was actually important for churches to have websites.  A lot of churches in our diocese didn’t.  I argued that we should, not just because it’s good marketing, but also because it’s what I described as “the new red door”.  It was the first thing that prospective visitors were likely to see.

Now, that focus has shifted to livestreaming worship.  Like us, lots of churches started offering livestreamed services during the pandemic lockdown, but you’d probably be surprised to learn how many have now stopped.  But it continues to be important for those same reasons that websites were 15 years ago – it’s among the first things many visitors will see before they join us for the first time.  When you add in the lifeline to this community that it offers to people who are distant, or otherwise unable to come to church, it seems like a no-brainer.  But still, many churches argue it’s no longer important.

Regardless of any of our personal feelings about these new technologies, it’s important that we embrace them, because it may be the only way we have to meet people where they are.

I blog.  I Facebook.  I use Instagram.  I have a YouTube channel.  I do these things for fun, but I also do them in conjunction with my work as a priest because I have this sneaking suspicion that these tools can bring us a step closer to finding and sharing the Body of Christ.  And like Jesus talking to the crowds about bread, I believe that these tools can help me to meet the people of God where they are.

And it’s true, we have to ask ourselves: at what point does the virtual world become nothing more than the temporal world?  To what degree does it share a clearer vision of the Body of Christ, and to what degree does it simply distort and distract us from what is true?

Perhaps these questions feel more explicit in the online world, but they are the same questions that face us in our lives as Christians every day.  What is real?  What is illusion, or distraction?  What brings us closer to Christ and what makes us feel more distant from our Christian center?  What builds up the Body of Christ and what causes it to break down?

We need our daily bread.  But as the world grows and shifts, along with our understandings of it, that daily bread may not look like it used to.  Even so, the core of what it means to live as Christians remains unchanged – even if the tools we use to do it have.

Whatever changes and chances of this world come, the goal is still the same – to love Christ and to live as Christ’s loving Body in the world.  That will always be the same.  Amen.