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| Sharing the Bread of Like at St. James |
One of my son’s favorite books as a child was Norah Dooley’s Everybody Bakes Bread – part storybook and part cookbook. Young Carrie and her baby brother are at each other, driving their mother crazy as she tries to prepare a loaf of bread one rainy Saturday morning. Finally, Mom gets a twinkle in her eye, and sends Carrie off to the neighbor’s house to borrow a “three-handled rolling pin.” Mom gets some relief, and Carrie begins a culinary adventure around her neighborhood, in which she samples Barbadian coconut bread, Indian chapatis, Southern cornbread, pita, challah, pupusas, and finally her own mother's Italian bread. She never does find a three-handled rolling pin, but she does discover a multicultural community in which all people, however diverse they may be, share the same human hunger for bread and belonging.
Bread is a universal symbol of life, and it runs through the biblical stories like Carrie moving from house to house in her neighborhood; each context is different, but the basic hunger is the same: the hunger for freedom, the hunger for community, the hunger for meaning. Beyond our physical hunger there is a spiritual hunger, and it is the combination of our need for physical and spiritual sustenance that makes our hunger human, and our meals a celebration rather than just a biological necessity.
I can still smell the bread my grandfather baked filling the whole house. It was satisfying and delicious, filling up my senses, my belly, and my heart. The love that it communicated: the sense of safety, the sense of home, satisfied a hunger that I didn’t even know I had. I just took these things for granted at the time. I pray God that all children can take such things for granted. Just the memory of that bread has sustained me through a lifetime’s journey.
I hope you all have such personal bread memories. Our scriptures carry these bread memories for us collectively: the bread Sarah served the visitors bringing news of her long-awaited pregnancy; the bread Joseph shared with his brothers during the famine in Egypt; the bread hastily made by Jewish slaves preparing to escape from Egypt; the bread God provided those former slaves in the wilderness; the shewbread kept in the Temple; the miraculous bread that fed Elijah, the exhausted prophet, and that he prepared to feed a starving widow; the miraculous bread that fed the crowds following Jesus; the bread at the last supper Jesus shared with this friends. The Bread of Life. Bread, bread, bread.
Different times, different places, different bread, but one hunger. The Biblical stories remind us that God knows our hunger and continually provides the bread we need. In John’s Gospel, Jesus offers a discourse on the bread of life that bears within it all of these bread memories. But he goes a step further. He declares that he is the Bread of Life incarnate, and that God does not wish to feed us with bread alone, but with God’s own life. The bread which God gives for the life of the world is Jesus’ flesh; and not for life only, but for eternal life.
Our deepest hungers – for freedom, for belonging, for meaning – can only be satisfied by God. And God gives Godself to us freely in Jesus, so that we may become like God and share in God’s eternal life. God shared our human nature, so that we might share God’s divine nature. Jesus is the lure that draws us to God, to the satisfaction of our deepest hunger, exercising a kind of gravitational pull that keeps us orbiting around the divine center of our being.
We can resist that gravitational pull, or become mesmerized by the false promises of transient things that never quite satisfy our craving: a political savior, an ideology, a lover, a job, a drug. Such things leave us complaining for more. Jesus echoes the Word of the Lord spoken through the prophet Isaiah:
Why do you spend
your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David. – Isaiah 55:2-3
It is only in relationship with God, in the steadfast, sure love that God bears for us, that we find the bread of life. Jesus embodies this very love and shares it with us freely. The sacrament of Holy Communion carries this bread memory for us, such that when we receive it, we are united with Jesus in God’s mission to satisfy the world’s hunger. “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice for God.” - Ephesians 5:1-2
May our lives, like fresh baked bread, become fragrant offerings to feed the world’s hunger for love. In the name of the True Bread, who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. Amen.
