Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Dear Friends in Christ, God’s grace and peace be with you.  Amen.

One of my favorite things to do is to make food for others to enjoy. To prepare some baked good to bring to the staff when it’s my turn to provide treats is one of my happiest endeavors:  cinnamon rolls, or perhaps a pie, which I know will delight my colleagues and get our meeting off to a happy start.

To make a complete meal for friends or extended family, choosing just the right recipes, adding some special spice from the cupboard, or some herb from the garden, figuring out some new way to flavor the lemonade or the iced tea. It’s my absolute delight. Singing as I stir, I can turn my kitchen into a cloudy mass of flour and steam, and my counters and floor into sticky, colorful abstract art, as I measure and toss, knead and blend, and (often several minutes after I hoped) present a wide spread of lovely things for the people I love.

One of my sisters aims for Portion Control, having exactly the right amount for the number of plates at the table. But I nearly always make way too much of whatever I’m preparing. Serving something plentiful and satisfying, allows me to be creative, nurturing, and hospitable. It brings out the best in me.

Is it any wonder that scripture so often uses food to help us understand God’s connection to us? From planting foods that bear seeds and fruit in the garden, to raining down manna in the wilderness, providing oil and grain to Elijah and the widow, or spreading a table before me with cups running over, God’s presence and care for us is expressed as the provision of abundant, nutritious, life-giving food. Jesus himself changes water into wine, roasts fish on the shore, and miraculously feeds those who are hungry with bread that multiplies and is so satisfying, that over 5000 guests can’t even finish the leftovers. (So much for Portion Control!)

In this sixth chapter of John, Jesus responds to the crowds who heard about the miraculous feeding, and come to him looking for more. Jesus seems to chastise those who are looking for bread, warning them against a quick sugar fix, and encouraging them to look for sustenance that will last (John 6:24-35).

I think we can read words like these and presume that Jesus must not be all that concerned with real food. “Do not work for food that perishes, but for the Life that endures. Believe in the One God has sent.” The gospel seems to imply that God isn’t as concerned with our physical nourishment, as much as God longs for us to believe. What’s most important is enduring for eternal life, which must only refer to going to heaven after we die.

But notice that Jesus doesn’t say that God will give us bread one day, but that God gives us true bread, present tense. We don’t believe in God so that we can be fed heavenly food, we are given the true bread from heaven now, right here on this side of the sea.

Don’t miss it, because the passage was read last week. Jesus feeds the crowd with real food. This is not just a religious text about cerebral thoughts and beliefs. When people are hungry, Jesus feeds them, with food that fills their bellies. But Jesus knows that full bellies can sometimes hide our hunger for something deeper, and he’s not about to leave us there.

We often think of John’s gospel as the richest in terms of metaphor or image – Jesus calls himself the Vine, and the Shepherd, Jesus is the Gate, and the Door, the Way, the Truth and the Life. John’s writing gives us the most descriptive, poetic depictions of who Jesus is, as if he keeps trying to paint a picture to help us fully envision the true message Jesus comes to bring.

But then again, think about how concrete and every day these images are, door, gate, way, vine, shepherd. Almost everyone in Jesus’s world had first-hand experience with these things. They are images and ideas that are extraordinarily commonplace, accessible. Rather than using profoundly mystical or esoteric ideas, Jesus uses concrete, every day images to illustrate his message.

God isn’t revealed to us in some hard to pronounce, rarely-tasted recipe you can only find in an exotic, exceptional restaurant, God feeds us with the most commonly tasted food you can imagine. Daily bread, here and now. Loaves and loaves of fragrant, satisfying, delicious, wholesome, but also plain old bread. Not just an eventual meal, consumed when we enter paradise, but heavenly bread on earth, made of real grain and taken into our very earthy bodies.

But in an even deeper way, Jesus is also telling us that God is here. God is present—as we gather together. In the food we eat, in the words we say, on the paths we walk, in the water we splash. God is with us. The word, the presence, the meaning of God has been made flesh, and lives in the bread, in the water, in the very Body of Jesus.

And of course, because Jesus feeds us with this bread, it means that God is present in our bodies too. Jesus comes to bring life to the world, a world full of full bellies, and full and generous hearts, too.

The reading we heard from Ephesians (Ephesians 4:1-16) is a letter written to a community of Christians who come from a wide variety of backgrounds. The writer longs for them to be united, to recognize the diversity of their gifts and backgrounds, and to claim it as a gift that allows their assembly to be unique and strong. Use your differences to build up the body. Use your unique abilities and interests in the service of one another, and in order to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The community of Jesus’ followers is a community that works for the good of the whole, because we believe the Whole is the Living Body of Christ.

What a contrast that will seem to a world which teaches us to look out only for our own interests, and to strive so that we can get what we deserve, and to put ourselves first. The community in which Jesus unites us is one that promotes the whole, encouraging and supporting each part to work properly, building up the entire body in love, because it is the body of Christ. It is the living, loving presence of God in the world.

Like bread formed from grains gathered from scattered fields, Jesus takes us with whatever our backgrounds, or ideas, or gifts, or challenges, and kneads us into one community of faith. And then, because this is the bread that comes down from heaven to feed the world, Jesus empowers us to feed our neighbors.

It’s that Portion Control issue again – there’s too much grace for just this house. Twelve baskets full of leftovers that need to be given to others. Once we’ve eaten our fill of the bread, we discover that there’s more we want to do.

This week our community gathered to help our neighborhood food shelf, Francis Basket, offer fresh produce and baked goods to our community. It was leftover stuff, mostly. Baked goods about to reach their expiration date, and fruit and vegetables that only had a few more days before it would spoil. But in the hands of friendly, willing brothers and sisters, food given to nourish and build up the bodies of neighbors.

This wasn’t just an esoteric, idea about the nature of divine generosity. This was real food in the hand of real people, just like the real and present love of God.

It’s not just food, either. Jesus scatters crumbs along the path for us to find and use in service to the world in need. In a few weeks we’ll offer a tangible welcome to those who catch the bus for the fair. We’ll offer them a simple gesture, just a little bottle of water, but one that never fails to surprise and delight the recipients, who often admit they didn’t expect us to offer it freely. Free gifts of kindness are hardly commonplace these days.

Since we’ve been fed with Living Bread and formed into a Body of Real Abundance, we offer actual demonstrations of kindness. Real relationships for people who are lonely. Authentic compassion for people in crisis. Genuine forgiveness for people who have harmed us.

So, this was my week to bring snacks to our staff meeting. I’m sorry to say, I didn’t bake anything. I ran out of time. I ended up serving a store-bought angel food cake. It wasn’t the greatest.

On Wednesday, we hosted some friends for dinner at our house. My husband took care of preparing the meal.  I didn’t even crack open the flour canister. There was no sticky mess to clean off our kitchen floor when the meal was finished.

Sometimes it’s worse than that. The meal I’ve planned just doesn’t get made. I have the wrong ingredients. I run out of time. I drop some key part of the dish on the floor and need to start over.

Sometimes my kitchen song sours; it becomes filled with bitter complaint about how the yeast didn’t rise, or with despair about how I feel wronged, or am overly discouraged by the state of the world.

Whatever. Jesus includes me at the table, anyway. It’s not because I’m always gracious or generous, faithful, productive, kind, or loving. Jesus includes me because that’s what the Bread of Life does. God never stops feeding me, whether I’m deserving or not.

Did you notice that Jesus never asks the crowd what they’ve done to be worthy of living bread? He simply says, “Come to be and never be hungry again.”