(Preached on Sunday, August 2, 2009)
Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” -John 6:35
BREAD! The staff of life! Did you ever wonder where that term originated? Or what it really meant? I have. So, I looked it up. It has its own entry in the dictionary. It means, “Bread, the basic food.” Well, duh! “Staff” is not much more help, until you examine the linguistic history, and discover far enough back that there is a root which meant “support.” So, what we have is this: Bread, the staff of life, the support of life, the basic food for supporting life.
Bread is the one food eaten in more places and in greater amounts than any other. It comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be long and skinny, short and round, or flat enough to roll up. But flat or thin, soft or hard, bread is an important food all over the world. It is thought that bread was first discovered about 12,000 years ago, in the mountain villages of what is now Turkey and northern Iran. People gathered the seeds of wild cereal plants and ground them into flour. They mixed the flour with water. Then the dough was kneaded and cooked on sun-heated stone to make bread. When the mountain people moved down onto the hot, dry plains, they took some of the cereal plants with them. They learned that by sowing the seeds, plants would grow, and they could use the new seeds to make more bread. This discovery soon spread to other Middle Eastern countries and to India and Europe. It was the ancient Egyptians who discovered that adding yeast to dough before it was cooked made it rise. They began to make softer, lighter bread. Thus it was that bread can be either leavened or unleavened. We tend to think of bread made from wheat flour, but it can be made from the flour of several grains: rye, oats, barley, and buckwheat can all be used.
Bread has played such an important part in history that it is not surprising that there are many beliefs about it. Bread is so important in Arabic countries that the words for bread and life are almost identical. Special bread it always a part of the Jewish Sabbath meal. It is eaten as a reminder that God miraculously provided food for the Hebrew people on their journey to the Promised Land. Of course, in Christianity, bread is shared at communion, symbolic of Christ’s body.
One of my seminary professors once suggested that a good exercise would be to do a study of bread throughout the Bible. I thought about doing that for this morning, but discovered it was not a one week project. There are 287 references to bread in the Hebrew Scriptures and 95 references in the Christian Scriptures. Just a quick scan of the references was very interesting. One could make a case for telling the entire story of the Bible through the story of bread. The very first reference to bread in the Bible is in Genesis 3:19 where God tells Adam that for having disobeyed he would now have to work hard and would eat his bread with the sweat on his face. Genesis then becomes a constant search for bread, until the people of Israel, in Egypt in the midst of a famine, sell themselves into slavery for bread. The central issue in Exodus then becomes the answer to the question: Who will the people trust for their bread? – Pharaoh, who enslaves them, or God, who offers them freedom. The bread of slavery is a sure thing, but the bread of God requires trust and risk. In a sense, this is the theme which continues throughout the Hebrew scripture: who do the people trust for their bread? And along with that, what do they do with their bread? Do they hoard it or do they share it?
The Christian scriptures continue this theme, when Jesus comes and begins teaching us to rely on God for our bread. He taught his disciples not to take any bread on their missionary journeys, trusting that God would provide. He instructs his followers to pray for no more than our daily bread, not worrying about tomorrow’s bread. Ultimately, he reminds us that, vitally important though bread is, we do not live by bread alone. It is not the most important nourishment for life. Rather he, himself, is the bread of life.
Jesus uses bread to teach us important lessons about life. First, he reminds us that even physical bread is a gift from God. The crowd asks him for a sign to demonstrate to them that he is the One God was sending and in doing so they claim the sign of Moses, providing the manna in the wilderness, as precedent. But Jesus corrects them, pointing out that Moses did not produce the manna, God did. The manna came from God, purely as gift. Even so, the bread God now offered them, the Bread of Life, was pure gift.
But this was a greater gift. For no amount of manna, no number of loaves multiplied, could provide the true nourishment for life. Only the very presence of God in a person’s life can truly bring nourishment. That is the true gift of God, given in Jesus, through the Holy Spirit: the active, abiding presence of the One who can feed our deepest hunger, which is for more than food.
We are a hungry and thirsty people, and we fill up on things that don’t really deed our deep needs. We eat junk food instead of vegetables. We drink carbonated beverages instead of water and fruit juice. We go shopping instead of being satisfied with what we have. We fill our hours with television and iPods instead of paying attention to our internal voice crying out for silence. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” When Jesus spoke these words, he was speaking to people who likely knew what it felt like to be hungry, who had probably survived food shortages. The idea of never being hungry again meant something to them.
For most of us, who have never gone hungry in our lives, it is hard to imagine what true physical hunger is. That doesn’t mean we can’t relate to the kind of hunger Jesus is talking about. We are hungry, whether we realize it or not. What are you hungry for? What are the deep hungers of your heart that are unmet, perhaps unspoken? Do you long for the perfect family, for just one loving relationship, for the end of loneliness, for a decent job, for enough money to pay the bills, for a younger and healthier body, for true peace in places where there is nothing but fighting, for true peace in your home, for true peace in your heart? Do you hunger for meaning, for a sense of purpose, for intimacy with God? We long for something deeper, for something more filling.
Theologian Augustine, in the 4th century in northern Africa wrote about this spiritual hunger we have as human creatures. “Man is one of your creatures, Lord,” he wrote, “and his instinct is to praise you. The thought of your stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” In many twelve-step groups, they make reference to a “hole in the soul.” A person can be very talented, have a nice family, car, and job, and still be empty. Twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich says that this leads to meaninglessness, despair, and possible self-destructive actions.
The good news is that the true bread of heaven, the true bread for life, is available to us, always. And it is free. It is God who does the works which feed us and transform us. All we need do is open ourselves up to receive and accept that bread regularly. Just imagine with me a moment: How would our lives be different if we spent a little more time in silence and a little less plugged into our electronics? They are not bad, they are marvelous tools, and they can connect us with the Spirit of God and the nourishment of God even, but it is still true that nothing can replace the practice of taking time for quiet, to just be still, silent in the presence of God to receive. How much would we feel nurtured if we stopped our work just for a moment to pay attention to the sunrise, the touch of a breeze, the taste of summer tomatoes, the smell of rain on the earth, the sound of children’s laughter? These are all gifts of God. How much could we be fed by worship if we tried to lay our worries down in the presence of God and attempted to listen for God’s voice among all the other voices that compete for our attention?
Jesus recognizes the hunger and thirst in all of us, and he offers something different: being renewed by a connection with God instead of filling up on things that do not give us life. Manna was a good thing; bread and fish even better. But the best of all is the life-giving bread of life: a close, nurturing relationship with God. Eat, and be filled.