Heavenly Bread

“HEAVENLY APPETIZERS”
John 6:25-35
Faith United
November 25, 2007


Where do you get your bread?
I like bread
I know it has a lot of carbohydrates in it
that we’re told to avoid
especially if we want to lose weight
but I’d rather give up brownies
than a good piece of bread
I love the smell of bread baking
I haven’t baked a lot of bread myself
but I love that smell
It’s the kind of smell that makes your stomach hurt
with a wonderful aching kind of hurt
the kind of hurt that anticipates biting into
a warm piece of bread
with lots of butter on it
I like good bread
I like the kind of bread that Lee and Vicki make us
for communion
it’s got substance, you can chew it,
and it tastes good… tastes like good bread
At different times, we’ve had the low fat bread
at our house,
and it’s like eating nothing at all
I like soft bread that I can chew
You already know that if I ever take communion
at a church where they give me only one of those
pitiful tiny squares of bread
or even worse, one of those Styrofoam tasting discs
that melt in your mouth
I’m left feeling unsatisfied and empty
When I come to communion,
I am hungry, and I want food
don’t just give me a little square piece of bread
that I can swallow with my shot glass full of juice
without chewing
I need FOOD
Where do you get your bread?
Do you know where to find bread when you need it?
When you’re desperately hungry
and you just need something to fill you
or to just give you a little sustenance
to get you through the day,
where do you get your bread?
My father used to have this weird habit
of taking half a bagel upstairs with him
when he went to bed
Just in case he got hungry in the middle of the night
it would be right there
Now, unfortunately, my mother gets on his case
about how many carbs he ingests
so the bagel habit has stopped
I know for a fact, though,
that he still sneaks into the kitchen
in the middle of the night
to toast a piece of bread
or get a banana
when my mother is sound asleep

Sometimes my father just needs a little bread
to help him make it through the night

At Subway of course
you have your choice of many kinds of bread
on which to have your sandwich
but I’m usually a purist
I usually stick to the plain Italian white bread
I don’t need anything fancy
One thing I do miss about the East Coast
is the sub sandwiches that you get
in a pizzeria or Italian restaurant
because there’s a lot of Italians in New Jersey
It’s hard to explain
but the sandwiches are made on a hard
Italian bread
that crunches and cracks
when you bite into it
I haven’t been able to find anything like it out here
The kind of bread that showers your lap
with crumbs from the cracking crust
when you take your first bite
It’s not neat, but it tastes really good
and you usually get to eat it
while still smelling the bread that is baking in the oven
in the back
Sarah experiments with garlic bread
and each time she’s in charge of toasting the bread
in the oven
when we have spaghetti or lasagna
Each time she tries some different combinations
of spices to go along with the garlic
and butter
trying for just the right taste
It’s a little different every time

When I was visiting my dear friend Karen yesterday
I was thinking about bread
She can’t eat anymore
She has a bite or two of a popsicle
or a sip here and there of water
Yesterday I thought about bread
as I gently fed her a couple of bites
of jello
and watched her work it in her mouth
It wasn’t much
but there’s something about the act of feeding
that is tender and holy
Jello and water have become her daily bread

What is your daily bread?
What feeds you or helps ease the hunger pangs in you?
Does someone else give it to you?
Or do you feed it to yourself?
I love communion
I love coming to you, as you kneel at the rail
I especially love seeing the little children
with their hands dutifully cupped in expectation
and I love leaning over and putting
a good chunk of bread in those empty hands
as those eyes look up at me with trust
and sometimes one of you will whisper, “Thank you.”
And that is bread to me
To feed people I love
Jesus had just fed five thousand plus people
on the hillside
people that had come to hear him speak
but also a lot of hungry people
maybe not even knowing what they were hungry for
Miraculously, they were all fed
and there was plenty of fragments left over
It was exhausting, I imagine,
to feed five thousand men plus their families
Especially when it was all over
and all the people came after him
with their hands all open
reaching for more
All had been filled that day
but they all wanted more…
So Jesus left, went up the mountain to get away
The next day, when he and his disciples
were on the other side of the sea
the crowds followed them there
like adoring fans, wanting a piece of his clothing
or a hankerchief with his sweat on it
They were confused,
because the disciples had left in the boat without Jesus
and yet here Jesus was with them….
how did he get there?
They’d been looking for him all night
how did he sneak past them?
And a very tired Jesus, I imagine,
tired because he’d had to save his disciples from that storm
on the sea
and deal with their reactions to him walking on water
a tired Jesus says to them,
“I know why you’re looking for me.
You want more bread. You’re not here
because you saw the miracle of thousands of people fed
you’re here because you’re still hungry
and you will never be satisfied….”
and he sighed
“don’t bother with the food that perishes,
but work for food that endures for eternal life
which the Son of Man will give you….”
And they get excited…
great! Eternal bread!!
How do we get it? What do we have to do?
And Jesus is exasperating
he won’t just hand it over
You have to believe in the works of God
you have to believe, he said, that such bread
comes from the hand of God….
Ok, great, they said,
what will you do now to show us?
What magic trick will you do
to convince us so that we can believe what you say?
Show us, do a trick, they said.
God did a trick for the Israelites,
by raining down bread from heaven every day

And Jesus, I bet, rolled his eyes
“That bread didn’t come from Moses
he was just the one who served it.
but it’s God in heaven that gives you that bread
that gave THEM that bread in the wilderness
when they were starving
For God’s bread is the kind that comes down from heaven
and gives life to the world.”
And they come, all of them, with their hands open,
not reverent on their knees like little children
in anticipation
but with greedy hands open, reaching, grasping
for more….
“give us this bread always!!”
And Jesus says something they can’t possibly understand
“I am the bread of life,” he says
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry,
and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty…”
Well, you can bet
that he got into real hot water for that one
the church leaders were furious
who is HE to say that HE is the bread from heaven?
We know him, he’s just Mary and Joseph’s son…. nothing special
So they harassed him further
and the people stayed hungry
and they didn’t know why

Where do you get your daily bread?
Who do you go to when you can’t seem to feed yourself?
Who do you trust to give you a piece of bread?
The kind that fills and satisfies
and chases away those hunger pains
at least for the day?
We pray in the Lord’s Prayer
give us this day our daily bread
give us what we need today
to get through this day, to do what we need to do
to face what we need to face
Just for today
Sometimes I just don’t have enough in me
to worry about tomorrow
just today
where can I get my bread today?
The good bread, not the cheap kind
the bread that crunches when you eat it
that you can chew on, and savor
the kind of bread that fills the emptiness
the kind of bread that’ll get you through the night
Jesus said to those multitudes
you have seen wonderful things,
you have seen the works and the miracles of God
and yet you’re only concerned with your stomachs
You’re only interested in the food
that’ll satisfy you right now
but is gone tomorrow, forgotten
Work for the food that lasts forever, Jesus says
How does this fit when we start the Christmas rush?
How does this fit when we’re bombarded with commercials
that harass us to get to the store
at 4 a.m. to fill our carts with as much as we can?
I don’t know about you,
but as I head into the Advent and Christmas season
that kind of stuff leaves me empty
Especially as I remember quiet moments
of feeding jello to my friend
and wiping her mouth
a friend that has fed me a lot
and for whom it is frustrating to be on the receiving end
without being able to give back
because she so loved to feed people
in so many ways
But I get bread in a couple of bites of jello
in feeding my friend
who is anticipating a heavenly feast
that’ll be more satisfying than our human minds can fathom

I get bread by feeding
We feed each other the bread of life
we need each other
Sometimes I’ve had to learn the hard way
where to get my bread
because being human, so many times
we look for bread in places that don’t have it
A friend of mine often tells me,
you can’t get your bread at the hardware store
We know where to get our bread
the kind that fills and satisfies and gives us life and sustenance
we get that bread here
and we feed each other with it
sometimes some of us need to be fed
and sometimes we do the feeding
but God provides the bread
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life…”
and it would take centuries for any of us
to even begin to understand what that means
They couldn’t have known back then
but someday they would
Rich Mullins, a Christian musician
has a song called “Hold me Jesus,”
and in it, he sings, “Surrender don’t come natural to me
I’d rather fight you for something I don’t really want
than take what you give that I need…”
and I get that
God longs to feed us all
and we can only get little appetizers here
that make us hungry for more
that make us hungry for things we can only imagine
for a life that is incomprehensible to our human brains
but we still hunger for it
and God gives us little tastes of it here and there
with each other, with the holy bread we share here
and through loving each other
knowing that someday we’ll all get to sit down together
at that heavenly banquet
and feast on the good things God has for us
for eternity….
Isn’t that delicious promise?