Bodies and Bread Sandwiches

Sermon 8-5-18

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I think I may have inherited my Dad’s love of bread. Growing up, my dad had a very special recipe for his all-time favorite sandwich. Take one slice of white bread, and another slice of white bread, and put a slice – or even two! – of white bread in the middle… and Ta-Da! You have a “bread sandwich”! Every day like clockwork, around mid afternoon, was bread sandwich snack time. As a kid I thought it was a great idea… now… it sounds just a little bit monotonous.

Perhaps you might have noticed a theme today… bread, bread, bread, and lots of it. Bread last week, bread this week, and - spoiler alert - more bread for three more weeks after this one. This series in the lectionary cycle is called the “Summer of Bread” by some, and a complete annoyance by others. Every three years around August, we ditch Mark and dig deep into John 6, in what I hope will be a few weeks of, not boring bread sandwiches, but instead a rich buffet of tasty loaves. True, it’ only my second time around in this part of the lectionary, so while I may feel this way now, you might want to ask me again in … 12 years or so if I am still this excited to spend weeks and weeks talking about bread.

While I was home – and conveniently gone for the first Sunday in the Summer of Bread – I met my cousin’s newborn son James and got to witness his baptism. James is about five weeks old by now and his talents currently include: looking cute, filling his diaper, eating, and apparently is an excellent burper.

Flat Jesus even showed up in St. Louis!

But he wasn’t the only baby I got to see or hold in the last two weeks. While I was in St. Louis for a conference hosted by Young Clergy Women International, I saw babies strapped on their mamas, babies being fed and changed, babies crying, babies laughing, fetuses still in utero … I even held a baby named Mabel and she though that me giving her hi-fives was the most hysterical things EVER!

Though these babies and their moms were not the star attraction of the conference, the theme of that week – Embodied Ministry – could not be complete without them. That week, Dr. Karoline Lewis lead us in a deep dive into the Gospel of John and what bodies and faith have to do with one another, especially as women. As a John scholar, Dr. Lewis pointed out the beginning of John, a passage we read every Christmas but don’t chew on its full meaning enough. John writes: “the word (meaning Jesus) became flesh” and lived among us (v. 14). The Word became SARX, in the original Greek. SARX means body. The Word was a body. And therefore, ALL BODIES, ALL Flesh matters to God.

On the way from the St. Louis airport to the hotel, the side of a brick Baptist church read – “Jesus Completely Saves.” And they are absolutely right… but perhaps not the way they may have intended. Jesus completely saves, and that includes our bodies – female bodies, male bodies, white, black, and brown bodies, trans bodies, differently abled bodies, new bodies, aging bodies, suffering bodies, healthy bodies. ALL bodies.

God care about what happens to our bodies, not just our “souls,” and that work began way before Jesus arrived on the scene. God saved the suffering bodies of his people in Egypt while they were slaves. Through God’s servant Moses, these exploited bodies were led to freedom. Then… these bodies came down with an acute case of the Nostalgia. Sure… they were SLAVES in Egypt… suffering night and day…  but gosh, didn’t they eat well while they were slaves?

I imagine that if we could hear my cousin’s son James’s thoughts, they might be just a little bit similar. Now, about 5 weeks out, I imagine James could be thinking… Yeah, so what if I had no leg room, and it was dark and cramped up there in the womb… but it sure beats a wet diaper, crying for my dinner, and being passed around to all these strange people!

And when he gets older, he’ll grow in the phase where it’s nothing but “Mom… mom…mom… mom….!” Nothing will ever go right, and mom will always need to fix everything.

Do we ever grow out of this phase, though? Do we ever stop complaining about SOMETHING? We are lead out of slavery into bondage into freedom, but things are not as easy as we expected them to be. Or we cry out when we are in dire need, not sure if God has heard us, wondering and waiting for God to respond.

What we do not know and cannot see is that, in the darkness and the waiting, God has already begun to respond to our needs before we even know it. Just like a baby doesn’t know that their mother is on the way until milk hits mouth… even though mom is already at work getting the bottle warm or the new diaper ready. Professor Hannah Shanks put it this way in her new book about bodies and Holy Communion, she writes: “The moment we turn ourselves to God, God – like a mother, begins to turn towards us, even if we may not see or feel God’s presence for some time.”

God tells Moses to tell his complaining people: “Draw near to the Lord, for he had heard your complaining.” And then, God provides – raining bread (and birds) from heaven. They shall eat meat and have their fill of bread, enough for that day. “Give us this day our daily manna.” Give us this day our daily bread sandwiches.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and the People of God still do not seem to get it. Yet again, they miss what has been under their noses the entire time. Jesus had to spell it out for them – Just as God gave the people manna in the wilderness, Jesus has been given to them in the flesh – a body to be broken, a body to be shared, a body to make all bodies one and whole.

Fast forward a few hundred years YET AGAIN… and we the people of God STILL don’t get this.

For us now, it’s so easy to look at this crowd and scoff at how dense everyone around Jesus seems. But we have no cause to feel superior, just because we have the advantage of hindsight. We too work for the food that doesn’t last, for success or admiration or material things, to chase after the image of the perfect mom or student or Christian. We miss where God is at work in our lives and instead are blown about, bouncing to and fro, from one new fad to the next, as Paul wrote…. We too we miss what’s right in front of us.

We miss that again and again, God provides. For any and all of our needs. And God is in the habit of providing A LOT, often out of a very little. God provided more manna than the freed slaves could eat in a single day. God provided a LOT of wine at the wedding at Canna. God provided A LOT of bread and fish to a LOT of people out of just one kid’s lunch. All to teach us that “grace is multiplied through sharing.”(Hannah Shanks again) Just as Jesus shared his body with us – “This is my body, given for YOU.”

At my cousin’s son’s baptism, communion was not part of the service. And the baptism took place in a denomination that does not ordain women. I honestly couldn’t tell you much of what the pastor said during the sermon, because all I could hear by his very presence as he tried to talk about bread, was “you’re not enough, you and your call don’t belong here.”

To all the little girls I saw up there with the male pastor during the children’s sermon, I wanted to whisper in their ear – “Don’t listen to this guy. You can be a pastor if you want. You are enough and your bodies matter to God.” So, I will just have to say it to all of you instead. God loves us so much that Jesus came as a body so that we an be COMPLETELY saved. You are enough, and you are enough, and you are always enough.

Every week we say the same words in the Lord’s Prayer… “give us this day our daily bread.” No matter how much the bread has been broken and shared, there is always enough for all. And YOU are ENOUGH, and worthy to receive it.

But this also means that other bodies are also worthy of care and provisions. This also might mean that OUR BODIES become the daily bread for others. We might have to put OUR bodies on the line to stand up for the bodies of others. Hannah Shanks again writes: “… our bodies will make that gospel proclamation to anyone who witnesses us.” As the body of Christ, we might be the bread sandwiches that get someone through the day.

Karoline Lewis ended our conference with this bold charge: “The Word became flesh… are you willing to risk the same?” I like to think that we can respond with the words from our baptismal liturgy: We will, and we ask God to help us. Amen.