God's Bread, Our Hands.

Sermon 8-19-18

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

Goodness, Jesus. Enough with the bread already. We get it, ok? Jesus…. Bread. Jesus, bread. Jesus-bread. Bread is super boring and super basic… or is it? How many of you have actually made bread? Like, handmade, not in your bread-maker? And even for those of you who have, do you any of you know how bread WORKS? Do you understand the art and the science that goes into this food that has been part of our diets for thousands of years?

After church today, I can drive to any grocery store and buy any kind of bread imaginable – super white bread, whole-wheat bread, honey wheat, 9 grain, pita, rye, sourdough, Italian, French, poppy seed - you name it, they probably have it. I can make my selection, go home, and enjoy it instantly, no waiting for mixing, rising, baking, or cooling. In no other time in the history of the world has this been possible.

If you or your children ever made communion bread as part of the youth group, you might remember a little of how that bread was made. (And we did just talk about it during our children’s message.) You saw the ingredients come together. You felt the flour on your hands as you kneaded the dough. You heard laughter as we all tried – and failed - to keep the mess to a minimum. And then in the oven it goes, and out pops some of the most delicious bread ever.

But how does bread… bread? Have you ever thought about how it is that power from a crushed plant, plus water, plus a fungus could be so delicious? It’s pretty wild. Bread is actually alive, then dies, then lives, then dies again, so that WE can live. Bread is a food of resurrection. (This TED talk is where I learned all the following about bread)

Bread begins as a plant we call wheat growing tall and strong, creating seeds, which over the course of thousands of years, has learned to graciously release these seeds for us to use. Wheat seeds, if you remember from your sixth-grade science class, are potential life. Some of these seeds we do indeed save and plant in the next growing season. But the rest go into making our bread.

The wheat was alive, and the seed is potential life, but then, what do we do to the seeds to make the flour? … we crush it. Pulverize it. Take away any possibility for sprouting and growing. A seed is not dead, but flour is.

BUT THEN … we combine the flour with water and yeast… and it becomes alive again. As the yeast grows, it actually burps... and sweats…. I know, gross, right? …making the bread rise up and taste good. Kinda icky, but oh so delicious. This is how bread becomes a living thing once again – when it is a dough colony of yeasty goodness.

And then, we put in in the oven. The heat makes the dough solid, and the crust crispy, and the ingredients bond… but it also kills the living yeast. So, what comes out of the oven is no longer alive in any way. Bread is dead. No seeds, no yeast, no life. Just… bread.

But then… we eat it. We gather around a table with our families and friends, where we laugh, we cry, and we eat. Bread was alive, then dead, then alive, then dead, then once again alive. Bread comes alive, in us and through us. Bread truly is a food of resurrection. It is perhaps little wonder that Jesus used bread so often to talk about himself.

The men and women who were listening to Jesus that day could not have told you about all the reasons that bread is bread. They just knew. They knew it, deep down in their bodies. They knew because they experienced it. The women knew, with their sweat and their aching arms – crushing wheat, kneading dough, serving bread to feed their families. The men knew with their sweat and their aching arms from harvesting these very seeds, the beginning of bread. They experienced with their bodies that bread is more than bread, and eating is more than eating.

A woman named Sara Miles experienced this too. She might be the last person that we would expect to see in any church: atheist and skeptic, world traveling war correspondent, lesbian, single mom. But one day, for no reason she could articulate at the time, Sarah Miles walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California, and received Holy Communion for the very first time.

And it changed her life. She describes that moment when she ate the bread and drank the wine, as “Jesus happened to her.” From that moment on, Jesus had lodged into her, like a crumb in her teeth, refusing leave. She went home that day shocked and confused at what happened. But she did know one thing, she knew it deep in her body: she wanted that bread again. And again. And again.

We have this saying: we are what we eat. When we eat bread, we eat death and resurrection and our bodies continue to live. And when we eat Jesus, we are eating Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we continue to live, through Jesus.

If you recall, all those weeks ago when we first started the “bread of life” part of the summer, the first part of the when story Jesus took five loaves and two fish and fed more than five thousand people. That’s about twice the population of New Hope. Before Jesus SAID, “I AM the bread of life….” he fed people actual loaves of bread. And then later on, Jesus said “Take and eat: this is my body, given for you…. This is my blood, shed for you.”

This is what kept Sara Miles coming back, week after week, to receive the body and blood of Jesus. She later joined St. Gregory’s, got baptized, and became an active member on the congregation, eventually helping to serve communion herself. Then she started a hugely successful food pantry, attracting hundreds of people who were homeless to the church during every week, which became very controversial within the congregation. But along the way, she – a recent convert – realized something that sometimes takes years to figure out. She writes in her book about this entire experience, “The point of church isn’t to get people to come to church… [it’s] to feed them, so they can go out and, you know, be Jesus.” (p. 267)

When we consume bread, we grow healthy and strong, ready for the day. When we consume Jesus, we are also strengthened for the journey of following Jesus and … and we actually become more like him. And so, we are able to “BE Jesus” … for one another.

This life we receive keeps us coming back for more, week after week. The rest of the week tries to defeat us and deplete us. This is not an easy road, to follow in Jesus’ footsteps when the rest of the world around us would rather seek success or being comfortable or having more stuff. It so hard to fight against the impulse to eat the much more palatable and easy fast food of numbness and isolation. This kind of food, the fast, easy kind, may full us up for a time, but it will not sustain us. It will not give us life that is abundant and lasting.

It may seem mind-numbingly repetitive to keep talking about Jesus and bread, but perhaps the reason we are spending so much time on it is that it takes a lifetime to literally and figuratively CHEW ON all that Jesus is and teaches. We may learn during first communion “instruction” at various ages, but we are never going to completely understand it. We can only experience it. God is with us in a way that we can see and touch and smell and taste in Jesus. And through us, other people are able to see and hear and touch Jesus.

Of course, we don’t actually turn into food of course… but we, especially here at Family of God, do a lot in helping alleviate hunger. For example, in just a few short weeks, we are going to raise some money and pack some meals for some kids around the world through an organization called Feed My Starving Children. And, we are going to be looking stylish in these T shirts with our church name on them and stick out like bright loaves of bread. On the front is the ELCA “tag line,” “God’s work, our hands.” We are going to help kids around the world with get nourishing and live-giving food to eat. We are going to be Jesus’ hands in the world, feeding the vulnerable, all because we are given the strength in our own lives from the very body of Christ…. so that WE can BE the Body of Christ.

Look at these snazzy shirts!

We are what we eat. God’s work, our hands. One bread, one body. Thanks be to God. Amen.