God’s Love; Bless, Break, Give
Sermon by Mother Mary White
August 18, 2024
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14, 12b-14, Ephesians 5:15-20, John 6:51-58
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Even as Jesus is saying these words, you can imagine some would-be disciples slipping to the back of the crowd before making a beeline home. Watching Jesus give sight to the blind and making the lame walk would have been amazing, but now He's not making any sense. Just beyond our reading for today, many of His disciples will say to themselves, this teaching is difficult. Who can accept it? The twelve will stick with Jesus, but many others will fall away. Knowing Jesus as a great teacher is one thing, but talking about your flesh as food and your blood as drink must have sounded like the Rabbi had lost it.
Our lectionary, our pattern of readings for Sunday worship, has really slowed down this month. We are the third of four weeks in a row on a single chapter of John's gospel. It helps to recall this discourse follows Jesus feeding 5,000 people as the time of Passover approaches. With that central Jewish feast in mind, Jesus referring to the bread that comes down from heaven makes more sense. Jesus is reinterpreting the story of the Passover and the Exodus through His own life and ministry.
Jesus has given them physical food, but uses that to teach them that He can give them spiritual food as well. He said, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.” He wants those who are listening not to eat just some bread and fish and then go home to be hungry again. He wants them to develop a spiritual hunger and thirst that only He can fill. And to teach this, Jesus uses the Passover story, which was about moving from slavery to freedom, to show how faith in Him also moves His followers from death to life. It is a spiritual lesson difficult to grasp.
The words from this gospel are given in the first year of Jesus' three years of ministry. John's gospel, with these bread of life passages coming so early in his ministry, makes clear what the other three gospels only hint at. The Eucharist is not about Jesus' sacrificial death alone, but in Jesus' whole life; from Bethlehem to Golgotha, and beyond an empty tomb in a garden, to Jesus' appearance to His disciples.
Jesus' whole life, his entire life, rather than the events of the last state of his life, institute the sacrament of communion. Everything Jesus did, who Jesus was and how he acted, is part of God's revelation to us. We are to take Jesus' whole life and make it part of our story.
God took Jesus' whole life, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to us. We are to let the story of God's love take us, bless us, break us, and give us back into the world. This is something that happens in the liturgy as we enter the story. We don't just listen to the words take, eat, but we actually give up. We come to the alter, to actually take and eat the bread that has been broken and given. We enter the story, and then we are called to make the whole story part of our story.
Dom Gregory Dix, in his work of scholarship on the Eucharist, The Shape of the Liturgy, wrote, at the heart of it all is the Eucharistic action, a thing of absolute simplicity, the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread; and the taking, blessing, and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with his friends on the night before he died. Was another command ever so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been repeated in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and beyond extreme old age, and after it from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.
The communion, that Jesus spoke of in John's sixth chapter describing himself as the living bread, is something that has deeply woven itself into the human story. Think of all the places you have received communion, and the people that you have taken communion alongside; people still living, people you don't see any more, people now long dead and seen only by God. Imagine all the places in which God has experienced the Eucharistic meal.
Jesus is the bread that came down from heaven whose presence sustains us in every place and situation in which we find ourselves. It is no wonder that Jesus’ command to take, bless, break, and give is so obeyed. We need this strengthening of the body and blood of Jesus encountered in the Eucharist when we are apart from God. We find it easier and easier to remain apart from God and to rely on other lesser answers to our deep hungers and thirst, hungers and thirst, which only Jesus can satisfy.
This is where the comparison to physical hunger and thirst help us as we know we need nourishment of food and drink again and again. We may eat a good meal now, but we will need another tomorrow and one in between, maybe two in between that as well. In that same way, we need spiritual nourishment again and again.
There are two important components to the Christian Walk. The first is coming to faith in Jesus, for which we have the sacraments of baptism and confirmation to mark us as Christ-owned forever. But coming to faith is just the first important step on what is to be a life-long journey. To continue the journey, to really make progress in the life of faith we all need practices in daily life that make it real.
In the last few years, our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has encouraged all Episcopalians to find the right way for them to consider different practices for a Jesus-centered life. And central to these practices is worship and the reception of holy communion on a regular basis. And the other practices are to turn, to learn, to pray, bless, go, and rest. And if you would like to learn more about those other practices, check out ‘The Way of Love’ on the Episcopal Church website.
Amen.
