BREAD FOR THE JOURNEY 1 Kings 19:4-8; Eph. 4:25-5:2; John 6:35; 41-51 I have about eight pounds on me I d like to shed. These eight pounds used to just fall off when summer came. The combination of hot weather and more opportunity for physical activity would do it without all that much effort. Not so anymore. Moreover, I m fighting the force of gravity as I was not when I was younger. Endurance athletes in high-calorie-burning sports like distance running and cycling often have trouble keeping weight on, sometimes burning 15 to 20 calories per minute when they are pursuing their sport. Their workouts can burn 4000 to 6000 calories per day, which then have to be replenished. To do this they consume great amounts of dietary fat, a dozen eggs (840 calories) or an entire cheese pizza (2000 calories), or a pint of Ben and Jerry s ice cream (1000 calories) or a few beers (150 calories each). If this doesn t sound like the healthiest fare, that is because many endurance athletes can t eat enough healthy food to get the calories they need to do what they do. It seems that the human body can eat almost anything when it is in constant motion and just maintain or even lose weight. And for those of us who want to lose weight, pretty much any diet will work if we take in fewer calories than we burn. But that s easier said than done. We don t know if the prophet Elijah was an athlete. What we do know is that he was on the run. It seems he had killed all of King Ahab s prophets not a very nice thing for the prototypical prophet to do and Ahab s wife, Jezebel, informed Elijah that she was going to see to it that he would meet the same fate as those dead prophets when she got her hands on him. So Elijah got up and got going, though it has only been a day s journey into the wilderness when we find him depressed and 1
tuckered out. Food miraculously appears, and an angel tells him to eat, which he does before falling back to sleep. The angel gets the sleepyhead up again and tells him to eat in order to have the energy to make the 40 day trek to Mt. Horeb. (Elijah s situation, it seems, is something like that of endurance athletes who are often too tired from their exercise to eat.) In any case, Elijah must eat and drink in order to be strong for his journey. For Christians, Jesus is Elijah. He is also Moses and David and Sophia/Wisdom. He is the embodiment of all the virtues of Israel s greats even as he is for Christians the incarnation of God s Word. Whereas it was an angel an emissary from God who gave bread and drink to Elijah to save his life and to give him strength for his mission, Jesus, according to our faith, is the bread of life from God, God s Word to feed and sustain the church. To see what this bread of life creates we have St. Paul s interpretation to the Ephesians where he tells them they must speak truth to their neighbors and put away falsehood, that they not be consumed by their anger so as to become vengeful, that they not be bitter or malicious but rather kind and tenderhearted and forgiving. In the end he says, Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us Someone reading this might think that Paul is not offering much more than common sense in his charge to the Ephesians, but if this is hardly more than common sense, it does not mean that his advice is not bread for the journey of life. How much better would the world be if we all lived as Paul advises. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Is that not good advice? The bread of life is an odd expression. It is, of course, a metaphor, which is to say a figure of speech that is meant to suggest a likeness to something else. Jesus is not literally bread any more than the bread of the Eucharist is literally Jesus. What the expression bread of life applied to Jesus means is that Jesus is like bread in providing sustenance to us. And what is this sustenance? It is a vision, an understanding of the world, a worldview of how things would be if the world were godly and thus a 2
vision of godliness. As Christians, we are the people who believe that Jesus is the bread of life. And for us, everything follows from this. Everything! As a case in point, in this political season (Does it ever end?), if a politician tells us that he knows how to make our society better, we will as Christians judge this claim by the standard of Jesus, and we will be looking for something more than the bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander and malice that are the meat and potatoes of American politics these days. If the economy is the issue at this time, and surely it is the issue or a large part of the issue in this or any other presidential campaign, we will, by Christians standards, want a President whose policies will lead to a society where those who have much do not have too much and those who have little do not have too little. What do the politicians have to say to this expectation as they go to their $50,000 per plate fund-raisers? People sustained by the spiritual bread of life that is Jesus will inevitably want material sustenance for all. Toward this end, the poor can save the rich from the futility of material excess, and the rich can save the poor from the misery of their poverty. We are in this together. If a vote matters in a democracy like ours, then we the people ought first and foremost to be informed as best we are able about the facts of life in our society. If we have any regard for the truth, we must know the facts, whether we are studying biology or casting a vote. But beyond this, we must also know the values by which we weigh the facts, and if we are Christian people, this means we see the issues not just in terms of our own interests but in terms of the interests of all citizens and even beyond, expecting of the candidates a good faith effort to see to it that everyone everyone has bread for the journey. The expression bread of life invites us to think about our faith on two levels, and this in itself is an important lesson. Too many Christians think that the faith is about a disembodied spirituality that has little to do with this life beyond being tolerably nice to others. The sum of such faith is waiting and praying and this is inadequate. The bread of life is sustenance for a journey that is both spiritual and 3
material, spiritual in that it nourishes our personal lives in the face of all the trials we face and the failures that are ours and the hopes that are ours, summed up perhaps in the question, how do we live with ourselves? The bread of life is wisdom for answering this question in all the forms it takes in the course of our lives. But the bread of life is also the image of material necessity: what do we need to live as physical beings in the world we know, and what do our needs have to do with the needs of others? How do we balance things so that there is enough bread for all? Christ is the bread of life in that he reveals to his followers a way of life that is a balance of the material and the spiritual. Think, for example, of the passage in the First Letter of John, where we read, Those who say, I love God, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. Our love for God is shown in our love for one another. This love is not disembodied, off in the ether somewhere. It is a practical matter of caring rightly for our neighbors, and in this regard, has political consequences in a world where politics can determine who eats and who doesn t. In the Gospel of John, the bread of life is described as nourishing one for eternal life. There is a contrast drawn between the manna in the wilderness which was day-to-day material sustenance and the bread of life that comes down from heaven, which is spiritual in nature, though not exclusively so. The manna was to keep the body alive; the bread of life is to keep the spirit alive. Both are necessary for the journey of life. We need to keep up our strength, physical and spiritual. We need bread for this journey that we are on. Where is it that we are going on this journey? It is a journey to the fullness of life that is the love of God. The Israelites understood the destination of this journey as a promised land. Christians understand the destination as a world transformed, where the reign of God comes and God s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven. You will, of course, recognize these words as coming from the traditional version of the Lord s Prayer, which Christian people learn as the model for prayer. Some will 4
think it is enough to have prayed this petition in the prayer, as if God will somehow from on high do our bidding. But this is a strange and I would say superstitious understanding of the power of prayer, which is not to motivate God s action but to get us to act according to the Will of God. For Christians that will is expressed in Christ Jesus, whose Word is bread for the journey of living. Amen. 12 th Sunday after Pentecost, August 12, 2012 Emanuel Lutheran Church 5