Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19, Year B

Finding God in the Ordinary

When I was growing up, my mother baked all the bread for our large family. Saturday morning was bread-making day, and I can remember the delicious odours that came from her kitchen. As children, we were not always very appreciative of mother's efforts. When Sunbeam came out with a big advertising campaign, we longed for that over processed white bread. I remember asking mother if we could please have some "real" bread for a change.

My mother talked about how her mother, my grandmother baked bread back in Wales. They lived in a terraced home with a small oven, not large enough for baking bread for the large family. At the end of their terrace was a communal oven, in which the local families could bake their bread. Grandmother would make huge loaves of bread, each with her particular marking – as I recall it was a knob on the top of the loaf – to set her loaves apart from those of other people, and then take them to the oven to be baked.

I have carried on the family tradition and become a bread baker. I do not bake all of my bread. I find that when I do so I eat too much of it. So now I bake bread for the most part to give away. I made some yesterday as I wrote this sermon. I have tried many kinds of bread from bagels to sourdough to rye. I even tried rice bread. However, I forgot the rising properties of rice. I had to keep separating the dough into different bowls. The bread was good, but there was far too much of it.

Bread is ordinary, everyday food. Most people think that unless you have a bread machine it is difficult to make, but in reality it is quite basic. It is made from simple ingredients – flour, salt, yeast, water, sweetener, (I use honey!). Truly it does take time and patience. It needs to rise. One gets a good workout kneading the dough until it is lovely and smooth. But it is not difficult to produce good results.

In its many forms, it is the most widely consumed food in the world, eaten by people of every race, religion and culture. It is the food of rich and poor alike. Bread has been around for thousands of years. Evidence from thirty thousand years ago in Europe found starch residue on rocks used for pounding plants. In all likelihood, starch extract from the roots of plants, such as cattails and ferns, was spread on a flat rock, placed over a fire and cooked into a primitive form of flatbread. Scripture refers to bread as the staff of life. God provided manna in the desert for the Hebrew people. Bread is a relational food. Breaking bread together is a universal symbol of peace. It is ordinary, everyday food.

Jesus broke bread for a crowd of hungry people. He took a few small loaves and some fish, blessed it, and fed the people who had followed him out into the wilderness. But they got hungry again. They kept coming back for more. Their expectation was that Jesus would keep giving them free bread. In reality he offered them far more. “I am the bread of life,” he told them. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry. Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” He was offering them not free food, but spiritual food. He explained to them that giving them bread and fish would not solve their problems. He asked them to make him and his way of living the “bread and butter” of their daily lives. Yet they could not accept it from him. They could not see beyond the Jesus they had grown up with. They saw the carpenter's son. They saw Joseph's kid. They did not see what he had to offer them. In fact, it was unthinkable. How could anyone as ordinary as Jesus, someone just like them, be the bread of life, the Saviour?

The crowd is expressing a reasonable human feeling on any number of levels. If you are hungry and you suddenly find a source of free food it is difficult to give it up. It is like winning the lottery. But how much more difficult it is to change one’s vision of someone we know, someone we have watched grow up. Yet when you think about it, it is in the ordinary, in people like you and like me, that God chooses to make a dwelling. God only knows why. And then God comes to us in so many disguises. Honestly, some of them can be terribly offensive. Old age, ugliness, poverty, leprosy, woundedness! It is a divine paradox, isn’t it? Our part in it is to look beyond it all to the source.

We too are offered that same spiritual bread. Jesus offers himself to us as bread from God, as grace for our lives, the bread of life. We are offered that choice. But there are many kinds of bread offered to us by the world that, while far from nourishing, are very tempting. They hold great promise. They promise wealth. They promise success. They promise an easy existence.

On the other hand, Jesus offers himself as the life of the world, the life of all of creation. He is our creator. He is our sustainer. God has chosen, through Christ, to be involved in our world. That is a choice that we too must make. For that choice is what makes atonement a possibility. That is what is offered to us in the Bread of Life passages of John's Gospel. Our responsibilities, our choices, are very real. We are offered a conscious choice to see the evidence of the risen Christ in the world around us. We need to see, not simply Jesus, Joe and Mary’s son, but to see Christ, to be, as Paul says, "imitators of God", to emulate Jesus, to follow him. We are called to demonstrate God's love to others through the way we speak and act, through the company we keep, through everything that we do.

Is it possible to be united with Christ through baptism, to confess our sins and receive absolution, to go through the motions of worship, and still fail to comprehend what it really means to believe in Jesus Christ? God has given us grace. But it is a two way street. I remember something that Corrie Ten Boom said in a talk that has stayed with me throughout the years. God has no grandchildren. We must choose to be children. We must choose to be beloved of God. We must hear the word. We must accept it. We must feed on the bread of life. We must appropriate it for ourselves and consciously accept God into our lives. Take God into the centre of our being. Become one with him through Christ. In that way, his life becomes our life. His love becomes our love. His purpose becomes our purpose. His goal becomes our goal. We are redeemed. We communicate his love and become broken bread to those around us.

Think what kind of a world we would live in if we accepted Jesus’ lifestyle and adopted it as our own. No child would ever die of hunger. No senior citizen would be lonely. AIDS would be wiped out, because we would not be hoarding needed drugs out of greed. We would be using good stewardship of the resources of the world. We would be attentive to one another, using the gifts that God has given to us. We would be serving at the table of the world.

Every time we say the Lord's Prayer, we pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." Are we like the crowds that followed Jesus? Are we asking for a free meal? Are we asking merely to have our material needs met? Or are we asking to be fed, to be nurtured spiritually by the true bread, Jesus Christ? Perhaps we simply rattle it off, not even conscious of what we are praying.

I am going to make a challenge to you. This week take those words and let them speak to you. Every day this week pray the Lord’s Prayer. Really pray, thinking about what it would mean to a hungry world to be fed those words of life. Think about it. We would die but not remain dead, because we would have eaten the bread of life. We would be like Jesus was, is and will be forever.

That is the Christian message. It speaks about sin and salvation, about death and life, about dying to sin and coming alive to God, about creation and redemption. What God has done in Christ affects not only us, but also the whole of creation. It is a call to renewal, to work with God to discern God's presence. It is about doing God's will, so that we can be transformed and then go on to be transformers in society.

What happens in the Eucharist happens on behalf of the whole world. The bread set before us brings the starving into our presence. It brings the joyless, the sick the suffering. For it is a reminder that what we hold, we hold in trust for all. So let us break bread together. Let us eat. Let us be bread for a broken world. Amen.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18, Year A

I Believe in Miracles

Readings: Genesis 32: 22 – 31; Psalm 17: 1 - 7, 16 ; Romans 9: 1 – 5; Matthew 14: 13 – 21

There is a song from the 70’s by Pearl Jam that talks about miracles.

“I used to be on an endless run
Believed in miracles 'cause I'm one
I've been blessed with the power to survive
After all these years I'm still alive”

I am not certain as I listen to the lyrics that the singer is actually attributing the miracle of his survival to God. Rather he attributes the miracle to his own powers.

Do we believe in miracles? Do we believe that God intervenes in our world and, whether it is through remarkable people or simply through God's own actions, brings about some miraculous happening? We want to, but our twenty-first century minds won't wrap themselves around the possibilities. We have seen it all. We live in a technological age that has made things that past generations just dreamed about totally possible. We also know that events are not always what they appear to be. I must say, I follow on YouTube, an amazing techie who has his three-year-old son doing the most fantastic things. In one video he is in a MacDonald’s playground that suddenly takes off like a rocket ship. It makes it truly difficult to believe in miracles.

It is especially difficult when we see what is going on in our world. There is war. There is violence and suffering. There are poor and hungry people. There are disasters and tragic events. So when it comes to the miracles of Jesus we want to believe them. They are about God intervening in our world. They are about God changing the bad things that are beyond our control. God relieves human suffering. The eyes of the blind are opened. Lepers are cleansed. Hungry people are fed. Such events give us a glimmer of hope in a world where so many things seem beyond our control. They give us a glimpse of God's glory. Yes! We want to believe them.

We want to believe the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. It reveals so much to us about Jesus' compassion for the crowds who followed him. He is suffering himself. News has just come to him about the death of John the Baptist. He is in grief. He reacts as many of us do by withdrawing. He goes to a deserted place by himself. He wants time to consider the tragedy. He wants time to consider what it means in his own ministry.

But the crowds follow him out into the wilderness. They follow as they always do. They have such need. He has compassion on them and heals their sick. And when evening comes the disciples want to send them away to fend for themselves.

"You give them something to eat," Jesus tells the disciples.

"We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish."
Out of his silence and grief, out of his compassion, Jesus performs a miracle. He takes the bread and fish and blesses them. He gives the crowd what they want, a miracle to thrill them and bread to fill them.

Stories about feeding hungry people are numerous in Scripture. There are six such stories in the four Gospels. These passages were very important to the early church community. That makes them important to us. What are you really thinking about this story? Let's face it; most of us cannot believe the story literally. We look for explanations. And it is not difficult to think of a few.

The most common, of course, is that it is a tale about people sharing their lunches. Jesus had the people sit down. He blessed what he had and started to share it. Others opened up their hearts and their picnic baskets and everyone had enough to eat. Now wouldn’t that constitute a miracle? Whenever people give themselves it is a miracle of God's grace. When we reach out to others and share what little we have we are bringing about God's kingdom of shalom.
It is a miracle that is enacted over and over again in our world. Back to YouTube, there is a video that has gone viral, which is just such a miracle. A homeless person is sitting on the sidewalk, his belongings within reach, and a Styrofoam cup in front of him to collect coins. No one is stopping. No one even notices him sitting there. Along comes a young man.

“May I borrow your bucket,” he asks.

Finally the homeless man nods. The young man sits down with the bucket and begins to drum on it. As the crowd gathers he puts his hat out. Two others join him, one with a guitar, another singing. Soon the crowd is enthusiastically dropping money into the hat. They complete their song. The crowd disperses. They pass the hat over to the astonished man and disappear into the crowd. A miracle! It certainly was for the homeless man.

I witnessed more than one miracle when I went to Africa to the World Council of Churches a number of years ago. There was one particular story that resonated in me. Two widows in a poor village in the North Transvaal needed work desperately. There was an abandoned factory outside the village. They got permission to use it. They began to make bead bracelets and necklaces that they sold. Their business grew. They began to export them. Others in the village needed work. The women bought the equipment to do batik and brought others into the co-op. They began to educate and train people for work. The next stage was to send in tenders on government jobs, roadwork. Now a whole village works. Hungry people are fed. They see it as a miracle of God's grace.

There is the thought that perhaps the main focus of the feeding of the five thousand is the ideal of Christ gathering together the people of God as the true shepherd of Israel. It reminds us that God provided manna for the people to eat as they journeyed through the wilderness. That too is a miracle that is enacted Sunday by Sunday. Our communities gather together in worship. We break bread and we become part of Christ and Christ becomes part of us. We are sent out to be bread for a hungry world.

The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand teaches us about our God, our God who provides for us. We have all been in situations that feel hopeless. We are constantly amazed by the ability of God to take what we offer and make it great. But it teaches us so much more. Jesus sustained physical life with bread. But his real purpose was giving people eternal life. And that is the real miracle in which we participate. He would have these people and us understand that the provision of God is more than enough to fulfill every need of every man, woman and child on earth.

All of this presents to us a tremendous commission. Needy people followed Jesus everywhere. We don't need to look far to know that the thing most common to people is need of one kind or another. There are millions in our world who have the most basic needs of existence – food, clean water, shelter, freedom, security. There is within each of us a need for spiritual fulfillment, for inner assurance and serenity, for meaning and purpose in life.
As the people of God, we are fed and nourished so that there is no holding back in our life journey. We come to the table of the Lord and bread is shared with one another. Our journeys become the journeys of all. The path becomes one path lived together. That is the miracle of God's love. Amen.