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.

Proper 20, Year B

What Matters?

Readings: 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

You are with someone you dearly love. You would like very much to convince him or her to change their behaviour. Maybe you want them to stop a dangerous habit, avoid a quarrel, forgive some bitterness, forget something from the past, or to make a decision about something that keeps being put off. It could be your son or daughter, your mother or your father, your husband or wife, a friend. She is standing there before you. He is sitting right next to you. You talk, you reason, you argue, you speak. There is no response. You might as well be talking to the wall. He just stands there staring at you. She just sits there not showing any sign of real contact. You plead, “If only you could see things the way I see them. If only you could understand what I understand. I wish I could get inside your head and make you see. I wish I could get into your heart and make you feel what I feel. If only we could both think the same way about this!

That is the way Jesus is speaking in the gospel reading. That is why we have heard the same message over and over again for the past three weeks. “Listen to what I am telling you,” Jesus is saying to the crowd. Week by week the crowd changes and grows. First it is an intimate group of followers. Then it is some friends. Finally it the crowds that gather to witness his miracles. When they find out that there is no more free bread, the crowd grows increasingly hostile. “I know what is at stake,” Jesus says to them. “Listen to me. Try to see what I am telling you. Try to see things as I see them. Try to feel things as I feel them. I come from God. Eat the bread I eat. Drink the wine I drink. Drink my blood and eat my flesh!” “Figure out what matters!” he is saying to them.

Paul has much the same message for the Ephesians. “Be careful then how you live,” he says to them. You need to decide how to live your lives. You need to decide what is worth putting time and energy and talent into. You need to ask yourself, “What really matters? What matters in my life? Is what I am doing worthwhile? Is it something that will sustain me, that will contribute to the world in which I live? Will it give meaning to my life?”

Ephesus was a great city with a fascinating and varied life. Paul knew that living there could become an end in itself. These fledgling Christians could be drawn into its sophistication, its affluence, its sexuality, its commerce, its cosmopolitanism. It had so much to offer. He is not saying that everything is bad. He is just saying that they need to make choices amongst everything that is offered. The choices they make need to be life giving for them.

What about our world today? Does it sound at all like Ephesus? Our culture is a mixed bag. It varies from the sublime to the obscene. All the things that could attract the interest of the Ephesians could attract us. We can waste our time on things that are useless, or we can live creatively and triumphantly. It has always been that way. It is, after all, a matter of choice.

How would Paul address us, living here in Port Hope? How would Jesus speak to us today? We live in a world in which millions are starving while others eat too much. We live in a world where there is crisis after crisis. We live in a world of violence. We live in a world where people die of AIDS while wealthy countries hoard drugs that could be life saving. We live in a beautiful world that is dying inch by inch because of our lack of stewardship. We live in a world which for many is a virtual world of Twitter and Facebook, often devoid of human contact. If Jesus were speaking to us, he would speak words of life. He would speak them over and over again until we learned to listen. He would use every possible way he could to get across to us, to convince us, to help us understand what is best for us. He would say that he himself, his words, his life, his witness, is for us. His words are for us if we will let them speak to us. They are for us if we allow them to be? He would use every word he could think of to let us know how much he loves us and cares for us and wants us to commit ourselves to him. He would speak even when he felt as if he were speaking to the wall.

So what matters? That is what the crowds around Jesus could not understand. They thought that it was about a miracle. They thought it was about getting everything their hearts desired. They thought it was about free food. They thought it was about being in the right place at the right time. They thought it was about being lucky.

That sounds pretty much like the world we live in. Let’s face it! We want miracles. We want everything our hearts desire. And we want it now. This week I got a letter in the mail. It was addressed to me. I suspected that it might be a request for a donation. I usually read such mail and then decide whether or not I wish to respond. So I opened it. It was a sales pitch for a good luck charm. If I were to purchase the ring they offered for only seven dollars they would guarantee that I would be lucky. All of my money and love problems would be solved. I would never have any difficulties in life again. All I need do is wear the ring.

We hear that same message in so many ways. Our materialistic culture hammers it out to us constantly. And we buy into it. If only we could move into a bigger house … If only I could win the lottery… If only …

Instead we need to keep reminding ourselves of what matters. Consider your own memories for a moment. We live in an age of extravagance. There is glitter and glamour. Yet I suspect that our most splendid moments are quite common and simple. A glass of cold water when we are hot and thirsty, a simple meal when we are hungry, a kind word when we are feeling down, a meaningful embrace expressed with sincerity … There is no act of love that is insignificant.

That is what Jesus wanted the crowds to know. He wanted them to know that God loved them. He wanted them to know that God really loved them. He wanted them to know the love of God in such a way that they could pass it on. He knew that if they saw and recognized the love of God standing there in front of them, if they understood that it was not about material things, but about warmth and attention and companionship and love, then that would be passed on from person to person.

We experience the truth of Jesus’ words in our tradition of the Eucharist. The act of celebrating life is a healing thing. It doesn’t just make us feel better. It makes us better. It is good for us. Worship is our way of celebrating life. We come together in a tumultuous and frightening world that makes us wonder sometimes whether there is even a future to celebrate. In community we share a belief that there is meaning and love behind it all. We feel touched by that love and care. It gives meaning to our lives; it gives hope. The sacred meal at the centre of our church’s life is not only nourishing for each of us, but it is nourishing and unifying for the whole body of the church. It convinces us of what really matters. Amen.

Proper 20, Year B

What Matters?

Readings: 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

You are with someone you dearly love. You would like very much to convince him or her to change their behaviour. Maybe you want them to stop a dangerous habit, avoid a quarrel, forgive some bitterness, forget something from the past, or to make a decision about something that keeps being put off. It could be your son or daughter, your mother or your father, your husband or wife, a friend. She is standing there before you. He is sitting right next to you. You talk, you reason, you argue, you speak. There is no response. You might as well be talking to the wall. He just stands there staring at you. She just sits there not showing any sign of real contact. You plead, “If only you could see things the way I see them. If only you could understand what I understand. I wish I could get inside your head and make you see. I wish I could get into your heart and make you feel what I feel. If only we could both think the same way about this!

That is the way Jesus is speaking in the gospel reading. That is why we have heard the same message over and over again for the past three weeks. “Listen to what I am telling you,” Jesus is saying to the crowd. Week by week the crowd changes and grows. First it is an intimate group of followers. Then it is some friends. Finally it the crowds that gather to witness his miracles. When they find out that there is no more free bread, the crowd grows increasingly hostile. “I know what is at stake,” Jesus says to them. “Listen to me. Try to see what I am telling you. Try to see things as I see them. Try to feel things as I feel them. I come from God. Eat the bread I eat. Drink the wine I drink. Drink my blood and eat my flesh!” “Figure out what matters!” he is saying to them.

Paul has much the same message for the Ephesians. “Be careful then how you live,” he says to them. You need to decide how to live your lives. You need to decide what is worth putting time and energy and talent into. You need to ask yourself, “What really matters? What matters in my life? Is what I am doing worthwhile? Is it something that will sustain me, that will contribute to the world in which I live? Will it give meaning to my life?”

Ephesus was a great city with a fascinating and varied life. Paul knew that living there could become an end in itself. These fledgling Christians could be drawn into its sophistication, its affluence, its sexuality, its commerce, its cosmopolitanism. It had so much to offer. He is not saying that everything is bad. He is just saying that they need to make choices amongst everything that is offered. The choices they make need to be life giving for them.

What about our world today? Does it sound at all like Ephesus? Our culture is a mixed bag. It varies from the sublime to the obscene. All the things that could attract the interest of the Ephesians could attract us. We can waste our time on things that are useless, or we can live creatively and triumphantly. It has always been that way. It is, after all, a matter of choice.

How would Paul address us, living here in Mississauga? How would Jesus speak to us today? We live in a world in which millions are starving while others eat too much. We live in a world where there is crisis after crisis. We live in a world of violence. We live in a world where people die of AIDS while wealthy countries hoard drugs that could be life saving. We live in a beautiful world that is dying inch by inch because of our lack of stewardship. If Jesus were speaking to us, he would speak words of life. He would speak them over and over again until we learned to listen. He would use every possible way he could to get across to us, to convince us, to help us understand what is best for us. He would say that he himself, his words, his life, his witness, are for us. They are for us if we will let them speak to us. They are for us if we allow them to be? He would use every word he could think of to let us know how much he loves us and cares for us and wants us to commit ourselves to him. He would speak even when he felt as if he were speaking to the wall.

So what matters? That is what the crowds around Jesus could not understand. They thought that it was about a miracle. They thought it was about getting everything their hearts desired. They thought it was about free food. They thought it was about being in the right place at the right time. They thought it was about being lucky.

That sounds pretty much like the world we live in. Let’s face it! We want miracles. We want everything our hearts desire. And we want it now. This week I got a letter in the mail. It was addressed to me. I suspected that it might be a request for a donation. I usually read such mail and then decide whether or not I wish to respond. So I opened it. It was a sales pitch for a good luck charm. If I were to purchase the ring they offered for only seven dollars they would guarantee that I would be lucky. All of my money and love problems would be solved. I would never have any difficulties in life again. All I need do is wear the ring.

We hear that same message in so many ways. Our materialistic culture hammers it out to us constantly. And we buy into it. If only we could move into a bigger house … If only I could win the lottery… If only …

Instead we need to keep reminding ourselves of what matters. Consider your own memories for a moment. We live in an age of extravagance. There is glitter and glamour. Yet I suspect that our most splendid moments are quite common and simple. A glass of cold water when we are hot and thirsty, a simple meal when we are hungry, a kind word when we are feeling down, a meaningful embrace expressed with sincerity … There is no act of love that is insignificant.

That is what Jesus wanted the crowds to know. He wanted them to know that God loved them. He wanted them to know that God really loved them. He wanted them to know the love of God in such a way that they could pass it on. He knew that if they saw and recognized the love of God standing there in front of them, if they understood that it was not about material things, but about warmth and attention and companionship and love, then that would be passed on from person to person.

We experience the truth of Jesus’ words in our tradition of the Eucharist. The sacred meal at the centre of our church’s life is not only nourishing for each of us, but it is nourishing and unifying for the whole body of the church. It convinces us of what really matters. Amen.

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19, Year B

Real Bread

Readings:
2 Samuel 18:1,5,9-15; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

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 that 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.

Later on, my sister and I became the bakers of the family bread. We baked enough, not only for the family to eat for the week, but enough to sell around the neighbourhood for spending money for ourselves. It did not matter how much bread we baked. We could always sell it. People valued it. They valued its nourishment. Bread became a significant factor in our lives. We got creative in trying new kinds of bread, buns and rolls, and then sweet breads that people were willing to pay much more for. It became a vocation for us.

There is an old Chinese saying that goes something like this. When you want to help feed people, don’t give them a fish; teach them how to fish. Anyone who has ever worked in a food bank knows the truth of that saying. If you offer only food, the line forms every day because people get hungry again.

Jesus took a few small loaves and some fish and fed a huge crowd of people. 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. He offered them 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 Mary's kid. They did not see what he had to offer them.

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.

We live in a technological age, a secular age. Many of the choices that we are offered every day are far from life giving. Many choices are destructive to the world in which we live. They are destructive of people and of things, of relationships, of resources. I think of just a few of the life and death issues of our age, genetic manipulation, cloning, euthanasia, abortion. The list is endless. And the problem is that when it comes to ethical decisions there are no easy answers. Life is not black and white.

That came to me very clearly as I read a novel by Judi Foucault this summer. “My Sister’s Keeper” is the story of a girl who gets herself a lawyer so that she can stop being an organ donor for her sister who is suffering from leukemia. The story is told from many points of view and offers many choices of how to live. There is Anna, the girl who was conceived to be her sister’s donor. She wonders whether she is loved for herself or simply because she can keep her sister alive. There is the sister who is dying of leukemia who struggles with pain and suffering and sometimes wishes it would simply end. There are the parents who try to make decisions for all of their children. There is the brother who feels left out and neglected and who acts out his frustration. There is the lawyer that Anna hires to represent her who has his own problems. And at the end of the story you are still left with the dilemma of wondering who is right.

How does that connect to Jesus, the Bread of Life? He offers himself as the life of the world. Not our life only, but the life of all 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’s son; we need to see Christ. To be, as Paul says, "imitators of God", to emulate Jesus, to follow him, to demonstrate God's love to others through the way we speak and act, through the company we keep, through our ethical choices, through everything 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, but 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,” she said. “God only has children.” And that is a choice we must make for ourselves. We must choose to be children. We must choose to be beloved of God. We must hear the word. We must accept it for ourselves. 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.

We should “eat” him. 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.

What if, for this week, we tried to take those words and let them speak to us of our human condition? 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 discerning God's presence. It is about doing God's will, so that we can 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 do so in trust for all. So let us break bread together. Let us eat. Let us be bread for a broken world. Amen.