323 The Meaning of Bread

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The Meaning of Bread” originally shared on August 7, 2024. It was the 323^rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   You can buy a loaf of bread at the grocery store for between $2 and $7. Jesus gave the world a bread that transforms and feeds us forever. Today, we’re going to find out what it is.

   The Paris Summer Olympics have been going on now for a couple of weeks and will end this coming Sunday. Thousands of athletes have trained their entire lives to compete there. We’ve seen medal-worthy performances and exciting competitions by men and women at their peak physical condition.

   I remember a study of 1,000 Americans, a reasonable sample, done in August of 2021, that showed that 40% overall, with 60% men and 20% women, believed that they were in good enough shape to compete in a summer or winter Olympic event.

   Were they all thinking of archery? Or curling?  Or air-pistol shooting like that Turkish guy who just seemed to show up and shoot, and won a silver medal!? 😊

   Maybe they meant that they could finish an Olympic event. Maybe they were not aware that the Olympics have qualifying standards. Or maybe the study was actually a test to identify the delusional. Those who were soon to be in for a rude awakening. 😊

   Like those who were there when today’s reading was first happening, in the text being read in the vast majority of churches in the world this coming Sunday, John 6:35, 41-51.

   The reading starts with a stunning claim, an overlapping verse with last Sunday’s reading, John 6:35,

35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

   How is that possible?

   This coming Sunday will be the third of five Sundays in a row in which the reading from the gospels will be focused on bread. Bread, Bread, Bread, Bread, Bread. 😊

   This happens every three years in our lectionary. Why?

   Last week, I said that I thought it was a reminder of the one thing we need in this life: Jesus.

   This week, I want to add that it’s because we need to know that our lives mean something, that our lives have a purpose and direction. We want to know that we have hope for the future. And when we know it, we can’t hear it too many times.

   I saw some photos online once that showed a dark green glass bottle that had washed up on the shore. It had a message in it. The message, written on a yellow sheet of paper, said, “We’ve been trying to reach you. regarding your vehicle’s extended warrantee.” 😊

   Yes, some people are persistent. Some people know that a message has to be seen over and over again until it sinks in. That’s why they keep calling.

   It used to be said, in advertising, that a message must be seen six times before it sinks in. “Six ‘till it sticks.” But that was before people’s attention span shrunk to the attention span of a goldfish. It probably takes more times now. I guess we still need to hear that message about the living bread.

   Everyone hearing these words in Bible times understood bread. Humans have been making bread for at least 30,000 years. Making bread and eating bread in some form has been a universal human experience. Even in places where rice is the staple instead of wheat, people make and eat bread in some form.

   Everyone gets hungry, and bread is an easy, inexpensive, and satisfying way to fill that hunger. Everyone gets thirsty, and water is an easy, inexpensive and satisfying way to quench that thirst.

   Bread and water is the most basic way to survive, but we have an even more enduring need.

   The gospel reading continues with John 6:41,

41 Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43 Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44 No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.

   Imagine some kid in your neighborhood, someone you knew as a child, grew up and started saying that he was God? We’d be skeptical, right? We’d want to see some signs. But would they convince us? Signs made a surprisingly insignificant impact on people as far as Jesus was concerned. One time, the people of Nazareth that he grew up with wanted to throw him off a cliff!

   But Jesus makes it clear that no one comes to God, God draws us to God.

   Our salvation comes by God’s action, not ours. When we open our heart and are transformed by God, we become a new creation. Our eyes are opened to see. We can recognize God because we are given what human beings were created to have, a living relationship with the one true living God. It comes from the bread of life.

   What happens to the bread that we eat? Some is expelled as waste but some of it becomes us. It feeds our muscles and hair, our blood and bone. It keeps us alive. It becomes so close to us that it is us.

   In the same way Jesus, the bread of life, does not only feed us but transforms us into being a new creation, not for life but for eternal life.

   That relationship is like a sympathetic vibration, where God, the source, produces in us the same tone. That’s what it means to be created in God’s image. We can’t experience that resonance unless it is given by God. God is holy and we are sinners (that means we are naturally cut off from God by our rejection of God) but God has given himself on the cross to restore that harmonic relationship.

   We resonate with God at the spiritual pitch that God has given and revealed to us by the Holy Spirit. We are created to do that. Each and every one of us.

   When I was on Internship in Des Moines, Iowa, I had an experience that changed my mind about infant communion. A bunch of us interns were brought together from all over the state to debrief, offer support, and do some learning together. We gathered at a Lutheran home for severely impaired and developmentally delayed children. When I say “severe” I mean children of whom it was not certain whether or not they had any awareness of their own existence.

   The chaplain came and talked to us about what he did. He said that he spent time with parents, dealing with issues of guilt over having to institutionalize their now older and larger children. And, he said that he led daily worship services. What kind of worship could he offer in this setting, we wondered? “Well, of course,” he said, “we have Holy Communion.”

   That got our attention. How could he offer Holy Communion to people of whom it was questionable whether they were even aware that they were there, we wondered? “Well,” he said, “they may or may not understand anything that I say. But everyone understands eating and drinking, and if that’s their only means of consciousness, I believe that that’s the way God communicates with them.”

   And so it is, I believe, with us.

   Our text from John 6 continues with the 46^th verse:

⁴⁶ Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷ Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸ I am the bread of life.

   Jesus had just fed at least 5,000 people with 5 barley loaves and 2 fish and had 12 baskets of leftovers, but the crowds missed the point about what that “sign” had pointed to.

   Two monks in Colorado from a nearby monastery were standing in a rural area at the side of a curved road. They held a sign that said, “Repent. The End is Near”. Cars just whizzed by.

   Around the curve, tires could be heard screeching and cars crashing and one of the monks turned to the other and said, “Maybe our sign should say, ‘Turn around. Road washed-out’”.

   Well, “repent” means to turn around. It doesn’t mean to be sorry for stuff we’ve done or left undone. It means to turn around on every path that leads us away from a living relationship with the one true living God and to live in our new life.

   It’s easy to drive on by the sign Jesus displays here in this text, too, and not get the point.

   Jesus wasn’t only talking about the elements of Holy Communion. In fact, that wouldn’t come until later. Jesus was speaking about the thing that he nourishes: life. Real life. Life as God intended it to be. The meaning of bread is the meaning of the cross.

   Jesus says, a few chapters down the line, in John 10:10:

¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

   Abundant life means a quality of existence that is internal, a joy that starts now and endures for eternity. Eternal life.

   There is a kind of life that is fed by bread, and it feeds us in many ways.

   The church I was serving when I retired, and now just Sally and I, work with our brothers and sisters in Christ in Tanzania, in East Africa, to build new churches. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania is one of the fastest growing Christian bodies in the world today.

   During the pandemic, during the isolation phase, I, like many people took up some new hobbies. One of them was baking bread. Many kinds of bread.

   I asked Dean George Pindua, Assistant to the Bishop of the Morogoro Diocese (the equivalent of a synod in the United States) in Tanzania, what kind of bread everyone there would know and eat as a source of nourishment and identity. His answer was a bread called “Mkate” in Swahili. I found a variety called “Mkate Wa Ufuta”, which Dean Pindua confirmed is a variety eaten in Tanzania. It’s called “Sesame Seed Bread” in English, and I tried to make it to see what it was like.

   Flour, yeast, kosher salt, coconut milk, and egg, are mixed, allowed to rise, and patted into round flat loaves. Oil is brushed and sesame seeds are pressed onto one side and that is heated in a griddle, sesame seeds down, while oil is brushed, and sesame seeds are pressed on the other side. It’s flipped and the other side is heated until finished. It’s delicious, especially when eaten warm. 

   Like bread of all cultures, Mkate Wa Ufuta is meaningful to Tanzanians as a cultural expression as well as being nourishing, like the lefse that we make every Christmas is in my Norwegian culture, or others that I made, like the Simit a favorite street food from my visit in Turkey, and a particular kind of bagel from when I studied in Israel. You can find bread from all over the world in L.A. in bakeries, and Naan, a favorite Indian bread, you can buy today at Target.

   But these breads are all provisional. They will not last.

   Jesus continues in John chapter 6, starting at verse 49:

 ⁴⁹ Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰ This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 

   Jesus had performed a “sign”, John’s word for “miracle”, in the feeding of the 5,000 and the crowd came following, almost stalking, him for more free bread. Jesus is concerned for the physical hunger of people and knows of our physical needs.

   Like manna, the bread that formed like dew but would only last a day, people live their lives and then they die.

   But Jesus, is the bread that endures. Jesus is the bread that sustains us forever.

   Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer, in his Small Catechism, a pamphlet on the basics of the Christian faith that he wrote for parents to use to teach their children and which he read from every day, writes on the Lord’s Prayer, the Fourth Petition: Give us this day our daily bread:

“What does this mean?

God gives daily bread, even without our prayer, to all people, though sinful, but we ask in this prayer that he will help us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanks.

What is meant by “daily bread”?

Daily bread includes everything needed for this life, such as food and clothing, home and property, work and income, a devoted family, an orderly community, good government, favorable weather, peace and health, a good name, and true friends and neighbors.”

   We pray for these things, and God knows that we need them even before we ask, but Jesus also points to an even greater need:

   Everyone who ate the manna in the wilderness died. Everyone who Jesus healed died. Everyone who Jesus raised from the dead died.

   Life ends. And then what? “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says, indicating a divine pronouncement. “Whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life.”

   If that doesn’t raise the hairs on the back of your head a little bit, you aren’t paying attention. Eternal life. It begins now and is brought to fullness in the life to come. It is fed by Jesus, the bread of life. Forever.

   Jesus concludes this text with verse 51:

⁵¹ 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.”

   Jesus says, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

   Jesus gave his life for us on the cross. His death gives us life, eternal life, abundant life.

   I saw a tribute video of comedian Bob Newhart after he died recently. He was on a talk show, talking about how difficult it was to do comedy in Germany because many Germans think literally. So, they will ask, “Why do you call that man ‘Curly’. He barely has any hair at all?” Or “Why do you call that man “Tiny”. He must weigh 350 lbs.!”

   This is where Muslim evangelists get it wrong when they tell others that Christians are cannibals, because Jesus speak of eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

   When Jesus says that he is the bread of life, he is not speaking literally, but what he says is real. Jesus will feed us with his real presence in Holy Communion, giving forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. He gives us everything we need for eternal life.

   We all die in our baptisms and rise with Jesus. We are saved by faith through God’s grace, as a gift. And our eternity has started, it’s already begun.

   Why? Because Jesus is the bread of life, the bread that came down from heaven. We have been drawn to him. We resonate with him. We believe because of Him. We are restored.

   What is the living bread that has come down from heaven? It’s Jesus.

   Who nourishes us so that we may live forever? It’s Jesus.

   The bread that Jesus has given for the life of the world is his flesh. It’s Jesus nailed to the cross!

   What then is life but bread, the bread that came down from heaven, the bread that is given to all who would receive it, so that we may never hunger or thirst for life again? It’s Jesus.

   The meaning of bread is the cross. The bread that transforms and feeds us forever is Jesus.

   Receive that bread today.