Searching for the Bread of Life

So I know I am posting these sermons a bit late (this one was given July 29, the tenth Sunday after Pentecost), but here it is. I wanted to post this sermon, given my second month at the Deer Creek Charge because I think the personal stories are important to connecting with a new congregation. I also wanted to post this because of this funny story: At Deer Creek, I put the supplies for a kids sermon on making bread in the box for my new blender. Everyone saw the blender and got all excited, asking me if we were going to have margaritas. I pointed out that Jesus said he was the bread of life, not the margarita of life, but I have been thinking about ways to preach Jesus as the margarita of life...

Also, we used a communion liturgy written by myself and Amanda Rohrs-Dodge and it was very well received. You can check it out here. 

Scripture: John 6:24-35

So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”

Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

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.”

Sermon: Searching for the Bread of Life

Today's scripture reading comes almost immediately after the feeding of the five thousand, which is why Jesus talks about how the people were following him, not because they wanted to learn more, but they wanted to be physically fed again. The people are treating Jesus as another Moses, here.

In Exodus chapter sixteen, verse three, we read that after the Hebrews have been liberated in Egypt, the people began complaining: “The Israelites said to [Moses and Aaron], ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.'”¹ So God creates manna. Again, the story from Exodus: “When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.'”²

This background is important to the story because, though Jesus' words in this scripture are beautiful, I hear a harshness in them, particularly when he tells them not to work for the bread the perishes. I think the harshness comes from this backstory of the complaining Israelites who refuse to trust the God who has brought them out of Egypt. Jesus knows the ways that we refuse to trust God, and the ways that we, like the crowd gathered in the story, want to see more signs, want Jesus to continue to do for us without responding to his teaching.

But Jesus is patient with us, even when we can sense that he doesn't want to be! He teaches us yet again about his way of abundant living, saying, “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Let us pray:

Patient teacher,

one who nourishes us and fills us,

help us be bread. Teach us this morning and every day

to center our lives on you, so that we may be sustained by you

and led into more abundant living. Amen.

Bread of life. I think this is a hard concept for many of us who have never been hungry to understand. Of course, some of us have been hungry, and most of us have seen hunger in ways we will never forget. Most of us are disconnected from the baking of bread--- that's why I brought in the supplies to make bread today for the kids. But I don't want to lose this, of all of the Gospel of John's what are called “I am statements”--- you know, “I am the way the truth and the life”--- because when Jesus says that he is the bread of life, when he says “whoever comes to me will never be hungry,” he is talking about abundant living in a way that shows the physical and connectional ways that we are to live.

Last week I talked a little about how God cares for our well being, God cares about our bodies. Jesus fed five thousand hungry people, not because he was expected to do so by that crowd, not only as a sign of his power, but because he had compassion for hungry people. Jesus has compassion too this morning in our story. The crowds have searched and searched for him, but, as he explains to them, they don't even know what they are searching for. They are looking to feed on bread again, and while Jesus cares about their hunger, he points out a deeper hunger within them. A deeper hunger within all of us.

We are hungry not just for food. Food was a sign for many of the crowds gathered that day, a sign of a different way of living, but many of them did not understand that sign, as many of us may not today. But I think they were seeking after that abundance that Jesus showed him in the fragments; how Jesus could feed five thousand people with a five barley loaves and two fish, fragments, and how Jesus cared about the fragments of the meal and collected them into baskets. From the fragments comes abundance with Jesus. And that's what the people were searching for.

When we talk about eating and abundant living, we are not talking about the Desert Fathers of early Christianity fasting in the desert. Some may be called to such a life, and some fasting is important to all our spiritual lives. And of course, abundantly living does not mean sitting on the couch with bags of chips and oreos lined up, either. We are talking about having enough, about being healthy, and if we have enough food sharing with those who don't, and finding ways for them to be fed always as well.

When Jesus uses the metaphor of bread, he is talking about what for many people, though this may not be true today, was a staple in their diets. Jesus is not the icing on the cake of life, he is the bread of life, a wholesome staple in our diets, not something extra that spruces things up a bit. Jesus feeds us and wants us to feed others.

That is the connectional piece of the bread of life. Jesus doesn't stop with being our sustenance, but calls us to feed the world, by witnessing to our faith in words, like sharing our stories, and in deeds, like feeding the homeless.

And we celebrate this abundant life every month with communion, a simple taste of bread and juice to symbolize an sustaining meal--- a meal that goes beyond the elements of food to knit together the people sharing together and open up ways for us to seek that abundant living together. Many of us may not think much about communion. Unfortunately too often rituals that we do with regularity, to imprint them onto our bones, can become meaningless, things that we do without thinking about them. But I want us to turn to the Lord's Table now to think about what this Bread of Life can mean with a story of my own encounter with the Bread of Life.

I studied abroad in Toulouse, France, my junior year of college. I was not a happy person then, though. While I was excited to live outside of the country, I was nervous, as many of us are when we are far from home, and I felt kind of dejected. See, I thought that God was calling me to be a missionary at the time, but my study abroad plans to go outside of Europe fell through, and so here I was, nineteen, so sure of God's call on my life, only to find that I didn't know where God was leading me at all. I had been seeking the Bread of Life with such certainty that I knew the way--- and maybe I did. Many of us feel God's call on our lives but sometimes that call changes or is lived out in ways we never expected. I think that is what happened to me. But I didn't know this at the time. I just knew I was tired and frustrated.

And I was lonely. Aaron and I had talked on the phone at least every day for the past five years before this--- and I went the entire month of September without hearing his voice at all. My sister Kate was starting college and I was missing all her exploits, and Suzanne was getting her driver's license. My host family was wonderful and the other women in the program--- we were all women that year--- were great, but I still felt alone.

I was going through what I think we are all familiar with in one way or another--- spiritual drought. I am the kind of person, as many of you may have noticed, who tries to see God in everything, particularly outside. But when I was in France, I felt as though I was walking through a fog or that kind of mud that sucks at your feet so you have to focus all your attention on the next step and ignore whatever is around you. This was perhaps one of the worst spiritual droughts of my life, though many of us have much less dramatic, day or week long drought, and many of us have droughts that last for years and years and we can't pull free. I knew I was in a funk, and I knew I didn't want to be in that funk anymore. I think that those people in the crowd following Jesus that day were also in a spiritual drought. They were seeking a way out, but they didn't know what they were searching for. They just didn't want to be in that drought anymore.

And so they started looking for Jesus. And I, I kind of did the same thing. I did what I as a preacher's kid knew to do. I went to church.

There are not many Protestant churches to go to in France. Though I have found beauty in Catholic worship, I really needed the familiarity and comfort of a protestant church. I looked around until I saw the closest one to my host family's house, called the Temple du Salin. The church sits facing a park, so I sat in the park for a few minutes before church started. I was afraid to go in the sanctuary early because my French was still very shaky and I didn't want to be pulled into a conversation. I also didn't want to have to sit alone inside a church for very long.

When I finally walked in, the building was enormous and cold. It was stone, and ancient, as most buildings are in Europe. In the winter time, I later learned, they had these kind of old looking red hot heaters hanging from the ceiling to give off a little warmth. The pews were not even remotely full. See, France is a largely secular country, and those who are religious are usually Catholic or, increasingly, Muslim. They are usually either older folks or they are immigrants, which is actually a trend in most parts of the USA as well. So we in the pews were an eclectic bunch, and no one really sat near one another.

I couldn't understand most of what was going on--- I was newly arrived, you see, and even though I had aced most of my French classes, you don't really know a language until you've been immersed in it. I didn't know any of the songs. And so I had almost resolved not to go back to the church...until it came time for communion.

Communion was when that little church came alive. It was what held that little church together, I think. The dark stone sanctuary became vibrant and warm. Everyone stood up and fanned around the sanctuary in a big circle. And then we all served one another communion. The bread, ordinary bread that was pre-cubed, which I usually hate because they kinda end up hard like crutons, was passed around the circle, each one of us serving one another with words of blessing. And let me tell you, that faintly stale bread tasted so amazing that first Sunday, like a little bit of heaven.

Then they passed the cup. Now, in France people care much less about germs than we do. When you buy bread, no one wears gloves to hand it to you, and they give you a little piece of paper to hold around the baguette with--- but if the baguette just goes in your bicycle basket, it certainly is not protected from the elements! So they passed the cup--- which was filled with wine: grape juice is hard to come by in Europe--- again with words of blessing to one another, and we all drank out of the same cup. It was liberating--- though when later in the winter I would take communion and hear the sniffles around the sanctuary and be sniffling myself, I must say sometimes I passed the cup without drinking. But in that moment on that day I could not think of any other ritual that would make us more connected.

This was the first time I felt as though I was a part of something bigger than myself. I didn't feel alone anymore. It was a simple communion with stale bread and germy wine, and we were ordinary people standing around that room. Some of us might have had a good week, some of us might have been having trouble at work, some of us, like me, were lonely. And yet, we all came together and blessed one another. I wanted to say with the crowd in our Gospel lesson this morning, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

I was able to start to come out of that spiritual drought after taking communion that day. Though I still struggled with loneliness and a deep sense of loss because I didn't know where God was calling me, I was able to make meaning in my time there. I began volunteering at a women's shelter. I traveled to visit friends. I made new, close friends. I even began to look at seminaries, though I refused to acknowledge any call to ministry at the time. But the Bread of Life was sustaining me, leading me to an ever-greater abundance.

May you find the Bread of Life sustaining too this morning. May we all be led to say as the crowd did, “Sir, give us this bread always,” until it becomes a prayer.³

Let us pray:

Bread of Life,

we give you thanks for the ways you have fed us in our faith journeys,

and we ask this morning that you feed us always,

and that we may respond to being fed by feeding others.

As we gather around your table this morning,

nourish us and strengthen us for the work ahead. Amen.

1Exodus 16:3. NRSV.

2Exodus 16:14-15, NRSV.

3Christopher Morse, Theological Perspective on John 6:24-35, Proper 13 (Sunday Between August 1 and August 6 inclusive), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, vol. 3, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 312.

Saying Grace

This is adapted from a story I preached for my liturgy class' Worship Design Project with Dr. Heather Murray Elkins. The scripture we used was 1 Corinthians 12:4-11, about how the body of Christ is made up of many parts, but it is still one body. We followed the story with an invitation to the table for a love feast, or agape meal.

Le Capitol, the center of the city

I studied abroad in Toulouse, France, in 2007 with about ten other women, most from my college but a few from other schools. None of us were really close before studying abroad together, but there is something about being thrown into a foreign land where everyone speaks a foreign language that can bring you together.

First semester living abroad is always really difficult, especially for those of us who had never been so far from home before, and especially around the holidays. So the director of our program, a petite French woman who would take one kernel of popcorn just to taste it and then be done, decided to throw a Thanksgiving dinner for us. I was actually a little upset about this. We were not eating dinner until 8 pm, which is what you do in France, and had been a sore point with me since I got there. I mean, Thanksgiving dinner cannot start at 8. You start making pumpkin pies in the morning while watching all the really bad pop stars lip sync to their really bad pop songs in the parade, and then you take a nap and then everyone comes over ready to eat non-stop for the next several hours. That's what it's about right?

A sculpture in Centreville

But I tried to let it go and focus on making something special for the dinner. We had all split it up and offered to bring something. I was bringing peanut butter cookies. Not quite tradition, but pretty USAmerican I must say. I had to go to three grocery stores before I found anyplace that even sold peanut butter. And when I brought the cookies and put them down among the other food, I was surprised at just how wonderful of a meal we had put together. I had never had pumpkin pie that good--- it was made from real pumpkins! I've only ever had it from the can. I had also never had champagne at Thanksgiving before. Or saltine toffee. And even the food I had had at Thanksgiving before, the myriad of brilliant green vegetables, the cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes, and, though I didn't eat this because I'm a vegetarian, the turkey--- all these things others had brought with them to the table made the night one of the yummiest Thanksgivings I had ever had (don't tell my parents; they are good cooks and I don't want to hurt their feelings).

But more than that it was one of the best Thanksgivings I had ever had. Here we were, women feeling very alone in this new place with a few Frenchies thrown in, none of us with anything really in common other than that we were far from home. Ollie, for instance, she and Alison brought the saltine toffee. Ollie was planning to go into corporate fashion for a while. I don't know how many of you actually know me, but my own sisters and mother who are much more fashion conscious than I am are embarrassed to be seen with me--- and yet Ollie never ever even talks about clothes with me. And Alison, who helped Ollie with the toffee, grew up in New York City, which is so far from the corn fields of Harford County Maryland where I grew up. And Kristin, who is graceful and a dancer--- she was there that night too. She and Priscilla brought the pie. I don't know if any of you have seen me dance, but uh, Kristin and I definitely have nothing in common there. And Priscilla, though we did enjoy sharing a good nutella crêpe together--- Priscilla is so sophisticated and has seen so much of the world whereas I am third generation (at least) Harford County and had never been that far away for that long alone before.

The list is long of the folks there that night and how different we all were,* the different places we were all coming from academically, geographically, culturally. But all of us came to the table together to eat and talk and just be together in the warmth, stuffing ourselves silly as you should on Thanksgiving.

But all of us came to the table together to eat and talk and just be together in the warmth, stuffing ourselves silly as you should on Thanksgiving.

As I left that night to walk back to my apartment, doggy bag in hand--- not a very French thing to do, but I could not pass up that food. I realized that because of the time difference we had been eating at the same time as my own family: 2 in the afternoon in Maryland, 8 at night in France.

In French, Thanksgiving Day is translated as le jour de grâce or le jour de l'action de grâce. The word used for thanksgiving here is grâce, which we would usually translate not as thanks but as grace. And this night for me was a very grace-filled night. We had come to the table, each bringing something of value to share together, each of us bringing the weight of our own homesickness, and of our own wonder at this new country. But there were also some who are kept from the table, who make us recognize our privilege and remind us that the table God intends for us to build is big enough for all of us.

And so we come to this table to share together. Hungry--- I hope--- but we come, bringing with us all that is ourselves to share, and hoping to create a table where there is always room for one more.

*I wish I could include an anecdote about each of the women who I was in France with, because they are amazing and continue to do such amazing things!

"God will protect us, even from Sarkozy"

Crossposted at OnFire.

Immigration is not just a USAmerican "problem"

I began to understand the importance of comprehensive immigration reform not in interactions with immigrant communities in the USA, with whom I had little contact despite living in a farming community, but in studying abroad in France and traveling across Europe. In France, I took sociology and history classes that touched on the social impact of migration of maghrébins (North Africans primarily from Algeria but also Morocco and Tunisia)--- a particularly salient issue as there have been riots in these ethnic communities that have received national attention (in 2005 mostly, but this is not new or over--- watch the film La Haine [Hate] for an artistic exploration of this social dynamic). I spoke with my host family and other French people about Islam and immigration. And I began to see how across Western Europe, immigration is a hot button issue--- from the insanity of the border security in the UK (I stood in line once as the only white person in a long line of brown men in Heathrow for "random" security checks--- I was the evidence that they were supposedly not racially profiling), to the debates over whether or not Turkey should be admitted into the European Union, to learning about Turkish immigration to Germany and initial attempts to prevent Muslims from becoming citizens. In October 2008, one of my best friends, a Bosnian woman (so a woman from the "other" Europe and a Muslim---read: not white enough), was supposed to come visit me but her ticket was revoked when it turned out she needed a visa in order to land in Germany twice (she had two layovers in Germany and would have spent a grand total of two hours in the country). So I began to study the insanity of xenophobia (fear of the foreign) in my own country (you can check out some of my reflections here).

The news today turned me back to the mess that is xenophobia in Europe. Last month, French president Nicholas Sarkozy announced mass deportations of Roma immigrants (more commonly, though derogatorily, known as gypsies--- for more of an explanation check out the Slate article called "Why do the Roma wander?").

"Hey, hey Sarkozy why don't you like the gypsies?" (VAMA feat. Ralflo's "Sarkozy versus Gypsy")


This is nothing new, of course: Italy, for example, declared a state of emergency in 2008 "due to the presence of Roma" and, let's not forget, during the Holocaust, the Nazis exterminated 220,000 Roma in its attempt to "purify the race."

And, for the French government, such despicably racist and xenophobic policies are nothing new. They are forever trying to ban the veil and blaming young men of color for everything wrong in the world. Last September, police invaded and dismantled a migrant camp in Calais. This event has stuck with me these past months because I have often wondered where those families went and what it was like to live through such a traumatic experience of loss.

Thursday and Friday, French police began the ethnic cleansing* program, resulting in the removal of some 700 people and a dismantling of 40 Roma camps, according to the BBC. Robert A. Kushen, executive director of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre, pointed out in an interview for the New York Times that "Mass expulsions based on ethnicity violate European Union law...and the failure of France to do individual assessments of each case--- as opposed to cursory examinations of papers by the police--- also violates European Union rules." Sound familiar?

If that does not sound familiar what about this story from the UK's The Guardian:

Although [an unnamed 27-year-old Romaian man] has lived in Marseille since he was child, he still has no papers, and cannot get a job. "This discrimination will not go away. France has become the opposite of liberty, equality and fraternity," he said. Asked about any friends and acquaintances among the 1040 people to have gone home "voluntarily" from Marseille to their native countries since January last year, he said he doubted they would have gone happily. "Even in Romania you had discrimination," he remembered. "No one wants us. There is no place for us. Not in Romania, and not in France."

I read these articles and am constantly reminded of the stories of refugees denied asylum in the USA, of immigrants who arrive in the USA as children and know nothing of their "home countries" and yet are deported, of USAmerican politicians who are attempting to overturn the fourteenth amendment to deny citizenship to USAmerican-born children of immigrants. Xenophobia is not exclusive to the USA, which is something we must remember as we are fighting for comprehensive immigration reform in our own country. The reason for the French government's stance on immigration is an appeal to the populist vote--- much like the increase secure-the-border furor in the USA. This is a problem across the world--- and not just in the global North: in South Africa, for example, there have been violent attacks against immigrant communities. While we do need to focus on policy and reforming immigration law step by step in the USA, we need to be thinking globally of how we can create a world in which we welcome strangers rather than demonizing them.

"Come, you blessed of my Abba God! Inherit the kindom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me; naked and you clothed me. I was ill and you comforted me; in prison and you came to visit me...The truth is, every time you did this for the least of my sisters and brothers, you did it for me."**

***

The title of this blog, comes from a quote in a New York Times piece from Ioan Lingurar.

* I know a lot of activists reject using the term ethnic cleansing when talking about Arizona's SB1070 and other anti-immigrant policies because its connection to the Bosnian genocide such a term brings with it. I am not suggesting that we forget that the term ethnic cleansing served as a euphemism for genocide. However, I am asking that we look at the definition of ethnic cleansing--- the forced removal of an ethnic group from a geographical area--- and use the weight of the term to name the reality of anti-immigration policies like France's.

**Matthew 25: 34-36,40, The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Priests for Equality (Sheed and Ward 2007).

***
UPDATED November 9, 2010 with the "Sarkozy versus Gypsy" song.