All Saints’, Dorval
August 11, 2024
Making hot cross buns at the Holy Week youth retreat.
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.
Once again, I’m looking back six years, to my first month preaching here at All Saints’, and reflecting on how much has happened since then.
At the time, I talked about how our bread for the journey is not only the literal bread of the Eucharist, but also the spiritual food of reading, learning about, and meditating upon the Word of God.
Over the course of this time, we’ve shared many meals of both kinds.
When I think of literal bread, I think, of course, of the thin white wafers that we take, bless, break, and share, week in, week out at this altar. And I think of hamburger buns at the Welcome Back Barbecue, and garlic bread at Messy Church, and toast at the Men’s Breakfast, and sculpture bread at Palm Saturday, and cinnamon rolls at St. Michael’s Mission, and Maundy Thursday matzoh, and sandwiches at funeral lunches, and innumerable pizzas eaten at Non Solo Pane and on the lawn with the confirmation class.
And when I think of spiritual bread, I think of the Wednesday morning Bible study group. I think of Advent quiet days and Epiphany retreats. I think of conversations over coffee about life and death, love and work, parenting and mourning, all the big questions we have as we seek for meaning in this life. I think of the PATH reading group, and the Montreal Dio online courses, and Lay Readers’ study days, and felt board stories and Holy Week youth events and our anti-racism reading group from the summer of 2020.
Because of course, during those years, there was a long period when we couldn’t share bread – at least not the literal kind. We couldn’t gather around a table, either an altar or a dinner table, and look each other in the eye. For months and months, our faces and voices were digitally mediated, and though we were profoundly grateful for the existence of those digital options, it was nothing like the real thing.
We could share spiritual nourishment, still, through those Zoom reading groups and online courses and the absurdity that was Zoom Messy Church, but it was still a time of profound loss. For the whole time that worship was online, Chris and I deliberately avoided programming any of the classic and beloved Communion hymns, concerned that singing about breaking bread together would be too painful when we weren’t able to actually do so.
And yet, in that time of testing and deprivation, we were able to come to understand, together, the reality of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” We were hungry and thirsty, for the literal Bread of Life and the living water of community – and yet we were not starving or dying of thirst. Because we abided together in Christ’s Body, in the living Bread, even when our physical bread was withheld, we were able to get through, together.
At the time, I compared online worship to a nutrient drip – adequate to prevent starvation, and something we should have been providing long ago for the people who can’t have solid food, but not in any way the same as gathering around the table together. We are so thankful that it was there when we had it, and we rejoice that it’s been almost three years since we were able to gather together, back around this table, and break the real and tangible bread.
Perhaps it feels a bit … presumptuous, is maybe the word I’m looking for, to claim that this congregation – not large, not particularly remarkable, full of very ordinary people and led by a very ordinary and imperfect priest – can be that bread for each other, can incarnate the presence of God.
But that’s exactly what Jesus is saying in the Gospel – “very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.” Whoever believes. Not people who are special, or have secret knowledge, or meet a certain standard. Anyone.
And Jesus himself faced the same questions in his own day: “Is not this the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” They assumed Jesus couldn’t speak for God, let alone be God, because he was an ordinary person from an ordinary family. But that precisely why and how Jesus could do what he did: by being fully one of us, he made, and makes, it possible for us to be in God.
Two weeks ago, we read the beginning of this long chapter about bread; that opening passage recounts the story of the feeding of the five thousand, which then becomes the basis for Jesus’ long discourse about his own identity as the Bread of Life. After he has multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the crowd, they tried to make him king, and he had to flee all the way across the Sea of Galilee (walking on water part of the way) in order to prevent this.
Dana Cassell, in a commentary on this passage, points out how completely illogical it was for the crowd to respond to this miracle by trying to make Jesus king. He had just shown them how to share, how to be in community together, and now they were trying to hand over their agency to him and let him tell them what to do. They didn’t recognize that by eating together, by experiencing this miracle, they had become part of him and he had become part of them, and so all of them, together, had to figure out how to make God real for the world the way Jesus had just made God real for them.
I can see the appeal, honestly. I would like to not have to work so hard or make so many decisions. I would like to be able to turn my life over to someone who’s smarter than me and can take care of things and tell me what to do.
But that’s not how it works, this Bread of Life thing. In order to have a Eucharist or a church supper, we all need to show up and play our parts, making the food and cleaning up after as well as enjoying the abundance. In order to be the Body of Christ in the world, we all have to seek out and feed on the spiritual food of God’s Word and God’s Presence, that manna in the wilderness that will keep us going through good and bad.
Together, over the past six years with me and for many years before that, that manna has been found here in this place and among these people. The Bread of Life is here, among us. It is us. And it will never fail us.
Amen.
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