August 16, 2009
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
I Kings 2:1-12; 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20;
John 6:51-58
Mother Teresa once said, “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”
This day when we hear Jesus speak of the bread of life, when we will baptize two very loved little boys, Max and Leo, it seems wise, maybe not as wise as Solomon's answer to God in the Hebrew Testament reading, but wise enough to explore just what that the hunger is that each human heart has for that bread of life, that bread made of love that Mother Teresa was speaking of and which Jesus promised his disciples.
The bread of life. Life – we know what life is when we see it, from waters teeming with schools of fish to algae finding a way to “be” on deserted rock and arctic cold, to jungles overgrown with vines and green and vegetation in colors so wild a palette that it explodes one's imagination. We know life from puppies to old women to a new born deer walking across our church lawn this past Friday. We know it and we know that Jesus would say he, he was the bread of that life, of all life. He is life; he is bread, bread, the common food of rich and poor alike. He said he was that bread, that life. Doesn't that say something very mysterious? Clearly metaphorical, clearly not literal, yet absolutely true?
What we know of life is that it cannot be lived alone; just as love cannot be without an object of love, alone. Life is always plural. Love is always plural. Lived/loved with one another, lived/loved together, lived/loved in relationship. All of the life I have described is not solitary, and yet we often forget how plural our lives really are. What would life be if lived alone, completely alone? The same as a life absent love.
But when Jesus tells us he is the bread of life, he is also telling us that we are never alone for we are in the circle of love that is God, that is, the relationship between father, son, and holy spirit. We are in that circle because Jesus is the bread of life.
Jesus is the love that is with us even when we are alone. We are always the object of God's love, God's life.
Always!
Today, with this baptism we deliberately mark and bring into the “bread of life,” that circle of love, two very special young boys, Max and Leo. These children already know what love is. And, although I don't really know their parents, I know their grandparents, Carol and Howard, and they have raised their sons, Max and Leo's father and uncle in the circle of love, the knowledge of being loved by them and loved by God.
We will bring them into the circle of God's loved by pouring water over their heads in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, claiming them as Christ's own and marked by the Holy Spirit forever. We claim them as followers of the one who is the bread of life. They will be invited to our communion table; and, when their parents determine, they will share with us in the symbolic bread we eat each week to remind us that Jesus is the bread of life and that we, as part of this circle of love, are joined to him and with him remembering what he taught and recommitting our lives to be his followers.
When I was young – in the olden days – one did not receive communion at baptism; one waited until one was confirmed. And as many of you know, I waited a long time to be confirmed because, well, because I was afraid. I didn't like the idea of eating the body and blood of Christ. I didn't want the bread of life. It was not a rational fear; it was a completely irrational fear. But I think I knew at some very basic level, “You are what you eat.” And I didn't want to have Jesus inside me. My fear was not about cannibalism, which, if we took this eating of body and blood literally would be, well, frankly, would be pretty gross. I didn’t even have some intuitive dislike of drinking “blood” that Jews simply are abhorred by and all the Kosher laws to this day defend against. My fear was much more grounded in realizing the truth of what Jesus says in the gospel this morning that HE is the bread of life. And I simply was not ready to accept the responsibility of ingesting that bread. I would then be accountable for living as Jesus lived, selfless and serving. I didn't want that life, that kind of love in my being, because I knew I would then be accountable to God in a way that I had not been prior to accepting the very basic truth of this proclamation by Jesus, that Jesus is the bread of life.
I could only see what I had to lose – not what I might gain.
And the truth is we gain far more than we lose when we agree to eat of the bread of life that Jesus is and offers us. We gain “eternal life” (and frankly we have no idea what that means) but more importantly, I believe, we gain something real and tangible for this life, each day, every day. We gain that place in the circle of love between Father, Son, and Spirit. We broaden the circle of love that surrounds us, not just to family and friends, but to all those who are members of that bread of life today, to all those who have been members since Jesus spoke these words, and to all those who are yet to come. We accept a moral and ethical way of being as outlined in the baptismal promises we make at baptisms on our own behalf and on the behalf of the children we baptize. We gain a freedom from accepting the values of the world and valuing instead the richness of the mystery that is in giving to others selflessly. We share this holy meal of, truthfully, pretty “unsatisfying” bread – at least if we think of “bread” as crusty, yeasty, bread! But the bread of life (we call communion), well, it satisfies a hunger not from physical lack but from spiritual need – if we let it. That is the “hunger of love” Mother Teresa is speaking of. The spiritual reality is that in giving up ourselves to the bread of life named Jesus, sometimes we are fearful as I wrongly was as a teenager. We fear that we will lose ourselves, but the truth is we gain a “whole” self, a holy self, filled to the brim with love in a way that cannot be filled by the things of this world. We gain self alive! Truly alive! Here and now with the bread of life, with the promise of being fully alive in Christ, with Christ, with God, with the Spirit, forever.
And so it is a very brave thing that we are doing here with Max and Leo today. For we are promising for them that we will be here, or our counterparts in whatever church they find their way to. We are promising we will be here for them, to love them as they are, where they are, and we will be continually inviting them to eat more and more of the bread of life so that their journey as a beloved person, a person filled with life, the life that counts and gives meaning to all life, the Christian life, will be continually inviting them to be whole and wholesome and selfless, that they might outgrow the need to be of the world and learn to live “in” it as one who sees with the eyes and heart of faith, the eyes and heart of Jesus, the eyes and heart of God, who sees all through the eyes of Love.
It is those eyes of love, that heart of life, that we offer these boys today, that we claim for them in God's name! It is not always an easy life or a charmed life, but it is always a blessed life. We wish them each a charmed life too, of course, but by this baptism we can only promise them a blessed life and that is far, far more than charmed. Truly there is no better way to live than to keep ingesting the bread of life, literally and figuratively.
So my friends, eat of the bread of life. Eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus, not as a cannibal, but as one on a spiritual quest to become what God would have you be, more and more each day. Eat the bread of life that you might find life as you have never known it. Eat the bread of life and fill your heart with the love that quenches all hunger.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd