"The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread"

A sermon preached by Rev. Deana Frances Dudley

at Christos Metropolitan Community Church, Toronto, Ontario and

Holy Fellowship Metropolitan Community Church, London, Ontario

10 August 2003

Well, once again, our lesson today is about bread. In the gospel lesson that was read, Jesus said, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever." Now, if you’ve been coming to church consistently in the last few weeks, you’ve heard several sermons, three, I think, on the subject of this bread of life. You might be excused for beginning to wonder if I’m ever going to get off of the subject of FOOD. But this really IS an important theme. The entire sixth chapter of this gospel is devoted to it. Christ IS the bread of life. Christ IS nourishment for our hungry souls.

What’s the most consistent image of heaven in the Bible? It’s not golden streets or pearly gates. It isn’t harps or eternal singing. It’s feasting with the family.

Now, that doesn’t mean that when we all get to heaven, we’re going to eat forever and ever. Even if we could be guaranteed never to gain weight, eating might get boring after a while. No, the reason Jesus often started his parables saying that the Reign of God, heaven, is like a feast or like a banquet, is because he wanted us to know that heaven is about the joy of abundance and togetherness. It's about the community of sisters and brothers. It’s about fellowship with Jesus and with each other. Christ really IS the bread of life. Christ really IS nourishment for our souls. That’s the main thing.

When I was in Jordan a few of years ago, we lived for the summer in a United Nations school for Palestinian refugees. For the most part, we just ate what they ate, which was traditional Palestinian and Jordanian fare, and though it was pretty plain food, I loved it, because I love Middle Eastern food. They were very friendly people, and very kind about trying to make some accommodations to our Western tastes. They served Tang at breakfast, even though the rest of breakfast was usually things like yoghurt and cucumbers and tomatoes, which frankly, I prefer to Tang.

And because most of us were Americans, on the Fourth of July, somehow they found hot dogs... well.... sort of... for us to have a picnic with. Hot dog buns, however, do not exist in the Middle East, so we wrapped them in pita bread, which was an ever-present staple of every meal we ate there. When I got back, it was months before I could look a piece of pita bread in the face again. We Westerners don’t quite appreciate what Jesus was saying when he said, "I am the Bread of Life," and it was a wonderful lesson to me while I was there.

You see, in the Middle East, bread at a meal isn’t just something on the side, that you can eat if you’re hungry and leave on the table if you’re not. Bread is at the very HEART of every meal. They have something like pita bread at every meal. They don’t use forks to put food in their mouths. That’s actually considered kind of crass. Such an object would defile. Rather, you break off a piece of the bread, pick up your food with it and eat it. Indeed, the ONLY way you can get to the main dish, the main thing... is with the bread.

So what Jesus was saying was that the only way you can get to the main thing, the main dish, the banquet of LIFE..... is through him, through the bread of life. And in this image, bread, I think we can see some unique things about Christ’s ministry to us, and our ministry to the world. So let’s look at this bread.

First, notice that the bread of Christ is universal. No one is excluded. Jesus said, WHOEVER eats of this bread will live forever." There’s no restriction on who Christ invites to his table. That’s why, when we serve communion, WE DARE NOT make any restriction on who is served. It makes no difference who you are or what you've done. It makes no difference where you’re from or how you got here. The only language spoken at THIS table is the language of hunger – and the language of feeding.

This bread image is helpful to us because bread plays an important part in our meals. Wheat, and bread, is a main staple of a Western diet. It’s interesting, though, to look at the way this scripture gets translated for other cultural settings. The translators have found it useful to focus on the main thing, and not on the Western or Middle Eastern bread image. For example, translators for a small tribe in South America may, instead of using "bread," refer to "the Banana of Life," because that’s what people there rely on for their daily sustenance. Early Hawaiian culture would have better understood, perhaps, "the Poi of Life," and THAT image would have been most meaningful to them.

The point is.... ultimately, it makes no difference whether you say Christ is the bread of life or that Christ is any other main focus of sustenance or nourishment one would have with one’s culture’s meal. We might even find that in a relatively homogeneous gathering like Christos MCC, we might have different notions of what bread is most sustaining to us. One person might prefer cornbread. I think I’m with the cornbread camp. But someone else might find a hearty seven-grain bread to signify something life-giving, while another might prefer, say, a nice croissant. That may be a helpful metaphor for some. One reason the name of Christ can be heard all over the world is that Christ is bread for the world. Christ is not American bread. He’s not European bread, or African Bread, or Middle Eastern bread. We worship a universal Christ.

Another characteristic of the Bread of Christ is that it is intensely personal. As we’ve emphasized before, ALL are welcomed at Christ's table. I’m welcome at Christ's table and you’re welcome at Christ's table. We’re all precious to Christ. There are no second class citizens at God’s banquet. Sometimes, in the L/G/B/T community, we need to be reminded that God knows each of us and will never forget any of us. Christ’s love is at the same time universal and extremely personal. Christ is bread for a hungry world. Bread for your life and mine. The bread Christ offers is both universal and personal.

The Bread of Christ is also communal. We know the bread that Christ gives us is personal. We rejoice in our acceptance by God and the indwelling of Christ's Spirit. But, that experience doesn’t happen in isolation. Let me repeat that. That experience does not happen in isolation. It happens in the context of Christian community.

Y’all know I probably spend too much time online. I saw something online once that I thought was interesting, and relevant to this. It was an article entitled, "Do This in Random Access Memory of Me." It read like this: "In June, the Rev. David E. Courter of the Independent Catholic Church International told the Associated Press that he would soon celebrate Mass online and allow people to take Communion by placing unleavened bread in front of their computer monitors."

Now.... call me old fashioned, but I gotta tell you, that just doesn’t do it for me. I know we all have different needs. And I admit that there are times for private communion with God – even if we do it in front of a computer screen, and I’ve been known to do that. But Christ is talking about something more than simply, or only, the personal or the individualistic. And that’s a clear reference to the practice of communion as it was practiced by the early church. The bread is personal, but it’s also communal. It’s bread for all God’s people. The strength we draw from the body of Christ is in part the result of our joining spirits as disciples. We BECOME the body of Christ. Christian faith is not to be lived in isolation. It is not a faith for loners. It is a sacred fellowship.

At meal-times, most of the time, there’s a lot more going on than eating. I suspect that the reason McDonald’s is the world's largest fast-food company, is not simply that they sell food (or a facsimile of food), but that they sell fun, good times, enticing experiences. Those of you who are parents.... do your kids ask to go to McDonald's to get hamburgers, or to be with other kids and get Happy Meal toys? How many adults here go to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal? Uh huh.....

Well, in ancient times, eating and drinking together was more of a celebration than it is today. A meal together was a sign of mutual trust and a kind of pledge to be friends. I used to see that play out the same way all the time when I lived in Washington, DC. Even in modern politics, when one head of state visits another, the host country often holds a state dinner or ceremonial banquet, not because they need to fill their stomachs, but because they need to strengthen relationships.

And the same is true of our communion meal in church. Our concern is not to fill our stomachs, but to strengthen relationships, with God and with each other. And John’s community understood that to have communion together meant to live in Christ and to invite the eternally living Christ to be in relationship with them.

And that brings me to my last thought on the bread of life. The Bread of Christ is both timely and eternal. I like that phrase, timely. I got myself a carton of chocolate milk the other day. I had a choice. I could get the one that said "Sell by August 9," or the one that said "Sell before September 1." Which one do you think I got? Most of us pay attention to those codes. We don't want sour milk or stale bread. Christ's bread is timely as well. It never gets stale.

When Jesus taught the disciples to pray for daily bread he used a word that’s unique in all of ancient Greek writing. Epiousios. It’s translated as meaning "for today, for the coming day, or necessary for existence." The bread of our necessity. The word isn’t found in classical Greek, it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Greek New Testament. Some people thought Matthew might have made up the word when he wrote his Gospel....

....That is, until 1947, when they unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls. And among all the shards of pottery, and scraps of parchment, there was a shopping list . . . some ancient woman’s notes of what she needed from the market. And Jesus’ word for "daily" was on the list. It was the designation of a category, the items she needed to purchase every day in the marketplace. Before preservatives were invented, bread needed to be baked daily. Like the manna in the wilderness, it could grow moldy the next day. So even though this bread Jesus gives us is eternal, it must be gathered daily. Thus Jesus says to us that we need to depend daily on God, on him, on the bread of life.

Do you see these wonderful paradoxes? Universal yet personal. Personal and yet communal. Timely and yet eternal. And this brings us to one final paradox: The bread of Christ is both to be kept, and it is to be given away. The bread of Christ gives us great strength. We don’t want to lose it. And yet, at the same time Christ means for us to share it, to give it away.

And that’s Christ’s message to us. A whole slew of delightful paradoxes. And the fact that we have these paradoxes invites us OUT of our tendency to make either/or judgments, and frees us to taste the all inclusive feast of heaven, in all of its mysteries. The bread of Christ is universal, and yet personal; personal, yet communal; daily, yet eternal; to keep, and yet to share.