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God as Bread.
I can see it.
Bread is crusty. It can have sharp edges, especially when the baker slices it down the middle before putting it in the oven, or makes a cross cut for our Thanksgiving bread we share here week by week. I eat the top crust of crusty bread last, because it is crunchy and chewy, both, and I always save the best for last. God is … crusty? Yes. And sharp. God is not just soft and tender. And God is, in all times and places, not merely the best, but the only One. And God endures at the last.
But bread is soft and tender, too. If it is baked thirty seconds less than you think it needs, bread can come out perfect. God can feel - maybe even taste - this good. “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” the psalmist says.
Bread is fragrant. Sometimes the smell of baking bread is so lovely it is maddening - that unmistakable yeasty smell, layered and strong. The psalmist sings of fragrances, too: “Let my prayer rise before you as incense,” we sing, usually around sunset, at evening prayer. “Let my prayer rise before you as baking bread,” would be my psalm. The Spirit blows where she wills, and when she blows, her breeze carries delicious smells of nourishment.
Bread can get moldy. If God is Bread, then God is home to - and God is food for - mold. God is that humble!
There are countless different kinds of bread. Is God diverse? Well, God certainly creates in splendid variety: the air is filled with birds of every kind; the seas teem with fish of every kind. And so of course bread is dizzyingly diverse too. Poor folk in ancient Palestine made their bread from barley, and so Jesus multiplied their bread to feed the crowd on the hillside. But in my feast with Jesus, he multiplies loaves of focaccia baked at La Rustica restaurant in West Seattle. God creates in splendid variety: what bread does God multiply that feeds you? What delights you? How does God taste, to you?
We punch bread. Well, we punch the dough, that is, as part of the rising process. If God is the Bread of Life, can we punch God? Yes. Yes we can. God can bear that. We, like so many prophets and singers of psalms before us, we get to confront and challenge God. We get to punch up.
But here’s the main thing, in my book, that makes “God as bread” so vivid and true: bread breaks.
On the evening of the first Easter Day, the Emmaus walkers recognized the Risen One when the bread was broken. Every week here at Grace, we break our bread with intention, holding it aloft for a time. I was taught not to make eye contact with the people when I hold the broken bread before them, because it’s not about me (it rarely ever is, but it definitely isn’t in this moment), and it’s not even about us, at least not as much as, say, the sharing of Peace is about us. When the bread is broken at the climax of our Thanksgiving Table prayer, we recognize Christ in our midst, and we acclaim that Christ appears in the breaking. The Body of Christ is, essentially, vitally, broken.
God as Broken Bread.
I can see it.
Only by breaking the bread can we share it, and stop hoarding it. (God showered pre-broken manna upon the Israelites, and it would rot overnight, so they couldn’t possibly hoard it!)
Only by breaking the bread can we feed others as well as ourselves.
Only by breaking the bread does the Bread that is God become food for the life of the world.
Here’s a story about the importance of breaking bread.
This past week I was talking with one of the people at Grace, and we were reflecting on, well, bad behavior humans sometimes do. I told this person that I continue to feel unhappy about my 42-year-old self, the person I was almost nine years ago. Now, I have worked as a therapist and I am “couch trained,” as they say about people who know well the inside of a therapist’s office. And nobody needs to hear my therapy agenda except the one person who gets paid to hear it. So I’ll just say that at about the age of 42, I was not in good shape. I didn’t have it together. It did become the year of my life in which I quit drinking, which has been a life-saving experience and a tremendous gift from God. So that is a strong point in my favor as a troubled 42-year-old! But I had some amends to make. I owed some apologies. I had work to do.
In the earliest days of recovery, I decided that I had misbehaved enough that I really should step back from receiving Holy Communion. I was a deacon then, so it was actually fairly easy to avoid receiving: I would just busy myself with the table things, clearing patens and chalices, cleaning up. Then we’d all go back to our seats and nobody would notice that I had taken a pass. “I’ll step back for 40 days,” I told myself, a somewhat grandiose use of a biblical number.
But then I told one of my close friends about this. He was certainly deeply empathetic about my struggles. He was and is a good friend. But he said to me - bracingly, the way a good friend can say it and pull it off - he said, “Would you just get over yourself and get into the Communion line with the rest of us sinners?”
And he was right. It wasn’t a mistake for me to feel remorse about my actions. But it was a mistake to think that there is anything, anything at all, that I could do, or think, or feel, that would separate me from the love of God, or put me beyond the reach of the broken bread.
Jesus feeds the multitude. There is no litmus test. There is no coach class or list of undesirables or meritocracy. This is the whole point! The Bread of Life is broken for all, for the life of the whole world. Everyone is invited to come and break bread together.
And we too - like the bread we eat - we are broken. As members of the Body of Christ, we break, sometimes in grief or frustration, but other times in glorious, deep joy. Maybe you saw the photo again this past weekend, the photo of three of the first eleven women ordained to the Episcopal priesthood. The Philadelphia Eleven were ordained on July 29, 1974. Three months later, three of them - the Reverends Alison Cheek, Carter Heyward, and Jeannette Piccard - concelebrated Eucharist, broke the bread, held it aloft, and lo! The church saw itself break open wide enough to welcome women priests, something we hadn’t done since the very first decades of Christianity itself. Mary Magdalene smiled.
So all this breaking of the bread: it is not just hard or sad. It is also glorious. Our hearts break open in compassion. Our minds break open in understanding. Our arms break open in the embrace of one another, and our embrace of those we call our enemies. Our hearts break open in costly love. Even our consciences break open, when we own up to our part in a problem, and strive to make a repair.
Eight years ago, as I turned 43, I began the work of making amends, whenever I could, with several people. That was a breaking-bread experience for me, to be sure. It was deeply vulnerable work. But it was deeply joyful, too. Our work today, all of us in this spiritual community, involves breaking, and being broken. Our Sacred Ground formation work last fall was just one example. Like all the varieties of bread, there are innumerable ways to break in this community - to break open, to break out, to break down, to break so that everyone can be nourished.
Come to this Table. Come to feed on the Bread of Life. But remember, this fragrant, luscious Bread is always breaking. And so you and I will too.
But rejoice! For at this feast of broken bread, we will rise up in unending life with God.
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Preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13B), August 1, 2021, Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 | Psalm 78:23-29 | Ephesians 4:1-16 | John 6:24-35