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Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to [Jesus], “There is a child here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated.
Loaves of bread.
Loaves of bread made from barley flour, which even the poorest households in first-century Palestine could afford.
God’s dominion revealed to us in the distribution of cheap but good bread, broken skillfully, handed carefully from person to person, until everyone has eaten their fill.
God’s dominion as the breaking of bread.
God as Bread.
I can see it.
Bread is crusty. It can have sharp edges, especially when the baker scores 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. So God is … crusty? Yes. And sharp. God is not just soft and tender. God is, in all times and places, not merely the best, but the only One, the One who knows us, the One who pierces us with awful yet graceful intimacy. And God endures at the last.
But bread is soft and tender, too. If it is baked just a little 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 sings.
Bread is fragrant. God 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. My psalm would be, “Let my prayer rise before you as baking bread.” 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! God dwells that lowly, that meekly.
And 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. As we’ve seen, poor folk in ancient Palestine made their bread from barley, and so Jesus multiplied barley 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 bread delights you? How does God taste, to you?
And .. we punch bread. Well, we punch the dough, that is, as part of the rising process. If Jesus is the Bread of Life, can we punch Jesus? Yes. Yes we can. The risen Christ, still wounded yet rising up in life – he can take our punches. 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. And so, every week here at church, we break our bread with intention, holding it aloft for a time. 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 the bread, and stop hoarding it. (God showered pre-broken manna upon the Israelites, but it would rot overnight, so they couldn’t possibly hoard it.)
Only by breaking the bread can everyone be nourished. (God in Jesus was known for countless meals with those who hunger, including Jesus himself, a famished peasant: he did not feed the hungry; he ate with them.)
Only by breaking the bread do we find the wounded but risen Christ in our midst.
And only by breaking the bread can we come to see how we ourselves — we who follow Jesus, the Bread of Life — we, like Jesus himself, will become broken bread for this hungry, this famished world.
But we live in such a famished world that we can no longer afford to confine the concept of “bread” to our creative metaphorical imaginations: the hungry multitude on the grassy hillside is all too literally real. In an article published today in the New York Times, journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote this: “It can be tempting, in an age of apocalyptic imagination, to picture the most dire future climate scenarios: not just yield declines but mass crop failures, not just price spikes but food shortages, not just worsening hunger but mass famine. In a much hotter world, those will indeed become likelier, particularly if agricultural innovation fails to keep pace with climate change; over a 30-year time horizon, the insurer Lloyd’s recently estimated a 50 percent chance of what it called a “major” global food shock.”
Harrowed by these fears in our existential age, we follow the One who literally gave food to hungry people in his effort to show us what the Dominion of God is like. And so we, in turn, literally feed people, at the center of our spiritual mission. (Notice our shelves full of food for our neighbors, in our entryway.) We are welcome to keep “bread” in our imagination as an image of Christ, but it is also our task, as followers of Jesus who fed the multitude, to become the barley, ground into flour for the substance of the bread, the substance of the Body of Christ.
“God as Bread” is not just a beautiful metaphor. “God as Bread” is a challenge, an exhortation, a sending of everyone gathered here to feed all who hunger, even at great cost to ourselves, against all of our instincts to hoard for a safe future. Jesus the Bread of Life joins the hungry multitude in their predicament, in their anxiety, in their vexing, spiraling crisis.
Here’s how Ignatius of Antioch, a first-century member of the Jesus Movement, says it: Ignatius says, “I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.” I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”
We are invited to follow Jesus the Bread of Life, but this following is not simply walking behind a friendly sherpa up a twisting mountain trail. To follow Christ means to be ground fine and consumed like he was: to be torn open, to be crushed like dry grain.
And so we affirm, finally, that when Jesus is on the hillside, surrounded by hordes of hungry people, and says to his disciples, “Make the people sit down,” he is saying something startling, something daunting. “Make the people sit down,” Jesus says, just before he wondrously multiplies loaves of cheap bread into a mountaintop feast. But he hosts this wondrous dinner with the full knowledge that he will himself become that bread, torn to pieces, distributed up and down the hillside, consumed by pilgrims who are frantic with hunger.
And then, following Jesus, we fall into this pattern right behind him. Ignatius makes this plain: we are God’s wheat, ground fine by the lion’s teeth, to be made purest bread for Christ.
We allow our lives to be consumed in mission alongside God’s beloved hungry people. We allow our hearts to be torn open in compassion for refugees, for victims of war, for migrants at the border, for farm animals in tiny cages, for human persons in tents just outside our door, for this whole grassy hillside we call Uptown, for the grassy hillside of this whole round world.
God’s mission asks a lot of us.
But we have guides along the way, apostles who help us understand, accept, and finally join God’s mission. My husband Andrew is, like his namesake the apostle Andrew, one of those in our community who evangelizes by baking bread, by fixing dinner. Happily, it was his turn today to bake our bread. I say “happily” because whenever it’s Andrew’s turn to be one of the St. Paul’s “Flour Children,” our house is filled with holy fragrance. Our kitchen is adorned with luscious fresh-baked bread. It’s almost a shame that this lovely gift will be broken and torn apart, then chewed and swallowed, by all God’s hungry people.
But that’s how it works. That is our faith. Come on up, then, hungry pilgrims. Come forward to eat your savior, which will strengthen you to be torn apart and eaten, too. In all this tearing and eating, all the people of God will receive as much as they want, all that they need. All God’s people will be satisfied. But all along this difficult Way, up and down this grassy hillside, all of us who follow Jesus the Bread of Life – we will surely be ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.
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Preached on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12B), July 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21