Church of the Incarnation

I don't care what the anti-carb diets say - I love bread. All kinds of bread. I love those biscuits out of the can, golden brown on top and baked in thin layers that you can peel off and eat one at a time. I love cornbread, dense and gritty and full of pieces of corn meal big enough to get stuck between your teeth. And I love big round peasants' loaves, with their almost impenetrable crusts protecting the moist, chewy bread inside.

When I was in Honduras on mission trips, I would help the women there make bread for the day. They got up long before dawn to start simmering the corn meal. For hours they worked with a pestle in a huge bowl grinding the moisture out of the hot corn until it became a glue-like dough. With one deft move I was never able to replicate they rolled a pinch of the dough into a ball and then flattened it between their hands into a tortilla about the size of a CD. They tossed each tortilla onto a pan over an open fire just long enough to seer in the moisture without making it brown or crisp. It took hours to make enough tortillas to feed our entire group. We ate them for breakfast with sweet bananas and refried beans. We ate them for lunch with a stew of rice and meat. And we ate them for dinner with chicken and beans. We used the bread as plates to hold other foods and we used it as utensils to scoop up bites. In every home in the little village where we lived, the women began their days by making essentially the same tortillas. They were a staple of the Honduran diet.

It's to an audience with this understanding of bread that Jesus says, "I am the living bread."

And bread is on their minds, since they've just eaten their fill of it at the Feeding of the Five Thousand. They've watched Jesus take less bread than their family eats in a day and bless it and spread it among a crowd that stretched as far as they could see. And everyone was filled. All received the nourishment they needed to journey home. Their physical need was sated. But the people have crossed the river since then, and the dull ache of hunger is starting to return. So they go to Jesus, hoping to be fed again, looking for tortillas from the Son of God.

Don't we do the same thing? Maybe we come to church because we like the other people we find here or because the music and the ceremony just make us feel good. Or we give to an outreach project at least in part so that we'll feel better about our own consumption, to assuage our guilt. We barely scratch the surface of what God holds out to us - we look for tortillas from the Son of God.

And Jesus meets us right where we are, with tortillas enough to fill our bellies (and probably some of our pockets) and overflow twelve baskets besides. But even as he hands us tortillas, Jesus also says, "I am the living bread."

No matter how many tortillas we eat, that dull ache in the pit of our stomachs will always return. Tortillas only satisfy for a time - even manna only satisfied for a time - because our hunger is deeper than our bellies. There's a nagging emptiness that friends and ceremony can't touch, that "isn't there more than this?"

So Jesus says, "I am the living bread."

I AM - the name God revealed to Moses, the unrepeatable name of God Almighty, who was before time and will be after time.

THE BREAD - the sustenance, the nourishment, the basic necessity, the plate to hold it and spoon to scoop it.

THE LIVING BREAD - that which makes us alive here and now and that which has eternal significance and gives us hope of eternity.

Jesus, God Almighty, offers us eternity, "more than this."

It's an exciting time at Incarnation. Last week we passed out bags of school supplies to 250 students at Draytonville Elementary School. This afternoon we'll kick off our youth program with a pool party. And next Sunday we begin Christian Education for all ages between the two services. I know it's an exciting time in many of your lives as well, starting new schools or adjusting as bodies age or jobs change. We all have a lot of this-worldly concerns making our stomachs rumble, concerns that can be met by a tortilla because they're fleeting. Please don't misunderstand me - these concerns are important, and Jesus is concerned along with us. But I think we run the risk of listening so intently to the rumble of our tummies and looking so closely at the tortilla in front of us that we might miss the living bread which Jesus also offers. I think we run the risk of getting so caught up in the details of our new programs for children and youth that we might miss the encounter with God which is the point of those programs. I think we run the risk of worrying so much about the changes in our lives that we might miss the changelessness of God which keeps us anchored.

But with every tortilla offered, Jesus also holds out to us the living bread, the opportunity to encounter God anew, to get a taste of the eternal.

One of my favorite moments of the service is distributing the bread at Communion. It's such a privilege to see you all, empty hands reaching out, begging to be filled with "something more than all this," begging for an encounter with Christ, an encounter that will sustain you through all the concerns of your daily life. But the real privilege is to be able to fill your empty hands, to tell you that you're receiving the body of Christ, his flesh, his humanity, his life and death for us, and his redemption of us, allowing us to be with him for all eternity.

Of course, we each encounter Jesus in our own way, and so the living bread at the Eucharist touches us in different ways. Some of us receive the living bread as a biscuit which we discover one flaky layer at a time. Others receive it as cornbread, ingested through difficult, gritty bites and kernels that get stuck between the teeth, making our gums bleed. And some receive it as peasant's bread, with a tough outer crust after which each bite is easier than the last. In all these forms, Jesus offers us the living bread, a sharing with him for all eternity.

As we come to the altar, it's easy to reach out our hands expecting just a tortilla, something to ease our worries and take away our pains. But as you reach out your empty hands and receive the little morsel of bread today, take a minute to keep your hands and your heart outstretched just a little longer to receive another morsel as well - the living bread.

Amen.