Deuteronomy 8.1-10
Psalm 34
Ephesians 4.25-5.2
John 6.37-51

Driving through the rural South, you used to see them along the roadside, on handmade signs nailed to trees, in faded paint on collapsing tobacco sheds.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.   Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. The wages of sin is death.  Old time Gospel messages often inscribed in archaic King James English, with serene disregard for the odds of the uninitiated unsaved making sense of them: Ye must be born again; I image some passing Californian puzzling over that one, wondering who this Chinese fellow Ye might be and why the necessity of his reincarnation is pronounced along Alabama’s highways.  That opaque religious language probably seemed obvious to the Holy Rollers or the Two Seed in the Spirit Predestinarian Baptists or whoever they were who posted those roadside messages, so familiar that its strangeness no longer registered, except on the clueless passersby, for whom it was utterly weird.
 

There’s something of this in Jesus’ words in today’s lesson from the Gospel of John.  We’re probably so used to them that we don’t hear the strangeness: I am the bread of life…the bread that comes down from heaven…the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.  What does it mean for Jesus to be the bread that gives life? What is it to eat that bread? How to make these words meaningful for people today? For ourselves?
 

The people Jesus is speaking to find what he says weird and offensive: they begin to complain about him because he said “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”  Further on in the chapter John reports that they “disputed among themselves, saying ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”  I doubt that their real problem was with the metaphors, with wondering how Jesus could be bread, or with their hearing an invitation to cannibalism.  We have no reason to suppose these people are so obtuse as to construe Jesus’ claims in some literalistic way.  Instead, what for them is offensive and barely comprehensible is what Jesus is plainly saying: that he, personally and uniquely, is God’s provision for his people; that all God’s previous ways of nourishing and saving his people were incomplete or inadequate – “Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and died” – but now in giving them Jesus God is giving them salvation for keeps, eternal life: “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”  No wonder they’re put off; Jesus is making huge claims about himself, claims that seem to undermine their identity as Jews. Yet it’s not as though Jesus drops this news on them out of the blue.  He has already done something to show them he is the bread of life.  Here, as elsewhere, what Jesus says is a mirror of what he does; he enacts the good news as well as proclaiming it.  Earlier in this chapter a crowd, eager for the healings Jesus has been doing, has pursued him up the side of a mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee.  There, with nothing but five barley loaves and two fish, Jesus miraculously feeds the crowd of thousands.
 

Commentary on the miracle of the loaves and fishes usually dwells on it as a sign of the superabundance of God’s provision.  Out of the virtually nothing that we have to offer the God who is with us in Jesus produces more than enough for everyone.  God’s generosity is overwhelming.  However, there’s another aspect of the account that lies in what is unspoken but assumed in the narrative.  Everyone concerned -- Jesus, his disciples, the multitude -- appears to take it for granted that sharing a meal is just what you do if you’re in the company of Jesus at mealtime.  There’s no discussion of what one might have thought the sensible course of action: letting these people go home for dinner.  The discussion Jesus has with Philip and Andrew does not concern whether they should provide a meal for everyone present, but how they can possibly do it, given the size of the crowd that has unexpectedly shown up.
 

As a Rabbi in first century Israel, Jesus is expected to be a good example, taking great care about who he eats with, taking pains to avoid the intimacy of table fellowship with the impure or with sinners.  Jesus becomes notorious for flouting this; recall the accusation: he eats and drinks with drunkards and harlots, tax collectors and sinners.  Jesus was not simply careless in his eating habits; he deliberately makes his ministry a moveable feast, a traveling dinner party where everyone is welcome.  The carefully delineated boundaries between the pure and the impure, between those whose way of life merits a place in God’s kingdom, a place at God’s table, and those who by rights should be sent away hungry are gleefully broken down.  Whenever Jesus sat down to eat he was demonstrating the arrival of the kingdom of God.  When Jesus is there, there’s a place for everyone at God’s table; there is acceptance and reconciliation for all comers.
 

What happens on the side of that mountain above the lake looks like this on a large scale.  Jesus is having dinner with thousands of strangers, with no regard for who or what they are; chances are few of them were the sort of people Jesus ought to have been breaking bread with.  Clueless and undeserving, they are welcome to partake in the life-giving meal of fellowship Jesus provides, to begin sharing in whatever rudimentary way they can in the divine life into which Jesus invites all of us.
Jesus does not just host the meal to which he invites all and sundry.  The meal happens only because he gives himself.  He is the bread that is broken and given away so all those invited to partake can live.  “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
 

For us to eat the bread is to share in the life of Jesus, a life that gives itself for others.  To eat the bread of life is to be transformed, to be forgiven and healed and drawn into the eternal life of God.  We can talk about becoming like the God who was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.  We can talk about being willing to make a place for others, even to live sacrificially for one another, but minimal honesty will remind us that this is mostly a matter of faith in God’s power to do his thing with us in his good time, despite ourselves.  In 1866 Mark Twain, who later became infamous for his cynicism about the hypocrisy of Christians, went to Hawaii as a newspaper correspondent. He interviewed the king. The conversation turned to religion and the king assured Twain that his people understood the true meaning of the Christian sacrament. “We understand Christianity,” said the king. “We have eaten the missionaries.” We know that none of us can claim to have been much changed, much delivered from our selfishness, our fear and self-righteousness, our readiness to judge and condemn and exclude.
 

Each week we come to this rail and eat the bread, remembering Jesus who gives himself for us, acknowledging the present power of his resurrected life, symbolizing our commitment to joining our lives to his.  I don’t know how it is for you, but for me it’s about forgetting and being reminded.  Some of you have seen the film Memento.  It’s about a man, Leonard Shelby, who has lost the ability to acquire new memories.  Each night when he sleeps he completely forgets everything from the day before and each morning when he wakes up he struggles to decipher his own cryptic notes and messages from the previous day that he discovers scrawled on the mirror, on his hands, his arms.  In a way that’s how it feels to me, forgetting who I am and being recalled to myself, needing once again to decipher the message, to taste the bread that comes down from heaven.
 

But sometimes, I think, we do see that life of Christ being formed among us.  Unless you spent the last two weeks on a spelunking vacation, you probably noticed that the Episcopal Church got a lot of free publicity, thanks to our General Convention up in Minneapolis.  The church is deeply divided on the issues that were voted on; in fact I know that even in our small congregation there are those of us who have strong convictions on opposing sides.  The whole thing was in a lot of ways pretty embarrassing but I saw it in a different light when I read the homily Frank Griswold, our Presiding Bishop, gave at the communion service that brought the convention to a close.  He noted that the media had often commented on the civility that characterized the proceedings.  But the Presiding Bishop disagreed: it was not civility that was at work; it was love. Addressing the battered delegates he said: “Paradoxically, our differences writ large have stripped us of our facile civility” and left us with love, not a feeling but a matter of the will.  “And the willingness of many of you who are deeply distressed by certain actions of the convention to stay, quite literally, at the table, is a profound act of love for which the community can be grateful.”  Even – maybe especially – within the Church we find ourselves called to put aside things that matter a great deal to us and put up with – maybe even love – one another, sacrificing our inveterate inclination to judge and exclude, to be vindicated for being right.  We find ourselves called to partake in the sacrificial bread and to share in the death and life of Jesus.
 

Frederick Buechner gives some good advice on how to remind ourselves that life for us can only be the forgiveness and reconciliation offered by our crucified and resurrected Lord:  The next time you walk down the street, take a good look at every face you pass and in your mind say Christ died for thee. That girl. That slob. That phony. That crook. That saint. That damned fool. Christ died for thee. Take and eat this is remembrance that Christ died for thee (Wishful Thinking, p. 53).
 

I’ll conclude with some words from the sermon that Rowan Williams gave last February when he was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury:  The one great purpose of the Church’s existence is to share that bread of life; to hold open in its words and actions a place where we can be with Jesus and to be channels for his free, unanxious, utterly demanding, grown-up love. The Church exists to pass on the promise of Jesus – ‘You can live in the presence of God without fear; you can receive from his fullness and set others free from fear and guilt.’

Amen.