Bread

You know how you feel about bread.  You hate to love it.

Isn't that true?  We are in the age now where gluten is of the devil.  You know it.  You're made to feel like a criminal every time you consume the devil's treat of wheat.  Wheat belly, atkins, gluten free, the catch words and buzz phrases fly fast and furious, falling over each other to eliminate wheat from our world. Gluten is a bit of a villain these days, which is funny, because for most of history, wheat, gluten, have been the engine upon which civilization has run.

We forget about this, because, of course, we have refrigerators, and canned goods, and year round apples, so we forget about the fact that for the majority of history, there were times of abundance and scarcity.  If you were a hunter-gatherer, you spent your time hunting and gathering.  that was it.  And everyone had the same job.  It wasn't as though you could be a dentist and your neighbor could be a nail tech.  No no, if you were alive, then you were a hunter / gatherer.  That was the only job there was. I know, I know, studies have shown that the hunter / gatherer people were happier and worked fewer hours, but here's the kicker - they worked fewer hours, but all at the same job.  They were hunter / gatherers, and that was their job.  Every day, you worked to make sure you didn't starve, and that was that.

But with the advent of grains, of crops that you could harvest, all of a sudden you could develop a surplus.  You could develop more food than anyone would eat that day.  and enough of a surplus

meant that you could have specialized labor.  And specialized labor meant that you could have dedicated construction workers, dedicated priests, dedicated bureaucracy, and dedicated military.  That meant that you could have all the workings, for good or for ill, of a modern working civilization.

Why do I bring this up?  Because in our modern times, we need to remember that Jesus as the bread of life is actually a good thing.  Yes, if you're gluten intolerant, or low carb, you might run shreiking from the room at the mention of bread, but Jesus is identifying himself as the greatest of all staple crops, the thing that keeps civilization going.  You may not like wheat yourself, but you must realize that staple crops have changed everything as we know it.

Now, here's the thing about staple crops.  if you Bing 'staple crops,' it should take you to the wikipedia page on staple crops, which will tell you all about the staple crops around the world, and how they are made into peasant food.  And the staple crops of the world, they're not very exciting on their own.  If there's one thing you should pick up on, you should know that the things you get, they're not going to set your tastebuds ablaze with excellence.  Corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, yams, that's what you're looking at with staple crops.  They used to dominate the menu for all the people of a given place, who used to eat overwhelmingly that thing.  Corn or wheat or rice, that used to be the majority of what was consumed.  I mention this, because this is how Jesus presents himself - the bread of life.  and for the people in the ancient near east, bread was the source of life.  This is what you ate. The widow of Narin, she and her son had only enough food left for one last loaf of bread, then they were planning on dying.  When the flour was gone, so were they.

Jesus, as always, knows what he's doing when he does things.  He knows what he's saying, and when he tells his disciples who he is, he tells them that he is the bread of life.  And as the bread of life, he forms the bottom of the food pyramid, the foundation of what the disciples will be building their lives upon.  That's what Jesus was always intended to be - to be the base for everything we do but not the only thing that we experience.  Think about bread.  think about bread in your home, and how you eat it (assuming that you're not gluten free.  If you are, imagine if you ate bread).  You have it alongside meals, in a breadbasket.  You have it under your eggs in the morning, You have it enveloping your meat and lettuce at lunchtime.  You have your peanut butter on it in the middle of the night (don't lie).  You have bread, but you have bread all the time and in conjunction with many many other things.   Rarely do you have a meal of only bread, undoctored and alone.  Usually, you have bread with other things, sometimes a great many other things.  This is who Jesus is.  He is the source and foundation for us spiritually.  He wants to be part of what we do, to be part of our daily experience.  Sometimes, he is the only thing, like he is on Sunday, but frequently, he is involved with the other stuff of our lives.  He is part of everything we do, making us in the world, but not of it.  This is how he is supposed to be, and if he is not, then something has gone wrong.  We are supposed to run on God, he is the source and norm of what we do, and who we are.  In him we live, and move, and have our being (preach it duck brother).  That's what we are for.  We are not supposed to be cloistered away, never seeing the outside world, nor are we supposed to ignore God for the remainder of the time that we are not in the church building.  He is supposed to be in and with everything we do.

The Lutheran understanding of Holy Communion is helpful here.  There are churches that say that the bread and wine just represent the body and blood of Jesus, so there is only bread and wine there.  There are churches that say that the body and blood of Jesus are the only things there, and that the bread and wine are totally gone.  And then there's the Lutheran church, that tells us that the body and blood of Christ, the true body and true blood, are in with and under the bread and wine.  And that's how Jesus is supposed to be in our lives.  Coloring everything, being a part of all our life experiences.  Not the only thing, but having his words, his blessings, his gift of forgiveness and salvation be part of all our experiences, and permeate them all.  The love of God that is in Christ Jesus affects, or should affect everything we do, otherwise our faith is just a hymn and a homily, just so much feel good chat, and nothing that actually moves us or changes us.

But Christ deigns to change us, from the temporal to the eternal.  He desires to have us be not here for a while, but with him forever.  To do that, he gives us himself as the bread of life, the bread of life that will be in, with and under everything that we do.  And surely, he will be with us always, giving us his grace in abundance, to the very end of the age.