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| Photo by Conger Design from Pixabay |
We have been hearing about Jesus the bread of life for the last 5 weeks. All this talk of bread has made me think about what we do at God’s table when the presider blesses and breaks the bread. [action of raising and breaking bread]
Somewhere along the way growing up, I absorbed the idea that breaking the bread has to do with the body of Christ broken, tortured, and killed. That it symbolizes humanity’s unwitting fulfillment of God’s plan for our salvation.
A more recent idea follows from the action of the Offertory, which happens as we are setting the table for communion. We bring the symbols of our lives, bread and wine and money, and place them on the table as an offering of gratitude to God. The bread is blessed by our prayers mingled together and infused with the Holy Spirit. And then, as our lives and our world are broken, we break the bread we offer to God.
We offer our brokenness to God in faith that God loves us, no matter what we have done. God blesses and transforms our offering of our lives into holy food for our souls, and that is what we consume as the body of Christ. Food that unites us with Christ and one another, for continuing Jesus’ ministry in the world.
At the end of the Gospel reading today, many of Jesus’ followers leave because they are not able to stomach the idea that he is living bread. Jesus turns to the twelve and asks, “Are you leaving, too?” Peter replies, presumably speaking for them all, “Lord, where would we go? YOU have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Through signs and miracles, storytelling with word and action, Jesus has created a vision of life in this world and beyond. If we loosely combine the gospel messages, his platform includes:
a God who forgives and forgets our faithlessness, our violence against ourselves, one another, and God’s amazing creation;
food and clean water for everyone;
healing and wholeness for addiction, mental health, ailments of our bodies, dementia;
justice for all who are enslaved by debt, violence of any kind, social pressures, or holes in our social fabric;
freedom to show love for one another and creation
thriving for all people without ridicule or fear, slander, name-calling, ego-posturing, or demeaning language.
Jesus has made his case as the bread that lasts, that fills our deep and insatiable hunger to be seen, loved, forgiven. Now it’s up to us. Is the vision Jesus offers compelling enough for us to let go of our own self-serving desires to follow the promise of everlasting life? That’s the choice before us.
Every choice has a cost and a promise. A cost because when we say Yes to one choice, we are saying No to other things. And a promise of something we desire. If we didn’t see a promise, we wouldn’t consider the choice.
The alarm goes off. We can choose to get up right away or hit the snooze button. Both choices have promise and cost. Promise of getting up is a cup of hot coffee. Promise of snoozing is a little more sleep. Cost of getting up is dragging my tired self out of bed. Cost of snoozing is possibly being late to church. Every choice we make, small or large, has both promises and costs.
We make choices all the time. We use our life experiences and learned wisdom to make choices. Our choices are influenced by the stories we know and absorb from people and media.
I am not a huge political junkie, but I have been watching and listening to some of the political conventions of the last 6 weeks. I am fascinated by how the candidates have offered visions for our national health and well-being. Carefully composed conventions created a buzz of music, celebrities, slogans and soundbites curated to cement the dedicated followers and entice the undecided. We are seeing well-orchestrated campaigns to attract and energize political followers.
The candidates cast a vision of how the world could look. And they invite us to follow them. To eat the bread they provide. To believe in the life they promise. To frame our stories of thriving in their language. And then, at the end, they ask: It’s a great vision, isn’t it? Will you join us? Will you stay and offer your story, your excitement, and your vote to bring this vision into being by supporting our candidate?
Sounds like Jesus at the end of today’s gospel, doesn’t it?
Are we willing to make the choice for Jesus?
The cost of discipleship is that we’re choosing to not be like the world. Choosing to share our time, emotions, skills as part of a community, to make right and costly choices instead of the easy and lucrative way, to be vulnerable enough to acknowledge the frailty of our human instincts for competition and status. We are choosing to make God’s priorities our priorities. To confront the evil and injustice we see every day when we witness people and nature stripped of dignity, the beauty of God’s precious creation wasted instead of loved. We are choosing to join Jesus in ministry with our neighbors who hunger for bread in this life and the next.
The promise of discipleship, of staying with Jesus, is the promise that God knows us, loves us no matter what, and wants us to continue to thrive and grow. It’s the promise that we are not now and never will be alone on this journey. And it’s the promise that the power of God to transform us and the world will continue to be revealed to us and through us.
Those disciples who stayed took a deep breath and acknowledged that they had seen wild and amazing things happen when they were following Jesus. Ordinary things - water, bread, fish, the stuff of ordinary every day life – had become extra-ordinary in Jesus’ presence. As Peter points out, that doesn’t happen anywhere else.
When the Word of God encounters the things of our lives, water and bread and wine, and they become infused with the Holy, we too have to admit that we cannot find that experience anywhere else. In baptism and in holy communion, God becomes viscerally present in Jesus the Word. And the Word becomes one with simple, common and ordinary elements, so that we who are simple, common and ordinary may receive the Holy with confidence.
It’s our choice to believe in God. It’s our choice to partake in the living food and drink of Jesus’ gift of himself to us. It is a choice that is not rational or scientific, it is a choice of faith. It is a choice for something that cannot be fully explained, something that must be known with the heart.
If it’s the only choice you make today, choose Jesus.
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