Bread, food: in one way or another, all our readings this morning focus here. "Give us this day our daily bread," we pray together every Sunday. In fact, many of us likely pray this daily and some may well pray it twice a day. But if we pause for a moment and think about the words, they might almost seem unnecessary. For instance, last week, I was fortunate enough to stay in not one B&B, but two. And at both of them, I had the choice between white toast and brown toast. And as I was in the midst of preparing this sermon, I couldn't help but have my thoughts turn to the selection at Tesco's, or Morrison's, or even the lovely bread Chris sometimes makes in our own kitchen. I'm sure most of us in this room - if we really stopped to think about it - often don't actually mean the words we'll be chanting here in a minute, at least in any literal sense. In St Andrews, even in the midst of the economic crisis we keep hearing about, bread is likely the least of our worries. Even if we broaden out the definition of "bread" to include all food - as the Lord's Prayer and the Bible undoubtedly do - bread is still low down on our list of worries. Perhaps when we pray "Lead us not into temptation," perhaps then, we can really feel the weight of the words. Or even, "Deliver us from evil." That one probably resonates very well to people living in an era where the threat of violence is constantly brought to our attention by the news media or by the CCTV cameras throughout even St Andrews. But asking for bread? At the very best, it may help us remember that someone else needs bread, but it is rare (though not necessarily completely absent) for those of us fortunate enough to live in Britain actually to feel the need to ask God for our daily bread. The readings this morning seem particularly pertinent for figuring out a way to pray these words sincerely, seriously, and without simply thinking of them as a reminder that all our sustenance comes from God. That is true, but when we ask God to provide our daily bread, we are actually asking him to do something, not just to remind us of something.
The Church walks a knife's edge between two extremes. On the one hand, we can be tempted to forget earth and focus all our attention on heaven. From this perspective, the words "Give us this day our daily bread" actually refer to spiritual food. We pray for spiritual sustenance when we pray the Lord's Prayer. And though this is not in and of itself a bad perspective, we must be careful not to go too far to this extreme. On the other hand, we can be tempted to forget heaven and focus all our attention on earth. Thinking from this perspective, we are actually praying for physical sustenance. As with all Christian doctrine, we have to balance polarities, never slipping too far one way or the other. This tension exists in today's readings.
In the first one, Elisha is brought twenty loaves of barley and some grain. He commands his servant to prepare food for the men there, only to have his servant wonder how 100 men could eat from so little. "So he repeated, 'Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says the Lord, "They shall eat and have some left."'" Sure enough, the Word of the Lord comes true, and the men eat and are satisfied. The stories of Elisha often have these points: he proclaims that a woman's oil will not run dry until she has paid off her debts and has enough to live on; he promises a woman a son and raises him from the dead when he dies tragically. God works through his prophet to provide people with physical necessities. But again, we must be careful that we do not focus too much on this side of things. The body is only one part of what we are, but like I said, it is a crucial part, one that cannot be dispensed with. We have a responsibility as the Body of Christ to do our best to fix these physical things, to work with God in healing the world, to be like Elisha, going to people and being God's physical presence with them, but we also must contend with the words of the epistle this morning.
Here, the Apostle Paul praises God even in the midst of his human suffering. He praises God because he has united the Jews and the Gentiles. If you were a bit surprised that I said all our passages this morning dealt with bread, I understand entirely because Paul does not pray for food in this passage. Instead, he says, "I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith" (Eph. 3.14-17). This is the second side of the polarity we're exploring. Paul is in prison, suffering, and he prays not for physical release, and not even for himself. He prays instead for the Ephesians to be rooted and grounded in love, to be filled with the fullness of God. Here we find the spiritual side of the spectrum. In the first reading, the focus is on physical food. In the epistle, the focus is on the Spirit renewing our inner person. We cannot dispense with either one. Christianity is not about extremes. Rather, we must live in the tension of these two: body and soul, bread and spirit.
And now we come to the Gospel. I'm sure you noticed that we've left Mark this week, though we have picked up in John in the same place: the feeding of the 5000. It's one of the few miracles recorded in all four Gospels. Last week, the Gospel reading skipped this bit and the recounting of Jesus walking on water. This week, we pick it up in John's depiction. In three out of the four Gospels (Luke is the exception), the story of Jesus walking on water comes immediately after the feeding of the 5000. To understand the significance of this, it will be helpful to highlight some differences and some similarities between John and Mark.
In Mark, the disciples come urging Jesus to send the people away, while in John, Jesus immediately asks Philip, "Where shall we buy bread so that these people can eat?" We are told that Jesus is testing Philip because he knows what he is going to do. In Mark, Jesus takes the five loaves and the two fish, blesses them, and gives them to his disciples to give to the people, but in John, the disciples are only told to get the people to sit down. Jesus himself gives the bread and fish to those who were seated. The way John recounts the event highlights something special about Jesus: he is always the one feeding his sheep, even when we are the ones physically there.
In both depictions, Jesus takes five loaves and two fish to feed 5000 men (not to mention the women apparently). Remember the story of Elisha: there he feeds 100 men with twenty loaves and grain. So here in Jesus, something spectacular occurs. In John, the people even notice: "Truly, this is the prophet who is to come into the world." In both Mark and John, there are twelve baskets of fragments, demonstrating the abundance that Jesus has provided. But before we get stuck thinking that Jesus is just a fancier Elisha, just another human prophet, we have to pay careful attention to what is actually going on in the narrative. All the Gospel writers with the exception of Luke point out an interesting fact: Jesus makes the people sit down on the grass. John states, "Now there was much grass in the place." I must confess, my mind boggled a bit at this. Why put in such a detail? What's the point? Could the Gospel writers be up to something by including this fact? Now, were I St Augustine, I might tell you to go off and think about this until next week when I would reveal the answer. Lucky for you, someone else is preaching next week, so you get the answer now.
This small fact, coupled with the recounting of Jesus walking on water, gets us to the heart of the matter, the balance of the paradox our first two readings suggest. Scripture often uses grass to discuss the fleeting nature of life. To take one well-known example: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever" (Isa. 40.8). Grass represents the short-term temporality of this life. But it also plays a prominent role in the early chapters of Genesis: "And God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food'" (1.29). The same word translated "grass" in John is translated here as "plant." So, grass is fleeting, something that disappears quickly, and it is also connected to God's physical provision for humans and animals. When John highlights the fact that there is much grass in the place, he calls to mind both the creator and the temporality of food. Not to step on next week's preacher's toes, but the following verses corroborate this. Jesus warns the people not to get distracted by just the physical bread he gave them, but to seek the bread that comes down from heaven, which is himself. This is also why Jesus, after feeding these people, is shown walking on water; it is why he can declare to his disciples, "It is I," in words coming directly from God's self-revelation to Moses. Here, in this story about a man from Nazareth feeding more than 5000 people, we find the physical and the spiritual coexisting. The God who created the heavens and the earth has come down at a point in history, has physically given people food. The people see something special in Jesus, but they can't quite grasp who he really is; so they think of him simply as a prophet. It takes the cross, the resurrection, and the ascension to reveal that in Christ, the physical and the spiritual have come together perfectly, that in Christ, heaven has come to earth and taken it on, begun to repair it, continues to sustain it.
Now, if all of this is true - that we must not focus only on the physical or only on the spiritual and that in Jesus the two are united perfectly - if all of this is true, then we can come again to those words we will pray in a moment - "Give us this day our daily bread" - and we can start to understand how we - we who find ourselves fortunate enough to live in a place where food is not on the top of our list - can start to pray these words seriously. Because God the Son took on flesh for us, because the one who provided seed-bearing plants actually became one of us, we all stand in a new relationship to God the Father. When we pray, "Our Father," we pray as one. We pray as the Body of Christ. That means, when we in All Saints', St Andrews pray for our daily bread, we are praying both for our own provision - our physical and spiritual provision - and we are also praying with and for those others who do not have physical bread, spiritual bread, or either. Praying the Lord's Prayer is an act of solidarity, the same kind of solidarity we see in the Incarnation. Just as God provides physical food in creation and spiritual food in the Holy Spirit, just as we physically take Christ in the bread and wine and spiritually feed on him in our hearts by faith, so also we pray simultaneously for both physical and spiritual bread. In the Our Father, we join with the entire Body of Christ, praying as one body, praying that God would one day give us all bread that never perishes. We, with our brothers and sisters throughout the world, make an actual request for something real, something tangible. And as the Body of Christ, he now works physically through us; we must therefore go forth and feed his sheep while we pray, just as he himself fed them on that hillside so long ago, with both physical and spiritual food.
Amen.
Sermon by: Jake Andrews