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When my mother’s father’s father first landed here in North America, he made his living as a baker. Or so I’m told. The story goes that he would open a bakery, get it going, and sell it so he could open another one, somewhere in Connecticut. Then my grandfather was the breadwinner, rather than the bread baker, through working in a bank in the city. I remember one of the meals mom would make for us, which was often my favorite, was milk-toast, which is, just as it sounds, toasted bread on a plate with milk poured over, often accompanied with a can of peas. I later found out the other meaning of the word milquetoast, being weak sauce, but when I was a picky eater as a kid, this was one of my favorite suppers. And now that I live on my own, I sort of default to cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pasta and veggies for dinner. It’s great during running season, all these carbs. I kind of exist on bread and dairy, when I look at my grocery list. I’m trying to add in vegetables more often, and am trying to be more intentional about salads when I have the chance to eat out. I chalk it up to my grandfather’s father. I’m hoping that I might some day have better luck baking bread from scratch that actually turns out to be edible. Lilly is usually first to greet me at the end of the worship service to ask if she can help ‘clean up’ the communion bread that Chet bakes for us. Hard bread and soft cheese is a slice of heaven. Bread fresh out of the oven is one of the best smells on earth. Bread is common to all of humanity, in one form or another depending on the local crops. That’s why it’s a central element to the Sacrament of communion, because it is so very common, so very ordinary, so very basic to survival wherever you go.
But we seem to have this problem of feeding ourselves with food that isn’t bread. I don’t mean gluten intolerance, I mean stuff that’s more chemical than food, I mean food on the run that’s more empty calories than nutrition, I mean food that’s a distraction from whatever else we ought to be dealing with at the moment. Some of you may be following Courtney on Facebook while she does her Beachbody work, posting again and again about making healthy lifestyle choices about food and exercise, measuring progress, being an encouragement to others who want to treat their bodies better. Being a good steward of our bodies, and of the bodies around us and the natural environment that supports life in these bodies, shouldn’t be all that difficult, but we all struggle with it. Whether it’s overeating, wastefulness, violence, sexism, racism, we are all connected by the simple fact that we live in bodies, and when one body hurts we all suffer. A year ago today, the body of Mike Brown was left in the middle of the road for over four hours after he was shot and killed. Female bodies are bought and sold and traded across the globe. Elderly bodies are put into special homes, disabled bodies are treated as inconveniences, young bodies are idolized and pressured into very particular boxes. Black and brown bodies are treated with suspicion and fear. Our bodies and our minds, our emotions and our actions, are too interdependent to try and separate them out. We strike out against other bodies to protect our own bodies, we isolate bodies from each other and we fill our bellies with foods that give us a quick rush but ultimately cannot sustain us and leave us grumpy and hungry again.
Elijah was ready to be done with his own body. He saw terrible abuse of power in his day and he did all he could do to stand up against it, but at the end of the day he was tired, and worn out, and ran away to hole up under a tree and ask for death. Jezebel chases after him to kill him when all he did was call and end to a multi-year drought… and slaughter the priests of Jezebel’s false god, Ba’al. A pretty amazing achievement, yet he still comes away from it feeling like a failure. He does all that God had asked of him, and in return is hunted by the authorities. He would rather die. He tells God as much, as he crawls under a broom tree and goes to sleep, waiting to just die, giving up, throwing in the towel.
But then an angel of God appears and gives him some bread. A warm cake and a jug of water. He eats a bit, then lays back down again… and he just can’t catch a break. The angel is there a second time, with another reminder to eat, to get his strength up for the journey ahead. As though standing up to a king and queen and forty prophets of a false god wasn’t work enough, there’s more ahead for him, and he spends forty days on his way to the mountain of God, Mount Horeb, the mountain where ages ago a bush had caught fire without burning to call Moses into the hard work of standing up to Pharaoh. It’s where Elijah will meet God in a still quiet, a sheer silence. But that is yet to come, Elijah doesn’t know what’s ahead, only that this angel has given him some food to sustain him for the journey. Roused him to move forward when all he wanted to do was die. Intervened in his suicidal thinking and called him into the next big thing, into mentoring the next prophet, Elisha, who will also do great deeds on behalf of the Lord.
That must have been some dense bread to have carried Elijah for 40 days. Though the angel might have been some encouragement, too. Angels usually have to tell people not to be afraid before they say much else. I don’t think Elijah cared enough to be frightened when this angel appeared with bread and water for the journey. He probably wasn’t too overjoyed to be pressed on toward anything else at the moment, either. But God doesn’t promise comfort in this life, only companionship. “Lo, I am with you always, to the end of the age,” is what Jesus says when he finally leaves the disciples after the resurrection. Not “Lo, you will never have trouble.” Not “Lo, you will never again doubt or fear.” Not “Lo, life in this world will be a breeze from here on out.”
And he doesn’t just tell us he will be with us always, he actually lives within us, so that there is no place we can ever find ourselves where he will not be also. Strength for the journey. Bread for 40 days worth of wandering, though we eat of it together every Sunday. Real food for real bodies. Real bread for real life. This isn’t some chemical substitute for food, isn’t some pint of ice cream that covers up the pain of daily tragedies in our lives and in the news. It’s not a private party, either. The Lord of Life comes among us as we live in these bodies and gives us his own body as bread for the journey.
The problem we tend to have with that, though, is that somehow we think we know what his body means. He’s the carpenter’s son, after all. He’s a first century Jew, after all. He’s a single man in his thirties, after all. He’s a nerd about the Scriptures, after all. We see bodies and think we know what goes on in the hearts and minds of the people. We think from looking at a person we can tell what sort of person they are, what they value, what they dream of. I just saw in the news this weekend a great story that Target stores are finally doing away with gendered marketing for toys and children’s bedding. Now instead of putting dinosaurs in the boys aisle and unicorns in the girls aisle, it’s all just generally kids stuff. So a girl who likes robots can have robots and a boy who likes rainbows can have rainbows, without being told from the start that they’re wrong. Kids and parents have been complaining for ages about this false advertising, because it’s ridiculous to look at a kid and tell them that because they have certain DNA they are supposed to like Barbie more than football or can’t play with dolls just because they’re supposed to like Tonka trucks. But we see bodies and think we know hearts. We do it to each other all the time, and we do it to Jesus, too.
Because of his body, Jesus was supposed to eat only at the popular kids’ lunch table. He was supposed to disregard female bodies, poor bodies, sick bodies, and was supposed to hate Roman bodies and other Gentile bodies. He certainly wasn’t supposed to eat bread with obviously hungry bodies. But here’s the thing about Jesus: 100% God, 100% human, his body was made up of the stuff he created all of life with in the first place. God sent manna in the wilderness, sent an angel with sustenance for Elijah, and came to us in a body just like ours to take care of our bodies, to feed us and sustain us, too.
When we eat bread we admit that we cannot live on our own. When we drink we admit that we have need and thirst. We eat to live, because without food our bodies will shut down and die. But our body is most alive when all systems are taken care of, well-connected, supported and well rested, on the larger scale of community life together. One body alone cannot survive. The letter to the Ephesians reminds us today: we are members of each other. Christ Jesus is the food that runs in our veins, the true bread from heaven that gives life to the body, the friend and companion who walks beside us and gives us strength for the work ahead of us, the one who breaks the boxes of our expectations and gives us the room and freedom to grow in new life together. We need this bread, this life, this gift, and Jesus is this bread, this life, this gift, broken and poured out for you, for every body, for the life of the whole world.
Thanks be to God.
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