John 6:24-35
“Good for You”
August 1, 2021 Communion Sunday
With all that time on our hands during the long, homebound months of the pandemic, many folks turned toward their kitchens and leaned into, if not for the joy of cooking, then the feeling of accomplishment when a new recipe turned out well or all those tomatoes found their way into sauces or even the challenge of unearthing new things to do with apples.
One of the biggest crazes was the sour dough bread phenomenon.
So many returned to the very basics, the technique that was universally used for almost all bread baking up until about 100 years ago.
All that’s needed is flour, water and time to create this living thing that one newspaper tagged as “America’s Rising Pet.
That flour and water combination that must be slowly and continually fed, creates a fermented combination of bacteria and yeast known as a sourdough starter.
Starters get passed down through the years or even decades.
There’s one woman that was cited a couple of years back from Kentucky who was using a sourdough starter gifted to her from a friend in Texas in 1973 and that woman had received her starter from a friend who passed it on from a friend way back in 1948 – and it has survived with added flour, water, attention, and patience – and has been the base for thousands of loaves since then.
Patience seems to be in short supply as this story picks up after the two great miracles of the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water.
In the part of the story after last week’s account of miracles and before today’s we learn that the crowds are stumped as to how Jesus got across the sea.
They figure he must have done something amazing – they go looking for him, expecting yet another miracle or sign and Jesus pushes them to go deeper.
They are focused on the physical and their hungers.
Jesus recognizes the importance of having enough to eat but he doesn’t want them to stop there.
In Matthew’s Gospel we hear this instruction as, “One does not live by bread alone.” (Mt. 4:4)
The bread that comes from heaven and is meant to be sustaining is needed to not just survive but to thrive. This is what Jesus has come bringing with him.
Jesus is calling that food that endures as the key to eternal life.
This eternal life is a closeness and intimacy with God.
It is a quality-of-life issue for Jesus, on earth and beyond.
Jesus has trouble getting through to these folks.
They continue to be stuck on the idea of “signs and wonders.”
Like any hunger, they seem insatiable.
They always want more.
What are they hungering for?
The physical feeding like that they experienced with the sharing with some to spare of the loaves and fishes – yes this is real.
But what else are they looking for?
Health, safety, a king.
Maybe they want to share in Jesus’ power
– perhaps he can show them how he does all those wonders.
Jesus is inviting them and us into a deeper form of nourishment that can only rise up when we recognize that God abides in us and we can live a life that abides in God.
To know, deep within us, that we are truly loved and held by God will, hopefully, draw us into a life kneaded and shaped and baked with love, and grace, and gratitude.
In her memoir titled, Take This Bread, Sara Miles, who was raised as an atheist, recounts how one day she found herself wandering into a San Francisco church where she became transformed by the simple act of receiving communion.
From then on, her faith journey called her to be a part of feeding physical hunger and that deeper hunger Jesus speaks of.
She soon turned that bread of communion she received into the act of starting a dozen food pantries in the poorest parts of her city.
Miles offered, “…this is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me… It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn’t promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God’s.”
― Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
This is the faith, the starter, that she found and that we all have available to us.
The good thing about sourdough starter is that if you’re feeling unsure of how to do it, it helps if someone gives you some of theirs.
We need not think of that as depleting someone’s supply of faith because whenever the starter is fed, you have to use a portion of it or throw it away.
Isn’t sharing it better than tossing it out?
Our faith, the one that proclaims that Jesus is the bread of life, just like we are about to celebrate with the sacrament of Holy Communion, is meant to be shared.
We are to be fed and to feed.
Let’s get started – again.
Amen.