Tenth Sunday after Pentecost (PR. 14)
John 6:135, 41-51; Ephesians 4:25-5:2; I Kings 19:4-8
We went to visit Mr. Tchassi, a first grade French teacher. In Togo, West Africa the children speak tribal languages at home, usually Kabye, Ewe and Losso and begin to learn the national language of French in the first grade. They learn English in the seventh grade and German as they enter high school. We walked up the path to Mr. Tchassi's family compound consisting of open-air thatch roofed structures arranged around the open area where chickens and goats roamed and cooking fires burned. He met us just as we were about to step from the field path into the compound itself. He was wearing only a panye, which was a large piece of cloth wrapped around his waist. Under his left arm he held a live chicken and in his right hand a rather large and very sharp knife. I knew in an instant that this was not going to end well, at least not for the chicken. I was right.
Mr. Tchassi greeted us and then proceeded to draw the knife across the chicken's neck. He quickly tipped the bird to the ground creating a pool of blood. He then plucked three hand fulls of feathers from the bird and threw them at the pool of blood. He turned and elevated the bird toward a large tree behind his livestock shed, then turned back to us and released the dying bird to flap and flip as he watched carefully. Suddenly the bird landed on his back, legs in the air and Mr. Tchassi jumped forward to grab the bird exclaiming in French, "A good sign! Bon. Good sign!"
With that he turned to us and declared that we were "welcome, well arrived." Togo is a land where 30% of the people are Christian, 20% are Moslem, and 50% are animists (what we often call some type of voodoo). We learned later that the great tree behind the livestock shed was a totem--a dwelling of the ancients--of a god to be respected and not offended. Rituals, actions, ideas that seem strange to us and yet...
To meet God is one of the great human desires. There are beliefs that God is very distant and others that place God deep within each of us. There are those who encounter their god in blind obedience to threats of extreme punishment or in acts of self destruction and there are those who have been met by the smiling face of God in quiet mountain meditation and miracles of healing grace. In our lessons for today we find the prophet Elijah fleeing in panic for his life from the angry queen Jezebel. At the point of our lesson Elijah is so exhausted, scared and filled with despair that he just cries out to God to let him die. He falls asleep under a solitary broom tree and wakes to find bread and water. The angel of the Lord tells him to eat and drink after which he falls asleep again only to awaken to the same meal prepared once more to strengthen him for the next 40 day journey to the mountain of the Lord where, after our lesson for today ends, Elijah is encountered by God in the form of a still small voice.
To meet God. To encounter that which is beyond our humanity. Faith seeks a form, a shape, a ritual or meaning. The language of our faith, of our encounters with our God, is rich in rituals, actions, metaphors and so much more. The ancient story of Elijah sets the tone for our reflections today on how God comes to us. In our Gospel lesson we continue the series of readings that focus on the image of bread as a symbol. As a symbol and yet as something more. Last week Pastor Chris reminded us of how references to bread reveal the fundamental needs we all have and how important it is to distinguish between our wants and those things that we really need. Bread is often used as a symbol or metaphor for the meeting our basic needs. "Our Daily Bread" is the phrase that we use in the Lord's Prayer to summarize God's providing for us. "Give us this day our daily bread" and yet our lives are more than just needs being met. When Jesus declares "I am the bread of life" he is not just instituting some type of special ritualized status for a loaf of bread.
Four times in today's lesson, Jesus declares that he is the most basic and important substance for our lives. This is more than just bread. Listen:
"I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry..."
"I am the bread that came down from heaven...Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. "
"I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die."
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
Bread. All we need is bread, the true bread of life and everything will be all right. This is so true and yet...The church has always struggled with ways of speaking about Jesus that could reveal something more than just the biography of a good person. We don't believe in good people. We may honor them and even model our lives after them but we do not believe in them like so many have believed in Jesus. "I am the bread of life", that's what he said. This is more than wonder bread goodness.
The language of faith is never easy. Bread is pretty basic but when a human being, when Jesus, identifies with it the meanings become far more complex. We like our world in simple terms but Jesus revealed to us the richness of God's presence in the world. All the great religions of the world have come to know that there is but one God who holds all creation and life together. But Christians believe that God revealed more than singular unity to the world when He sent his Son and then the Holy Spirit into the world. One God revealed in three persons. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God in three persons, a God not easily simplified or packaged. Yet that is exactly what we try to do. It is one of our great human sins that we are constantly in the process of trying to limit and contain our God. We are quick to decide we need to define for God and the rest of the world the qualities that make God God. We define what is absolutely good. We decide who is right and who is wrong and strangely enough we almost always seem to be on the right side. We know that we want to do God's will so we decide that what we want is what God wants. To structure God's world we derive rules, laws and teachings that we impose on others. We enjoy deciding which sins are the worst and how they should be punished. We order God's creation. That usually means that we have to exclude some part of humanity and creation condemning it as evil and usually not like us. We especially like to see God as judge of the universe so we make judgments about the world based on what we think God would want us to judge. We seem to always forget that God's judgment is reserved for the end of time not measured into each minute, hour or day.
Jesus did not condemn those whom he met who were outside the faith community but rather he opened the way of grace, reconciliation and community. His focus was not on what should divide us or be used to exclude others. He found the common point where faith and life intersected. Bread, for example. The basics provided a starting point for building wholeness in a diverse and complex world.
That's really what the apostle Paul was trying to get the church at Ephesus to understand when he writes to them in our second lesson for today, urging them to put away falsehood and speak the truth to their neighbors. He urges them to be angry for the right reasons. In a world of terrorists and wars, violence and suffering, Paul cautions us not to give into the evil that surrounds us. We are to have a righteous anger grounded in the fact that we are all members of one another. Even as the early church affirmed the oneness of God it also came to recognize the oneness that Christ revealed for all humanity. One body in Christ was a favorite image.
One. It is a white wrist band that expresses a new found unity among God's people to strive to end hunger and poverty in the world. It is a white wrist band worn by students, NASCAR moms, politicians and movie stars united as ONE to help make poverty history. ONE believes that allocating an additional ONE percent of the U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like health, education, clean water and food would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the world's poorest countries. ONE is a coalition of 2 million people and over 70 non-profit, advocacy and humanitarian organizations that includes our Lutheran church as well as all the programs we support such as Bread for the World, Heifer, Habitat, Church World Services, and Lutheran World Relief. ONE is committed to helping the American public understand that our country currently provides less than one percent of our GNP in non-military aid. Paul urged us to speak the truth in righteous anger. The truth that every week AIDS claims as many lives as there were American fatalities in the entire Viet Nam War. The truth that every day 6,000 children are orphaned by AIDS. The insert in today's bulletin provides a litany of numbers that should create some righteous anger. But the world is not numbers. It is real people in need of bread and water for the journey of life. So the insert also tells the story of Godfrey. A story that humanizes the numbers. A fifteen year old AIDS orphan who received gifts from our Lutheran World Hunger fund and responded by offering one of the only two chickens he had to our Lutheran representative as a sign of his thankfulness. To be so thankful for God's blessings that you respond with 50% of the bank account. The miracle of the bread of life.
In the wilderness, the prophet Elijah could see no hope or future until he had bread and water. Then he set off for the vision of God's holy mountain. A world in hunger and poverty sees no future other than death and destruction. But what if we tried God's approach. What if we rained bread like manna from the sky. What if Israel dropped not bombs and leaflets on Lebanon, but bread and medicine. What if we sent not volunteer soldiers but volunteers committed to peace, constructive engagement with people's needs and supplies to improve lives.
Jesus said, "I am the bread of life." There is an old saying, "You are what you eat." In a few minutes you will be invited to receive the gift Jesus promised to give us. And it comes with a promise, "Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." You are what you eat. With this promise we can only rejoice with the psalmist for today who exclaimed, "Taste and see that the Lord is Good; happy are they who trust in him!"
Amen