12th Sunday after Pentecost
1 Kings 19:4-8
Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:356, 41-51
Dear fellow ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ,
grace and peace to you
from the bread of life that sustains forever. Amen
Elijah is tired,
in his body and soul.
As prophet of the Lord
he has just defeated and killed the 450 prophets of Baal
and now Queen Jezebel
has sent word that she wants to kill him.
So he runs for his life
into the wilderness until he can’t go anymore,
he sits under a tree
and is so tired he gives up,
he says I’m done, just go ahead and take my life God,
and falls asleep.
But the Lord isn’t done with Elijah,
and an angel comes and brings him water and fresh baked bread
wakes him up and makes sure that he eats.
He’s still tired and falls asleep again,
and again the angel wakes him and urges him to eat
“otherwise the journey will be too much for you. He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb to the mount of God.”
and there he encounters God in the silence,
an experience he wouldn’t have had
without the rest and the food.
Elijah needed rest and sustenance for both body and soul,
God knew this and provided.
The food for the body,
the encounter with the angel for the soul.
God knows it is not always easy to follow God,
to live the life of God
and so God supports and sustains those who are called.
Notice how Elijah’s experience
mirrors the Israelites’ escape from Egypt,
following the defeat of the gods of Egypt by the plagues
the Israelites are freed
then as the Egyptians seek their lives
they escape into the wilderness
where they too are weary
and God provides sustenance for them
and brings them to the mount of God.
This is what God does,
join people to the God and God’s way of life
and then provides for them.
So it should be no surprise
when Jesus, provided by God,
tells the crowds, “I am the bread of life.”
We heard him say this last week
in response to the crowds seeking sustenance from God.
They saw Jesus as a new Moses
and wanted him to provide bread for them,
Jesus tells them,
I’m not Moses, I’m the bread,
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Jesus is the sustenance sent from God
and on the strength of this food we can go forever.
Now today we hear the crowd’s first reaction to this teaching
and their response is complaint,
they take issue with Jesus saying
that he came down from heaven,
‘wait a minute they say, you didn’t come down from heaven,
we know your parents, you’re Joseph’s kid’
and they let their certainty in this knowledge
prevent them from seeing
what new thing God is doing in Jesus
who yes is Joseph’s kid and the one sent by the father,
God is the one doing the new thing,
God is the one who is teaching
who is drawing people into the life of God,
then Jesus doubles down on the manna metaphor
“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…”
Jesus is the bread that sustains life in God,
and not just for 40 days but forever.
Or put another way,
when we are joined to God through Jesus
it’s a once and for all thing
and how Jesus does that is through his action on the cross,
through his flesh
- we’ll get into that more next week-
but for this week we’re focusing on how Jesus is bread that sustains,
is ongoing sustenance,
is the ongoing invitation and way to join in the life of God.
Now Jesus as bread that sustains forever,
doesn’t mean that we won’t get tired in our life in God.
Living God’s way of life in the midst of the world is tiring,
what it does mean is that we have the means of sustenance with us always
that we can draw on for strength, Jesus
And Jesus knew that we as humans
would need tangible reminders of his presence with us
- in our church we call them sacraments
or the means of grace,
the sign of water recalling us to our baptismal identity,
bread and wine at the table
literal food and drink
Jesus fully present on our lips,
in our stomachs,
taste and see that the Lord is good,
and we have the community,
the body of Christ
through which this bath is given,
the meal shared,
the hands that Christ uses
to reach out and tap us on the shoulder when we get weary
encouraging us to eat and drink and rest,
just as the angel did for Elijah.
Whose are the hands of the community that God uses?
They are our hands
even as we are sustained by Jesus the bread of life,
we are also called to be bread for the world
to sustain the life of the world.
In our reading from Ephesians for today
Paul encourages the community,
realizing that they will not be perfect
yet still telling them, to “be imitators of God”
this is our task too,
in the midst of our own imperfections
to seek to speak the truth in love,
to forgive as God forgives,
to be kind and tenderhearted,
in short to be a community that sustains one another
and the world around it,
to be bread.
This is a tiring way of being,
so God draws us together on Sunday mornings,
in worship,
offers rest and encouragement,
food and drink,
and on the strength of this food
we go back out into the world
where we will travel until we encounter God once again,
often in surprising ways,
in silence,
in Joseph’s son,
in a loaf of bread. Amen
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