Grandma's Bread (John 6:24-35)

8/5/2024

This sermon was originally preached on August 4, 2024 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here (with the excerpted sermon at the end of this entry). Today's Gospel text is John 6:24-35 and is our second in the Bread of Life discourse sermon series.

Good morning, Gethsemane. You probably don’t know this about me, but as a born-and-bred Denverite, I grew up traveling to Crosslake MN at Christmases or in the summer to visit my grandparents who owned a little motel right on the lake. When family came, the motel was all but shut down to travelers and became instead the Courts Family Rambler Home. It was awesome. Those vacations were my favorite, not just because they were always big family reunions involving all my seven aunts and uncles, their spouses, and all us bazillion grandkids, but because driving into Crosslake and crossing the bridge to their motel on the other side, always felt like coming home.

I haven’t thought about those vacations in a long time, nor even my grandparents really, and never in such depth -- but when I began to wonder about what made Jesus’s bread so special in today’s text, it wasn’t the sourdough sensation of 2020 that sprang to mind and lingered. Nor was it the memory of thinking my mom was sending me to school with cheap wheat bread when all I wanted was other kids’ fancy expensive wonder bread -- I know better now; God bless her. Instead, what swirled into my mind and stayed is the memory of standing in my Grandma kitchen up at that Crosslake motel and jockeying with my cousins for the first slice as she pulled a loaf of fresh, hot bread from the oven -- which would be devoured in literal minutes by us minions at her back.

That bread was made of some kind of magic: It was the softest, warmest, spongiest, sweetest bread ever, from all eternity. Not even Garlic Texas Toast -- a true delicacy to my still uncultured taste buds -- could compare to my grandma’s bread smothered in her homemade rhubarb jam.

I cannot recall what it tasted like -- only that I lived for it every time we came to Minnesota, and that I could never get enough of it. Every time she offered up a slice, I wanted to chase it with a sandwich. When she gave me a sandwich, I wanted a second and then a third. I was insatiable about that bread, and a total menace to everyone else in the family who wanted some. All us kids were.

And while our parents -- her children and their spouses -- chased us kids out of the kitchen for being constantly under heel and not knowing our place and not leaving grandma alone to bake in peace, I don’t remember grandma ever being annoyed at us for wanting more or for waiting in line to eat what she made. She was as eager to feed us that bread as we were to devour it, and she never once told us to leave some for others or save our appetites for dinner. She just kept baking the bread.

In today’s gospel, we see the crowd doing much the same as I did in my grandmother’s kitchen. They’ve been filled to overflowing with five loaves of bread and a couple fish that were somehow multiplied by miracle to feed thousands -- with leftovers to boot. Food is clearly extortionately expensive -- Philip just said in verse 7 of last week’s text that not even 8 months wages would buy enough for everyone to have even a little bite much less be filled -- so it stands to reason that for many among the crowd, food was so unaffordable that this was the first full belly they’d had in a while.

So we see right off that Hunger & poverty are not and have never been anomalous to human societies. In so many ways, in fact, they are ubiquitous and unending. Indeed, as Bishop Craig Satterlee writes, we, ourselves, bear witness to “the long lines for humanitarian aid which demonstrate, [that] eating your fill one day does not mean that you will not be hungry the next. [And] When there is no food, and you do not know how you will sustain your life today,” eternity doesn’t come to mind. “Think of parents,” he says: Think of Palestinian parents grabbing their children from their beds amidst bombardment and struggling to reach the next safe zone in starving bellies. Think of our Salvadoran siblings crossing hundreds of miles toward the promise of a better life here, only to watch their kids starve to death in the desert” -- think of them and you begin to see a picture of the people in today’s gospel.

“[Those of us] familiar with bible stories,” he continues, “are sometimes impatient with the crowd chasing after Jesus.” After all, we know the ending of the story -- that when Jesus offers up his body as bread and his blood as wine, he is giving us so much more than bread and fishes.

But they don’t. So of course they want more!!!

So much so that they track Jesus down -- verses 22 and 23 say they were watching closely enough to know he didn’t cross with the disciples in their boat the night before. And having seen only one boat on the shore, they know he didn’t cross his own, so yeah -- these folks were eager to find him again. They were Hungry yesterday, and they’re hungry again today, when they’ve finally found Jesus and ask him, “When did you get here?”

Again: It’s pretty common for commentators and modern readers who know how this all plays out to read annoyance into Jesus’s answer, or even see him scolding the crowd for following him not out of true belief but because they want a quote-unquote “Free meal ticket.” But when I think about both the historical and immediate circumstances surrounding Jesus’s rising influence among the weary and marginalized suffering under the boot of Empire, not only do I find that interpretation jarringly arrogant and rooted in western capitalist supremacy; I also find it just sad. How reckless we are with our words, and how quick we are to attribute our own scorn to Jesus, when met with poverty and hunger.

But what I hear is Jesus naming a very real need met -- the relief of having been given a belly-filling meal and its attendant twin, the fear of not knowing when they might be fed again -- and then naming another, unmet need, to which they are not yet attuned: Their need for a food that requires no labor and endures to life eternal.

We’re gonna detour for a moment because the Greek here is especially important in the gospel of John, and how Jesus uses it is illuminating. For here he juxtaposes working -- performing a task in trade -- for food that is perishing, with working for food that is menousan. The root word for menousan is meno. And this word meno -- it’s not just to “endure” but to abide.

And abiding -- this ever-present remaining -- is the centripetal force of John’s gospel. It is the verb that connects everything from the beginning when the Holy Spirit descends upon and abides in Jesus at his baptism; to its pinnacle in the Vine and the Branches discourse of John 15; and its threads are woven everywhere across the rest of the gospel. Here in John 6, it is the verb -- the leaven -- that effectively turns Bread into Life. This bread is abiding forever -- so there’s always a loaf on the table.

Notice, too, how little actual work it is to abide. To abide is to remain. To stay present. It is a child melting onto their caregiver’s lap for an afternoon nap. It is a branch growing new leaves come spring. It is the moon turning the ocean tides within the gravity of earth, which turns our days within the gravity of the sun, which sustains all life on this planet. To abide is not to do; but to Be. Specifically, to be in relationship, connected, in community.

The crowd craves this -- the nearness to One who can provide abundantly; and they need a way of living that is not just sustainable but miraculous -- and this is the need Jesus names when the Crowd finally finds him.

By answering them with an invitation to work for food that does not perish but abides, and will be given to them, he intentionally, I think, begs their next question which is how to do that work. These people know how to obey Levitical Law and follow Rabbinical, Priestly, and Imperial instructions in order to be faithful and survive, so they ask him: What work must we perform to get this everlasting source of food that the Son of Man will give us? And Jesus’s answer here roots the seed: The work of God is simply to trust in the one God sent. To be in relationship.

But it’s never that simple, is it? Not for us, and certainly not for them. For they are now beginning to grasp what Jesus is actually saying, and that this conversation has nothing to do with physical bread but with who, exactly, is the one sent by God to give them the everlasting Bread. And they respond not pesteringly but faithfully.

Like Thomas the Faithful -- not the doubter -- who will become so rooted in Jesus that he will not risk trusting in any person or resurrection apparition whose scars he cannot not see and touch and confirm for himself, these folks know their ancestral God: Theirs is the God who led them out from slavery in Egypt and fed them manna in the wilderness, every single day without fail. And they are right to demand a sign that Jesus is talking about the same Eternal Father whose abiding provision comes from no man but God’s own hand.

And Jesus affirms that sameness explicitly, in verses 32 and 33, saying the God of Moses who past-tense gave them the manna from heaven, which sustained them by day but was rotten by night, Is His Father who is currently, right now, giving them the True Bread. And the Bread of God, Jesus tells them, is not “that which” but he who comes from heaven and gives life to all.

When the educated and faithful but still-confused, not-quite getting it, eternally hungry and eager crowd replies, “We want THAT Bread -- every day, at all times, for every when: give us that bread,” Jesus makes his claim so clear it cannot be missed: “I AM,” he says, “that Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will not hunger, whoever keeps faith in me will not thirst.”

The truth probably dawned on some of them the way it dawned on me the other day as I thought about my grandma’s bread, and I finally, at 42 years old, got it.

When grandma gave me a slice, I craved the whole loaf, and it never seemed to run out. There was always a loaf of bread on the table for us to eat.

Now that she’s gone, sometimes I wish I’d asked her for the recipe so I could make the Bread myself, despite knowing -- like you know, like we all know -- that even if I followed her recipe to a perfect T, I would never be able to make my grandmother’s bread because it wasn’t the bread that fed me, but Her. She fed me her warmth. She filled me with her kindness and love and constancy. When I was in her kitchen, she fed me wantedness -- I felt wanted with and by her. My whole life, from those childhood vacations through my college years in northern mn when I’d visit them on long weekends, she nourished me with a perpetual -- enduring, abiding -- open invitation to come thirsty and drink her coffee which remains, to this day, the best coffee ever made; and to come hungry, trusting that as sure as the sun rises, there would be bread.

But it was always her. And that with her, I could always just be me. No caveats. No demands. Just me, wanted and welcomed -- by her.

She was Jesus. In ways I never realized until writing this sermon, my grandmother was Jesus to me.

And so, I suppose, I am and we are to each other, right?
Just as it was Jesus’s abiding I AMness the crowds craved; just as it was Grandma’s abiding presence my soul craved; so too are we, God's provision to our neighbors.

So Let us Be That, Beloved, as Christ’s body on this earth:
Be Jesus, Be Love -- so all who are hungry and thirsty may be filled.

Amen.

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