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Good morning, Gethsemane! Couple questions: Have you ever had a conversation with someone that was just a disaster of miscommunication? When, because you are speaking two different languages, either literally or metaphorically, the conversation goes all the way off the rails? It happens all the time in big ways and small ways and sometimes on purpose. Like when my son Elijah says “thank you” in German -- Danke -- and I immediately reply Shein because of that old Neil Diamond song.** It drives him bonkers because he’s told me over and over that the appropriate response to Danke is bitte schön. But that is, of course, why I do it: It’s a game we play, and I love it. I think he does too, though he probably wouldn’t admit it.
It happens in hilariously scripted and honest ways, too, when two people think they’re talking about the same thing but clearly aren’t, like in that old Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” bit. And, of course, it happened a lot while we were in El Salvador, as I tried -- and failed -- to pull enough Spanish from memory to be conversational with our beloved siblings who don’t speak English. Sometimes, I knew just enough for them to get what I was saying, and to laugh as we all acknowledged I know un poquito Español. Other times, everything was lost in translation and we had no choice but to communicate through smiles, laughing, dancing, and that sacred unspeakable language of the soul that connects us when words cannot. But there are other times, still, when the misapprehension seems intentional. I’ve seen it a lot on social media where it’s so easy to hide behind avatars and forget that we’re relating to real humans on the other side of a screen. It’s easier, sometimes, to double down on ridiculous arguments even after we’ve been proven wrong, than to admit our mistake and move on. We try to save face but end up cutting off our own nose to spite it! I suspect that in today’s text -- which is the culmination of Jesus’s Bread of Life discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum -- that intentional misapprehension is at play, and Jesus knows it.
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image: The Bread of Life © 2016 Mike Moyers
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. |
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