March 23, 2006

Bread

Lent 4B   Jn 6.4-15

I left a call for my old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk and asked him for some counsel about this Sunday’s gospel, John’s account of the Feeding of the Multitudes (Jn 6.4-15). It’s never been all that easy for me to talk about miracles, especially that one, the only one recounted in all four gospels. Quirk can talk about anything with impunity.

He called back shortly, and I had barely said hello, when he pronounced, “It is true that we do not live by bread alone. But it is also true that we don’t live long without it. To eat at all,” he said, “is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other.” He went on, “It also reminds us of the other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch.” (I’ve a hunch Fred  Buechner put these words in the Canon’s mouth.)

“That’s great,” I replied, only to be interrupted. 

“When old Screwtape (he always liked C S Lewis’s name for Satan)…  when old Screwtape challenged Jesus in the Wilderness to turn the stones into bread, he was told to get lost, to stop insulting God. When Jesus’ disciples challenged him to feed a few thousand families out there in the boonies whether or not there were any stones around, he took a kid’s basket of carp and some bread, fed the whole lot of them, and had more left over than he started with.”

Then Quirk added, “Why did Jesus refuse a simple miracle in the wilderness with the Devil and readily fulfill one in the country side for the multitudes? Why?”

“Maybe,” I dared answer, “maybe he was clearer about the purpose of his life at the later time?” 

“No,” the Canon roared. “Where did you ever get such an idea? What matters is that both stories are there and most importantly, they’re about bread. And once again they remind us that to eat at all is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other. And that it also reminds us of all of other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch — the poor, the starving, the millions without health insurance, the….  

“Eating,” the Canon was in full lecture mode now, “even when you’re alone, eating is a corporate act. You don’t make that food all by yourself. It’s a global economic affair. It’s a family affair. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works. That’s the way Jesus works. Out there with Satan,” he added, “it wasn’t a matter of eating. It was a matter of grandstanding, and Jesus wisely would have none of it.”

The rest of our conversation was more gossip about what happens to priests when they become bishops, a kind of bread neither of us had yet tasted and never would. Frustrated, we hung up.

Our conversation about bread reminded me that whether or not we’ve ever yet seen that what we do around this table every Sunday is exactly what Jesus was doing out there with that crowd,  surely we’ve seen it now. For both are miracles, not so much the kind that create faith, but the kind that our corporate faith, itself, opens for God by grace to create. Miracle, indeed.

We bring faith to this table. Maybe it’s not all that commanding or noticeable to us or to anybody else in our lives, maybe there’s not even much piety in it, but it’s there or we wouldn’t be here. One of the startling things about this eucharistic life in which we, the church, center ourselves and which we embrace is how similar it is to all the rest of our life and especially to our relationships and, indeed, to this story about feeding the multitudes. 

Life seems always richest when we’re  thankful, even, I’ve found, when we’re thankful for the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. In the first few months of beginning to recover something of my humanity through learning to live a Twelve-Step program, I was consciously thankful and talking about it to the point of annoying others. But then along came an unfortunate disappointment, and I was into a plague of the “poor me’s” in a New York minute. Finally, a friend said to me, “You have been so thankful that the rest of us are getting nauseated hearing about it. If you really mean it, why not try being thankful now for whatever this is that’s so terrible?”  AA calls it an “attitude of gratitude.” I’ve never seen a time when it doesn’t accomplish miracles in itself. Such a capacity for thanksgiving is, indeed, of the substance of the “spiritual awakening” of which the twelfth step speaks.

The celebration of the Eucharist, just as Jesus’ celebration with the loaves and the fishes embodies such an attitude of gratitude. Eucharist means grace, it means thanksgiving, it is why we come here together every week, thankful or not, to celebrate thanksgiving and get a life of it.

We have met the offering, and it is us. The bread and the wine and the offering of money are us, our nourishment, our sustenance, a microcosm of us — our loves, our companionships, our families, our parenting, our children, our work, our loneliness, our joys, our sorrows, our anxieties, our angers, our guilt, our resentments, our pleasures. All are brought into the presence of the Christ to be blessed and received again. We are no different from the thousands gathered there on that hillside — also gathered with Jesus.

The story continues. Watch the similarity with what we do in this place. Jesus took the loaves, and first, gave thanks. We sometimes call it saying grace, another meaning of the word eucharist. Then he broke the loaves and shared them. He would do this same thing again with the bread and the wine in the Upper Room, saying the very words we say here, and again on the road to Emmaus. And again, in a very few moments with us.

And further, Jesus is always apt to come into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon — of all places — not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but at supper time or walking along a road, or in the person seated next to you. He never approaches from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and in the midst of the questions that real life always asks.

Our vocation is to pattern that life that’s shaped in the Liturgy in our own way. To take and receive it as it comes to us. To bless it, which is to give thanks for it. To sacrifice it, which is to recognize that it is already made sacred. And to share it. Just as with the thousands gathered there and with the hundreds who gather here. That is to make eucharist, to share in a miracle. 

That is the miracle. It is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other. It also reminds us of the other kinds of emptiness — in us and in our families and especially in our society and in the world, the kinds of emptiness that even the Blue Plate Special can never touch.

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