[Propertalk] Proper 15 b 2018 - part 1

[Robert P Morrison]

This is the first of at least three parts...
Bob

	THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY THE THIRTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER
PENTECOST 

	1 KINGS 2:10-12; 3:3-14   PROPER 15 B 

	EPHESIANS 5:15-20   19th AUGUST, 2018 

	JOHN 6:51-58   PSALM 111 

	 How much Bread do you and I need? 

	 How much Bread can you and I take? 

	 It seems as if we’ve been drawn to think about Bread for a very
long time. But then, it was and is not only the staff of life. It was
and is at the heart of the Gospel and the call to be Church. But Jesus
warns – or rather opens our minds to the fact that the Bread for
which we should be looking is “living”. 

	 Such Bread not only provides basic nourishment, it also talks about
being absolutely fresh and free from dangerous contaminants. 

	 Back in the good old days, people in prison were fed bread that was
moldy, and spoiled in all sorts of ways. Prisoners were made to feel
grateful that they had anything to eat at all. It was another way of
denying their humanity. 

	 Looking at it from the other side, twenty per cent of the population
of Australia is descended from prisoners shipped out from Britain,
many of them having done little more than stolen a loaf of bread.
Perhaps the best known bread-thief of all time, fictional or
non-fictional, was Jean Valjean, who served nineteen years in the
galleys for trying to keep his family from starving. So he stole a
loaf of bread. 

	 Granted, those fictional and non-fictional characters are from the
past, but not that far past, and even within our own memories people
have been incarcerated for stealing bread or something similar. 

	 Bread, then, is NOT a luxury, but a necessity which lies at the
heart of so many of us. 

	 THIS is how Jesus wants us to think about our relationship with God,
as Jesus was trying to demonstrate it. THIS walking in Jesus company,
this acting as Jesus did to feed the hungry of body, mind and spirit;
THIS is how we are to live, treating everyone with unqualified and
equal respect and dignity. THIS is how we’re supposed to be affected
by the Bread who lives within us. 

	 I’m reading a second book by Sara Miles, whom I quoted a couple of
weeks ago. She writes quite simply and directly, “Eating Jesus
cracked my world open and made me hunger to keep sharing food with
other people.” 1 

	 Isn’t that what meeting, greeting and eating Jesus is all about?
No matter the length of time we’ve been a follower of Jesus, whether
this is the first or three thousand six hundred and fortieth time 2 
we’ve come into Jesus’ Presence in an attitude of worship and
praise, and been intent on coming to meet and receive Jesus in the
Bread of the Altar; no matter how often, Jesus hopes we’ll be
relaxed and open enough to be cracked wide open again and again, today
and every day, so that we can be transformed to be more and more like
Him. As Sara put it, “I kept learning that my new Christian identity
required me to act. Simply going to church offered no ethereal juju
that would automatically turn me into a less smug and self-righteous
person. Time and again, I was going to have to forgive people I was
mad at, say I was sorry, be honest when I felt petty, and sit down to
eat, as Jesus did, with my betrayers and enemies: the mad, the boring,
and the merely unlikeable. 

	 “As I got pushed deeper into all these relationships, I started to
suspect that the body of Christ was not a metaphor at all. ‘Because
there’s one bread,’ as St. Paul, another poleaxed convert, wrote
in astonishment, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake
the one bread.’” 3 

	 This is the most difficult thing for us to accept. Javert, the
single- and dark-minded antagonist of Jean Valjean, would NOT think of
the former galley slave as anything but a crude lump of semi-humanity
to be forever despised. He couldn’t imagine that Valjean should be
anything other than a chattel. Transformation by any means, was
completely impossible, his act on behalf of children and wife meant
nothing. 


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