I am Bread

I don’t know how it happened, but by the time I was twenty, I had memorized at least a few lines of the catechism in the back of the 1979 Prayer Book. If you’re ever bored during a sermon, the Catechism is a good way to occupy the time. You can find it in the Prayer Books in the pews, beginning on page 844. That page explains that we don’t view the Catechism as a definitive doctrinal statement. If you grew up in the Catholic Church, you might be unsurprised to hear that Episcopalians view our catechism not as a list of settled answers, but as a starting point for discussion and questioning.

And there are at least some helpful questions in our catechism. The one I had unknowingly memorized is on page 857. The discovery came in a theology class in college. The professor, a Roman Catholic nun, had asked the class “what is a sacrament?” Without knowing from whence the words came, I blurted out, “A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” Later that day, I called my mom, who by that point had been an Episcopal priest for a number of years, to ask her where I got that answer. She said to me, “look at the Catechism. Apparently you hadn’t totally checked out during confirmation classes.”

A Sacramental People

Episcopalians are a sacramental people, a Eucharistic people. Like the ancient followers of Jesus, each week we gather to break bread. We teach that this outward and visible sign points to an inward and spiritual grace.

For the next several weeks, we will hear Jesus talk about Bread. Our lectionary assigns us five Sundays in this chapter of John centering on bread. Theologians wonder whether this back and forth occurs here because the story of the institution of the Eucharist does not feature in John’s Gospel. John’s was the last Gospel written, and communion was already the central way that Christians worshiped. Maybe John didn’t need to tell the story of Jesus’ words, “this is my body” because Christians already heard that story week in and week out.

Instead, as he often does in John, Jesus asks us to plumb deeper. John places the dialogue about bread right after the feeding of the five thousand. The crowds chase after Jesus again, and the people are hungry. The question for today is “what are they hungry for?” It seems obvious, but much of John’s Gospel is elusive. In John’s Gospel especially, Jesus’ words ask people to consider the inner meanings.

When I shared the Prayer Book’s definition of a sacrament with my professor, she smiled and then told me the definition was lacking. Now the answer is nice and pithy. It fits on the small onion leaf pages of the prayer book, but the words don’t communicate the fullness of the meaning of “sacrament.” One of the ways our short definitions misses is important, she said. Sacraments are, and here’s a twenty thousand dollar word, “multivalent.”

Multivalence

Multivalent means, essentially, they point in multiple directions. Bread as a sign does not mean just one thing. Bread can be food for the hungry. Blessing bread reminds us that the work of feeding people is sacred work. Broken bread points us to the broken body of Jesus and the fractures within our human community. Shared bread can be a symbol of our common life, our work to gather up the fragments, the work of reconciliation. Sacraments do not have just one meaning. Sacraments are robust signs. They can point us in several directions at once.

Coming to this table at times may comfort us, at times may challenge us. At times coming to this table should make demands on our lives we’re not altogether sure we are ready to answer. Jesus’ frustration with the crowd today is they want bread by just one definition. They want to be fed externally. They want to be guaranteed this food, as their ancestors were fed by God in the wilderness.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the people in Jesus’ story today. Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted as saying, “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” In a world with rising prices, where food insecurity is increasing, food pantry lines are getting longer, God’s work is the work of feeding. That is certainly true. I would also say, there is a sense in which the mystical work of the church today MUST be to reconnect our sacraments with the real lives of those who are struggling.

If you want to worship Christ in the Tabernacle…

In 1923, Frank Weston, the Bishop of Zanzibar, a missionary from the Church of England, came back to London for a conference. At the time, the Church of England, like the Episcopal Church was in the midst of a restoration of the Eucharist. For centuries, due in part to the bloody battles of the Reformation, Anglicans did not keep the ancient tradition of weekly Communion. This conference was a gathering of Anglo-Catholics, as they called themselves. They were seeking to restore the ancient ways of worshiping. They wanted incense, and chant, and all the trappings as well. And centrally, they wanted permission to celebrate the Eucharist weekly, and to reserve the consecrated host in a Tabernacle in the church, a place like our aumbry there in the wall, a place set aside where people could be reminded of God’s presence, and pray close to the blessed sacrament.

In his closing address to these earnest high church folks, Bishop Weston exhorted: “if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.” A little over a hundred years later, with perhaps a few changes in vocabulary, I would say this is still the work for many of us in the Christian tradition, to make the connection between feeding the hungry and coming to this table for spiritual food. Nourishing our spirit requires both. Following Jesus means making the connection between daily bread and spirit.

Proposing a World

The French philosopher Paul Ricour said that, for a symbol to be a symbol, it must point not simply to one meaning. It can’t be simply one dimensional. A true symbol is actually more than just multivalent. Ricour says that a true symbol proposes a new world. A true symbol proposes a new world. We live in divisive times where it is easy to know what we are against. It is easy to know that we are against misogyny and homophobia. It is easy to know we are against a certain worldview. In the midst of that negative way of stating our faith, he sacrament we gather around each week proposes something positive. The sacrament proposes a new world. In the words of Arundhati Roy “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” When we gather for Eucharist, we propose the same world Jesus proposed, a world where all are welcome at the table. All have a place. All are fed.

Christ is present in the bread we take, bless, break, and share. But Christ is not only present here in church. Being a Sacramental people means that we carry the blessing out into the wild world. We gather around these outward and visible signs of God’s grace because doing so forms us, helps us to learn to see that God is present wildly present in our world. God has a stake in what we do beyond these walls.

In another smaller sign of God’s presence today we will bless some backpacks. We will pray for school kids, teachers, administrators, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, grown up students, tutors and grandparents too. We will pray that as a school year begins, we make the connection between the work we do together in this place and the work our school communities do all year long.

That we follow a Savior who says, “I am bread” should remind us that Christians are a people of metaphor. Jesus was not very literalistic. Jesus often worked on multiple levels of meaning.

Faith, in the end, isn’t about memorizing particular answers. It isn’t. As proud as I was of the answer I came up with in that college class from the catechism: Rote memorization isn’t faith. Faith is about growing our capacity to see the depths of God’s presence. Faith is about holding space open to be surprised by the wildness of God’s grace. Faith is about learning to inhabit our world in a way that makes another world possible. Worship is about listening for signs that a more just and more loving world is on her way.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says. Jesus does not say, “I am the holy bread, only for the few, the chosen.” Jesus doesn’t say “I am a meal which is reserved for the wealthy or the pure.” Jesus says, “I am the bread,” the basic stuff of life. God can be found in the simplest of outward and physical signs. Inward and spiritual grace abounds, if we can recognize our hunger.