Sermon: Feeding Bodies

By Joanna Lawrence Shenk
John 6:30-35

When I was growing up one of my favorite smells was that of fresh baked bread. I loved it when I would walk in the door after school and there would be warm bread on the kitchen table. The butter would melt right into each slice and I could eat piece after piece. 

When I was in Cincinnati visiting my siblings in June, my brother Andy who has 3 sons, ages 6 and younger, recounted this story. One day he was with the boys at a park and was giving them pieces of bread to eat as a snack (very tasty sourdough bread). The boys love bread, just plain bread. Another kid, maybe around 10 years old, was walking by and he looked at Andy and said incredulously, “ew, you’re just giving them plain bread?!” It’s as if he was offended that the boys would just be enjoying plain bread. And Andy was like “Yep.” 

In first century Palestine bread was life. It made up at least fifty percent of people’s diets. To eat bread was synonymous with having a meal. And bread was not wasted – not even the crumbs. Making bread was a labor intensive practice and in the lower classes it was women’s work. Grinding the grain was the back breaking part. Poor folks ate gritty, barley bread, whereas the wealthy ate softer wheat bread. 

In the brief histories of bread I found, it was during the Roman empire that bread was first commodified. According to one history, “Bread was the backbone of the Roman daily diet. Commercial bread-baking began to emerge and the role of baking meager flatbreads on the home hearth moved from the hands of women in the household into the hands of the men who ran commercial bakeries. These commercial bread bakers were powerful men in Roman society… Bread required massive quantities of wheat, firewood, and slave and animal labor to produce a daily supply that could feed up to 12,000 people (depending on the size of the bakery). Donkeys walked in circles for hours on end, rotating the industrial sized stone mills that ground the wheat. Slaves did the same if animal labor was not possible. The ovens were fired from dusk until dawn and enough grain had to be imported from within the region or from provincially confiscated territories to supply the Roman people with their daily bread.”

I am not sure what exposure the people of Galilee would have had to these commercial bakeries, however I can imagine any wheat grown in the region would have been exported to these bakeries in urban areas. I can also imagine that a bakery able to make a daily supply of bread to feed 12,000 people would have seemed God-like. And of course this daily bread was not free. 

Earlier in chapter six of John, Rabbi Yeshua feeds 5,000+ people. You may remember the disciples ask him, “where can we buy bread for this many people? Even 7-8 months’ wages would not be enough to buy bread for all these people (200 denarii).” And yet, all of those thousands of people were fed, with bread to spare. 

It’s on the heels of this experience that the people find Rabbi Yeshua again and ask him for more bread. They recall the manna story. Yeshua responds that it was God who gave that bread from the sky and it is God who gives the bread now. The true bread – the non commodified bread – is God feeding the people and the people feeding each other. 

Yeshua is saying “wake up! The real bread does not come from a Roman bakery that takes your wheat and then charges you for the product. The true bread comes from the sky and the earth. I am the bread, meaning I am God who is feeding you. Rome and empire-serving religion, do not give you true bread.” 

I love the meditation from Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh along these lines: 

“If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the clouds and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you…”

God is feeding you, says Yeshua, not empires and markets. You are being fed by God and in response you feed others. Like manna, God gives enough. Like manna, God’s abundance is not to be hoarded. When the Creator’s abundance is hoarded, there is hunger and thirst. 

As baby humans we are fed from our mother’s body – we cannot feed ourselves. As mammals we are made to feed each other, and we depend on the bodies of animals and plants to feed us. And ultimately, in our death, our bodies will feed animals and plants as well. 

Our market-driven economy can feel so far removed from this truth – that all food comes from God – from the bounty of creation. On my daily walks through the park near my home, where I visit the rock I talked about in my last sermon, I’m seeing many ripening blackberries bushes. Each day I consider it a kind of communion to eat a couple ripe berries, but not all the ripe berries. On my walks I’ve seen robins, warblers, finches, scrub jays, crows and sparrows, to name a few. And I know coyotes, skunks, raccoons and deer live nearby. I’m sure they enjoy the berries as well. 

Obviously I don’t need the berries to survive, but it is an important awareness to remember that my creaturely neighbors depend on them. So if I was to take a basket and gather all the ripe berries just because I can and I like how they taste and I found them, that would basically be stealing, or hoarding. I think about the Chochenyo Ohlone speaking people who frequented this location – gathering and processing acorns in season, as well as soap root and tule plants, among many other things I’m sure… They were aware of what their neighbors needed and that they were all fed from the same source. 

When Yeshua said “I am the bread of life” he was trying to decolonize the minds of the people. The true source is God, not the wealthy commercial bakers. The true source is the community being fed by God and feeding each other. 

The term Eucharist comes from the Greek word, eucharistia, which means thanksgiving. The ritual is a celebration of the Creator who feeds us and it is a reminder to feed others. 

At our Discipleship Group in years past we sang a simple table blessing before our meals that goes like this:

“God bless to us our bread, and give bread to all those who are hungry and hunger for justice to those who are fed. God bless to us our bread.”

Yeshua saw what was making people hungry – an extraction economy that was benefiting the few at the expense of the many. Yeshua was calling his disciples, and the people, to a different order – to a re-ordering that was in keeping with the laws of creation. This was good news for many, and quite threatening to those who were benefiting from a disordered status quo. 

Yeshua chose this path, not because he was destined to suffer, but because he hungered for justice. He knew God offered the true bread – the life that comes when communities live within the bounds of the natural order. 

I won’t take the time to connect the dots to our disordered reality, since I think we’re all well aware. Instead, I ask, how are we reordering our lives so we can recognize and share true bread? What are our practices of gratitude for the earth and sky that sustain us? Do we praise the Creator as our source, (or instead our bank accounts)? What are we willing to sacrifice so that the hungry can be fed… so that our reality can be reordered? 

During the second half of July Mennonites walked from Harrisonburg, Va. to Washington DC (140+ miles) calling on our nation’s leaders to send bread not bombs to Gaza. Earlier this spring, our congregation helped to lead a communion service outside Senator Padilla’s office calling on him to feed the people, not the war machine. Throughout this past year members of First Mennonites have made meals for recently arrived Central and South American families seeking asylum in San Francisco and participated in a celebratory meal where everyone ate together. In the last couple years we’ve provided food for the Apache Stronghold prayer vigils on their visits to San Francisco. We also make meals for the parents of new babies in our congregation and for those who are sick. And hello, fellowship snacks! That is a weekly labor of love provided by the community to each other. 

We are not starting from zero here. We have practices of feeding each other from the abundance with which God feeds us. We are calling for and working for the re-ordering of our society in many different ways. May we truly recognize the food that we eat as the bread of heaven – as the miraculous gift that it is. With wonder and gratitude may we feed the life of the world – both in our living and in our dying. 

As a way to feel this in our bodies and to practice feeding each other, I made bread to share with you this morning. This bread is gluten-free, although not vegan, made from blue corn flour. I really wanted to make acorn bread but that will have to wait until the oak trees near my house bear their fruit. I invite us to pass this basket, offering this bread of life to each other. Along with Thich Nhat Hanh I invite you to notice the sunshine, the blue sky, the clouds and the great earth in this bread. It is the body of the cosmos, just like each of our bodies. As you pass the bread to each other you are welcome to say “the bread of life for you.”