“The Living Bread”
Video from Livestream (starts at 18:00)
Well, friends, something completely and totally unbelievable happened to me this week. Like, it’s the kind of thing that defies all expectations. I’m going to tell you what happened in just a moment, and I’m pretty sure that you’re going to think that I’m spinning a yarn. It’s the kind of thing that just does not happen.
I actually had a pretty positive experience at my appointment last week with the IRS.
I know. This might be the first time in the history of the English language that sentence has ever been uttered, but it’s true! I promise!
Now, before you get too worried, no I’m not being audited *knock on wood*, nor am I dealing with a penalty situation or anything like that. I e-filed my return on time and everything, but I was still waiting for the direct deposit of my refund. I waited the advertised 21 days and then I would start checking my bank account every couple of weeks, but nothing was coming through. I would go onto the IRS website to use their refund tracker tool, and it would just say “we’ve received and are processing your return, we apologize for the delay”. Nothing else. No phone number to call. No notices coming through in the mail. And time kept tick, tick, ticking on.
Four months and four United Methodist conferences, one interstate move, and one new job later, I was frustrated, and I decided that something had to give. Online tools and automated voice systems weren’t going to help me—I needed a human being. So, I made an appointment at the Tax Assistance Center in Albany and readied myself for battle with the institution that’s probably pictured in the dictionary next to “cold, unfeeling, bureaucracy”
And, wouldn’t you know it, I end up getting to my appointment late, and, even though there is literally no one else in the waiting room, the thought that runs through my mind is “oh no, they’re going to make me reschedule”—except throw some other words in there that I probably shouldn’t say while I’m up here.
Much to my surprise, that didn’t happen.
A civil servant greeted me, and do you know what she did? She helped me out. She gave me the answers I was looking for. The IRS had evidently flagged my return for identity verification, likely due to the fact that I had requested my refund be deposited into a new savings account.
Was there some waiting while she worked things through her computer? Yeah. Do I still need to wait another couple of weeks for my return to finish processing now that my identity has been verified? Yes again. But this civil servant was able to resolve my problem and answer my questions, in spite of the fact that I was late and in spite of the fact that she was about to go on break. All that anxiety and stress that I had built up as I prepared myself for this interaction washed away, and I found myself as one of two humans, sharing a moment of genuine connection, on the fifth floor of the Albany Federal Building at the IRS Tax Assistance Center.
Hard to believe, isn’t it?
When I was a college student, the United Methodist campus ministry that I attended would spend a portion of its worship services dedicated to folks sharing stories like this. “God sightings”, they were called. Just a quick story about God showing up in unexpected ways over the past week. And, more often than not, the stories that my peers would share were about completely mundane, ordinary things that happened to them. Things like getting to the dining hall right when they were putting out fresh french fries straight from the fryer or a random bit of information mentioned in a lecture that connected to a problem they were working on in another class or even just coffee shared with their lab partner waiting for some sort of biochemical reaction to take place in a petri dish—and my sincerest apologies to any science-minded folks if none of what I just said made any sense. I was a music major. We didn’t spend much time in the lab.
But it was the ordinary quality of these stories that made them so extraordinary. I don’t know if all of us had the precise language for it at the time, but this practice that our community had adopted was forming us in such a way as to see the world through incarnational lenses. That is to say, we were cultivating the spiritual discipline of seeing the real presence of Christ all around us. To make the conscious choice to embrace the mundane with a sense of awe and wonder. To look at the very world in which we live, with all of its ick and its muck and its grease and its grime and be able to say, yes, even in the midst of all of this, Christ is present. That the incarnation was not a one-time thing that took place two thousand years ago but still happens in our own day and age. He comes to claim, that great Easter hymn proclaims, the here and now and dwell in every place and time. Not throned afar, remotely high, untouched, unmoved by human pains, but daily, in the midst of life, our Savior in the Godhead reigns.
In the midst of it all, God. Still. Shows. Up.
That’s the promise of the Gospel, friends. God still shows up.
That’s what, I believe anyways, Jesus is saying throughout this long discourse on bread in today’s scripture lesson. But before we get too much further, we have to go back to the beginning. Like, the very, very beginning.
John’s gospel is unique amongst the other three gospels in many ways. Whereas Matthew, Mark, and Luke all start their gospels off with stories that take place in the same relative time period, John brings us back to the very foundations of the universe and offers us a long and flowery prologue wherein he identifies Jesus Christ as being the very word and mind of God made flesh.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and lived among us.
This word that John’s gospel uses here, flesh—sarx in the Greek—has a certain connotation that transcends human flesh and blood and bones and takes on more of a flavor that conveys “materiality”. That is to say that we affirm the mysterious particularity in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth as being the incarnate Son of God.
And.
The mystery and miracle of the incarnation persists to this day in our own material reality. Jesus Christ continues to be born anew throughout our lives in the very things that bind us to one another, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
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| Alton Brown and his yeast-puppet friends |
Because that’s just the thing, isn’t it? Bread doesn’t just blip into existence, nor is it the product of any
single individual. Countless untold and unnamed individuals—all with human lives and human dreams and human frailties—makes bread possible. Even in Jesus’ age, it was highly unlikely that the bread that made it on your table came from grain that you, yourself planted and cultivated and watered and harvested and milled. Even if you did bake the bread yourself, you probably acquired the flour from somebody else. Now, back then it was maybe more likely that you knew the person who harvested the grain and the person who milled it into flour than we do today, but the point still stands—even back then, the ingredients for your bread were the product of someone else’s time, ingenuity, and labor.
single individual. Countless untold and unnamed individuals—all with human lives and human dreams and human frailties—makes bread possible. Even in Jesus’ age, it was highly unlikely that the bread that made it on your table came from grain that you, yourself planted and cultivated and watered and harvested and milled. Even if you did bake the bread yourself, you probably acquired the flour from somebody else. Now, back then it was maybe more likely that you knew the person who harvested the grain and the person who milled it into flour than we do today, but the point still stands—even back then, the ingredients for your bread were the product of someone else’s time, ingenuity, and labor.
And what about the technique—the very process of making the bread itself? Isn’t all of that inherited knowledge and wisdom too? Oh sure, I’m not saying that there haven’t been individuals throughout history who made singular developments in bread making and baking. A pita is different from a baguette, which is different from a focaccia, after all. What I am saying is that all of these singular developments build off one another.
Put another way, we don’t exist in isolation. All of our successes and achievements exist in the context of all those who live around us and all those who came before us.
We are constantly in the company of others, friends, whether we see it or not, and Christ continues to exist to this very day as the very fabric of our social reality that binds us to one another. We cannot relate or interact with anyone else without first doing it through Christ because Jesus stands in the space that exists between you and me. It’s good news that can be comforting, yes absolutely, It’s good to know that we are never alone. We’ve been given the greatest gift of all, after all. Through Christ, we have been given the gift of each other.
And yet, it’s also good news that can be convicting. Because if Christ stands in the space between you and me then the way I interact with you is first done to Christ. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: the way I relate to you can either worship and honor the Christ that stands between you and me, or it can crucify him, There is no in between.
That’s true of you and me here and now. But it’s also true of me and the grocery store employee who put the bread I bought this week on the shelf. And it’s also true of me and each of the bakers over at the Pepperidge Farm factory who baked that loaf of bread and the factory workers who developed and maintained each of the machines that helped the bakers bake that loaf of bread. And it’s also true of me and the truck driver who shipped that loaf of bread from the Pepperidge Farm factory to my local Hannaford’s. And it’s also true of me and the construction workers and highway planners who built the roads that trucker drove the bread to the store on and I drove the bread from the store home on. And, yes, it’s also true of me and the IRS agent who answered my questions this week. I could go on and on and on but the point is that, through the mystery of the incarnation, Jesus Christ stands between me and each and every one of those human beings, and I either worship Jesus or crucify him each and every time.
And, more often than not, I crucify the Christ that stands between, if only by failing to see the full breadth humanity that exists in each of these instances. I fail to see that the bread I’m consuming is living bread—that it conveys the very presence of Christ. In our vast, globally interconnected age, it’s so easy to turn a blind eye to all of the human lives that brought my loaf of bread into existence, but, by the power of the Holy Spirit, I want to be better. It’s why I have continued to show up in communities like this throughout my life. Because, somehow and in some way, Christ continues to work through each and every one of us in a way that makes the burden of this daunting task lighter. I’m here because I know that I can’t do this work by myself, and I give thanks to God to be in the company of you all as co-laborers on this journey with me.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I came into my situation with the IRS this past week with vast amounts of privilege. Economically, I’m in a secure enough place—I don’t need my refund to keep the roof over my head or food on my table. My education prepared me to know how to work within complex and bureaucratic systems—grad school was good for something. I don’t, in my own immediate family, have any horror stories of dealing with the IRS in the same way as many others who look like me or have a last name that sounds like mine have. And my working schedule is flexible enough to take some time out of the day to go to an appointment like that during business hours without costing me financially. None of this makes me a bad person—being privileged is not bad, in and of itself, but rather a responsibility: from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be expected.
The problem with privilege lies in how it shields us from this fundamental truth: we are not alone. We are never alone. No matter how strong or how high we build up our own walls, we are always in the company of our neighbors, and Christ is the living bread who stands in the middle, who stands between us and our neighbors. And worshipping the Christ who stands in the middle can look like a lot of things—it’s worth noting that this entire discourse that Jesus offers on being the bread of life comes after his followers saw to it that the crowd that came to see him had enough food to eat that day—that their own material needs were met.
But we can’t even begin to worship the Christ that stands between us and each and every one of our neighbors without first acknowledging that they are as fearfully and wonderfully made as human beings in the image of God as we are. That their birthright entails loving and being loved. Seeing them for who they really are—not replaceable cogs in a cold, unfeeling machine, but full human beings through whom Jesus the Christ and the living bread is revealed to us. Because of Christ, our neighbor is not a stranger, but rather, becomes like yeast which rises our dough and enriches its flavor.
God is still showing up, friends. God is still showing up in places and in spaces where we least expect it. Because if God can show up on the fifth floor of the Albany federal building in the IRS Tax Assistance Center, I’m pretty sure that God can show up anywhere.
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