Be gentle, when you touch bread,
Let it not be uncared for, unwanted.
So often bread is taken for granted.
There is so much beauty in bread,
Beauty of sun and soil,
Beauty of patient toil.
Winds and rain have caressed it,
Christ often blessed it;
Be gentle when you touch bread.
What's on my mind? Bread!
One way and another there has been a lot of it about the place this week.
On Wednesday I found myself, to my considerable surprise, standing in the pulpit of Tewkesbury Abbey, following an invitation to their very beautiful Musica Deo Sacra Festival.
As a Gloucester ordinand and priest, with a serious addiction to church music, MDS was a regular source of wonder and delight...so it felt like a daunting privilege to be asked to preach. In the event, the Spirit danced the music was glorious (Finzi Welcome O sacred feast is beyond words when sungvin context, at the Offertory) and I was surprised and delighted by the appearance of several friends from days of yore, including my WEMTC Principle, Richard Clutterbuck, the lovely John and Rachael Willard, Simon Fletcher and someone whose path crossed mine at a time of deep tragedy for her family, which remains one of the most formative experiences of my priesthood.
With blessings like that to celebrate, the preach was all but incidental, and the wonderful hospitality of Molly and Hannah Faith Barraclough (extended to Willow too) and the warm welcome of Nick Davies looking very at home in his new context, really carried the day.
Thursday, of course was Lammas Day, and in my very own Voices of Morebath moment I got to preside at the Loaf Mass after Mark Oakley had pronounced Decanal blessings on our excellent neighbours in Borough Market, Bread Ahead. The amazing smells that emerge from the bakery every day, the perfection of the cinnamon buins and the friendliness of the entire team make Bread Ahead a blessing to us, so welcoming them to the cathedral was delightful.
The day before Nick had talked about how conscious he is of the Abbey's past when he presides at the high altar, of those who have prayed and consecrated there before him. I had a similar sense of long gone congregations gathering for the loaf mass, hopeful for the harvest, deeply connected with dependent on the cycle of seasons we would seem to override today.
What would they have made of a woman at the altar, going home to eat food she had not grown, living in a world replete with plenty for some, whole others are ground down by poverty?
I was glad to be forced to confront the questions...
In case you're interested, here's what I said at the Abbey. The intention was Thanksgiving for the Blessed Sacrament, the readings those for Corpus Christi
When I was a student I had a good friend named Jack. He was extremely tall (particularly when standing next to my 5’4”) and carried not an ounce of surplus weight. He was a great cook and a famous host, but the meals I remember him by most clearly were those I never actually got to eat. You see, Jack was generous with his invitations to afternoon tea, and his rooms were only a short walk from one of Cambridge’s better bakers. When he was expecting guests, Jack would set forth to Tyler’s, on a mission to buy bread for the tea-party. Unfortunately, on more than one occasion the smell of the new bread, and its fresh-baked warmth proved too hard to resist, and he would arrive back in his rooms with only the stub end of the loaf, having consumed the rest on the walk between bakery and college. Legend has it that on one occasion at least, he visited the bakery 3 times before actually making it home with an untouched loaf. Bread from Tylers was pretty wonderful, but for someone Jack’s size, one loaf was only a short-term solution.
I often think of Jack as I break the bread at the Eucharist.
Of course, we generally use wafers, and sometimes people complain sadly that they bear no resemblance to real bread at all.
Actually, that's no bad thing. There’s no room for confusion. We’re not eating a “proper meal” together, but taking part in something quite different, whose value lies far beyond any standard nutritional benefit. The fragment of unleavened wafer we receive becomes something much greater than itself, for it is here that we are offered Christ, in all the fullness of his risen life.
In our gospel this morning, John sets out to demonstrate that Jesus is the One for whom Israel was waiting, and to do this he aligns Jesus with Moses...To understand his technique, we need to remember that for the Jews, the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) provided a constant frame of reference. The contents of these books were not abstract concepts for the Jew - these were living words, pregnant with layers of meaning, and each new generation of Jews felt themselves living in the story in some way….in the same way, of course as we find ourselves living in the story whenever we gather to make Eucharist.
So John’s Jesus is inviting his hearers into an exercise in anamnesis as he evokes memories of the defining period in Jewish history, the Exodus from Egypt, and recalls God’s provision of manna, “bread from heaven”.
This was the freedom food, which enabled God’s people to travel onwards to the place they had been promised.
The food which sustained them, and made it possible for them to live as a people on the move, following wherever God lead them.
The bread of life, but for one day only.
You see, though this food seemed miraculous, it had to be consumed on the day it appeared, or it rotted and became worthless.
The Israelites were not allowed to build up prudent supplies in case of crisis.
They just had to trust God’s provision, day after day after day.
Now Jesus compares himself with that bread…in terms guaranteed to have any observant Jew sitting bolt upright on the edge of this seat
I am the living bread
I AM is the name God gives himself when he meets Moses, at the burning bush
Say I AM has sent you.
And so Jesus identifies himself with God and urges the crowd
“Stop looking only to your physical needs!
Your ancestors ate manna but died!
You who ate when I fed the 5000 will die in time!
But belief in me is ‘food’ that leads to eternal life.”
Jesus, the bread which now comes down from heaven sustains those who eat for ever.
This is no less the food of pilgrimage, no less a food provided directly by God,- indeed this food represents God’s very life, available to be absorbed by all God’s people.
Jesus is offering himself to his disciples…whoever eats me…
Imagine the impact of that, with Jesus himself standing beside you, on a hot day in Palestine, as the crowds press around, murmuring in doubt or disapproval.
A living, breathing man inviting you to eat him.
Shocking, unthinkable words.
Frightening, unwelcome words – in the same way as those words Jesus spoke at the Last Supper
“This is my body…this is my blood...”
John wrote several decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection, as part of a community that would have regularly celebrated the Lord’s supper together. For them, as for us, Jesus’ imagery - eating flesh and drinking blood - had come to life in a new way as the church shared the meal Jesus instituted.
So it is, week by week, when we gather and make Eucharist.
We bring ourselves, just as we are, broken, flawed, hungry for love and reassurance.
We bring the mess and muddle of our lives and lay them with our gifts upon the altar.
And as the bread and wine are consecrated and transformed, as Christ becomes truly present in those ordinary things made holy by the power of the Spirit, so we find ourselves joined with Christ and with one another.
There is a story told about a Eucharist that took place in prison camp – where rations were low, and morale lower.
Neither bread nor wine was available but the longing for Christ, the prayers of the faithful and the words of the priest together made this a true and holy Communion.
Listen
It was Easter in the camp. There was not a single cup.
No bread or wine. The non-Christians said, "We will help you; we will talk quietly so you can meet for worship." Too dense a silence would have drawn the guards' attention as surely as the lone voice of the preacher. "We have no bread, nor water to use instead of wine," the preacher told them, "but we will act as though we had."
"This meal in which we take part," he said, "reminds us of the prison, the torture, the death, and final victory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The bread is the body that he gave for humanity. The fact that we have none represents very well the lack of bread in the hunger of so many millions of human beings…but in Christ all our hungers are satisfied. The wine, which we don't have today, is his blood and represents our dream of a united humanity, of a just society, the hope of the kingdom to come...."
He broke the bread and held out his empty hand to the first person on the right, and placed it over their open hand, and the same with the others: "Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me." All of them raised hands to mouths, receiving the body of Christ in silence. The communion of the empty hand..."
Was Christ present there? Need we really ask that question?
My flesh is real food and my body real drink.
Real. Not material, but deeply deeply real.
Food and drink that sustains us to live our deepest reality, as we take our place as beloved children at our Fathers table.
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”
Hear Christ speak these words to you as you make your way to the Communion rail, as he comes to meet you and answer your deepest needs.
In that tiny fragment of bread, we receive Jesus himself, all we will ever need to sustain us on our pilgrimage.
Bread is the traditional staff of life, but the life that this bread represents is everlasting.
It is the life of God himself…and we are invited to share it.
Thanks be to God!
