A sermon preached at Crown Court Church in London

August 11, 2024

Exodus 16:1-18

John 6:35, 41-51

Introduction to Worship

Today we continue in John’s Gospel, and Jesus is still talking about bread. 

I’m okay with that because I talk about bread a lot too. I had to give up gluten for a while when my knee was having inflammation problems, and it did help my knee but it hurt my soul. 

I live in San Francisco, which is famous for our sourdough bread. And I know I can get very good sourdough bread here too, but ours is famous. Some say because of the weather in the bay area. But most people point to the fact that in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, over 80% of the city was destroyed, mostly from the fires that started in the rubble. There’s a bakery in the city that was founded in 1849, when the city was founded, and that founding baker had perfected a sourdough starter one of the gold miners had given her. As the family was evacuating in the aftermath of the earthquake, a member of the family went back into the house and gathered up the mother dough in a bucket, bringing it to safety. The mother dough in San Francisco is 170 years old. 

I do get paid a salary at my church, but I also get paid in homemade sourdough bread and bottles of wine that my parishioners make and share. I really suffer for Jesus. 

Whether you can eat gluten full bread or not, we all need basic sustenance of some kind to survive. Jesus didn’t say he was the sticky toffee pudding of life, or the Terry’s chocolate orange of life. Both things are favorites of mine that make life better. But I could, technically live without them. Probably. 

Jesus uses the essential food as his metaphor. 

As we continue in worship I invite you to consider this quote by Nikolai Berdyaev, who says, 

Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.

It’s one thing to take care of our own needs. As we hear Jesus talk about the bread of life, I hope we also will think on the needs of our neighbors, our community,  our world. 

Sermon

I promise I’m not reading you the same passage of scripture each week. This section of the lectionary keeps us in the 6th chapter of John for quite a while. It is the lengthy ‘bread of life’ section. And one can wonder why Jesus is so long winded about being the bread of life, but I think it is because it is so pivotal to understanding who he is, and what he came to do. 

Give us this day, our daily bread. We pray it every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer. Because it is one of the oldest known foods, that we and our ancestors have relied on. The oldest bread scholars have found is over 15,000 years old! It wasn’t at the grocery store you like the least, but was found in Jordan. People were making bread from local grains before people were planting crops. 

Jesus is going to talk them through this metaphor until they understand it. Last week they wanted more signs. This week, they are complaining. “Bread of life. That’s rich. He’s Jesus, the carpenter’s boy from Nazareth. Him, come down from heaven? Is that what we’re calling Nazareth these days? Hahaha”. 

Jesus has heard these insults about his hometown before. I don’t know London well enough to guess which town or neighborhood would be the similar backwater insult you’d throw at someone. It’s a timeworn way of silencing people you don’t agree with or understand. 

So he gives them an illustration that maybe they will better connect with:

“Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

Jesus is speaking of eternal life, but doing it with a metaphor about the life we live now. Something we can understand. 

The story of the Exodus, from which Jesus’ manna reference comes, is the story of a group of people who had been forced to leave their homeland because of economic and political reasons. They were a poor minority, refugees in a foreign land, where the other inhabitants were afraid of them and enacted regressive and limiting economic and immigration policies to keep their “fear of the other” at bay. 

Images of the violent rioters throwing fire bombs into hotels housing asylum seekers here in the UK this last week remind us that we are still living the story of scripture. 

The biblical refugees, the Hebrew people, became enslaved to the powers and systems of this foreign land. And they cried out to God. The truly scandalous and powerful story of the gospel is that God heard the cries of the oppressed and responded by liberating them from slavery. Perhaps we have heard the story of Exodus so many times  that this story doesn’t shock us.

It absolutely should shock us. 

The news here in the UK this week reminded us that people continue to fear the foreigner, the refugee, the oppressed. We have forgotten how our biblical ancestors, and likely our literal ancestors, were once strangers in a foreign land.

And God heard the cry of the oppressed. And liberated the people.

It’s understandable that the Israelites might be confused about their own identity after generations of slavery. One can see how they might doubt their own goodness, or their capability. It even makes sense that they could question their relationship to God.

Generations of slavery and years of trusting Pharaoh, could make one doubt that it means to be “chosen people” or even doubt the goodness of God.

And now they’ve been freed, delivered out of slavery, away from whatever kind of home you can build in a labor camp, when denied the opportunity to define your own existence or own your own labor. They have been delivered by God, away from Pharaoh.

As our story begins, they leave Elim, which was an oasis with 12 springs of water and 70 palm trees (Numbers 33:9), and find themselves in the wilderness, a place without such visible support. It doesn’t have Pharoah’s pots of meat (‘flesh pots’) or bread. It doesn’t even have date palm trees or springs of water. They can’t walk down the street to Waitrose’s to buy a roast chicken. Whatever supplies they had when they left Egypt are dwindling. They are in a place where they cannot use their own gumption, ingenuity, or resources to save themselves.

Slavery is behind them, in their rearview mirror.

The Promised Land is still ahead of them.

Right now, in the present moment, they are brought by God to be in the wilderness, dependent on something other than themselves.

They are in the wilderness,  where their words are “they complained” (SEVEN times we’re told they complained), and “God will kill us with hunger”. Their complaining might be better called anxiety, or worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet. A general fear about things that could go wrong.

God’s act of delivery in the recent past is forgotten.

The promise for the future is forgotten.

Hunger and anxiety dominate their verbs in their present moment, clouding their call to rely on God.

As one of my seminary professors, Walter Brueggemann has written:

“What is striking in this assaulting contrast is how present anxiety distorts the memory of the recent past. Egypt is known to be a place of deep abuse and heavy-handed oppression. Here, however, none of the oppression or abuse is mentioned, only meat and bread. The seductive distortion of Israel is that, given anxiety about survival, the immediacy of food overrides any long-term hope for freedom and well being.” (page 812, New Interpreter’s Bible, vol 1)

How often do we do that too? How often does our anxiety of the present moment lead us to forget the deliverance of the past and forget the promise of the future?

Jesus takes the religious leaders back to the wilderness when he speaks of the bread of life. The wilderness was a place where the people had to rely on God’s provision, rather than their own. 

Friends, we are in a wilderness moment.  Politically—we’re seeing opposing views of humanity fight for power. In the church—whether Church of Scotland or the PCUSA—we’re seeing dwindling resources and rising anxiety about the future of institutions we love, that have cared for us, and that we have cared for.  It is a time of wandering in the wilderness.

In our passage, God hears their anxiety and their worry. And God responds, with the promise of manna and quail, enough for each day.

Our collective anxiety seems to be higher than ever, as we worry about what the world will be like, what the church will be like. I’m feeling frantic and anxious and needing to do something, anything, to fix even one of the problems of the world.

We’re feeling frantic and anxious and needing to do something, anything, because we’re afraid of starving in the wilderness, and we don’t see so much as a wafer thin morsel of good news anywhere around.

And so we complain. And we cry out. And God hears our complaints. God hears the cries of God’s people. God tells the people to draw near, for God has heard their complaints. And God offers manna.

Manna is not an absurd, extravagant, gluttonous feast of a meal, where the table is spread with more food than they can eat in a week. Manna is not too much.

Manna is also not a scarcity product, where there isn’t enough for everyone. We’re told, “those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.” Manna is the abundance of enough.

We call this story the “miracle of the manna in the wilderness”, but maybe the manna isn’t the miracle. We want to think of miracles and picture a big laser light show and fireworks where the Hebrew people immediately get teleported from slavery straight to the Promised Land with no delay.

Maybe the miracle is that in the wilderness, when we don’t know where we’re going and we’re not sure we’ll survive long enough to get there, God hears our worries and fears and complaints—and God provides.

The miracle in this story is that our time of wilderness is also a time when God is taking care of us.

Manna is what we need for each day.

Give us this day our daily bread, as we pray each week.

I think that often, when we get all anxious and jangly about the problems of the world, it’s because we’re borrowing worry and trouble from another day. We overlook the fact that we have enough for TODAY and we see all the manna lying on the ground, and start worrying that maybe we should fill our pockets, buckets, and storage barns with manna for the next 5 years.  “It’s here today, but what if it doesn’t come next Thursday? Maybe I should just put some away for later….”

If you read on in the story, the Hebrew people did that. And the manna goes foul, and they can’t eat it.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t be responsible about doing what is ours to do for future provision. I’m saying the wilderness is not the time or place for frantic, anxious hoarding and squirreling. 

God provided manna only for the time when the land was wilderness and uninhabitable. Once they crossed into the Promised land, once they’ve crossed out of wilderness and into a habitable land where they can provide their own bread, the manna will stop.

Manna is a temporary provision, through which we learn it is okay to not always have the solutions to our own hunger. Manna teaches us to rely on God’s goodness and God’s provision, so when we leave the wilderness, maybe—just maybe—we can carry that grounded, non-anxious sense of being with us.

Why do we think Jesus talked about manna to the people who came to him with complaints and insult? 

On one level, I think he’s trying to say that whether we’re talking about this life or eternal life, the character of God is the same. God hears our complaints. God responds with provision. In the wilderness God sent manna. For eternal life, God sent their very own son. 

Why do we think Jesus talked about manna to the people who were anxious and complaining?

For me, the lesson of the manna is one of abundance. 

And I think when we are anxious and complaining, it can be helpful to remember manna, and to remember abundance. Because if I’m worried there won’t be enough—of whatever it is I’m worried about—money, jobs, love, acceptance, community, or welcome—if I think there won’t be enough of that to go around, then I have to start deciding who I want in and who needs to be out. 

Sometimes the protests against immigration are about racism and white supremacy, to be clear and we loudly condemn that behavior. But I suspect some of the protesters are there because they’ve been taught to fear there isn’t enough and they worry that new people coming in will take what they need. Jobs. Health care. Education. 

Jesus says to them, “Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life.”

Note that he doesn’t say, “the first 100 people who believe will get eternal life and the rest of you are out of luck”. 

Whoever believes. There is room for all in God’s kingdom. 

I don’t know how you talk about stewardship in the Church of Scotland, but in the PCUSA,  we believe our financial gifts are the literal manna that sustains and feeds the church through our wilderness wanderings as we journey toward the Promised Land.

And if everyone gives what they can give, we will have enough. Enough to do the sexy things like keep the lights on and buy toilet paper. Enough to do the visionary things like working to reduce poverty, to address racism, and to feed and house people. Enough to do the unseen or rarely seen things like care for staff in just and equitable ways, offer pastoral care to the homebound, or buy sandwiches and coffee for gathering time after worship.

Stewardship is like manna. When everyone gives to their capacity, there is enough. My husband and I learned this early on. We didn’t have much money when he was in medical school. But we learned that if we paid our pledge at the beginning of the month, we had enough left over by the end of the month to pay our bills and buy our groceries. The months where our fear of “not enough” led us to wait until the end of the month to make sure we had enough to get by before we gave to the church…that was when our pledge went unpaid.

The scale of our giving is different now than it was then, but the manna-like nature remains the same. When we give first, and trust that God is in our giving, we have enough. 

When God gave the manna and quail, God said it was to make sure the people followed divine instructions on their journey through the wilderness. Are we willing to do that? To day by day, trust God to provide for us while we journey through a wilderness time?

God’s not asking us to build a rocket ship to lift us out of the wilderness tomorrow, even if we might wish that were the speed at which we could move through uncertain times.

God is asking us to be, to trust in God’s provision, day by day, to get us through the wilderness.

What does that look like for you? To trust the provision of God both in our daily life and in our eternal life?

Here’s a poem that sums it up for me. This is one of my favorite poems. By a poet named Naomi Shihab Nye. Called Gate A-4

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning
my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just
like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,”
said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We
told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly in Arabic.
The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying.
She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day.
I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would
stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,
answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool
cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and
nuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the
lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered
sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two
little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,
some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. 

Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that
gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about
any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

This friends, is what I hope we can remember when the wilderness gets us down. God has provided for us in the past. God is dreaming great things for the future. God is feeding us today. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.  Give us this day, our daily bread. Amen.