A Homily for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on August 4, 2024, the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost.

Last Sunday we heard how Jesus fed the hungry crowds who followed him, how God in human form looked at these hungry people each in their need, looked at them with compassion and gave them what they craved, bread and fish, more than enough. After the feeding of the five thousand, the crowds press in on Jesus even more than before. They threaten to take him and make him a king, this man who fed the multitudes. They want to crown him the king of bread.

Yes and no, Jesus says in today’s gospel. It’s a continuation of the same passage from the Bread of Life discourse in the Gospel according to John. He’s drawing out the difference between food that perishes, that feeds us in the moment and then leaves us hungry again, and the food that endures for eternal life, as God answers our deepest desires with the gift of God’s own self. God meets us in our need and feeds us, and this includes our very literal daily hunger, when the stomach asserts itself growling for fuel and nutrition. God feeds the hungry Israelites with manna, showered down right outside their tent door each day as they wander in the wilderness, newly delivered from captivity—and complaining all the while. They are fed with bread from heaven. The daily bread we pray for, the daily bread for which our Lord teaches us to pray, includes our very literal actual starchy daily bread.

One temptation in the spiritual life is always to leapfrog over the flesh and blood reality of our daily lives and search for some totally other, purely transcendent thing. This is a way of using God, turning God into an idol, to escape our need. To escape the contingency and risk that is part and parcel with being a created human being in a fragile world. Turning God into the king of bread or the king of good feelings or the king of risk mitigation. God becomes the solution to a problem we’ve made out of what is actually just our life as it is, not a problem to solve but this mixed-up reality both hungry and beautiful. God in Jesus Christ becomes human and enters into this contingent created reality with us, once and for all showing us that this mix-up is where God meets us. “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood”—that’s the Gospel according to Johnny Cash. God comes to us and meets us in our need and feeds us. 

So following Jesus is no shortcut around the truth of our hunger. And it’s no shortcut around the very real call to care for our neighbors who are literally hungry and thirsty. And yet Jesus is also pointing us to a steadiness in the midst of our hungry life together that becomes available when we trust him. This is the food that endures, a steadiness that doesn’t depend on circumstance. The bread of life isn’t something that comes and goes. It isn’t a thing at all. It’s a person, Jesus himself, in relationship with us, sticking with us, steady through thick and thin, better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and health. In the incarnation, in our Lord’s passion and crucifixion and resurrection—God has married Godself to all creation and pledged to never leave us or forsake us. When pastures are green, he sits down with us in the grass. When the seas are threatening, he clambers into our boat as it tosses to and fro. 

This is the steady, faithful, sturdy love of God in Christ Jesus from which nothing can separate us, and Jesus the bread of life is giving us this bread always, before we think to ask. Jesus gives himself away for us, God can do no other. When he feeds his disciples at the Last Supper, he says “This is my body, given for you.” “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” God chooses to be with us as one who feeds us with self-giving love. This is who God is! The same God who called to Moses from a bush burning unconsumed out of the corner of his eye, off the beaten path and said “I AM THAT I AM” calls to us to be who we are. The same God who led the Israelites on an impossible pathway through the sea into freedom leads us to ourselves, freeing us little by little to live and to love. And the same God who fed the wanderers in the desert feeds us: “This is my body, given for you.” As St. Edith Stein wrote, “God is love, and love is goodness giving itself away. It is a fulness of being that does not want to remain enclosed in itself, but rather to share itself with others, to give itself to them… All of creation exists thanks to this divine love spending itself.” God is a calling, liberating, and feeding God. Jesus still comes to us with those same words: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

This promise is almost too much for us to take in. When the Israelites wake up to manna, wonder bread dropped down from heaven, their first response is confusion. That’s how manna gets its name. “What is it?” they ask. “What’s this?” “This is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat,” Moses has to tell them. Perhaps this was confusion, perhaps it had the tenor of curiosity. In that sense, “What’s this?” is of course a wonderful question to ask as we practice opening our hands to receive our daily bread. “What is this?” can open up some curiosity about how our calling, liberating and feeding God is showing up in our life just as it is to care for us. And it can also open up some curiosity about our life as it actually is rather than the self-defeating suffocating stories we are always telling about it. Before I launch into the story I’m rehearsing about my life, who I am, who other people are, how I’ve won or how I’ve failed, what other people have done to me or what I’m owed, before any of that, there can be a simple, gentle, open-handed inquiry: “What is this?” In that simple question, a gentle inquiry into whatever circumstance of our life is coming up. Trust in God’s presence and providing care for us through absolutely everything. What is this? No need to cover over what is difficult. This too is the bread the Lord has given us to eat. God is giving Godself to us through our life this day, which is our daily bread.

The speakers from the crowd struggle to understand this free gift. But what should we do?! they insist. They, like us, want to gloriously perform the works of God, or at least to watch Jesus gloriously perform them. But he is with us as one humble and lowly in heart. Jesus’s glory is to receive what the Father gives, and he is calling us to open our hands to receive, too. “This is the work of God,” Jesus says, that you trust me. “That you believe in the one whom God has sent,” That you stretch out your hands to be fed, to receive abundant mercy and forgiveness and love. It has all been given for us in our need, before we think to ask.

         Lord, teach us to receive you. Open our hands; uncurl our fists. Grace us with the humility and freedom of having nothing to prove. Liberate us from our obsession with performance. Nourish us to maturity of faith; guide into the steadiness found only as we rest in your loving care. Free us up to serve our hungry neighbors, each one a part of your One Body. Give us eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us, feeding all creation. We are so hungry, Lord. Give us this bread always. Amen.