NOT BY BREAD ALONE John M. Buchanan
Luke 6:17-26 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

February 13, 1983 . Columbus, GH

The greatest temptation of al? is not so much to engage in individual
self-indulgence as it is actually to believe that doing what one wants
and having what one wants will make one happy. The temptation 1% actually
to believe that the more one consumes the better one feels: to appropriate
as one's own an image of the world as supermarket, and the gift of life
as one of these frantic, hell-bent-for-leather, races against the clock,
up and down the aisles, grabbing all the goods one can aefore the time
runs out. The temptation is actually te adopt as one's working fbypathesis,
the notion that the meaning of one's life may be calculated on the basis
of what one accumulates over the course of seven or eight decades. And
the tragedy of it is that in the middie of that we forget how truly to
be happy.

I'm giad that it is acceptable ana even fashionahie for Protestants
to observe Lent. It used to be that only the Romans observed the season,
but happily we are recovering our commen liturgical heritage and the
seasons of the church year are back “in”. Lent, someone wrote recently,
is the shape of God's resolve to put things right. It is a moment in
the year's time for acknowledging that the world is in a mess and that
we share some responsibility for that. It is a season for honesty and
repentance and responsibility: it has historically been the time when
the church has stripped down to assentials to remind itself that the
issues are always life and death. Lent is the time of year, someone
said recently, for Christians to confess that they have been locking for
their salvation in the wrong places: that they have not been noticeably
effective in discovering happiness.

It begins this Wednesday and, appropriately enough, the lesson for
the day is Luke's version of tha Beatitudes, a more familiar version of
which appears in Matthew, at the becianing of the sermon an the Mount,

William Barclay calis them Luke's bomesnelis, and they certainly are
&@ more assertivve, aggressive form of Matthew's mild blessings. Luke's
beatitudes are human, earthy, real. Matthew says: “Stlessed are the poor
in spirit.” im Luke it reads, “Blessed are you poor.” Matthew's “hunger
for righteousness?" became a simple "hunger" in Luke. “Those whe mourn shall
be comforted” becomes, in Luke, “you that weep now for you shall Jaugh”...
But most important, Luke adds a literary device which makes the entire
sequence unavoidably sharp and uncomfortably paints? - particularly if
you happen to be, shall we say, comfortable - which moans al! of us.
Almost as if to answer a1] the attempts to soften his statements by calling
them metaphors, Luke adds a "woe" to each blessing. “Blessed are you poor,
woe to you that are rich.”

What is it that caused Jesus to take such a position? He did not
condemn wealth nor reject people of property and means out of hand.
Zacheus, Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea were men of substance, Matthew
was a tax collector, perhaps a wealthy man, which is why ~ cynical scholars

~2e

Sometimes bread is more than bread. Thus, the traditional Jewish prayer,
even more ancient than the Celtic: “Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, King of
the world, who bringest forth bread from the earth."

Sometimes bread is more than bread. Sometimes, most times, it is quintessen-
tially the food we need to live. (Tet me tell you more about bread than you probably
wished to know. It's production fas consumed most of the attention of most of
the people who ever Hved. Bread represents civilization, Wandering, nomadic
people don't eat much bread. Manna in the wilderness is a great, life-giving miracle,
because you don't have the capacity to produce bread if you're on the road the
better part of forty years. Anthropologically speaking, the manna the children
of Israel ate in the wilderness was a lab exercise in the kind of life they could lead
in the promised land if they promised to settle down and plow some fields instead
of wandering around the desert, living in tents. Bread means civilization,

There were bakers in wealthy households in the ancient world and they were
good at their art: they experimented with ingredients, baking methods, shapes
and sizes. But for the vast majority of households in the ancient world, baking
bread was what you did, most of the day, every day, day in and day out, as long
as you lived.

The dceugh was made from wheat flour and water, supplemented by whatever
other cereal meal was available. In Canaan the people learned to crumble and
knead a piece of yesterday's bread to provide leavening. Baking could be as simple
as a heated rock and the flat round cake covered with hot ashes, or as sophisticated
as a kind of convection oven made of an inverted earthen jar. The loaf was ordinarily
an 18 inch disk, like a small pizza, Three per day ~ was the basic diet. One of its
major functions, from the beginning, was to convey other food into the mouth,
an edible utensil, a practice we have all seen our youngsters try on occasion.

Even in antiquity bread is celebrated for its power as a symbol. The Old
Testament employs a variety of images - the bread of idleness, bread of deceit,
bread of tears, breads of adversity. And then, one time, one of them drew all of
that meaning together and gave the world something it has never yet been able
to stop pondering. Jesus said: "I am the bread of Hfe; he who comes to me shall
net hunger.”

He had fed a large crowd of people with a few loaves of bread and a few
fish, The next day part of that same crowd had followed him. They became uncom-
fortable when he wondered out loud about theix motives. For their part, they re-
vealed those motives clearly and impatiently by saying: "What work do you perform?
Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, He gave them bread from heaven,"
Translate that: "How about some more of that bread, Jesus?" And he said, ",..the
bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives Hfe to the world."
And they said, "Lord, give us this bread always," and he said, "I am the bread of
life,"

it is not accurate to conclude from this that Jesus didn't care about bread
which is bread. After all, he had provided a substantial meal the day before. And
I believe, only someone who knows about and loves the look and smell and touch
and feel and taste of good bread, has the ability to use it as a metaphor for something
else. My guess is that the one who called himself the bread of Hfe, knew and loved
and was something of an expert on that less august bread which fills the air with
its bouquet, and the sight of which is an insistent reminder fo the needs of the
flesh which, on measure, are among the creator's better ideas.

~3-

The truth is that we need one another to be human and to be happy.
The book everyone is talking about is John Naisbitt's Megatrends, and
in a fascinating chapter titted. "High Tech - High Touch" > the author
writes: “We must learn to balance the material wonders of technolegy
with the spiritual demands of cur human nature." (p. 40) Naisbitt is
not a socfologist, or psychologist or minister. He is a social forcaster
and fis clients are AT&T, GE, and I8M. He describes how electronic data
processing can now make us very self-sufficient. Happily esconsed in
our electronic cottages we will soon be able to do our banking, shopping,
communicating and entertaining at the consola of our Apple Home Computer.
But, says Naisbitt, we are encountering something called "High-Tech Back-
lash" and public resistance for instance to automatic and electronic
accounting. "Some of us want te go to a teller. In fact, some of us
want to go to the same teller each time." (p. 44) Te'econferencing
and computer shopping are logical and independence sroducing high tach
trends which aren't working because people jike to be isgether. “The
more technology we introduce inte society, the more people will aggregate,
will want to be with other people: movies, rock concerts, shopping.
shopping malls, for example are now the third most frequented space in
our lives, following home and work place.“ Naisbitt conciudes his chapter
on technology with a sentence which could, with a little polishing, become
a commentary an our text: "By discovering cur potential as numan beings
we.....develop the inner knowledge, the wisdom. perhaps, to @uide our
exploration of technology.” {(p. 53}

Apparently the goal of self-sufficiency and independence is not
as noble as we think. In fact, perhaps - as Luke suggests - it is contrary
to our humanity which is our happiness. In @ book of essays, theologian
Dorothea Soeile, writes about the danger of aeath by bread alone..... "To
live by bread alone is to die @ slow and dreadful death in wiich a}
human relationships are mutilated and strangled. Our bodies stilt funetion.
#e stilt Igo about the chores and routines of life. Se come andd go and
speak. Yet we do not really live."

I suppose we have al} know or know someone who spent a life time
being totally self-sufficient, and now, in Tater vears, lives in a hell
of fsolation and alienation. The author catches the near demonic nature
of the ernsricsnee..... “Death ty bread alone means being alone and then
wanting <9 be lef. alone, Being friendiess., yet distrusting and desnising
others, forgettin, others aad being forge.ie: ; neither laughing nor being
laughed at, -either crying for another nor ceing cried for by another.
How horrible it is - this death py breed alone.” fp. 3/4)

The Lenten text suggests that humanacss, I’'e, Piessedness, happiness
are a product of interdependance and that the opposite of al} of that
is our obsession with self-sufficiency. When it translates into global
politics the stakes get much higher, of course.

As a nation, we still enjoy the thought of self-sufficiency and
independance and recall with great fondness the day when we approached
that blessed state. The popularity of Hinds of War I think is at least
ta part because in 1945 the United States had emerged as a truly self-

-4-

1 would submit that "sweet bread from the starry heaven" - "bread of Hfe"
~ points to the single most compelling need with which you and I must cope. We
are not, that is to say, idly playing with the piety and poeiry of antiquity. We are
now dealing with the top item on the agenda of every single one of us. In the terms
of our own lives we are now talking about the profound need of every person for
something more than survival, for some meaning, some personal significance. We
are now talking about the universal and personal need to know that one matters,
counts for something, that one's life adds up to something.

In the introduction to the book everybody has read, is reading, or will soon
read, In Search of Excellence, the authors quote psychologist Ernest Becker, “Society
wis a vehicle for earthy heroism. Man transcends death by finding meaning for
his life. It is the burning desire of the creature to count...What man really fears
is not so much extinction, but extinction without significance." The authors of
the best seller conclude that one of the formulas for success in business is a corpora-
tien which answers that deep, theological need. (Peters and Waterman, In Search
of Excellence, xxiii}

Jesus said, “I ar the bread of life” and the inference is that there was a hunger
in those people which would not be satisfied by manna from heaven, and that there
is a hunger in us that is not satisfied by food: that there is a security and a freedom
not bestowed by full barns - and there is a thanksgiving which gathers up the bounty
of creation and goes beyond to confront the creator.

How simple Hfe would be if only it were not so. How simple if human need
began and ended with enough bread to eat and a place to sleep. And then it comes
to us that the hunger itself is of God: that Augustine was gloriously and wonderfully
Yight in the prayer that goes: "Thou hast made us restless until we find our rest
in thee." Speaking at a University Convocation at Chicago Professor Joseph Sittler
told the academic community that one of the burdens of scholarly integrity was
to live a lifetime of probing, doubting, questioning that which seems to be pinned
down. It is to indulge and even to cultivate the spiritual and intellectual hunger
for the whole, eternal, illusive truth. To all whoa sometimes weary of the search
~ tire of being perpetually hungry - Sittler spoke eloquently, "Blessed are they that
hunger and thirst without being filled...For just to hunger and thirst, and to know
without settling for it, that you de hunger and thirst, is given a kind of negative
benediction. Hunger, unabated, is a kind of testimony to the reality of food. To
want to have may become a strange kind of having."

"Give us this bread always" the crowd said to Jesus, not knowing what it was
really asking, | suppose. We know. We ask for what we need ~- ultimately. We
ask for bread of Hfe: for meaning; now and then for some sense that Iam intended
by God, I am loved by God, Iam saved by Gad. What we ask from life is something
upon which to conclude that I am more than a biclogical coincidence; that I am
accepted and loved and graced by that which is greater than 1,

Bread of life - translate that ~ the love of God the creator. Without it, life
has no taste, bread is only bread. With it, regardless of circumstance; in season
and out of season, in sickness and health, on the recky shore of the new world,
or around a laden Thursday table, in prison, hospital ward, nursing home, in church,
ving room, board room, with God's love - we are not only safe and free and gloricus~
ly alive ~ we continue te discover that the best religious idea we can come up with
is always pratitude.

w Md .
ce rer
a

~5-

Happy are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of Gad. Happy are
you when you forget about yourself for a minute and }ive entirely for
others. Happy are you when you purchase a gift and give it away and
enjoy the delight and surprise in the person to whom you give ft far
more than you would in receiving a gift. How happy to be a giver of
gifts. How happy it is when the ones you love are happy. How blessed,
not when you have everything, but when your elderly parents are content
and vour children are happy and your loved ones are laughing. How happy
to lose your sense of self in the act of giving to another only to realize
that in giving and living for others you are the best self you ever will
be. “Blessed are you poor..." The happiness promised by the beatitudes
is internal. It is like listaning to one of the majestic Bach concertos
and being so drawn into the mysterious intricacy of the music that you
realize simultaneously your own smaliness, your poverty, your own poor
humanity in the presence of the music's magnificence. [t's like the
sheer joy of being in the prasence of great art which is implicitly to
be made smalier and more human by the greatness of the art.

We don't live by bread alone, nor by anything we eat, or own or
use. We live by grace: by gift: and a happy thing it is to realize
it. Blessedness, the New Testament calls it: the happiness to be found
in the discovery of our true self the moment we forget about self: the
richness te be discovered in acknowledging one's poverty: the life
which is given in the act of losing it: the gifts which are received
in the very act of giving.

So Lent, and the reenactment of the oid but always surprising drama:
the story of a Lord who embodied God’s Tove: a Lord who died loving,
that we might somehow catch on and learn to live. Amen,