BREAD John M, Buchanan
John 6224-35 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
Navember 20, 1983 Columbus, OH

Among the people of the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands off the coast
of Scotland, traditions and rituals are preserved which began perhaps twelve hundred
or thirteen hundred years ago. What makes them fascinating to students of history
and religien is that many of them are a curious marriage of Christianity and a much
older pagan, Celtic spirituality which extends many centuries before the Christian
era. For instance, the Consecration of the Seed. In the unforgiving climate of
the istands a farmer needs all the help he can get. Planting is done with great
care! rye is sown in November and December, oats in January and February, barley
in March and Aprit ~ and with much ceremony. "Three days before being sown
the seed is sprinkled with clear cold water, in the name of Father, and of Son, and
of Spirit, the person sprinkling the seed walking sunwise the while...The ritual is
picturesque, and performed with great cere-and solemnity."

The ancient invocation which is prayed on the occasion has been passed down
across the centuries,

"E will go out to sow the seed,

in the name of Him who gave it growth:
{ will place my front in the wind,

And throw a gracious handful on high...

Friday, day auspicious,
The dew will come down to welcome
Every seed that lay in sleep
Since the coming of cold without mercy;
very seed will take root in the earth,
As the King of the elements desired,
The braird will come forth with the dew,
It will inhal+ life from the soft wind!"
{Celtic Invocations, Alexander Carmichael, p. 60)

The inhabitants of the islands knew that the bread, the successful result of
the process, was the one thing standing between hope and despair, laughter and
tears, literally life and death. There is simply no way you and i can understand
the power of that. Others have: that pathetically small band of people huddles
on the coast of Massachusetts during the winter of 1620, whose lease on life was,
quite simply, one growing season. Others do today - the majority of the people
of the world, for instance, for whom bread represents life, salvation, survival.

It is not difficult te understand that bread is sometimes more than bread,
“A rose is a rose is a rose" Gerirude Stein reputedly said as a kind of Hterary declara-
tion of cynical integrity. But bread is not always merely bread. "Take, eat, this
is my body, broken for you," Jesus said, During the blitz, many English children
were removed from London and placed with families in the countryside, It quickly
became apparent that the terror of nightly bombing might not be as painful as
family separation. Children were encouraged to keep reminders of their homes
and families with thei: pencils, pictures, shells, rocks. One child slept every
night with a piece of bread from her family's dinner table clutched in her hand.
Bread, for her was a sacramental reminder of a relationship and a blessed promise
of joyful reunion, peace, love. (see Lawton Posey, The Ministry, 3/80, p. 31, Bread
and Wine) The commonly shared experience of being transported into the past,
into one’s childhuud, by the odor of baking bread is evidence of a compelling power.

=o

it was a large caravan heading for Canaan: servants, guides, herdsmen, trunks,
bales, wagons, sheep and cattle, wives and children, It has all the marks of a very
triumphant entry: a victorious homecoming for an enormously successful prodigal
son, Two thoughts, however, dull the shine on this potentially auspicious occasion,
One of them is the thought of Esau, who for ali Jacob knows is harboring a 26-year
grudge and rather relishing the thought of a meeting to settle the score. Esau is
still there. The other thought is Jahweh ~ God ~ a thought so awesome and relentless
and holy - that it never gets expressed verbally. But Jahweh has been there and
is there, showing up at curious times, in that peculiar dream about a ladder to heaven,
and in sleepless, night-time reveries about a promise and a covenant and a mighty
nation, Jacob can't shake the thought that he has a job to do: that he is chosen
ry the creator to do something, at least to be something ~ other than the crook that
e is,

And so l have always imagined a mixture of motives as they approach the border,
and Jacob, a bit ostentatiously, stands down and watches them all cross the small
stream called dabbok and at the very last minute decides to remain behind alone.
During the night we are not told what he does: prays, thinks, remembers, regrets
~ makes resolutions, plans ~ ? And at some point he is accosted, attacked and for
hours wrestles with 2 strange opponent. When the sun rises in the East, Jacob has
anew name - Israel ~' the one who contends with God" ~ and a imp.

Given similar circumstances, the night before our life takes a dramatic turn,
we would pray for strength. A swift chariot and strong shield might be more appro-
priate for the occasion. Jacob needs to be “equipped for ministry" to use current
ecclesiastical jargon, and we would at least turn to the page in the Worshipbook
marked ordination and pray God to give him intelligence, imagination, and love.
On the far side of the Jabboks of my life I've prayed for a variety of gifts, What
Jacob got, however was a limp.

God's chosen, that is to say, gets a lesson in human frailty, human limits, human
mortality. That, this extraordinary story says, at the outset is worth having. Let
Jacob's new limp then stand for his humanness, his vincibility, and write yourself
into this story by thinking for a moment about how important, and how difficult, it
is to deal with your humanness,

The theologians suggest that it is a lesson we would prefer not to learn. In
fact, we spend a lot of time avoiding it, denying our mortality, unwilling to affirm
our limits. We seem intent on establishing something immortal, something absolute,
At the most basic level mest of us have serious trouble acknowledging the limitations
of our own intelligence, our own opinions, our political preferences, our social atti-
tudes. At the most basic level we have trouble seeing that what we perceive is
only a part, a very relative part - at that, of the whole truth. Most of the evils
visited on one part of the human race by another part of the human race were the
result of this relentless absolutizing. Naziism, Communism both posture as the
final, absolute solution and because of that confidence, feel called toa coerce the
rest of humanity to share their assumptions and adopt their systems. When we commit
the same error? when we make anti-communism, for instance, the only criteria
for our friendship and national support, we end up with oppressive dictators as ou’
friends, and the millions of people they are oppressing as our enemies. A lesson
in ou humanity is a precious reminder of the limitations of anything human, even
the ideologies for which we would die, or for which we are willing to volunteer that
ow children die, It is good, at times, to learn the lesson of Jacob - the fact that
we all limp,

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The one who so powerfully appropriated bread as a symbol of salvation, knew
it, | believe, as an expression of nature's goodness and benevolence. He knew Psalm
104, for instance, in which God is praised for "wine to gladden the heart of man,
oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man's heart."

I've read that Psalm all my life without noticing that bread strengthens the
heart: not the back, or the shoulders, but the heart, the spiritual focus, the locus
of cur humanness, in Hebrew terms, What profound disservice we render our tradition
when we disembody aur humanity; when we regard human being as a good spirit,
captured in a decaying, sinful bedy. Bread as symbel reminds us of the wholeness
and unity of our humanity. From our Jewish forbears we inherit a wholesome,
lusty, affirmation of the created order, of the stuff of life. The Greeks didn't believe
that and taught that the flesh, the material world, was suspect, at best. Christianity
has traditionally tilted in the direction of that Greek mistake. And even though
Thanksgiving is a national and net an exclusively church holiday per se, it can be
a necessary reminder that God created the world and God created our humanity
and that part of a faithful response to the creator God is a full affirmation of what
he has created.

Physical needs are real. Helmut Thielicke, one of the great and brave German
preachers during the Second World War, once quipped to his Stuttgart congregation
that if they could take only one object inte the air raid shelter, and had to choose
between a wool sweater and a volume of poems, they should grab the sweater.
Thielicke also said somewhere that even Beethoven sounds lousy on an empty stom-
ach.

We have learned good medicine is - and always has been - wholistic. Good
physicians have always treated whole people, not merely fixed broken bones, Healing,
we now know, is a process which involves a whole person: when depression and
despair and hopelessness are untouched, physical symptoms are not likely to disappear
either,

Bread is a scriptural reminder that our humanity - ou Iimitations and our
needs — is blessed by God. No iess a local authority than Hugh Missildine, commenting
on the Lord’s Prayer several years ago, said about the petition - "Give us this day
our daily bread." “This very beautifully says we're not just agents to something

Pilgrims, I love to be reminded, were not nearly as sclemn as the dour Puritans
who followed them. They ate and drank heartily and loved and laughed and sang
their Psalms with "mirth" ~ which sounds like jolly piety with a twinkle in its eye.

Bread is a reminder that God intended our humanity: that cur humanness,
our needs - are blessed by God: that both our hunger and its satisfaction are part
of God's intent. But there is a deeper hunger. There is a hunger that lingers and
ghaws even when we have eaten the bread that is only bread: a hunger that presents
itself, not particularly in response to the demands of the body, but in response
to another need. The prophet Isaiah invites people whe have no money to purchase
“drink and food no money can buy.” / Amos alludes,to a "famine in the land," not
a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but for Hearing the word of the Lord. A
Sibylline Oracle which is probably pre-Christiaf declares: “Those who fear Gad
will inherit true eternal life, feasting upon the’ sweet bread from the starry heaven."
{cited by Raymond Brown, The Jerusalem Bible, John, vol. 1, p. 264)

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anda

God insists on the struggle. It is a haunting thought! In one of Frederick
Nietzchi's novels a character is talking about why God must die. "God looks with
eyes that see everything. He peers into man's ground and depth, into his hidden
shame and ugliness." And Paul Tillich wrote: “He is God only because he is inescapa-
ble,"

The Jabbok, by the way, is not on the map. The stream - the place -~ is insignifi-
cant. So our Jabboks, the places where God catches up with us, will be remota,
obscure: perhaps not sitting in church at all, but alone, at night, trying to sleep.
Dorothee Seelle, in her book Death By Bread Alone, tells about trying to live through
a period of deep personal darkness. She writes, “I had reached the end of the line
and God had scrapped the first draft of the design for my life. He had not comforted
me as a psychologist would. He had not offered me any of the placebos society
usually prescribes...He knocked me to the ground. Gradually it began to dawn on
me that people who believe,limp somewhat, as Jacob limped after wrestling with
God." (p. 32}

It is God Jacob is wrestling and so we can expect the story to be repeated
for us. "Why are we all limping?" J. Barrie Shepherd asks in a poem based on this

story!

Can it be this love of Ged

must wound us so that it can heal us?

Might this halting hip of Jacob signify

that when we do contend with love, when we
grapple with and finally are transformed by
the power of God's grace we become

more vulnerable, not less:

more likely to get hurt than .

those who chose always to play it safe..."

If we have lived life, we all Hmp a Httle finally. We may not be guilty of Jacob's
crassness and avarice, but if we have lived we know a bit about moral compromise
and expediency. We all limp home finally with the bright dreams af youth a little
faded, with our banners a bit soiled and torn: with failures as well as successes,
in our satchel with our weaknesses as well as our strengths clearly revealed.

lf we have lived life and if, along the way, we have been accosted by God we
will limp a bit. But along the way we will have come to understand that the imp
is a gift - a mark of something wonderful. We will have known that God loves and
accepts us in spite of our failures: that God loves our humanness more than we
have ever been able to love it: that God gives us what we can never earn ~ namely
his grace and love and presence,

The one who learned it first was a distant relative to another who affirmed
our humanity by taking it upan himself: Jacob - distant relative of Jesus - who lived
our life and died our death and showed us God's great love for us and in whose human-
ity you and I are given back our own humanity.

The story doesn't end ~ as all good stories never end. Jacob held on till morning
and then, in the hght of a new day, Hmped across the Jabbok into the promised land
to live the rest of his life as God's chosen; the same Jacob, but with a new name
now and a limp to remind him of that strange night long ago and the incredible thought
which I imagine never left him until the day he died - the idea of God, a God who
loves and cares and accosts and forces us to wrestle through the night. Amen.

oS

Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas are inclined to get blended into one extended
holiday in our culture. That would seem yet another secular invasion of cur sacred
territory. Until we stand with that crowd, hungry, and without much tact, or taste,
with only our hunger going for us, ask for bread. And until we hear him say “I am
the bread of life." Mixing it all together would seem an intrusion until we sense,
on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, an Advent of a King who was born in Bethlehem,
which means, everyone agrees, House of Bread. Amen.