COMFORT FOOD

A Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B

by Pastor Laura Gentry 

1 Kings 19:4-8, John 6:35-51 & Ephesians 4:25-5:2

I have a confession: I love cinnamon rolls. I love them not just because they taste so good but because they remind me of childhood. My Grandma Smith used to make the best cinnamon rolls. I remember my sister, Kathy, was determined to get Grandma’s recipe so she asked her to write it down. Since Grandma never used a recipe, she thought she’d have some fun with Kathy. So Grandma and I sat down and wrote out the whole recipe with humorous ambiguity. As I recall, it went something like this: Heat some milk in a pan. Throw a bit of butter in with it. Add a dab of water and an egg or two. Then dump a whole bunch of flour into it, but not too much. Oh, but before you do that, make sure there is some yeast, sugar and salt in it. Stir it all together and kneed it for a while. Then let it rise until it’s pretty risen. Needless to say, Kathy never could quite replicate those cinnamon rolls they way Grandma did. Nevertheless, even the smell of a good cinnamon roll makes me feel happy inside.

There has been much talk in recent years about “comfort food.” In 1972 it was added to Webster’s Dictionary. The way it works is that when we are children, we associate flavors of foods with pleasant memories. In this way, certain foods become like security blankets for us.

Well, in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is talking about bread again today. For those of you with perfect worship attendance for the lst few weeks, you know that this is the third week in a row that we’ve had a bread-centric gospel reading. We’ve heard about Jesus being the bread of life in Mark’s gospel and now we hear about it from John’s gospel. And here’re a preview of things to come: we’ve got 2 more weeks of gospels about bread. So what’s with all the bread talk? Did the people who put the lectionary readings together figure that lots of people miss church in the summer time so no one person will have to hear all 5 of these sets of readings? Did they just figure they could stick them all hear in August and nobody would notice? It seems to me that this is an extremely important point and so they keep giving us readings to help us really “get it.”

There’s something really comprehensible about bread. It is a staple in our lives. It is symbolic of all food, really. And food is so very important to us. Think about how much time and energy you put into food preparation. Perhaps you plan menus. Then you have to obtain your groceries or grow them yourself. With all the rain we’ve been having, that’s difficult. Yesterday, I found my tomato plants had crashed into my pond (tomato cages and all), which very much disturbed the little turtles who live in the pond. But back to food preparation. You’ve got to prepare your ingredients into tasty dishes and then when the whole meal is over you’ve got to clean it all up. That’s the worst part, I think. Food is a big deal.

But we have to go to all this work (or else go out to eat) because without food we will die. It’s not a luxury item. We need food for sustenance. Perhaps that is why Jesus as the bread of life is such a powerful metaphor. Without Christ, we die. Without him, we cannot have abundant life or the promise of eternal life.

And as I’ve said, we usually associate food and positive feelings. Food is our comfort. It gives us a sense of warmth, security and connection with those we are eating with. Bread is comfort. Even cinnamon rolls bring comfort.

When Jesus tells his disciples that he is the bread of life and that whoever eats of this bread will live forever, he is not just talking about some happy promise to come. He is saying that he is our comfort in the present tense. By believing in him, we are given abundant life that begins today and lasts for eternity.

Sometimes I hear people use the expression: “I’ll rest when I get to heaven.” And this always annoys me. I’m busy too, but it implies that they will just work their way through life being miserable and trust that they’ll eventually get to be happy and rested in the life to come. This seems to miss the point that Jesus is making here that the bread he brings is for NOW, not something that we have to delay enjoying. He said that he has come to bring life and life abundantly, that he has come that his joy may be in us and our joy may be complete. That’s good bread. That’s the ultimate comfort food.

And we hear about comfort food in the reading from First Kings today too. In this section of the story, Elijah has triumphantly defeated the prophets of Bael on Mount Horeb. He has won the prophet showdown. He’s the rock star of the prophet world—amazingly proving that his God is more powerful than the false gods of Bael. So is he happy? No, because now he’s running for his life. Queen Jezebel has ordered him to be killed. Now, on the run, Elijah is zapped of his strength. He cannot go on. But has been faithful and so God provides for him. An angel feeds him bread baked on a stone and gives him a jar of water as well. This supply of food lasted Elijah 40 days and 40 nights. If only my groceries would last that long!

I think this story, combined with our gospel reading, reminds us that God is our sustenance. He provides for us—he give us his very son to feast upon. Sometimes we feel empty and worn out, like Elijah before the angel arrived. The journey can often be a rocky road. As the God-become-flesh in Jesus, God is well aware of how difficult our journey is. And that’s why he gave us himself, the bread of life. And we can partake of this good bread in the word and sacrament. That’s why we show up here in worship. We know we need this bread to live. We are weary and we need to hear the gospel read and preached, we need to participate in the hymns of faith, we need to confess our sins and hear the graceful word of forgiveness, we need to be reminded of our baptisms through which we became God’s own, and we need to come forward and receive Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. The whole service from start to finish is spiritual comfort food to keep us moving forward in this journey of faith.

To have faith means to admit we can’t do it on our own. In the same way my sister could never make Grandma’s secret cinnamon roll recipe, we cannot find the recipe to eternal life on our own. We cannot save ourselves no matter how well we attempt to behave. We are beggars to God. Like Elijah, we are lost in the wilderness and we need God to provide this bread for us. The good news is that God is eager to do so.

In the reading from Ephesians today, Paul urges us to reach out and take this bread of life—to let it change us from the inside out. We ought to let go of the old and allow God to make us new. We ought to leave the darkness behind and enter into the light of God’s glorious new day. We ought to put away our selfish, childishness and behave with the maturity the Spirit gives us. And thus, we should leave foolishness behind and live in wisdom. He says we should let go of these old ways in the same way you would take off your dirty clothes so that you could change them out for new, clean ones. Put off the old ways, he says, and put on Christ.

It is time for us to put off our pity-parties and our oh-poor-me notions that keep us from moving forward in faith. We HAVE the bread of life. We are able to feast on it through faith each and every day. And this strengthens us to be the people we were created to be. We really CAN put off bitterness, rage, anger, slander and every form of malice. We can put on kindness, compassion, and forgiveness. We can shine with the light of Christ, who is our bread!

That’s why we have such good comfort food: because we have important work to do. God wants to heal us and move us into the exciting life of faithfulness. Let’s eat our fill and put on new life! Amen.

Now may the peace of God keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

THE BREAD OF LIFE

A Sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B

By Pastor Laura Gentry

John 6:41-51 & Ephesians 4:1-16

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  

The crowd that surrounded Jesus in our Gospel lesson in John became angry at what they thought was arrogance. How dare he call himself the bread of life?  He’s just a regular guy from Nazareth. How can he satisfy us? They don’t understand.

 

Yet, just a few verses earlier, this crowd was totally excited about Jesus—so much so that they tried to make him king. They had seen a little boy's lunch turn into a spread for thousands, with 12 baskets of leftovers. The miracle was amazing but they were understanding it more as a magic trick than a sign illustrating who Jesus really was. He tried to get through to them, nevertheless. He said he was the bread of life, something that would last far longer than the bread we eat. What he brings will satisfy the very hunger if their souls. But they can’t see it. They do not have the eyes of faith. And so they miss the bread of life he offers them.

Do we see Jesus as the bread of life? I mean, really know him in that way? Do we feast on this bread that gives life? Or are we missing the banquet? The theologian Karl Barth wrote, "Were we to hear only of a god who measures up to our rule and is able to do what we can also do for ourselves without him, what need have we of such a god? Whenever the church has preached such a tiresome little god it has grown empty."  We need bread that is truly satisfactory.  But where can we find it?

 

In the letter to the church at Ephesus, there is a challenge that sets a high standard: "Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering, a sacrifice for God." The point of this passage is that if we want to feast on the bread of life, we must follow in the way of Jesus—we must imitate him.

 

There is a legend of a man with a scarred face. He was embarrassed of it and so he made a mask to cover it. He made the mask look like a saint. It was a beautiful, flawless face on the mask and the man wore it always. He even fell in love and got married but even his wife was not allowed to see his real face.  Years go by and finally the people of his village find out about his scarred face. They legend goes that they are desperate to see who he really is and how what his face looks like behind the mask. So they surround him and rip it off. They are shocked to find out that his face has taken the form of the saintly mask. By pretending to be a saint all these years, he has inadvertently become one! 

 

The lesson of this legend is that we become what we habitually imitate. We become what we think and do. The thoughts that fill our minds, the passions that drive us, the habits we fall into—all of these things are building blocks that form us into who we are. If we fill our hearts and minds with the shallow, empty things of our popular culture—or if we cling to our hurts and angers, our resentments and bitter feelings, we're only hurting ourselves. Martin Luther explained it this way: "You cannot keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair."  What he meant was that we will always have sinful thoughts, but we can’t welcome these thoughts and let them get a foothold in our hearts.  If we do, we are feasting on the world, not the bread of heaven.

We become the patterns by which we live. Christ, the bread of life, wants us to feast on him, not these empty things. He wants us to fill our hearts and minds with God's Word. He wants us to work on loving as he loves, caring as he cares. In all things, we are to be imitators of God. That’s what the Christian life is all about.

 

John Wesley once wrote, "First let us agree what religion is. I take religion to be, not the mere saying over of so many prayers, morning and evening, in public or private, but a constant ruling habit of the soul, a renewal of our beings in the image of God, a recovery of the Divine likeness, a self-increasing conformity of heart and life to the pattern of our most holy redeemer."

In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which we heard a reading from today, we hear some good advise for how to create a constant ruling habit of the soul. Keep in mind that things aren’t going well for Paul at the time he writes this—he is imprisoned for his evangelism. But instead of feeling sorry for himself, he is writing powerful letters from prision. Let’s listen again to the beginning of this chapter:

“I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

Aha! There is the secret. We’ve got to figure out how we can stand one another. That’s what he said! We need to summon all our humility, gentleness, patience and love so that we can live together in peace. Being an imitator of Christ is no easy work but it is vital because when we do, we can live in love as one body with one faith through our one baptism in our one God.

So you see that having the bread of life to eat is not just a personal matter. We partake of Christ together, as a family. And that means we have to be extra cautious in how we deal with one another. We can’t be mean and self-centered because that would cause hurt to our fellow believers—our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are called to bring our gifts to the table so that together we can build up the body of Christ. That’s what the bread of heaven can do for us and for our community—not just this congregation but all believers in Christ everywhere. But we’ve got to live it. We’ve got to take action.

 

The Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard told a parable of a community of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher. The duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. With these wings there was nowhere the ducks could not go. With those wings they could soar. Shouts of "Amen!" were quacked throughout the duck congregation. At the conclusion of the service, the ducks left commenting on the message and waddled back home. They never flew.

 

There were some who knew Jesus personally and they enjoyed his miracle of the feeding of the 5000 but when they heard him preach, they were like the ducks. They didn’t get it. The waddled home. Let’s learn from them so that we can avoid being waddlers too.  Jesus is offering us himself, the bread of life so that we can live a life worthy of the calling. This is of ultimate importance.   Let us not waddle home today, but let us feast on Jesus and fly home.

Now may the peace of God keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

ABUNDANCE

A Sermon for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
by Pastor Laura Gentry

John 6:1-21 & Ephesians 4:14-21


Oh no! How are we going to feed all these people? That is the serious concern in today’s gospel lesson. At this point in his ministry, Jesus is attracting a huge crowd wherever he goes. Word has spread about the healing power he posesses. And in this passage, they are on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, up on the mountain and Jesus is surrounded a fantastic-sized audience. So he tests Philip by asking him where they can buy bread for all these people.

Philip kind of freaks out here. He has no idea how they could afford to buy bread for them all. He says that even six months’ wages wouldn’t be enough. It seems totally impossible.

As people of faith, we know that nothing is impossible for God. With God, everything is infinitely possible. God’s power is "far more than all we can ask or imagine," as we read in our lesson for today from Ephesians.

This is certainly the case in this story. It is discovered that a little boy in the crowd has packed a sack lunch and presumably is generously offering it for the group. The only problem, however, is that his lunch consists of five loaves of barley bread and two little fish and the crowd is 5,000 men plus women and children. Impossible? Absolutely. But Jesus blesses the lunch and it is distributed. Shockingly, there is enough for everyone and so many leftovers that it takes 12 baskets just to gather them!

It is much more than they could ask or imagine. Truly this feeding is miraculous, but in John’s gospel these events are called signs rather than miracles. They are signs because they point to deeper truths about who Jesus is and what he has come to do. This sign cannot be taken at face value—we must probe deeper. It is not about Jesus being a guy who magically makes bread and fish multiply. It is about the fact that Jesus is himself the bread of life, the one who will soon nourish them with his own body and blood. Bread satisfies hunger for the moment but he satisfies spiritual hunger for all time. Jesus made a similar statement to the woman at the well—calling himself living water. Still, the crowd doesn’t seem to understand this sign and instead, they want to seize him and make him king because of the free lunch program they are sure he will institute. They had come to this mountain searching for Jesus and even after this marvelous sign, they still don’t find what they are looking for.

And you are here this morning—why, I don’t know. But I can assume that it is because you too, are seeking Jesus. You are trying to find the one who offers the opportunity to live an everlasting and meaningful life. You are clamoring after the God who makes the impossible is possible. You are looking around this world where of despair and fear and scarcity and you know that there has got to be more—there must be abundance if you can just tap into the power of Jesus that can feed a multitude with just five loaves and two fish.

Well, if that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place. That’s what our life of faith is all about: seeking and finding the abundance of our God. Yet as humans it is difficult to accept such lavish love and care. In our New Testament lesson for today, we are offered a prayer. Paul writes:

“I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

Yes, the God who feeds the multitude with one boy’s lunch is the God of abundance. That’s the sign Jesus wants for us to get. He is the bread of life. And he feeds us with the unfathomable love of God—the fullness of God. And because this power is in us through the Holy Spirit, there is nothing we can’t do. This Spirit can accomplish far more through us than seems possible. And we are called to live in that believe in the possible, to stake our lives on it.

The theologian Soren Kierkegaard said faith is like floating in a deep ocean. If you struggle and thrash about, you will eventually tire and sink. But if you relax and trust, you will float. Faith, you see is trusting in the bouyancy of God to keep you safe. It is allowing God to be your everything: the ground in which you live and move and have your being. You have to let go of your fears and trust in the abundance of God and how much it can be present in your everyday life. That’s the sign that Jesus was pointing to in this miraculous act.

To close, I share with you a famous quote by Marianne Williamson.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.



May the God of all possibility bless you with the peace of Christ which passes all understanding. Amen.