Sunday Sermon – August 19, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

Year B Proper 15
John 6:51-58

I can still remember the first time I received communion. I was nine years old! I grew up in a small Anglo-Catholic parish, and when I was a little girl, we still did the whole “first communion” thing, rather than focusing on baptism or on our own hearts. For a few Sundays over the course of the fall, my friends Rebecca, Cory, and I met with our interim rector, Mother Alison, on several different occasions to talk through what this sacrament meant in our commitment to love the world and to love Jesus. It was a lot like how I do baptismal prep now… Anyway, while I remember feeling SO grown up when the big day came – The Feast of Epiphany. I also remember what happened after the service. The mother of one of the other girls, Rebecca, made each of us a red, hooded cape – just like the kind our Felicity American Girl dolls had. After the service, most of the congregation left quickly to get home before the snow started, but Rebecca, Cory and I ran around the empty church JOYOUSLY in our white dresses and white shoes with our red capes trailing behind us. Our families had to drag us home.

I’m grateful for that memory in my life with Christ – that pure, innocent joy of childhood. As we grow up and take on more responsibility and acquire more knowledge, life gets more complicated. The questions we ask and the answers we seek get more complicated.

We all have deep yearnings that change through the different seasons of our lives. We struggle with not enough time in our days. We need more space in our heads to remember thing. We all have unique and profound burning questions that we don’t yet have the answers to. Some seasons find us yearning for deeper connections with another human being, or sometimes, the void we’re struggling with is one we don’t yet know how to fill.

In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he is the living bread that came down from heaven. We talk about Easter and the promise of eternal life, but the bread that sustains us in our earthly life lives too. What all is Jesus getting at in today’s gospel when he tells us that he is the bread of life for the world?

We break bread together every Sunday. We gather around that table and praise God for the salvation of the world through Christ our savior, retelling the narrative of the Last Supper in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward, spiritual grace, given by Christ. In Holy Eucharist, the grace is found in the bread and wine that also become the body and blood of Christ. Grace is that unearned, undeserved, unconditional love from God that forgives us of our since and draws us closer to God and to each other.

The bread of life for the world is that grace: love that redeems, love that sustains, love that breaks down barriers and bridge chasms, love that connects us more deeply, love that abides and abides. In today’s gospel, Christ tells us that when we receive the sacrament of communion with open hearts, we’re taking Christ into ourselves. When we receive the bread and the wine, we’re choosing to abide in Christ and to trust in God’s grace – and when we invite God in like that, God lives in us.

That what Christ is trying to teach his listeners today. That’s what he’s trying to teach us today. Communion. The bread of life. This encounter we have with Christ deepens our relationship with the God who promises us eternal life. I know my heart hungers for that, but what about all of the other things we’re hungering for? We have questions about ourselves and the world; we struggle for more balance, greater clarity, deeper understanding and stronger love. And what about those seasons where it feels like our hearts have a hole in them?

Lord, give us this day our daily bread. We say these words in the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, after the eucharistic prayer, and they’re about more than eucharist. Daily bread is sustenance; daily bread is not a meal with a dessert cart. When we follow Jesus’ teaching and pray for daily bread, we’re praying for sustenance. We’re praying for what our bodies, minds and spirits NEED to get through the day. The answer we want is not always the one we get, but if we keep our hearts open to God, we’ll have just enough of whatever it is we need to get us through. In all of the seasons of uncertainty that we encounter in our lives, what better sustenance could we ask for than the bread of life?
The Grace of God surpasses all understanding in its ability to redeem and heal and transform and connect us more deeply to God and each other. Come to the table and receive life. Come to the table and be fed. Go out into the world and proclaim that message with every little kind word you say and deed you do and truth you proclaim. Then, come back and be fed again, so as to keep your heart full – so you can keep passing that grace on!