Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Trinity – 4th August 2024: Exodus 16, 2-4, 9-15; Ephesians 4, 1-16; John 6, 24-35

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

‘Lord, give us this bread always’. (Jn 6,34)

 

Around the year 270AD Anthony, from the city of Koma in Lower Egypt, left his home and travelled deep into the desert to find space and freedom for contemplating God. Not the first to lead an ascetic life, nonetheless Anthony is considered the first of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. His desert life is depicted in many works of art through history, not least by Hieronymous Bosch.

We could discuss his life more fully, but we must press to the question, ‘why go into the desert?’ Part of the motivation for these desert monks and nuns was to find solitude, and partly to escape the metropolitan fleshpots – to turn their backs on the cities, full of noise and the babbling of people, to escape the moral corruption that is characteristic of city life. Where ate the fleshpots of Athens, I can hear you saying?

One of the adverse consequences of seeking this solitude, is that people from the fleshpots wanted to hear the spiritual advice of such saintly men and women – so far from getting the peace they wanted, the clamour of spirit-hungry humanity followed them. It was not so easy to escape from the fleshpots.

Moses has a slightly different situation to deal with. Having escaped from their slavery in Egypt, the People of Israel have had enough of the desert wandering – their patience in the search for the Promised Land is wearing thin. It is reported that the people are grumbling – a common theme in the scriptures – and that compared to all this freedom and lack of certainty, hunger, scarcity of comforts, endless travelling with seemingly no destination in sight – they lament the sort of lives they had in the fleshpots of Egypt.

Please, let us go back to them. We had everything there, and here we have nothing. How can this be better? What is God up to? Why are we following you, Moses and Aaron? Give us fleshpots any time.

The grumbling of the people is heard; their lament is noted. It is OK to grumble to God, to lament, to complain about how God might be responsible for our lamentable condition. There is a lovely verse in Psalm 56 (vs 8) ‘You have counted up my groaning; put my tears into your bottle; are they not written in your book?’ A beautiful image – our plight recorded in God’s book; our tears, the weeping of humanity, collected in his bottle and kept precious.

God hears their cries and God responds according to his nature, his essence. God gives of his bounty; God overflows with his graciousness; he gives not out of superior largesse, the noblesse oblige, but as an outpouring of himself.

Those essentials that the people associated with living in their past circumstances are provided – God provides, Yahweh Yireh.

We are told that the people are provided with quails, and the following morning with a ‘flake-like thing’, fine as hoarfrost. It is their bread. We of course would say it was their manna from heaven. The people’s needs are provided for by their God. ‘It is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat.’ Says Moses.

Jesus refers to this happening. He goes to the very heart of the event. It is not a human being like Moses who provided for the people, but God. It is God who provides – it is God who gave them their heavenly manna’ ‘Lord, give us this bread always’ is their response. These words resonate in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, a prayer than nourishes us now and countless billions of the faithful down through the Christian centuries, ‘Give us this day, our daily bread.’

In our eucharist we take bread, and we take wine, and we affirm our belief that the bread is the body of Jesus, the wine the blood of Jesus. ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.’

The eucharist is at the heart of our faith and practice – but our understanding of our daily bread widens beyond just our physical needs – our daily sustenance. God provides also for his whole church. He sustains us with the daily calling of his people –  each one of us, with no exceptions – that we may each sustain and nourish each other; our daily bread to sustain us in our faithful witness, both within and beyond our sacred gathering.

By God’s divine provision God calls us into ministry to feed one another spiritually, to feed the world spiritually. We are literally, each of us, bread for the world. Our bread is God’s grace – give us this daily, Father in heaven.

St. Paul informs us that ‘grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.’ (Eph 4,7). The divine gift is Christ’s very church – and this is you and me (and a good many other people besides). God takes us as we are and by his glorious alchemy he calls us into being ‘apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors teachers’ not for the sake of the individuals who have such ministries, but, as St. Paul says ‘to equip the saints (that’s you and me in St. Paul’s language) for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ’ so that we may grow together ‘to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ (Eph 4, 13). This is the real thing. This is not some dainty confectionary, but the bread of life for the feeding of the body of Christ. ‘Lord, give us this bread always’.

As we go through life – sometimes faithful, sometimes grumbling, sometimes having a clear vision sometimes cloudy, sometimes going through real personal sacrifice sometimes yearning for those fleshpots (that rather dubious place preferred by the grumbling Israelites), we pray and yearn for our daily bread that we may be sustained and nourished from the boundless generosity of our God.

To bring us to a close I would like us to sing that great and rousing hymn as we reflect on the bread of heaven.

Guide me, O thou great Redeemer,

Pilgrim through this barren land;

I am weak, but thou art mighty,

Hold me with thy powerful hand.

Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,

Feed me now and evermore.