Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Psalm 84: "Church Done Right"


            It is like the video clip we just watched (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZugkzkgjDk).   People from different nations singing together, walking the same path for a while, and working together to build not only a church building but also the community that is such an integral part of Christianity.  And music always seems to make the journey go faster.
            It is like an experience I had on the second day of my recent 60-mile breast Cancer walk when I had about 30 miles under my belt.  The route had entered a concrete tunnel that ran under the road above.  It was the kind of place where the sound of footsteps – my own as well as those ahead of me reverberated up and down the length of the passageway. 
            When I was in the middle of in the tunnel, a group of perhaps a half dozen walkers entered behind me and began to sing.  “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray….” Their joyful notes echoed off the walls and bounced from the ceiling, filling the concrete channel with glorious song.  Music always seems to make the journey go faster. 
            It is like when you were a kid, perhaps in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, and your troop would go hiking.  Inevitably at some point the way would seem especially long and arduous.  That was when someone always started a song.  “I love to go a’ wandering along the mountain track, and as I go I love to sing …”  Music always seems to make the journey go faster.           
            And so it was in ancient times when Jews would travel great distances to Jerusalem.  When their feet were tired and there were still miles to go before they reached Zion, they would sing because music always makes the journey go faster.  And many of the songs those men and women sang are the psalms that we still read even to this day because they are found in our Bible.
            Psalm 84 is one of those songs.  It is called a Psalm of Pilgrimage because it was first sung when groups of people from all over the surrounding areas made their way over grassy hills and through desert valleys to the Holy City.  This psalm most likely originated in the golden moments of Israel’s history, when the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were for a brief time united, perhaps when the great King Solomon sat on the throne.  
            Every year crowds of people would flock to Jerusalem, making their way from every part of the outlying territories, attempting their pilgrimage to the Holy City so they might worship at the Temple and be in the presence of Yahweh/God.
            Baptist pastor Randy Hyde describes the journey this way:  “You are an ancient Jewish pilgrim, on your way to Jerusalem... Zion, the Holy City.  Can’t you just feel the sand between your toes?  You have never visited this holy place before, and the anticipation of doing so has raised in you an excitement you haven’t felt in a long, long time, if ever.
            You are not alone, of course.  It is far too dangerous to travel in this part of the world by yourself.  You are in an entourage of fellow travelers, which means you are able to share your excitement and anticipation with others.  All conversations are about what you will do when you reach Jerusalem, where you will go, why you have decided to come.
            Obviously, you have to tend to practical matters.  You talk with the others about where you will stay, how much it will cost, whether you will have any funds left over with which to buy souvenirs.  But once these kinds of conversations find suitable solutions, or at least possible answers, your thoughts always go back to the reasons why you have come in the first place.
            The chances are, your purpose has to do with a religious festival of some kind. Perhaps it is Passover, or it might be the Festival of Lights.  The Jewish calendar afforded the faithful numerous opportunities to come to the Holy City and live out the mountaintop experience of praising God with like-minded believers.  As you travel, your thoughts are not on the incessant heat, the dust, the varmints, the thirst, the danger... you are thinking of one thing and one thing only: your destination.
            All the elements of this stimulating journey give rise to an emotion you have never felt before, and your heart breaks into a spontaneous song...
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yea it faints for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.

            Soon, your fellow travelers pick up the refrain of your singing, and join in.  It becomes the hymn, the chorus, that signifies for all of you the very reason for your pilgrimage, not just to the Holy City, but to the very heart of God.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
            Wow!  Imagine having a group of people like that coming to church each Sunday – men and women so passionate, so excited to be sitting in these hard pews praising God, feeling as close to God as they do to one another.  Surely that is a preacher’s nirvana dream!
            A Sunday School teacher once asked her older students to talk about what going to church meant to them.  It took a while to get past the silly, attention getting responses to answers that were more serious and heartfelt.  Finally, one young woman spoke up and said, “Coming to church is like walking into the heart of God.”  Coming to church is like going home.  No wonder those ancient Israelite pilgrims joyfully sang as they traveled to the Temple.
Better is one day in your court than a thousand elsewhere… One day spent in your house, this beautiful place of worship, beats thousands spent on Greek island beaches. I'd rather scrub floors in the house of my God than be honored as a guest in the palace of sin….as one modern Biblical translation expresses it.

            Oh, that worship in our modern times might generate such enthusiasm and passion!  Yet, we all have seen the statistics.  According to national studies, if we are a typical congregation, seventy two percent of us will go away feeling that we have not encountered God and that our lives are not much changed from when we walked into this sanctuary this morning.  Is it any wonder that worship attendance has dropped significantly over the past few years in all mainline churches if most people feel that worship is no more significant an experience than a Sunday morning athletic contest or a second cup of coffee and the newspaper?           
            How do you feel about attending church? Do you love it? Do you look forward to coming to church? Do you get a thrill out of coming to worship? Do you miss it when you can’t attend?  (www.tillhecomes.org)  Those are all questions that this Psalm ought to raise for us. 
            Someone once said that at church we get a glimpse, a foretaste, an appetizer for heaven. If you are looking forward to heaven, then you should also look forward to attending church.” 
            Of course, most folks out there still in their jammies think of church as a place where you have to show up - on Sunday morning, no less - to fake a few smiles, listen to dirge-lie organ music, and half-heartedly sing a few songs, and then, to top it off, suffer through a long-winded sermon…Given those presumptions, they can not help but have some sort of idea that heaven is going to be one long, unending church service., a never-ending sing-along in the sky, a celestial organ playing one old hymn they never knew after another, forever and ever, amen.
            And most people, when they conjure up that image, want nothing to do with it. They think, “That’s it? That’s heaven? That’s the good news?”  We know we don’t want to go to hell, but we’re not sure we want to go to heaven either.”  (www.tillhecomes.org )
           Well, I certainly do not believe that is what heaven will be like, and I also do not believe that is what worship should be like either.  Like most churches, we stand at a crossroads in this congregation.  We are at a pivotal point in deciding who we are and who we want to be. 
            I attended a clergy workshop here in Maine this past spring, and the new President of Bangor Theological Seminary was speaking.  He began by asking us 30 or so pastors of local churches if, given the current demographics of our congregations and presuming no significant changes occurring, how many of us believed that our church would still be in existence in 20 - 25 years.  Only one person raised a hand.
            What does it mean to “do church right?”  What does it mean to make this place – our sacred place – feel like home to not only those who have been members for decades but also to those who walk in for the first time?  These are the questions that as a congregation we need to grapple with if we are truly committed to growth and particularly if we see that growth coming from young families.
            As your pastor, I do not have all the answers here – and it would not work even if I did – because this is not my church – it is our church – and unless we are all committed to flexibility and change, whatever I might say or believe is not going to fly anyway.  You see, “doing church right” is not solely my responsibility, but it is the responsibility of each and every one of us.
            However, as your spiritual leader, I will throw out a couple of things to think about.  Overarching this concept of “church done right” is the fact that change is inevitable.  Even if we do nothing and if our church is still around in 20 years, it will look different than it does today.   That is a given.  Either we will have done church right and we will be thriving, or we will have a dying congregation.
            I believe that “doing church right” is going to involve acting in ways different than the manner our church has acted within our collective memory. ”Doing church right” is going to involve thinking outside the box.   So – here are some thoughts and questions to mull over and talk about with your families and church friends.
            First, those young families we hope to attract were raised in a different world than we were.  The Portland Press Herald ran an article this past week on the Beloit College Mindset List which chronicles the social landscape as seen by incoming first year students.  Two items struck me – and they characterize those young families we are talking about as well. 
            One was that the class of 2016 “has no need for radios, watches television everywhere except on actual TV sets, and is addicted to ‘electronic narcotics.’”  They communicate through Facebook and other social networking sites.  They listen to podcasts.   They blog.  They are used to interactive and instantaneous communication.  As a group, they do not sit in pews and listen to someone speaking at them and sing songs that reflect a theology that is foreign to them. 
            The other item that struck me is that they are much less likely to identify with a specific religion.  Biblical terms that are so common to us, such as “forbidden fruit” and “Good Samaritan” are unknown to most of them.  They do not come with strong church backgrounds.  Many of them come with no religious background at all.  In a “church done right”, how do we make them feel at home in our sacred setting, part of our blended and diverse congregation?
            Second, I would caution us all that making someone who ventures into worship feel at home is far more than a welcoming smile and an invitation to coffee hour.  It also involves feeling at home – or at least engaged - during the full hour of worship.  The generation we are seeking to attract does not care how things were always done because many of them do not know how things were always done.   Those who venture into churches are interested in having their children learn the social values they do not often learn in school.  They are interested in changing lives and are not sure, but do wonder, if perhaps a church might be the way to do that.  They have an ongoing passion for issues of justice and for peace.  They want to talk about them.  They want their worship experience to reflect a commitment to them.  They want to act upon them. 
            They are seekers, perhaps trying to make sense of the real truth behind those oftentimes hard-to-believe Bible stories.  They are intent on deepening their relationship with God but perhaps in ways that are different and foreign to us.  They do not come to worship so much to be comforted as to be challenged.   They sing different songs.  They make music differently.  They think that the organ is an outdated instrument.  In a “church done right”, how do we make them feel at home in our sacred setting, a part of our blended and diverse congregation?
            Finally, I wonder whether people need to connect to this community through formal membership or even Sunday morning worship at all?  In a “church done right”, is the size of the faith community determined by the number of people who enter the sanctuary on Sunday - or might it be determined by the number of lives that church regularly touches?  How important is worship to the overall life of a faith community?  Right now, most people who do not attend worship regularly also do not play an active role in this faith community.   But could people play an active role and not participate in worship?  Or would they be considered second-class citizens, so to speak.  I don’t know….something to think about.
            These are the types of questions your Core Group on Growth will be raising with you in the next month or so.  It is an exciting time for us – and certainly a journey to find the truly holy places in our life together – and so I challenge you to become engaged in the process. And if it seems overwhelming or beyond your comprehension, remember that we need you on this journey – whether you are 28 or 88. 
            And remember that we do not journey alone or without a GPS.  We have the Holy Spirit to guide us and the Gospel Message and Way of Jesus as a reference point before us, ready to lead us home to God, so that our hearts can sing as the ancient Israelites did before us:
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yea it faints for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond VIllage Community Church, Raymond, Maine
                        

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14 "Solomon's Wish"


         A teenage boy, on his way home from school, came upon an old rusty lamp by the side of the road.  Intrigued, he picked it up and rubbed it.  POOF! A genie appeared and immediately offered the boy three wishes.
         The young man, of course, was delighted and gave a great deal of thought to what he would wish for.  After some consideration, he decided first to ask for good health for himself and his family. 
         “I wish,” he said, “for a potion to cure all sickness.”
         “Granted!” proclaimed the genie. “When you return home, your wish will be waiting for you.”
         The boy got quite excited then and imagined what he could do if he had great wealth as well. ‘”I wish for a diamond so large that it can not be carried,” the boy stated.
         “Granted,” replied the genie. “When you return home, your second wish will be there as well.”
         The boy could hardly contain himself now.  Health…wealth….what else might a teenaged boy dream of?  Ah, beautiful women!  “My final wish,” he pronounced excitedly, “is a dinner date with a famous female movie star.”
         “Granted,’ repeated the genie one last time. “When you return home, you will find the answer to your final wish.”
         POOF!  The genie disappeared.  The boy dropped the magic lamp and raced home.  He bolted through the front door and breathlessly asked his Mother if anything had been delivered for him today.
            “Yes,’ she said, “In fact, it’s been a very strange day. First, around the time school let out,  a 55-gallon barrel of homemade chicken soup showed up. A little while later, I received a call from a lawyer saying that a long lost cousin of ours had died and left you an old and deserted minor league baseball diamond.  Then, just a few minutes ago, some big wig from Universal Studios called to invite you for a dinner date.....with Lassie.”
            Wishes!  We all have those secret dreams – even the young King Solomon back in the earliest days of Judaism.  That is part of what this passage is about – Solomon’s most famous wish.   However, if we look as well at the verses surrounding these two snippets from 1 Kings that we read, the verses that are omitted from the lectionary reading, we also find ourselves immersed in the very early history of the fledgling nation of Israel and in the transition of power from David to his son Solomon, both of whom were two of Israel’s most prestigious – though certainly not perfect – kings.
            Solomon ascended to the throne when his father, David, died.  However, Solomon did not come to his coronation easily.  In fact, if we were to skim those verses that are not included in our lectionary reading, we would discover that a number of people were eliminated along the way, bodies littered about on Solomon’s pathway to the throne. 
            You see, Solomon was not King David’s only son and rightful heir.  First, there had been Absalom who made a huge mistake in mounting an ill-fated campaign for the kingship even before David had died.  But there were others as well who stood in the way of Solomon grasping the power he sought. 
            As Disciples of Christ pastor, Mickey Anders writes, “Joab (who was David’s nephew) had to be killed. And Shemei, who had once cursed David, was killed. And then there was Solomon's brother, Adonijah who was his main rival for the throne. He had to be killed too. And it took the helpful maneuverings of the prophet Nathan and (Solomon’s) mother, Bathsheba, to make sure Solomon was the new king.  So when we read our passage today, let's not be lured into thinking that Solomon was an innocent young lad who stepped in quietly after David's death. All of these stories are filled with intrigue, plotting, and even violence.” 
            Though we may like to think otherwise, Solomon was not a young man who sat around deep in prayer and Bible study.  No – Solomon was engaged in a ruthless pursuit of power and control, taking vengeance on those who had opposed the monarchy, and doing everything necessary to assure and solidify his place as the ruler of a unified Israel. 
            As Calvin Seminary professor Scott Hoezee writes, “I hate to say it, but this is the Old Testament at its most brutal.  Yes, we can carve out the verses the Lectionary has chosen and focus on David’s peaceful death and Solomon’s prudent selection of wisdom as the gift he most wants to receive from God but all of that is nestled in the midst of some real-world violence and sin and mayhem that is about as tough to swallow as it is finally to ignore.”
          Though we remember Solomon as the builder of the great temple in Jerusalem and as the one who artfully solved the problem about which prostitute was really the mother of the baby, Solomon was no angel, no innocent boy king.  Solomon was as human – as flawed – as the rest of us. 
            And yet, in the midst of the intrigue and the violence of his ascension to power, so reminiscent of that final scene in the movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone is in church attending the baptism of his nephew even as the murders he has orchestrated are being committed one by one, for Solomon, even in the midst of all the malicious plotting, there is this Biblical nugget, this golden moment when Solomon is sleeping and dreams of his conversation with Yahweh/God.
            Luther Seminary professor Karen Schifferdecker puts it this way:  God “appears to Solomon in a dream there and says, "Ask what I should give you." It is a remarkable offer for this young king…. One can imagine what he might request: long life, riches, power, and victory in battle.

            (However), Solomon asks for none of that. Instead, he praises God for God's faithfulness to his father David, and he describes his own situation.  He is a young man…He has to govern a very numerous people; and not just any people, but a nation of God's own choosing. Therefore, he asks of God a "listening heart" (or, as many translations put it, "an understanding mind") in order to judge God's people, and "to discern between good and evil."

A listening heart, an understanding mind, and the ability to discern what is right and good – Solomon asks God for wisdom, and in the end, this request is the key to all the other blessings that Solomon enjoyed.
            When we set this passage in its true historical context, we have before us one brief shining moment when we see Solomon for who he is – a mixture of good and bad, of glory and malignancy.  Like each one of us, Solomon is both a saint and a sinner. 
            Even as Solomon seeks revenge and hungers for power, when he confronts Yahweh/God, he wishes not for personal gain, for material possessions, for diamonds.  He wishes not even for good health – or women (though heaven knows he had enough of them what with his 700 wives and 300 concubines).  No - Solomon asks God for wisdom – for the ability to listen, to understand, to discern justice in the midst of conflicting reports of what is right and what is wrong.
            Now, if part of the reason we read the Bible is to prod ourselves into reflecting on our own lives, then we need to ask a question this morning:  How often is our first wish the same as Solomon’s?  How often do we ask for wisdom – in ourselves and in our leaders? 
            Of all the things we ask for God in all the ways we ask and we pray, how often is a listening heart, an understanding mind, and the ability to discern what is right and good at the top of our list?  How often do we pray that wisdom – and that the One who is Wisdom Incarnate – will come to us and lead us home? 
            We live in a nation today where surely all of us can agree that it is difficult to see wisdom at work in our political processes.  Our Congress is polarized, and TV pundits fuel the separation, pushing us farther and farther apart.  We are categorized as living in blue states or red states.  We talk with people we agree with and demonize those who have a different perspective.  We seldom if ever seek out – or demand that our leaders seek out - common ground.  
            And “if we are no longer encouraging our politicians to find common ground and are not willing to live near people who think differently than we do, how do we ever find different perspectives to find unique answers to increasing difficult and complex challenges??”  (Process and Thought) Surely we need to ask for wisdom.
            And as United Church of Christ pastor Kate Huey reminds us:  We may argue vehemently about putting the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall as a mark of our faithfulness….Yet so many of us fail to make sure that all of God's children have the basic goods of life—(most particularly) those most vulnerable and in need.  (Yet), wasn't this exactly what God expected in both the Old and New Testaments? Aren't justice and compassion the "gospel" values preached and embodied by Jesus, the one whose wisdom we desire? Would Jesus have much to say about engraving Commandments in stone and putting them on display in public places when the heart of God's law is broken all around us?”  Surely we need to ask for wisdom.
            In so many ways, we are so like Solomon – flawed, broken, but with the same potential for unbelievable glory.  Solomon knew enough to ask God for wisdom. 
Solomon was humble enough to wish for a listening heart, an understanding mind, and the ability to discern what is right and good. 
            May we who proclaim that we follow Jesus strive to be like Solomon in his golden moment.  May we too pray for wisdom – and may we also live and demand that our leaders live as the Source of All Wisdom showed us in his own life – constantly seeking justice, always loving kindness and forever walking humbly with God.
 By Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, www.rvccme.org
           

           



Tuesday, August 7, 2012

John 6:24-35 "There is Bread....and There is Bread"


            Just about every grocery store in the US that I have ever frequented has almost a whole aisle devoted to bread.  In the Millcreek Shaw’s where I take my mother food shopping every week, it begins right after the peanut butter and jelly.  It starts with the bagels and English muffins and then marches forward into the specific loaf brands – Arnold, Pepperidge Farm, Nissen, the store brand – and then it self-divides into the different kinds of bread within each brand – from Pepperidge Farm cinnamon raisin swirl to Shaw’s 7 grain to Arnold whole wheat, then onward to the white, rye, pumpernickel, and more.  And it all ends with the hamburger and hot dog buns.
            And that is only the bread aisle.  We must not forget the bakery section – with its enormous muffins, more bagels, French baquettes, dinner rolls, sub rolls, peasant loaves, organic bread, Pigs that Fly bread, and all the seasonal breads from challah to hot cross buns. 
            No matter who we are, we in this congregation do not suffer a shortage of bread – and that is part of the reason why the power of this passage in the Gospel of John can be easily lost on us. When it comes to the ease with which we can chow down,  we are very different from the people who followed the man Jesus and to whom Jesus directed his message of good news. 
            The verses we read this morning pick up after the story of the feeding of the 5000, where Jesus managed to assuage the hunger of a whole bunch of people gathered on a hillside with a few fish and a couple of small loaves of bread and still ended up with 12 baskets of leftovers.  These were the people who did not reliably get three square meals a day.  They were the ones whom Jesus was thinking about in the prayer that has made its way down through the ages to us – “give us this day our daily bread.”  That petition had a very particular meaning to those who first heard it.
            There were no French baquettes for these men and women, no cinnamon raisin swirl, pumpernickel or rye (even Jewish rye), no hamburger or hotdog buns.  In fact, if one were cynical, one could make a case that a lot of those people who followed Jesus around the lake and ended up in Capernaum where we meet them again this morning were merely hanging around for another free handout.
          Or perhaps (thinking about the passage less cynically) they had experienced recent times like an American woman who wrote this:  "In Haiti] I have seen a little girl try to ease her hunger by eating dirt. When I approached her, she covered her lips to conceal the mouthful of grit and pebbles, but tiny telltale stones glistened on her lips and chin.”  Or this – “I just wish we could set a table for the little Haitian boy who cried in my arms last night.  I asked him why he looks so sad. He burst into tears, eyes full of pain, and whispered, 'I'm hungry.'
            Unlike we who experience an abundance of bread every time we walk into a supermarket and so perhaps have lost a sense of the relationship between bread and survival, the people to whom Jesus spoke were more like the 925 million people in the world today who are by definition going hungry.   Unlike us, they were acutely and viscerally aware of the bread-survival connection. 
            In fact, bread had factored into the history of the people who followed Jesus that day from their very beginning.  After all, the Hebrew people had left Egypt in such a hurry that they had been forced to bake their daily bread without yeast on flat stones in the desert sun – hence the matzo we serve at our Seder Meal during Holy Week each year before Easter. 
            And when the Hebrews had no bread as they wandered for forty years in the wilderness, God sent them manna from heaven to eat each day.  And did you know that the Hebrews had ended up in Egypt in the first place because they had to leave their own land due to a famine, once again unable to feed themselves?
            You see, the people who pursued Jesus around the lake that day understood that bread was their lifeline.  And here was a rabbi who had provided it to them. 
            “Hey, when did you get here?” they inquired when they finally linked up with Jesus again in Capernaum. 
            And so the context is established for the gospel writer to weave together a marvelous conversation between Jesus and this group of, if not physically hungry now then inevitably soon-to-be hungry, women and men. 
            The crowd speaks from its collective empty stomach while Jesus wants to talk about God. “And back and forth it goes: there’s the food that perishes and there’s the food that endures for eternal life; there’s manna for the wilderness, given not by Moses but by God to the Hebrew people—and then there’s bread from heaven that gives life to the world; there’s the food that we work to put on the table, and then there’s the food that God works to give us; there’s the bread that never satisfies for long, and then there’s the bread that satisfies forever so that we are never hungry again.”  (from “The Bread of Life”)  There is bread – and there is bread.
         The dialogue morphs and blends between physical hunger and spiritual hunger.  As Lutheran Biblical scholar Ginger Barfield writes, “"In this text, Jesus is trying to repair the faulty understanding the crowd took away from last Sunday's text."  To that end, it is about more than bread for the body.  It is also about bread for the soul.  It is about the outrageous and amazing words that the Gospel writer puts into the mouth of Jesus when the rabbi proclaims:  “Just as bread is your physical lifeline, so I am your lifeline too…I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
            In the end, Jesus seems to say, there is something even more debilitating than physical hunger, and that is spiritual hunger.  Ah – now that kind of hunger I think we can relate to.  Mother Theresa once said, “The spiritual poverty of the Western World is much greater than the physical poverty of our people…You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don’t know what it is”
            Which one of us has not experienced that sort of hunger? Which one of us has not found ourselves running on empty?  Perhaps we have no place to set down roots, no place to really call home.  Perhaps we feel so lonely even in the midst of those we call our friends and family.  Perhaps our mother, father, spouse, best friend has passed away.  Perhaps we feel so stressed and strung out by work.  Perhaps we feel so broken down, so unloved, so aware of the pain of the world around us and so tired that we do not know where to begin to fix it.  
            Perhaps, in the midst of our affluence, in the midst of baquettes and buns, pumpernickel and rye, in the midst of all that we are told we need, we hunger for more - for love, for meaning, for someone to walk the way with us, for someone to show us the way in the first place, for a way – just a way - to leave those pangs of pain and hunger – deep hunger – behind.
            And so some of us drink.  Some of us smoke dope or snort cocaine.  Some of us bury ourselves in work – or social networking.  Some of us eat.  However, both Jesus – and Mother Theresa - agree that those behaviors will not work.  They will not solve the problem.
            “What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”  That is what Mother Theresa says.  “The person who aligns with me hungers no more and thirsts no more, ever.”   That is what Jesus says. 
            There we have it – in a nutshell – in a loaf of bread:  the challenge and the calling of the church.  The church is meant to be a safe place for people to seek that living relationship with God and to align with the one who assuages our deep spiritual hunger and thirst. 
            The church is meant to be a place where you and I are constantly challenged to alleviate or at least to lessen the hunger we see in all its forms all around us. 
            The church is meant to be a place where we understand that we are called to hold in our arms the boy who weeps from hunger and to wipe clean the mouth of the girl who can only eat dirt. 
            The church is meant to be a place where we are both called and challenged to live such lives of service.  Why?  Because we seek to be aligned with Jesus, the Bread of Life, and so more deeply connected to God.
            Today, as happens each month, we are reminded not only of our deep spiritual hunger and our commitment to diminish the hunger of those around us.  We are also reminded of that connection, that lifeline which bread has come to symbolize in the Christian Church.  And so today we prepare for a feast.   We prepare for that time to reconnect with the Bread of Life.
            As the author of the blog Magdalene’s Musings writes, “Every month we lay the table for a meal, and it’s funny kind of a meal. A tiny piece of bread—or more, if you can tear it off yourself and are hungry for a larger hunk. A small sip of juice, or whatever your bread can soak up. A funny, tiny, almost insignificant kind of a meal….That is the custom we carry forward today. Bread that is so much more than bread. Fruit of the vine that is so much more than the fruit of the vine. Food that is so much more than food, because it draws our attention beyond the food to the creator of the food. A meal that is simultaneously so much less than a meal (as defined by our super-sized appetites), and yet so much more than a meal (as defined by the love of the one who serves it to us).”
            There is food and there is food.  That is what Jesus is telling us in this passage.  There is food for the body and food for the soul.  And, oh, we so need food for the soul. Not so much to bring us comfort – though comfort is good when it happens.  Not so much even to bring us personal peace, though peace also is good when it happens.  But to bring us into a vibrant, living, breathing relationship with God – and in the end to align ourselves with the One who calls and challenges us to dare to follow his Way. 
            And so in great high hope, we gather around the table we have set  – hungry for bread, hungry for the bread of life.  Come, for all things are ready.