First, read the text: John 6:51-58.
Here’s the sermon:
It is Salvador Dali’s wife, Gala, who sat perhaps with lap comfortably open, flowing skirt, hands held. She was his model for the Madonna figure in his painting, Madonna of Lligat, that’s on the front of today’s bulletin. The boy Jesus on Mary’s lap was also not a figment of Dali’s imagination but modeled from a boy in town named Juan. While I often prefer to choose art where the holy family has features similar to the ancient Palestinian people they were, it is fitting that Dali, like many artists, painted from what and who he knew. It is a living faith that sees the divine through people we know, at least in flashes, moments, or actions – reaches for them when we think “that’s what God looks like. This is the bread of life – that dinner.”
Isn’t it the people who are closest to us, whose bodies and mannerisms we know well, who reveal Christ to us, give us bread, help us know the meaning of love, forgiveness, wholeness. Or sadly conversely, those who are close to us can so harm us when they withhold love, or bread, or that image of the divine so that we might also see it in ourselves.
This painting is also fitting because today, August 15, is the day in which the church around the world lifts up Mary the mother of Jesus. We see here layers of divine mystery – Mary, the God-bearer, holds on her lap the child Jesus, who holds the globe and the scriptures. Dali described Mary as the tabernacle that held Jesus. The cut-through in her torso to the celestial sky symbolizes transcendence, and then Jesus is the tabernacle of the living bread, the Eucharist. (https://globalworship.tumblr.com/post/71134594422/christ-child-madonna-by-dali-1950)
That’s a lot of churchy language, and it’s a trippy, surrealist painting. But Jesus’ words we just heard in the gospel are not any less layered or symbolic. Lest we think Christianity is simply a set of principles, or easily followed practices, or a place that you go, or a culture that you are born into, we have these words from Jesus today which are more like Dali’s art: surrealist, mystical, and yet also so fleshy. Jesus repeats again – “I am the living bread that comes down from heaven.”
Today’s the fourth Sunday in a row that we’ve heard from Jesus about bread, here in John chapter 6. While there are whole swaths of the Bible we never read on a Sunday, the cycle of appointed readings that we share with the wider church, called the lectionary, keeps us right here for five weeks. A lot of preachers go on vacation… or preach the other scriptures… But Jesus just keeps talking about bread.
Will Willimon writes: “[Here] repetitiveness can best be seen as a sign that what is being said is important. It is also a sign of the difficulty of what is being communicated. It is as if, in this sixth chapter, Jesus knows that what is he talking about is against our accustomed means of making sense, so much that he must be redundant and repetitive, in order to keep hammering upon our cognitive defensives until we comprehend that when he says ‘bread’ he is not talking about flour, water, and yeast; he is talking about something that has ‘come down from heaven.’” (Feasting on the Word)
Some things we say over and over because they are important and true. Like – “God loves you.” “It will be ok (- even if it’s not).” Sometimes we repeat things our whole life because they are hard to actually believe, or can never fully be put into words.
We say some of these things every week here: “give us today our daily bread.” “Body of Christ, given for you.” We reach out for these things, and hold them close – and God places them in our hands. This bread becomes an inextricable part of us.
Other descriptions of our relationship with God, even from this gospel, put me here and God over there, with clearly defined boundaries. God’s the shepherd, we’re sheep, vine/branches. But today’s gospel, about abiding and consuming, does not have that comfortable distance and defined roles. As Martin Copenhaver writes, “[here] language is pressed to the limits to express the indissoluble union and inextricable participation of one life in another. For those who receive Jesus, his life clings to their bones and courses through their veins. He can no more be taken from the believer’s life than last Tuesday’s breakfast can by plucked from one’s body.” (https://www.davidlose.net/2015/08/pentecost-12-b-meeting-the-carnal-god/)
As Dali knew, sometimes those people whose bodies we know so well, or the bread or wafers whose taste we can conjure up immediately – whether it be a favorite recipe or brand on your table, or the wafers that we use – that tastes of living bread for us. The experience of it – from this table, to your own, each are layered with all of the experiences of tasting it every time before. In this space, I think about how these pews have seen layers of dust and wax, polish and sweat, people and their prayers through generations. This is one way in which this bread is eternal.
It is living bread that we receive, that holds the promise of God’s love. These things we say over and over, enfolded with layers of meaning that just get richer each time… like layers of a croissant – each time you receive communion or hear – God loves you. This is living bread for you. Or like a russian doll like Dali’s painting, the layers are people and experiences that reveal God’s love – maybe it comes in the form of a meal, or a welcome, or a gesture, or a word. And for you it may have been a child, or a parent, or a teacher, or a friend, who held the bread for you, kept the faith, and they received it from someone else, who received it from someone else.
Living bread. Thanks be to God. Amen.
A Wideness in God's Mercy 