Liturgy is Only Authentic, if it Leads to Changed Lives

Sermon, by Pastor Ronald Nelson

Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost

August 25th, 2024

Joshua 24:1-18

Psalm 34:1-22

Ephesians 6:10-20

John 6:53-69

Twenty-First Sunday in ordinary time.

Turtle Island

Well, here we are. This is the last Sunday we will be using the Gospel of John for awhile.  But you have not gotten rid of me yet! Or maybe you have? Next Sunday we get back to my favourite Gospel, Mark.  Or a special worship on creation?

In the 1970’s, Robert Zimmerman wrote, “Gotta Serve Somebody.”  His message was,

“you may be an ambassador to England or France,

You may like to gamble; you might like to dance…

But you are gonna have to serve somebody…

It may be the Devil or it may be the lord,

But you are gonna have to serve somebody.”

Like all genuine gospel music, the song is not just singable, it challenges some basic common assumptions – This one goes to the heart of our culture’s addiction to individualism and independence.

The fact is that as we head towards our election next year and the USA in 3 months, we must understand that we are obsessed about preserving our individual rights, which is a clear and ironic illustration of the truth of the above chorus.  The minute we discover what orients our decisions, what we would protect at any cost, we know what we serve – consciously or not. Bob Dylan could have been paraphrasing what we hear Joshua saying in today’s first lesson. In today’s first reading, Joshua gathered his people and called them to make a solemn commitment.  They were to proclaim publicly whether or not they wanted to serve the lord who had freed them, fed them, and brought them - a unique people - to the Holy Land. They swore enthusiastically that they would always serve the lord their God. Their common identity came from God’s work and their response.  We know they kept that commitment as “perfectly,” as we keep ours!

All of this leads into our final reflection on John 6, the moment when we hear the reaction of Jesus’ various disciples. The readers of Joshua and John detect an atmosphere of crisis. Would they remain faithful to God or not? Their decision was entirely free. God does not coerce, God simply invites. Or as we heard last week, “wisdom invites, cajoles, and persuades, it never commands.”  When Jesus finished explaining that he, Jesus, was the bread given for the life of the world, the majority of his disciples came to the conclusion that it was too much for them to accept.  Are we any different today?  Some of them apparently cherished the concept of a more mysterious God who stayed on the heavenly side of creation, a God they could worship from a safe, cultic distance.  Others realized that the God Jesus represented in his own total self-giving, could only be served in an imitation of that same love, and they found that too costly.  The writer of John explained their reactions by simply saying, “because of this many of his disciples turned back, and no longer went about with him.”  This basic decision is always a turning point. And for many, probably most, they returned to their former way of life.  John does not tell us how Jesus felt. The writer of John only tells us that Jesus knew that some of the disciples lacked faith and that even one of them would betray him.

Of course, Jesus told his disciples that they could come to him without the help of God’s grace, but even with that, did he expect so many to walk off, to leave him?  John implies that when Jesus looked to see who remained, the group had shrunk to a mere twelve. A lot less romantic way of explaining how there came to be 12, instead of the twelve tribes of Israel idea that is often used to explain the 12 disciples.  Which is the way we have often explained happenings in the bible.  Sad to say, making up some grand idea instead of just admitting the facts.  We can only imagine the look on Jesus’ face and the tone of his voice when he asked, to the last of his followers, “do you also wish to go away?”  The pharisees had begun to talk about eternal-life, the Sadducees refused to go there.  The Sadducees felt that believing in heaven created too many complications.  I have to confess; I lean towards the Sadducees.  Remember, as I quoted last week, the church wants you to “think for yourself.”  John 6 paints a picture of Jesus offering us, eternal life.

The writers of Joshua and John presume there are times when we are forced to choose between at least two ways of looking at our faith.  In all of the gospel of John, this is probably Jesus’ most vulnerable moment. When you offer yourself to someone else and they turn you down, (I am sure some of us have been there) it sure leaves you vulnerable.  On the other hand, it was also the natural result of offering himself for others.  Therefore, it was all Jesus could do, he offered himself.  The results depended on their openness to his gift of life. Yes, the teachings of Jesus usually led/leads to division. “How can this person give us his flesh to eat?” Taking the literal sense of these words, they missed Jesus’ point.  Jesus’ teachings may have been challenging but he did not shy away from them.  Peter spoke for his fellow disciples, by responding to Jesus’ question by asking a question (something Peter had learned from Jesus to do).  “Lord, to whom can we go?”  Then Peter added, showing he had listened, “you have the words of eternal life.” “We have come to believe and know that you are the holy one of God.”  Now of course Peter did not fully understand the implications of what he said. Nevertheless, what he said committed him and his companions to continue as Jesus’ disciples with all of the unpredictable repercussions that would entail.  I wonder if the founders of this congregation, really understood what they were doing when they took the name St. Peter?  Peter had his strengths and his weaknesses. He was not perfect, but his misunderstandings of the faith help us to think about our faith. Peter’s portrait of the process through which they came to believe in Jesus is certainly worth looking at. 

So, here we are, we have been contemplating Jesus as the bread of life for five weeks.  That is almost as long as Lent and longer than Advent. We have had time to ponder how God has shown, and shows us, love and care.  As we now reach to the end of this immersion into the Gospel of John, the scriptures are inviting us to stand with Joshua’s Israelites and Jesus’ disciples as they are asked about their commitment; after remembering so much about God’s goodness, after hearing the promise of life-giving bread and being reminded that God draws us to this idea of a Christ who loves all and draws us into our deepest longings.  Yes, now it is time to review our own fundamental allegiance.  Please remember we do not need a Billy Graham altar call. You will have one in two weeks when your pastor is back, and the Eucharist will be offered.  For now, we need to renew our deeply personal and public dedication to God.  Please think of your next time at the Altar for Communion as a re-enactment of the pledge Joshua was calling forth in our first lesson today.  Just think of what we are saying when we say “amen,” at the end of our service today.  As Augustine said, “are we willing to receive what we are and to be what we receive?”  Jesus’ offer to those who would receive him is nothing less than an invitation to an adventure of unlimited love that leads to unlimited life. Those disciples who had remained with Jesus understood the implications of all this. Remember they said, “this is too hard.”  Those who were concerned primarily with their own well-being were not able to stay with him without the grace of God.  So that part was “easy,” but now this is where it gets hard.  Because if we allow ourselves to be drawn by grace, we will become counterintuitive, and countercultural. We will become a faith of empathy for people of diverse humanity. We will not practice the theology of cruelty, exclusion, and malice that so many seem to proclaim as Christianity today.

The hymn “Onward Christians Soldiers” is just beyond the pale.  Early Christianity was largely pacifist. I have never been quite there, although my six years in the Marine Corp was about as safe as it could be, it was not long after I was in Canada that people said to me, “you can never go back to the USA with your views on Vietnam.” So it was too much, is too much, for many would-be disciples.  We hear it again, “do you also want to leave?” and we should not be surprised that most of our friends and family have walked away.  You see this is what liturgy is all about, my preaching, Sonya’s playing, our singing, and praying, and listening is only authentic if it leads to changed lives. Faith is a gift, but it is also a choice. Paul was in jail when he asked his readers to pray that he would proclaim his faith boldly. It is hard work to preach and believe in daunting times. I, as a preacher, fear, on one hand, to sow division or misunderstanding but on the other hand, I fear failing people by an overcautious silence. I believe in placing these readings before us today, the church is affirming the crisis which is at the heart of Christian commitment.

So, for us addicts of freedom, as we have meditated on Jesus as the bread of life, I ask the following questions to myself and to you, knowing full well that none of us live up to the answers of these questions, even with God’s help. But we still need to ask ourselves these questions.  Do we make God the centre of our lives?  Do we live in such a way that our daily decisions and choices bear witness to our relationship with God?  Do we live in mutual faithfulness and service to spouses and family?  Do we accept the wisdom of God as our guide on this earth?  In other words, does faith permeate all that we do?  Remember in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures we find a God who has given us free will.  Interestingly, the more we use that free will, the more we actually become like the God we are trying to imitate.

Today is a turning point, yet another opportunity offered by God. How do we decide? How will our decisions affect the rest of today? How shall they reshape tomorrow?  We “gotta serve somebody.” And so, today, like every worship service we partake of, we ask, “are we all in?” and we hear God ask,

“Will you come and follow me

If I but call your name?

Will you go where you do not know

And never be the same?

Will you let my love be shown,

Will you let my name be known,

Will you let my life be grown

In you and you in me?”

“Will you love the you you hide

If I but call your name?

Will you quell the fear inside

And never be the same?

Will you use the faith you have found

To reshape the world around,

Through my sight and touch and sound

In you and you in me?”

[ELW 798 v. 1 & 4]

Amen.

Wisdom invites, cajoles, and persuades. It never commands.

Sermon, by Pastor Ronald Nelson

Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost

August 18th, 2024

Proverbs 9:1-6

Psalm 34:1-14

Ephesians 5:15-20

John 6:51-58

(Twentieth Sunday in ordinary time,

Turtle island)

We are dealing with a decidedly and unmistakable Eucharist IC motif these Sundays, and not offering communion makes it a tough call at best and just plain hard for me as the preacher.

I looked back at our last red hymnal [service book and hymnal] published in 1958. The way they handled this situation then was to have one set of lessons used year after year and to almost completely ignore the Gospel of John.  Before I was an ordained pastor, I could lead worship and preach  sermons without worrying over the lack of communion services. In fact in the summer of 1963, two years before I was ordained, I did just that for three months. As I have said before, if we had continued in that mode of ignoring much of scripture and having communion often only four times a year, I doubt I would be preaching today.  It is also interesting that Dr. Karoline Lewis in her writings on the gospel of John said, “my commentary on chapter 6 has deliberately postponed a discussion on communion. Why? Because it does not include in its writings, the words of institution, etc.”  So with Dr. Lewis’s blessing I will struggle with these texts as we do not again have communion today?

Having gotten that off my chest, let us move on then with the lessons.   As a prelude to the Gospel today, the first reading from proverbs sets the tone.  David f. Ford said, “wisdom has on the whole not had an easy time in the recent centuries in the west, yet it may be making a comeback.”  The wisdom texts of Hebrew scriptures address the practices of ordinary life more than the great events of history.  Why?  Because they attend to those who suffer.

Therefore, in our times of great suffering and the superpowers’ indifference to ordinary life, it may be a good time to think again about wisdom.  L’Arche, in spite of its leader’s transgressions, is an example of wisdom listening to the needs of god’s people. Wisdom, in our text today, is personified as a gracious hostess,  who prepares a feast and offers it freely to all who have  sense enough to accept her invitation.  But the most striking characteristic of this account is the importance it gives to women.  [just think of the two leaders of the republican party and what they say about women and yet most of their supporters profess to being Christian.  Go figure!]  Wisdom invites, cajoles, and persuades - it never commands.

No one can survive without wisdom, the way of wisdom is the way to the understanding of life.  In John’s gospel we find Jesus as the wisdom incarnate.  Then Ephesians continues to talk about how believers should conduct themselves at the communities’ gatherings.  What these readings then are doing is giving us some guidelines as to how we conduct ourselves not only at worship but in the world.  Now what we have in today’s scripture lessons and in fact on any given Sunday is contradictory characteristics of the writers’ various theologies.  So, for instance, the old SBH I just mentioned, was not honest in almost totally ignoring the gospel of John, and neither are non-liturgical pastors who keep riding their same “hobby horses” Sunday after Sunday.  So if we were to follow proverbs and never use the book of Job, we would be doing the same thing.  Biblical wisdom is often portrayed as predicting what God would do.  In that mode, we can always predict that God will always give me everything “I” need, “especially a long and meaningful life.”  But if I ignore god’s specific rules and regulations I and my descendants will live miserably and die young. If that is true, what about the book of Job? No matter how well Job “a just man” adhered to God’s laws, he always got the dirty end of the stick.  Everything went against him.  He and his family were constantly punished.  I am sure we have all known people like that, in fact it might be us.  We have done everything right and yet we have suffered. Thus in Job we find there is no predictability in God’s actions.  Even when Yahweh eventually appears to Job, Job’s questions are never answered. Basically God says, “I am divine and you are not.  You will never understand why I do what I do, so stop worrying about it.”  Is it any wonder that Rabbi Kushner made big dollars in 1981 with his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”  But today our readings all come down on the side of proverbs.  The author of proverbs pictures a great banquet, providing food and drink that takes care of our thirst and hunger for a lifetime. 

The writer of John puts some of the same wisdom in the mouth of Jesus, when Jesus speaks about, what some of us would say, is “the Eucharist.”

And then John’s Jesus takes the effects of food and drink beyond his life into eternity.  Even the writer of Ephesians seems to assure his readers that if they revolve their lives around doing the will of God, things are guaranteed to go well with them for the rest of their lives. Now I am sure that is what you would like me to say, right?  But what I am about to say is, our faith is not, or at least should not be, simply a matter of black and white.  I think the Lutheran church finally began to get our theology on the Eucharist right in the 1970’s when we began to understand what Paul and his students were saying about the Eucharist rather than when we just tried to ignore the gospel of John and hoped people would not ask about communion. [“Visible Words” by Robert w. Jenson is a good example, of how we began to get it right.]  For me as I look at these lessons there comes forward a subtle but meaningful practice at communion.  The way I, as a pastor, and the assisting minister do it, and I think Pastor Joel does the same, we eat and drink after everyone else has eaten. In other words in the Eucharist we, like those feeding the 5000, symbolically, only eat when everyone else in the community has eaten.  To be a disciple is to be a servant like Jesus was. Jesus put the needs of others ahead of his own. Discipleship means to offer one’s time, talent and treasure as food for the many hungers of god’s people.  Yes, if we are to be disciples we must have a capacity for compassion that overcomes conceit and self-centeredness with concerns for others.    

We Lutherans used to argue that we had to have some kind of scholarship understanding of the Eucharist before we could partake of it.  Finally, as I mentioned above, we began to understand that first Corinthians 11 was not talking about knowledge, but about our failing to share the food [bread and wine] with everyone at the table.  The basic idea is that the hungry should be fed by you and me.  Without that as part of our mandate then the liturgy of word and sacrament is incomplete.  Paul understood and hopefully we do as well.  Only when the poor are well fed by the generosity of the assembled community is the Eucharist  complete.  Raymond E. Brown’s “The Gospel According to John,” suggests that the whole of John 6 reflects the liturgical setting of a Christian Passover-Paschal feast which remembered; the gifts of the manna in the wilderness, the loaves and the fish in Galilee, and Jesus’ death on the cross.  All within the context of a Eucharist IC celebration.

Sadly, we Christians have missed the mark on carrying out most of what Jesus tried to teach. We had crusades to kill the infidels, we killed witches, and we privatized our faith to the point that “saving our soul” was all that counted and worst of all, we justified the above and much more by wrongly  citing scripture.  The writer of Ephesians said, “watch carefully how you live, not as foolish persons, but as wise… do not continue in ignorance.” So we as Lutherans especially continue to struggle with the meaning of the Eucharist.  All is a matter of faith, not logical or scientific fact. We can only grasp it through the wisdom of faith.  We do this by witnessing in awe and wonder before god, speaking and doing no evil, dedicating ourselves to good works, and pursing peace in our lives.  We as Christ-bearers must offer our whole selves to others, and to God’s wise plan for justice and peace in the world.  For me the bottom line of all of this is that God comes to us because we do not know how to go to her.  We are connected to one another.  We are all family.  The human family is one flesh, and whatever happens to anyone of us happens to all of us.  Any attempt to divide the human family is an attack on all of us. The war in the Ukraine is a “good/bad” example.  Oppression and exploitation of many will always eventually afflict everyone.

Justice and the common good are the only antidote to global suffering and sickness. It is rather simple and easy to go to church and to receive the bread and the wine. But it is another thing to actually be the church and experience life around us. Each week I want to do what the Rev. Marbury Anderson did for me as my pastor in the 1960’s.  I was 25 and about to be ordained when Pastor Anderson wrote the following for 8th graders in 1965: “during this course, when you are probing the significance of Christ in your life, remember that your church is not interested in giving you a lot of trite answers to your questions about being good, about life, death, and eternity.  Instead, your church wants you to read, study, and think for yourselves, to let the Holy Spirit so increase your faith in Christ that you find those answers that are meaningful to your life.”   I understand proverbs as being like a mother who always wants to first comfort her child.  My mother was like that, but then she would talk to me about some of her “Job” like trials.  One trial she had was, she had multiple sclerosis and yet she lived to be 92.  I will be honest, every time I have a pain, I wonder if I have not inherited MS from my mother. 

As I share the above two experiences with you, I say to me and I say to you.

Come and seek the ways of wisdom,

She who danced when earth was new.

Follow closely what she teaches,

For her words are right and true.

Wisdom clears the path to justice,

Showing us what love must do.

Listen to the voice of wisdom,

Crying in the market place.

Hear the word made flesh among us,

Full of glory, truth, and grace.

When the word takes root and ripens,

Peace and righteousness embrace.

Sister wisdom, come, assist us,

Nurture all who seek rebirth.

Spirit guide and close companion,

Bring to light our sacred worth.

Free us to become your people,

Holy friends of god and earth.

[ACS 971]

Listening to this wisdom,

We will begin to understand

Build a longer table, not a higher wall,

Feeding those who hunger, making room for all,

Feasting together, stranger turns to friend,

Christ breaks walls to pieces,

False divisions end.

Build a broader doorway, not a longer fence.

Love protects all people, sparing no expense.

When we embrace compassion more than fear,

Christ tears down our fences:

 all are welcome here.

[ACS 1062 v. 1& 3]

Amen.

Your Journey Never Ends ... Your Will Be Done

Sermon, by Pastor Ronald Nelson

Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

August 11th, 2024

I kings 19:4-8

Psalm 34:1-8

Ephesians 4:30-5:2

John 6:41-51

(Nineteenth Sunday in ordinary time,

Turtle island)

Look at any prayer book that is gathering dust in your library, search Google etc. I do not think you will find a suggestion that you should pray like Elijah does in today’s first reading. He was basically telling God, “enough! I have had it! Just let me lie down and die! Here and now!” I doubt us “good” Lutherans ever heard that prayer in our confirmation classes. But the fact that the prayer is not given to us to memorize or create hymns from, does not diminish the quality of its honesty, or the witness it bears to the profound relationship Elijah maintained with the God who had called him into a life of prophecy.

I do not think I ever asked God to just let me die but I certainly do remember being down by the falls, a couple of times, in the early morning yelling, “why am I doing this?” ~ Yes, those were nine interesting years in NFO. When we find the “your will be done” in the lord’s prayer too hard to pray, perhaps we can echo Elijah’s cry and trust that God hears our prayers with compassion.

After praying, Elijah lay down, perhaps hoping to never awaken again.

But lovers of God do not get off that easily. An “angel” woke Elijah up and told him to eat. When Elijah laid down again, he was told to get up and finish eating the food because he would need energy for his journey. The long journey first took him to Mount Horeb, and then to where Elijah would anoint Elisha as his successor and finally to where he would be “carried off in a chariot of fire.” [II kings 2:11] Was this story a myth, a fairy tale or what? Who knows? But the one thing it tells us is, God did not allow Elijah to die until Elijah finished his work for God. Elijah’s story seems to teach us that God listens to our prayers and answers our prayers by showing us all that life can offer. But there are times when it seems God is just asking too much of us.

We have laboured on behalf of others, but we do not see the fruits of our labour, and it just does not seem to be appreciated. Our families take us for granted, and we are exploited at work. All we have wanted to do was to serve and help others. Doing something for others is hard enough but even when we meet opposition, what is a person to do, other than give up? Yes, we are often like Elijah. There are times when we are challenged to our way of thinking and we are asked to accept a new perspective.

We are called to be open to cultural diversity and to help those we are not enamored with. And then to top it all off “new” biblical insights are shared by an 84 year “old” preacher and, we just might be like Elijah and or the Jews murmuring against Jesus. This then was the message that Jesus was trying to convey to his companions as he described himself as the bread that comes from heaven. According to the Jesus in the gospel of John, the bread from heaven was God’s offer of a life more abundant than they could ever imagine.

The people murmured, just like we do now, “this Jesus was just one of our neighbours,” “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Yes, they were just prisoners of their own measly expectations. They would not, they could not, fathom the idea that God could work through one of them, much less that their small lives could ever be worth anything. Their refusal to accept that Jesus was special betrayed their lack of faith in the value and potential of their own lives and consequently their lack of faith in the God who formed them as a people in God’s image. Jesus was telling them then and us now; “Elijah,” “Ron,” “you” and “you” and “you” get in touch with your inner feelings, with your deepest human longings, the part of yourselves which yearns for and leads to God. Augustine prayed in gratitude for this capacity to be open to God with the words, “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

Jesus’ call to those who would hear him was the most open invitation he could make. In effect Jesus was saying, “allow yourselves to be in touch with God’s spirit within you and you will realize that I am offering you living bread, my very life which brings eternal life to the world.” The scriptures we heard this week try to awaken us, to what God is offering us.

Elijah is here to lead us in the kind of sincere prayer that makes us vulnerable to God’s unlimited offers. The memory of the people who murmured against Jesus in the synagogue warns us against mortally diminished hopes and dreams that often drive people to block streets, honk horns, and storm capitals for no apparent reason, other than that in their minds, their hopes and dreams have died. Yes, just like the stories of Jesus and his fellow Israelites; we allow ourselves to be caught in mires of our own making. On the one hand we are asking for answers, on the other hand we resist probing and mining for answers and even refuse to hear the answers. It is as if we demand messages from Heaven, but we want to dictate how the answers will come, and what they will convey.

Together these scripture lessons today urge us to allow our heart’s longing for God to lead us to receive the life that God desires to share with us. We are so fortunate to have these stories in scripture not simply because they are great adventures, but because they provide clues that help us to recognize God’s acting in history. These stories indicate the kind of things God is known to do. Jesus knew these stories and he wanted his fellow jews to ponder them as they questioned whether or not he had any connection with God. Yes, today’s scriptures invite us to search our hearts and minds and to act from our deepest hopes and desires. Elijah cautions us that God will never settle for less than all we can become. The letter to Ephesians, reminds us that God’s spirit is active among us and that we have the power to collaborate with the spirit and to keep the spirit alive in our communities.

The gospel of John today adds to Elijah’s story, calling us to abandon our minimized hopes and minimal expectations so that we can be open to God’s unlimited offer of life. Quite simply, when given seemingly impossible tasks, or if we carry burdens of fear and doubt ~ God does not abandon us.

When we question the presence of the lord in the midst of our very human struggles, God reminds us that God is the living bread. If we taste and see the goodness of the Lord, if we eat the bread and fervently ask to become what we receive, then anger will dissipate in our lives. Then the marks of faith; kindness, forgiveness, and compassion will define our lives. Jesus’ invitation to hear and learn, to come to him, to eat and to believe so as to live is, as timely now as it was 2000 years ago. All we need is to hunger for the bread of life. Sounds so easy, eh? Well, I hope by now you know ~ it is not easy. I say it in almost every sermon, “we have to go back to our Galilee”, it is where we work and play that we need to live out the bread of life.

Elijah was fearing for his life when he said the above prayer. Queen Jezebel had a contract out on Elijah’s life. Elijah had executed prophets of Ba’al. [not something I would recommend doing but there are some “prophets” today I would???] Elijah was “running” all over trying to get away from Queen Jezebel’s gang. When Elijah finally got to Mt. Sinai, God said, go back to Damascus, to “your Galilee” and carry on your ministry there. Now we find out why Elijah just wanted to die.

Just like Elijah, we are called to follow a God who is compassionate and forgiving, that is the easy part. But sometimes it seems like God is leading us in the wrong direction, eh? Well, just think about it. Think about the wrong psychological directions we have taken in our lifetime. Think about the wrong relationships we have formed. Think about the times we did not even think we had gone astray, but we did, we presumed “it” was what God wanted us to do, but we were wrong? Yes, we may have to go through several “metanoias” in our lives. Yes, we may have to “change our mind”, or “change our heart.” We may have to even change our basic value systems. We may have to change directions in our lives. Think about it. It took Jesus thirty years to figure out what he was to do, and even then, on the cross he said, “God, if there is another way to do this, count me in.” Do we understand why “metanoia” is at the heart of Christianity? God/Jesus is not asking us to do anything that God has not already done.

In next week’s gospel, the murmuring of the hungry crowd will intensify as the Jesus in John’s gospel will be challenging the people to look beyond the bread and fish which filled their stomachs, and even beyond the bread of his teaching which filled their hearts and minds, in order to accept the bread of his very self. The bread that God has blessed, broken and shared with all for the life of the world. For most of us, our lives are not very dramatic, but we are all on a journey. The arc of every life involves change, leave-taking, risks, and challenges. Each of us is inevitably confronted with times of struggle and pain, perhaps even to the point where we just feel like giving up.

In our gospel for today, Jesus offers himself as the food for our journey, the bread of life. By not having the Eucharist these Sundays, we find the meaning of the “bread of life” is so much more than a piece of bread and a sip of wine. How do we experience the “bread of life?” Could it be a phone call to or from a friend when we or they are feeling alone? Could it be a casserole delivered to a family dealing with illness or grief? Could it just be simply a word of encouragement when it is most needed?

I have found people, like medical staff or wait-staff, actually enjoy being asked something about themselves rather than just being treated like servants. As God’s disciples, we are called to be bread for others. By giving of ourselves – gifts of time, resources, emotional or physical support – we too become bread, broken and shared with and for others in this suffering world.

The spirit sends us forth to serve,

We go in Jesus’ name

To bring glad tidings to the poor,

God’s favour to proclaim.

We go to comfort those who mourn

And set the burdened free,

Where hope is dim,

To share a dream and help the blind to see.

We go to be the hands of christ,

To scatter joy like seed

And, all our days, to cherish life,

To do the loving deed.

Then let us go to serve in peace,

The gospel to proclaim.

God’s spirit has empowered us,

We go in Jesus’ name.

[ELW 551]

Amen.