Bread is the staple food in all cultures where wheat is the staple grain. In such cultures bread becomes a symbol of divine generosity – an embodiment of God’s care and concern for human beings. Our own collective religious memory contains countless instances and references to bread as a sign of God’s presence, God’s blessing – God’s involvement in human affairs.

I promised last week to continue to explore Jesus’ riffing on the bread metaphor found in John 6 – and I know you have been waiting with bated breath for today.

I love the verb to riff. It has a street-cred vibe. Originally, a musical term for a repeated melodic phrase, forming an accompaniment for a soloist – riffing has also come to mean a new variation on or a different manifestation of an existing theme or idea. In his 6^th chapter, John portrays Jesus’ riffing with gusto on the metaphor of bread. John records the grumbling of the crowds and the growing sense of alarm among the disciples as Jesus’ riffing on the metaphor of bread as spiritual food leads him to make some rather startling claims:

1. 1. I am the bread of life, come down from heaven.

1. 1. I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never go hungry.

1. 1. I am the living bread, and this bread is my body, which I will give for the life of the world.

The disciples sense of alarm goes through the roof when he tells the crowds:

• • Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. This is the bread come down from heaven …. The one who eats this bread will live forever.

I’m put in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful line from her novel The River:

In the land of the nearly blind you need to draw really big caricatures.

For Jesus, bread is a metaphor for identity, his communion with God, and our communion with him – I am the bread that has come down from heaven – those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.

As John reports, Jesus’ bread riffing becomes more and more controversial. His audience is a hungry one. After the feeding of the 5000, Jesus is aware that many are coming to hear him in the hope of a free meal. The crowds have little bandwidth for bread as spiritual food while their bellies remain empty and their grumbling grows louder. Rather than placating their growing dissatisfaction, Jesus ups the ante. Like members of the Trump campaign team, you can imagine his disciples frantically signaling to him to please dial it down – you’re losing the crowd. They will later privately complain to Jesus that his teaching is just too bizarre to follow.

Because bread is one of the most familiar metaphors of our Christian faith – our familiarity with Eucharistic imagery insulates us to the shock value of Jesus’ statements. We miss that Jesus is drawing some really big caricatures – which if taken seriously – have the potential to turn our comfortable worldview upside-down.

In the Lord’s Prayer the request Give us this day our daily bread becomes a metaphor for all of life’s basic needs. Daily bread is not only having something to eat but also somewhere to live, something meaningful to do that enhances our human dignity, someone to love and be loved by. Our difficulty is one of familiarity. How many times have we prayed the Lord’s Prayer? How many times have we participated in the Eucharist? Familiarity inures us to the radical implications of Jesus’ teaching. If we long for the bread from heaven that feeds our spiritual hunger, can we avoid ensuring that everyone – and not just the few – receives their daily bread? How long can we go on blithely receiving the Eucharistic bread from heaven without accepting that with it comes a responsibility to work for peace with justice in the world?

Every sermon reaches a pivotal point at which the preacher has to decide to take a left or right turn and follow one path rather than another. Here is this moment. The right fork leads me to focus on the internal dynamics of the Eucharist. To speak about the theology of the presence of Christ made real through the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. That in taking, blessing, breaking, and receiving bread and wine – Christ becomes present to us within the boundaries of this material space and time i.e., this place, among these people, in this moment when time as past and future collapse into the enteral now of the present.

I would speak of the Eucharist as a double transformation event. Catholic theology focuses on the Holy Spirit’s transformation of bread broken and wine outpoured to become the vehicle for Christ’s sacramental presence among us in time and space. Our Anglican twist is not to deny the emphasis of Catholic theology but to recognize with equal emphasis that receiving is as important as blessing and breaking. Through receiving – draw near with faith and receive – we the gathered people of God become likewise transformed to constitute the Body of Christ in the world. As a double transformation event. – the elements of bread and wine become transformed – yet so too does the body of faithful receivers.

But if I had taken the left fork I would speak not of the internal dynamics of the Eucharist but of its direct effects as a political action in the world. After each celebration of the Eucharist, we hear the words of the dismissal – this Eucharist is ended – go in peace to love and serve the Lord. We are sent forth nourished by the bread from heaven to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

William Stringfellow one of our great Episcopal theologians of the 20th century and a native son of Rhode Island soil – ending his days on Block Island. He was an apostle of a deeply catholic spirituality rooted in the action of the Eucharist as social and political action in the world. In Keeper of the Word Stringfellow wrote of the Eucharist as a transcendent event, [encompassing] all that has already happened in this world from the beginning of time and prophesying all that is to come until the end of time. Here, Stringfellow is articulating the cosmic significance of the Eucharist as an action collapsing the flow of time – past and future folding into the present moment involving specific persons – gathered in an identifiable place – in the here and now of a particular moment.

For Stringfellow celebrating the Eucharist was a political event of social action. He summed up social action as being the characteristic style of life for human beings in this world.

In this manner, Stringfellow echoed an earlier 20^th-century Anglican theologian and mystic, Evelyn Underhill in her poem Corpus Christi.

Come dear heart! The fields are white to harvest: come and see, as in a glass the timeless mystery of love, whereby we feed on God, our bread indeed. …Yea, I have understood how all things are one great oblation made: He on our altars, we on the world’s rood. Even as this corn, earth-born, we are snatched from the sod, reaped, ground to grist, crushed and tormented in the Mills of God, and offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.