Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
“Members of One Another”
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Ephesians 4:25-5:2/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (John 6:35, 41-51/NRSVUE)
I won’t be so presumptuous as to speak for you, but all of Jesus’s talk about bread lately has made me really hungry. And while I appreciate a good piece of bread as much as anyone does, these recent food cravings have led me in a slightly different direction — specifically, to the shortbread that my late Scottish grandmother used to make.
According to the recipe that’s been handed down through generations of my family, it has only five ingredients: flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and butter (a half pound of butter in a twelve inch square pan, to be exact). So, in addition to being really good, it’s really good for you.
Because she knew that it was my absolute favorite thing among all of the things she baked, my grandmother would always make me a pan of that shortbread for my birthday. She passed away more than thirty years ago, and I still miss her and that shortbread.
When I was old enough to drive, I’d head over to Grandma’s house and pick it up for myself rather than let my father bring it home after he’d stopped to visit her (which enabled me not only to spend some time with grandma but also to hide ir from the rest of my immediate family so they wouldn’t eat it). Grandma and I would sit on the tall chairs around her kitchen counter and eat shortbread (with Neapolitan ice cream), watch baseball (she never missed a Mets game), and talk about whatever. And while I definitely enjoyed the shortbread (and the ice cream), the experience clearly wasn’t just about food; but food was what got it all started.
It’s tough to deny that food can be an incredible storehouse for memory. No one has ever replicated the perfection of my grandmother’s shortbread (to this day I don’t know if there was something about the oven she used, or some additional ingredient she managed to keep secret from us), but if you threw together some flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and a mountain of butter in a pan and put it in the oven right now, the scent that would soon waft through the air, the anticipation of that first bite and the crumbs flying everywhere, would immediately take me back to the hours I spent in that kitchen in Paramus, New Jersey when the New York Mets were actually kinda good.
And so the mere thought of that shortbread does something really interesting in my mind and in my heart — it reminds me that my grandmother is, in some sense, still very much here (in the memories of her that it brings to my mind), and that she is also very much not here. Is there a food that would provoke a response like this in you?
I wonder if Jesus’s disciples had a similar experience whenever they sat down to enjoy a meal after he’d died (and risen) — after all, he did tell them to remember him whenever they dined together. And I wonder if our story for today ever came up, as they sat there eating and sharing memories of him:
“Hey, do you all remember when Jesus ticked off the religious authorities by going around telling everyone that he was the living bread that came down from heaven, that he was the bread of life that would enable people to live forever?”
“Yeah, I remember that. But, I have to tell you, I’m still not completely sure I understand what he meant. I wish he were here right now to explain it to us.” Though obviously they wished he were there for a whole bunch of other reasons too.
And I wonder how Jesus’s later disciples, living during the time that John put pen to paper and wrote this all down, might have felt when they read it and when they sat down to share a meal together, because that would have been anywhere between six and eight decades after Jesus had last walked the earth, and several years after anyone who had encountered Jesus in person was gone.
And I wonder if they understood his strange words any better than their predecessors had. What does it mean, after all, to be bread from heaven, to be the bread of life, to be the bread that bestows eternal life upon all who eat it?
Did they think that Jesus had meant it literally — that every time they ate the bread and drank the cup they were actually eating his body and drinking his blood? Maybe they did (and there are, in fact, many people who continue to hold that belief today). Or did they think he meant eating the bread that gives eternal life in a different sense? Though, in fairness, this doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to figure out.
And I wonder if these first disciples of Christ (and later ones too) actually realized, as they sat there countless times in countless places throughout the centuries sharing meals and sharing stories, that they were answering that question as they did these things in the very doing of these things.
Because as they gathered together, wherever and whenever, over food and drink to talk about what Jesus had been and said and done, the experience made them aware of the fact that Jesus was still very much there (in the flood of memories that all of this brought to mind) and that he was also very much not. This, I think, is what it means to eat the bread that gives eternal life in a different sense.
As Luke tells us, when Jesus gathers his first disciples for what would be his Last Supper with them, he takes a loaf of bread and gives thanks; he breaks it and gives it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Jesus definitely understood the power that food shared in community has to fling open the doors of our storehouses of memory.
It’s like I said earlier: it’s not just about the food, but the food is what seems to get it all started; and when we come together to share that food, something transcendent can happen. As two of our most basic human needs are met simultaneously — the need for sustenance, on the one hand, and the need for community, on the other — our connections to one another in that time and place, and our connections to one other beyond that time and place, come to the surface and converge.
And, as they do, we sense that those we can’t see face-to-face are truly with us in other ways;
we understand the the lessons and stories of those who came before us matter to us both now and going forward;
we feel the past breathing life into the present, and the present breathing life into the past.
In a nutshell: we remember.
So every time that Jesus’s disciples got together to share some bread and a little wine, the stories of his time among them bubbled up to the surface and got told — of the teaching and the caring and the healing, of the things he’d done that they should keep doing because they’ve always been the right things to do: Loving God and loving neighbor; caring for the least of these; putting the needs of others ahead of your own; working for the common good.
And because the need for food and the need to gather are inherent to being human, and because the memories of Jesus passed down through the generations are so timeless, when we gather here over bread and cup to remember him — all that he did and all that he was — we feel his presence even as we acknowledge his absence; we know that he’s here, in some sense, and we wish that he were still here, in another. And all of this is true, even though we’ve never had the chance to meet Jesus in person.
But maybe, just maybe, this is how we experience a little bit of eternal life while we’re here on earth: coming together to share a meal and the memories of those we hope to see someday, making sure they live on in some way not only for us but also for the generations who haven’t yet had the chance to meet them.
As I was thinking about all of this over the past week, and longing for some of my grandmother’s shortbread, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t actually have the recipe for it. So I reached out to my family and tracked it down. In the process, I chatted with my Mom, my aunt and my cousins (with whom I hadn’t spoken in quite a while) — with the people who had first-hand knowledge of my grandmother too.
Even though we weren’t able to gather over food to trade stories in the way that people always, it was food that got it all started in this case too; and in that experience I was reminded of the fact that my grandmother is still here, in some sense, even though she’s not here in another. And I found myself feeling both happy and sad at the same time.
Grandma died several years before my daughters were born, so they they never got the chance to meet her in person, but I’ve told them a lot of stories about her: things I remember her saying and doing, and things she said and did that I heard second hand. In this way, she’s alive for them in a less than complete sense. And, I swear that sometimes I catch glimpses of her in them too — when one of my daughters in particular talks, to me she sounds just like her.
But I also realized that I’ve never made Grandma’s shortbread for them. And so maybe when they come home for the holidays this year, I’ll just throw together some flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and a mountain of butter in a pan, put it in the oven, and tell them some stories about her.
And who knows? Maybe I’ll even bring in some for you all too…