Staff of Life

Propers: The Ninth Sunday after the Pentecost (Lectionary 17), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is something inherently miraculous about bread, something we often overlook when it’s so easy to buy a loaf in a bag at a store. Bread is a living thing, a growing thing, the very stuff of life—or “staff of life,” as the Scriptures call it. When there isn’t any bread, they say the staff of life if broken. And without it, we simply cannot stand.

Grain is a wondrous thing in and of itself. We lack the digestive capability to simply eat the grass of the earth, the way that cattle and horses and sheep all can. But the grain, the seed, that we can eat. That we can breed. That we can select and grow until the kernels swell full and ripe and fall to the blade of the scythe. Did you ever see what maize, what corn, looked like before humans bred it? Let alone rice or wheat or oats or barley? It’s amazing what time and intention can do.

Once we domesticated amber waves of grain, it was like harvesting the sun itself. Our nutrition is now drawn straight from light and earth and air. And it’s reason that lets us do this, reason that grants the gifts of imagination and experimentation. It’s the Logos, the Word, the divine spark within that makes us human, that lets us do such things. Other species may use tools but no other species can farm.

Now, you probably know this, but within each grain, each seed, is starch, a concentrated source of fuel, full of calories for a newly sprouting plant. Enzymes in the seed break the starches into sugars, which the endosperm can eat—and so can we. Grains also contain storage proteins with reserves of ions and amino acids that the seed will need to grow. Now here’s the fun part. When you grind grain into flour, add water, and knead the dough, storage proteins form a sticky web called gluten. The more you work the dough, the stickier and stretchier it can get.

Then the final bit of magic arrives: the yeast. Yeast is a single-celled fungus, all throughout the air around us, and it has a remarkable little defense mechanism. When it eats sugar, it produces alcohol, a poison to predators and competitors. And it also breathes out CO2, carbon dioxide, just like we do.

So when the yeast gets into the dough, it eats those sugars and burps out gas, which is caught by the net of gluten protein to form bubbles, to puff up and rise. When you bake bread, when you heat up that dough, the yeast goes nuts, the alcohol and water evaporate, and voilà: you’re left with a lovely life-giving loaf.

It’s puffy, nutritious, delicious, easily portable, easily preserved, and you made it from grass and air. How amazing is that? Of course, bread also has a brother, and that brother is beer. If you can bake bread, you can brew beer. Same stuff goes in it. In ancient Egypt, the brewer and the baker always shared a wall with a window, because they used the same ingredients: the same grains and water and yeast. And these two together produced for us the first and greatest Agricultural Revolution.

Beer and bread are why we built cities. They’re why we cultivated fields, and discovered mathematics, and learned how to write, and developed complex societies. Culture, cult, and cultivation always go together. And for us it all started here: with bread and beer. I could go on, about how bread and beer produced life-saving antibiotics in the Middle Ages, or the miracle of industrial refrigeration in the nineteenth century, or how there wouldn’t be governments or economies or science or philosophy without grain and yeast and sun.

But by now you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about agricultural science rather than religion. We’re here for faith, not food—as if the two could be separated. My reasoning is simple: for the next five weeks, we’ll be reading from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. And that chapter is all about bread. Five weeks preaching bread. And this could get tedious if we lose sight of just how bloody incredible it is that we grow grass, feed it to a fungus, and end up with all of human civilization.

Bread is a wonder; bread is a miracle; bread is the staff of life and gift of God. And it’s easy to forget this, when it’s cheap and easy and packed in plastic. It’s easy to forget how miraculous life is once we’ve commodified and commercialized it. Little wonder that Christ holds up a round of bread and says, “This is My Body, given for you. Do this for the remembrance of Me.” God chooses bread as His Body!

In our first reading this morning, from the Hebrew Scriptures of our Bible, a man brings before God an offering of firstfruits. This is when folks would offer loaves made from the first gleanings of the harvest in thanksgiving to the One from whom all blessings flow. We still do this today, mind you, a version of this. August 1—next Sunday—is Lammas, the Loaf-Mass, when we bake bread at the start of the wheat harvest and bring these fresh loaves to church for a blessing.

The man in this story, bringing his firstfruits, must, I think, be wealthy, for he has with him 20 loaves, and more fresh grain besides, here in the midst of famine. This, in the ancient world, is the easiest way to distinguish the rich from the rest. No matter what, the rich have food—while everyone else, in time of trial, must pray for daily bread. Elisha, the great and miracle-working prophet, tells the man to give his offerings to the people, to the poor, that they might eat. But what are 20 modest loaves to a hundred hungry souls?

Yet at the word of the prophet of God, all eat and are satisfied, and all have some left over. This indeed is a miracle. Leftovers were not a thing in the Ancient Near East: one typically ate what one had, not what one wished. The only time when people got full, when they had more than enough and to spare, was at religious festivals or marriage feasts. All throughout the famine, Elisha provides not just sustenance but abundance for all whom he encounters.

Jump ahead 800 years and we come across Jesus doing much the same, though on a far vaster scale. It is the time of Passover, the definitive holiday of Jewish religious life, yet Christ is not in Jerusalem as has been His lifelong custom. Here on the eastern shore of the Galilee, where Gentile and Jew live together, where the poor cannot afford to make the long trek to Jerusalem for the festival, Jesus offers a Passover of His own, holding up the bread in thanksgiving—that is, as a Eucharist. Thus one boy’s five loaves feed 5000, with bushels of bread besides.

One could approach this story from several angles. An obvious starting point would be that Elisha was perhaps the greatest prophet of old, second only to his master Elijah in working the wonders of God, yet here Christ outdoes him by miles. If Elisha was so great a prophet, what then must Jesus be? Another angle, on which we’ve touched already, is the Eucharist as Christian Passover, and Christ as the true Christian Temple. Here in Him we find the presence of God on earth. Here in Him we find our Passover Lamb, who liberates us from slavery unto death and leads us to freedom in limitless life. And this is most certainly true.

But the bread—the bread is my focus today; the miracle of food sprouting forth from the earth. The thing about Jesus is that He reveals to us who God truly is. That’s why we call Him Son of God, God-With-Us, the visible Image of the Father on high. Jesus is the Father in microcosm; and so the Father is Jesus in macrocosm. What Jesus does for us, the Father does for all. Jesus multiplies loaves of bread. And this indeed the Father does for all of His children all across the world.

We have a superabundance of bread. The fact that many go hungry, while others build billion-dollar private rockets, has far more to do with human greed and folly than with any sort of famine on the earth or stinginess in God. Life truly is miraculous, wondrous, and superabundant, no doubt. Our mismanagement of the Creation entrusted to us as stewards is the clearest evidence of original sin. But the abundance is there, as it was for Elisha, as it was for Jesus.

That’s our job now, as Christians, as “little Christs.” Perhaps our five paltry loaves seem as nothing before the world’s great need. But with humility, generosity, love of God and neighbor, we’d be amazed at what grace could flow forth from our hands—the crucified hands of Christ.

Never lose sight of the miracle of life, the miracle of bread: that grass from the earth and yeast from the air can produce in limitless quantity, and astonishing variety, an almost nearly perfect source of food. We have all that we need and more to spare. Let us give thanks for the stuff and staff of life! And let us ever remember that offering our thanksgivings to God is synonymous in Scripture with offering our bread to the poor.

“This is My Body, given for you. Do this for the remembrance of Me.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.