“Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest home.” It is so good to be here with you all this morning to celebrate Thanksgiving. I have nothing at all against parades, turkeys, or football, but Thanksgiving never feels quite right to me without gathering to give thanks to God. The danger of being thankful in the abstract without having a subject for our thanks is that we start to think that we earned all the good that we have by our own striving or by being lucky. It is meet and right though to gather in the name of God, to sing hymns of praise to God, and to celebrate the Eucharist, the Great Thanksgiving, on this day of gratitude. Such worship directs our thanks not inwardly or to chance, but rather to the God who has chosen us and loves us in Jesus Christ and intends these blessings for us.
There
are a lot of ways to think about thanksgiving and gratitude and the lens that
Jesus gives us this year is that of bread. Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.
Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never
be thirsty.” Bread, of course, is a staple today. In meals that many of us will
share later today, there will, undoubtedly, be bread. It might be dinner rolls,
pie crusts, or cornbread stuffing – but in one form or another, we will likely
eat some bread later today. Use it as an opportunity to reflect on and give
thanks for Jesus, who is the bread of life.
The
section of John that we heard from this morning follows the feeding of the five
thousand. Understandably, that incident got people’s attention and the crows followed
him, seeking more. Jesus though questions the more that they are after. Jesus
says that they are coming to him not because in him they see signs that the
Kingdom of God is coming on earth as it is in heaven, but rather because they
want more of the loaves that were multiplied. The question to us is “what do we
pursue?” That which shall perish or that which is secured by Christ? If we were
to think in terms of the gratitude lists that many people will make today, we
get a sense of what we are after.
If
our gratitude is rooted in how big our bank account is, or how solid our reputation
is, or how much growth our business has seen then it might well be that we are
pursuing things that shall perish. It’s not to say that we can’t appreciate those
sorts of things, but if that is the reason why we are grateful, then we will be
in pretty rough shape when the winds shift direction.
Jesus
counsels us to instead pursue the food that endures for eternal life; this is the
food that he himself is for us. We can be grateful for the fact that our sins
have been set aside by God; that there is nothing that stands between us and
the eternal love of God, and there’s not a thing that we have to do to earn
this grace, rather we can enjoy it. We can be grateful for the fact that Jesus
has shown us his most excellent way of love. We can be thankful that God has
given us to one another and given us the purpose and joy of becoming beloved
community. These blessings flow from God and will never run dry.
Bread
that never runs out is an interesting offer, especially for the people to whom
Jesus was speaking. Most of them lived on the loaf that was a part of a daily
ration. Every day, their livelihood and sustenance depended on being given a
loaf of bread – some days that didn’t happen, and some days it was only half a
loaf. One of the hardest things for us, in our prosperous context, to remember
about reading the Gospels is that, for the most part, these are stories written
by and to people living in deep poverty. Being given bread that endures, that
never spoils, that never runs out is another way of saying security and
liberation. So this is quite the offer that Jesus makes.
Like
us, the people want some evidence. They mention that Moses gave them bread in
the wilderness. When the people left slavery in Egypt and were wandering
through the wilderness towards the Promised Land, they were fed with manna
which appeared daily. Jesus corrects them: it was not Moses who gave the bread,
rather it was God who fed them, and it is the very same God who sustained the
people in the wilderness that will sustain them now in the wildernesses of
life. Call it a down payment, a guarantee, or proof – they wanted to know that
they’d be getting this super bread that never spoils.
To
which Jesus says, “No, no, no. You’re thinking of this all wrong. I have not
come to give you stuff, to be a genie who grants you wishes, rather I have come
to give you myself. For I am the bread of life who has come to give life to the
world.” It’s as that African-American spiritual puts it, “In the morning, when
I rise, give me Jesus. You may have all this world, give me Jesus.” Jesus does
not give us the bread that never perishes, he is the bread that never perishes.
If we have Jesus, we know that all shall be well.
One
of the interesting things about the manna that the people received in the wilderness
and that the people suggest would be the sort of evidence that they’d accept is
that the word “manna” means “what is it?” We don’t know exactly what manna was –
some sort of flaky substance that the people ate. But they, clearly, did not
know what it was either. In the Hebrew language, there are words for bread,
food, and flakes. But they did not call this heavenly bread by any of those
words – instead, they named it with a question: “what is it?”
What
is it that we truly need; that truly satisfies us; that truly nourishes us? It
was St. Augustine who famously said that our hearts are restless until they
rest in God. And how true that is. We can look for meaning and purpose in fame,
in pleasure, in wealth, in achievements and we will get tired before we ever
find it. Brands spend billions of dollars each year on research and development,
and just as much on marketing and advertising. They always have to come up with
something new to catch our attention, to dazzle us, to momentarily satisfy us.
And though the Church really could do a better job at bringing people into the
story of God – we’ve never once had to develop version 2.0 of the bread of
life. We don’t need to convince people that this bread satisfies our hunger for
love and mercy because once we have come and seen and tasted the goodness of God’s
grace, we make the same request as those in today’s passage: “Lord, give us
this bread always.”
When
Jesus is introduced in the opening chapter of John, we read that in him the
Word of God was made flesh and dwelt among us, revealing God’s grace and truth.
And throughout John, Jesus makes seven “I AM” statements; seven sayings where
Jesus shows us the fullness of this grace and truth. And this one is the first
of those – “I am the bread of life.” Jesus is what nourishes our faith and
helps us to grow as Christians. Jesus was broken for us on the Cross, just as a
loaf is broken, so that we might receive grace upon grace from seeing and
knowing the unwavering depths of God’s love. Jesus, like the bread we will eat
later today, gathers us around the table in fellowship with God and all
Creation. Jesus, is both the host and the meal of the Eucharist, in which we
are fed out of the depths and abundance of God’s grace, peace, and love.
So
how do we receive and feast on Jesus? One is to sit with him daily in prayer.
The prayer “Give us this bread always” is a prayer that can bear the weight of
our deepest hopes and needs. We can
share Jesus just as we would share bread with our earthly companions. We can
tell others to come and see the reason for gratitude that we have found through
St. Luke’s. We can partake of the Eucharist regularly as a way of not just
knowing that Jesus is the bread of life, but as a way of seeing this bread, receiving
it in our hands, and taking him into our very bodies. Just as we cannot live
without food, we cannot be alive in God’s love without Jesus. The Eucharist is
a tangible way of being fed by God so that we can be reminded that God sustains
all of our lives.
Later
today, when you have some bread, remember that Jesus is the bread of life who
was broken for the life of the world. Therefore, let us keep the feast and feed
on him daily in our hearts with thanksgiving.
