{"id":511686,"date":"2006-08-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-08-24T17:03:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T21:03:40","slug":"bread-proper-14-b-2006","status":"publish","type":"sermon","link":"https:\/\/staging.episcopalchurch.org\/es\/sermons\/bread-proper-14-b-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Bread…, Proper 14 (B) – 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cafe Beaujolais, a wonderful bakery on the northern California coast, makes a rich, dense bread they call Austrian Sunflower Bread, boasting different seeds and grains and yielding a golden loaf of complex texture and rich flavor. This is how it\u2019s described in their materials: \u201cAustrian Sunflower Bread, our healthiest loaf, is hearty and moist, keeps well despite a lack of any oil or butter. Made with white flour, sunflower seeds, cracked wheat, oats, barley, polenta, millet, buckwheat, flax seed, soy grits, sesame seeds, water, malt, sea salt, and yeast.\u201d This is the sort of bread invoked by Jesus\u2019 claim: \u201cI am the bread of life.\u201d Certainly the follow-on claim: \u201cThose who come to me shall not hunger,\u201d has much texture to it when such a bread is considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is your usual bread of choice? Even in the absence of a market survey, it\u2019s reasonable to imagine that the most popular and most often eaten bread in America is sliced white bread \u2014 that stuff of many air holes, squishy texture, consistent predictable color, and a flavor so bland it is hard to describe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We love it. It\u2019s the perfect platform for peanut butter and jelly, and toasted, makes a good bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. One of the reasons we like it is precisely because it contributes so little to our experience of food. Tasteless, it doesn\u2019t compete with other flavors. Of little texture, it is easy on the palate; we don\u2019t have to work much to eat it. Predictable in its shape and color and size, sliced white bread is portion-controlled. Lacking in its own nutrients, vitamins are added for our good health. Mass produced and prominent in our grocery stores, it is the best price we can get. To top it all off, it has preservatives so that freshness is not so much a concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am the bread of life,\u201d Jesus said. Is Jesus akin to sliced white bread? What kind of bread comes to mind when we hear \u201cI am the bread of life\u201d? Perhaps some will think of pita bread, or brown bread, what we have come in contemporary times to associate with the Last Supper. Yet even that is not what we use in most churches for communion bread, probably because of \u201cconvenience,\u201d which some of us have named \u201ctradition.\u201d In the Protestant churches that commemorate the Lord\u2019s Supper, the bread of choice is the conventional white bread. In churches of the Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic traditions, we often use communion wafers. Is this the \u201cbread of life\u201d to which Jesus likened himself? Many a seminary professor has observed that it is easier to imagine the communion wafer as Christ than to imagine the wafer as bread. The same has been said of our favorite American white bread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s Gospel reading begins with Jesus\u2019 proclamation: \u201cI am the bread of life.\u201d Earlier we read the story that has come to be known as the feeding of the five thousand, wherein many hungry people are fed on very little bread. The focus of this feeding story has traditionally been the miracle of the free meal, with little attention given to the bread itself and what it might signify. In the same way that the focus of the mass feeding has been on the miracle and not the food itself, so, too, with today\u2019s proclamation that Jesus is the \u201cbread of life,\u201d we usually focus our attention on Jesus rather than on the bread. But how can we begin to understand what he was saying about himself until we look more closely at the bread?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This passage from John\u2019s Gospel is a lesson about abundance. It is difficult to associate plain white bread, the mass-produced kind, with abundance. It makes a good carrier for other flavors, but by itself, doesn\u2019t have much \u201ctooth.\u201d Consider a sampling of breads from smaller bakeries, and the sorts of breads many of us make at home:<\/p>\n\n\n\n