On Saturday, my friend Kendall came to Asheville to lead a “Bake and Pray” workshop at Trinity. I had been out of town most of last week, and when I finally sat down after her workshop to put together my thoughts for the Sunday evening service, some of what she said about how bread shows up in the Bible helped me connect the Old Testament reading and the gospel.
Sermons are meant to be heard, not read, but both options are below for you. (Begin at about 21:40.)
Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life…
John 3:14
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Yesterday here at Trinity we hosted a workshop called Bake and Pray. The leader, Kendall Vanderslice, has a Master’s in gastronomy and a Masters in theology. (Yes, she’s a professional baker, and she was born with the name Vanderslice!) She taught us how to measure flour, water, salt, and yeast: she also taught us about the theological meaning to be found in a loaf of bread
.
Kendall asked if any of us knew where the word bread first appears in the Bible. (We didn’t.)
It’s in Genesis 3:19 – (a word that can be translated food, or bread) when Adam and Eve have eaten what they weren’t supposed to eat in the garden of Eden, and God is naming the consequences that will befall them. God says
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life…
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.’
Bread, in the Bible, is first associated with the consequences of sin, and with hard labor.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
But it’s also associated with gift and provision
exactly because it’s so hard for humans to get bread (or, at least, for much of human history it has been – planting, watering, weeding, waiting, harvesting, grinding, mixing, waiting, baking – and that’s all assuming the weather works in your favor).
Bread is often named as a way God provides for God’s people – and so, Kendall pointed out, when we eat our piece of toast in the morning, we are eating
a reminder of our frail nature and fallen world
as well as the provision God offers.
Give us this day our daily bread.
When the Israelites were led out of slavery in Egypt, God provided for them as they wandered in the wilderness by giving them daily bread. It fell like dew every morning, a steady and sustaining grace.
But the Israelites, as the story goes in the book of Numbers, grew tired of God’s provision. They became impatient with their journey towards a new home, and they indulged in what was at this point a regular habit of grumbling, and complained to God and to Moses
Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.
(That line – there is no food, we detest this food – reminds me of myself when I want to order takeout even though my refrigerator is full. There is no food in this house! Ok but none of it suits my particular mood right now.)
The Israelites rejected God’s bread, and
then poisonous serpents came into their camp, and bit the people, with fatal venom.
Here’s how the writer of Numbers picks up the story: The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”
The consequence of sin (for them, for us) is death:
that’s what the Israelites were asked to look at in order to be healed: they were asked to look at the poison that came into their lives because of their failures to trust God.
To be healed, they had to look with clear eyes at the consequences of their sin. They had to face reality: the reality of their mistakes, and the reality of the pain their mistakes had caused.
If they refused to admit it – tried to pretend it never happened – they wouldn’t find healing. They would die.
In today’s gospel, the devout Jew Nicodemous has come to Jesus in the middle of the night to quietly ask a few questions about the things Jesus has been teaching. And in the middle of explaining his identity and his calling and his coming death, Jesus refers back to this story from Numbers.
Jesus says, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Jesus on the cross is like that bronze snake Moses lifted up. It’s a strange thing to say. How are they alike?
Well, both are lifted
Both, if looked upon with faith, bring healing and life.
They are like two halves of a piece of bread, poison and provision.
I think of these two things lifted up like parentheses around our salvation.
Open parentheses: look with clear eyes upon the pain and poison our failure to trust God has brought upon us. Look at the bronze serpent.
Close parentheses: look with clear eyes upon the one who has come to save us from sin and death, to invite us into the life of the world that will never fade away, full of beauty and harmony. The one who came to set us free from our worthless ways, from our joyless refusal to be nourished by God.
When we lift our eyes,
when we look at these two things together – our failure, God’s provision –
We find life.
We find the bread of life, which somehow holds within it all the poison, and all the healing.
In a moment, as we receive the bread here,
May we lift our eyes
May we eat with thanksgiving.
Three Things
The Beautiful and Banned is a new podcast from my long-time friend Jessica Goudeau. Each week, she and cohost Christine Renee Miller deep dive a banned book, offering a wealth of historical background, literary criticism, and love and enthusiasm while also thoughtfully addressing pressing questions about our common life. If you miss being in a lit class with a truly great professor, or if you’re longing for more nuanced conversation to help you think through contemporary debates, please check it out.
Two new books about Genesis come out this month, and while I haven’t read Marilynne Robinson’s yet, I have read Jessica Jacobs’s (a couple of times); I love it, and it has changed my preaching on Genesis (for instance, it gave me the dual meaning of El Shaddai that hits at the end of this sermon.) If you’re local, come celebrate its release Friday night at Trinity!
While I was traveling, I finally finished Sun House, the recent novel from David James Duncan. (Absolutely incidentally, I read his Vietnam novel, The Brothers K, while I was in Southeast Asia; I read his outdoorsy Pacific Northwest novel, The River Why, while backpacking across the US toward my new home in Seattle; and while Sun House is mostly a Montana novel, the opening scene (which reverberates through the book) is set in Mexico, which is where I read it.) Listen, it’s way too long and has some very cringe moments, and I’m not sure that the way he blends religions is respectful to any of them, and his female characters are a bit too angelic for my taste. (The New York Times review is pretty right on, though I would like to add to the reviewer’s interpretation of the title something about the Son taking on a House of human flesh in the incarnation.) Still, I liked reading it. I find that when I’m reading DJD, I do imagine the world around me a little differently (even if that shift is kind of comparable to how I imagined the world differently while I was a teenager reading This Present Darkness, lol). And, actually, though I didn’t fully realize it, I think this book gave me my final image in that sermon above, an image one of the characters uses to describe an ineffable experience:
Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.