single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 13
Aug 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
Our Saviour
in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey
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The Bread of
Life --
Ordinary, Yet Powerful
Reflections on the
lessons for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Deuteronomy 8:1-10 / Psalm 34:1-8
Ephesians 4:30-5:2 / John
6:37-51
The world we live in has changed quite a bit -- maybe faster than at most other times in history -- in the past few decades. I'm probably not alone, but I often feel as though I'm living in a world practically disconnected from the one I was born in, and grew up in. One example: I can count on mystifying younger people of a certain age by telling them that I completed my entire education from grade school through college and graduate school and seminary before personal computers were considered commonplace. One of the memories I have of living in dormitories is the hallway sounds of dozens of people typing their homework late at night. Students don't hear that anymore.
I was on Eighth Avenue the other day, waiting to cross the street. The man next to me was having a full-volume conversation on his cell phone that not so long ago would only have been considered appropriate in the most intimate setting. As I stood there, he stopped talking, shot me a dirty look, and snarled "Do you mind?" Contrast that with a visit I had from some parishioners in my last parish. While I was talking to the parents in the kitchen, their two boys aged about 10 or 12, roamed into my study and came back to get their father and show him the mysterious apparatus on my desk. They didn't know what it was. It was a dial telephone.
Another big change: The way people think about food. I realize that what we know about food now represents real advances in health and well-being. But it seems as though everything that was drilled into me as a child is just exactly not what I should be thinking now. When I hear about the Atkins diet, I hear a hundred voices telling me to eat my vegetables. Meat is the enemy. Any milk but skim -- which we used to disparage as "bluejohn" -- is as good as poison. A little rhyme I remember sums it all up:
If you are what you eat
then here's what I am:
Biscuits and cornbread
and gravy and ham.
Now, of course, that's a recipe for disaster, and maybe grounds for a child abuse charge.
But it's an inescapable truth. You are what you eat. Literally, of course, and -- as today's lessons point out -- figuratively and spiritually as well. In Deuteronomy -- this passage is a sermon attributed to Moses -- we read what we already know in our hearts. We do not live by bread alone. And sometimes -- like in the case of Manna in the wilderness -- bread is not always just bread. Plenty and richness and all kinds of goodness are signs of God's sustaining love for us, bounty is a call for us to see God in the world around us, to be mindful and thankful and generous.
Jesus takes the idea another step. Plain old bread, he says, sustains not just our physical bodies for everyday chores. There is a higher, sacramental, kind of nourishment that gives us strength for an inward journey that builds ordinary human lives into the image and likeness of God. As important as it is to get through the days and weeks of our lives, that kind of living is sort of empty until it hooks up with some higher aspiration.
Christians remind themselves of this other need - as real as any common hunger -- with a ritual meal, by eating together with people we know and people we don't know and with people all over the world whom we will never meet, acknowledging our common journey deeper and deeper into the heart of God. Week after week we repeat a common and earthy act, but one suffused with terrific significance at the same time.
Jean-Pierre Caussade wrote in Abandonment to Divine Providence:
"God speaks to individuals through what happens to them moment by moment ... The events of each small moment are stamped with the will of God .... we find all that is necessary in the present moment . So often we are bored with the small happenings around us, yet it is these trivialities -- as we consider them -- which would do marvels for us if only we did not despise them."
Bread, he wrote in the 1740s, is a perfect example of God speaking to us through the mundane. Ordinary bread, something we know well, becomes divinely significant and sustaining when people gather together and share it in recognition that we all of us start in the heart of God and spend a lifetime journeying back there together.
Ordinary stuff. Stuff we know. Stuff that endures across all kinds of shifts and changes is what God uses to bind us together and move us along. Often, the ordinary things God appears in are so familiar to us that we fail to notice.
The bread of life we share here on Sunday mornings is often misunderstood. Some people try to make it out to be more than it is. Some despise it for being less than they think it ought to be -- precisely because it's ordinary, familiar, common -- rather than magical, powerful, and glorious.
But the ordinary is powerful, magical, and glorious for eyes who through long practice can see beyond the surface. The plain bread we offer around here every Sunday morning has a very ambitious purpose: To nourish you in a literal sense, and to teach you that everything God gives you to eat and drink at your own dining room table or in other, symbolic, ways is also a sacrament aspiring to give you the strength you need to become the person God made you to become.
What we are doing in church is gathering together and -- through hearing God's word, catching up with each other, and sharing a plain little meal of bread and wine -- reminding ourselves that what we do here around God's Table can happen to us anywhere.
-- Mark Lewis
Links for further reading:
By purchase from Amazon.com
Abandonment
to Divine Providence
by
Jean-Pierre De Caussade, John Beevers
(Translator)
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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