Metaphors and figures of speech are not just the tools of poets, but the fabric of our everyday life. In the previous sentence alone I employed two different metaphors to talk about metaphors (i.e. tools and fabric). We use linguistic images all the time, often without realizing it, and we tend to have a few favorites we come back to time and again. The same thing is true in our spiritual lives. We use images, metaphors, and figures of speech to talk about God and to describe our relationship with God; and we tend to come back to a handful of common and well-loved images, like Father, Shepherd, and King. It is worth our time to think about which images for God we gravitate towards and also to explore other, less well familiar images for God from our scriptures. It is worth our time to reflect on our personal theology.
Theology, as a word, has a Greek origin that means simply, “words about god.” So perhaps contrary to popular belief whenever we use words to talk or write about God, we are by definition, practitioners of theology.
Theology is very concerned with the language we use to talk about God and our experience of God. Again, perhaps contrary to popular belief (and perhaps what some authors and speakers might lead you to believe), there is no special separate language we use to talk about or with God. The way we talk to each other, to our friends, family, coworkers, cashiers, baristas, teachers, and even strangers is the language of theology.
I say this because our everyday language is laced with images, metaphors, similes, and other poetic devices. If you don’t believe me, try spending a day saying everything you mean exactly and literally. It’s hard if not impossible.
The Bible is the same way.
It may be inspired by God, but it is written in human language which means it is always to some degree imprecise.
You can disagree with me on this, but I believe that it is generally true that humans hate imprecision.
We want things to be perfectly clear. We want the text of Scripture to be perfectly clear, so that our understanding of God and ourselves, and what faith is can also be perfectly clear. We want everything to be solid, stable, and secure; and when it’s not, we can feel very uncomfortable and anxious, and even afraid, and that can lead us to react in ways that close us off to the power and presence of God, and our neighbors.
I think this desire for perfect clarity and our incredible discomfort with ambiguity is one of the reasons White Protestant Christian traditions have historically put so much emphasis on the text of Scripture as the source of knowledge about God. And emphasized specific kinds of theology, doctrines, and interpretations that reduce the imprecision and ambiguity of language in the Bible as much as possible, to a comfortable level.
An emphasis on the Bible is not a bad thing. It’s why my sermons and bible studies are centered around the specific details of the text of Scripture. However, if we focus on the Bible as the only place God is revealed, we can inadvertently teach ourselves to resist other ways God may be trying to reveal God’s self to us.
When the Bible uses images and metaphors to talk about God, these images are invitations for us to consider how God is revealed in our personal, subjective experience of the objects in those images; and that contemplating our experience of those images actually reveals something meaningful and important about God’s identity and our relationship with Her.
It has been my experience that Christians tend to resist or dismiss these types of personal experiences and reflections as unimportant. But truthfully, the Bible uses images precisely because our ordinary personal experiences and reflections are important ways God chooses to be revealed to us.
Having said all of that, our image for today comes from John 6 where Jesus describes himself as the bread of life. This may seem like a very straightforward and unremarkable image, but again, the purpose of this sermon series is not to give you an intellectual understanding of the meaning of this image, but rather to invite you to explore your experience of this image and how that experience can shape or challenge your experience of Jesus, and what it means to be a disciple.
I’m going to do this by inviting you into my own experience of “bread.”
I have a surprisingly long and elaborate relationship with bread, and it begins with my mom.
She is a traditional Russian Mennonite mother who bakes a lot.
My parents have two full-size upright refrigerators and two full-size freezers in their house. My mom, at any given time, has literally several hundred pounds of flour and sugar on hand.
But, my mom doesn’t bake bread. She never has.
Instead, she bakes a version of traditional Mennonite buns called Zweiback.
When Mennonites emigrated from Russia in the early 20th century, Mennonite daughters, mothers, and grandmothers also baked Zweiback, and slow baked them a second time so they would dry out and stay edible for the journey to a new home. These women made enough Zweiback to last their families for several months until they could find a way across the ocean and a place to call home.
Mennonites left Russia in the early 20th century because politicians were persecuting and killing Mennonites as religious and social undesirables.
When I think about Zweiback, this “bread” my mom makes, I’m reminded that my daily bread is connected to the power and politics of this world.
There is a parallel between the idea of “bread for the road” and the story of the Exodus of the people of Israel out of Egypt. In that story, God acts like my mother and her mother before her, and her mother before her, preparing bread to nourish loved ones on a journey to a new home. I’m talking about manna, that strange bread from heaven that is a sign of God’s liberating and caring love as God led the people out of political and economic oppression and exploitation in Egypt.
Lauren Winner, in her book Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, notes the connection between this story in Exodus and the experience of Black mothers and grandmothers preparing food for their families as they traveled throughout the Jim-Crow South, because many places did not serve African Americans, and were not safe for Black travelers. Between 1936 and 1967 a guide for African American travelers was compiled by Victor Hugo Green, a black postman, that listed safe places for African Americans to stay and eat on their journeys. But it was the food prepared by mothers, wives, and grandmothers that sustained their families in between safe respites and on the road.
Eating and not eating are intimately connected to our politics in this country. To race, class, and power.
This kind of food for the road, bread for the journey, is what Jesus has in mind when he describes himself as the bread of life in John 6. Jesus is this kind of bread for us, for all who are denied safety and food in our culture and world.
To build on this image a little, if Jesus is the bread, then God is the baker.
Jesus says in John 6 that Moses didn’t provide manna for the Israelites, God gave them bread from heaven to eat.
Thinking about Jesus as bread might not be particularly challenging, but how does it feel to consider God as a baker of bread?
The rise of culinary industrialization and the advancement of nutrition science in the early to mid-20th century led to the eventual development of the “perfect” loaf of bread. It was scientifically engineered to be filled with nutrients and vitamins, it was perfectly shaped, perfectly white, and so consistently perfect no housewife baking bread at home could achieve such results. It was a wonder bread.
Lauren Winner writes, “Echoing [Micheal] Pollan, [Aaron] Bobrow-Strain argues that white bread ‘had long stood as a symbol of wealth and status — and in America, racial purity.” She goes on to note that the consistent perfection of this scientifically engineered bread was seen as impossible to get wrong with modern baking appliances and techniques, yet the inevitable failure of ordinary housewives to duplicate that perfection was used to shame women into buying bread instead of baking it themselves. And it worked. I worked for Wonder Bread, daily delivering hundreds of identical loaves of perfectly shaped white bread to dozens of stores.
Sometimes you hear the question: who brings home the bacon? To describe the highest income earner in a household. I think a more interesting question is “who cooks the bacon?” Or rather “who bakes the bread?”
I may be wrong about this, but I suspect in many if not most places in the world, it is normal and even expected that women, mothers, sisters, and wives, prepare the food for the household. Yet, in the culinary world, there are far more male chefs than there are female chefs. When I think of chefs, the first names that come to mind are Gordon Ramsey, Micheal Smith, a Canadian chef, and Jamie Oliver, a British chef.
It was impossible for me to find a firm figure, but according to some estimates, male chefs outnumber female chefs anywhere from 5:1 to 12:1.
What kind of baker or cook or chef is God?
What is God’s presence like in the heaven kitchen? Speaking metaphorically of course.
“Is Mary sitting companionably at the breakfast bar, drinking a beer [chatting away as God prepares a meal for her family]? Or are there angels standing in the corner squabbling with their siblings?”
Is God an imperious white-aproned chef striding around the divine kitchen barking orders as angels bustle about trying to satisfy his standards of perfection?
Is God a machine producing spiritual food engineered to meet our daily grace requirements, perfectly shaped, perfectly impossible to reproduce, and perfectly white?
Is God a mother, lovingly preparing food for the road?
I’ll admit these are leading questions.
The image of God as a loving mother or spouse baking bread fits with my broader experience of God as a caring provider, but it also challenges many of the traditional ways I’ve been taught to think about God.
If my experience of my mother as a baker, and my own wife as a baker reveal something true about God, then I have to come to accept that God chooses to be identified with and revealed by the women in our lives, the cooks, bakers, and lunch makers. They are living, breathing images of Her.
And while we might easily accept that most chefs are men, it is still relatively uncommon for men to do the majority of the cooking at home. According to the dominant cultural ideology in parts of our society it is un-masculine and unmanly to cook for your family unless it’s red meat over an open fire.
When I think this way, I realize that God is un-masculine according to the deeply ingrained gender ideology of our culture for preparing the bread of life for us.
As I was reflecting this week on my experience with bread, I realized how connected food and memory are in my life.
I have memories of carrying individually wrapped slices of my mom’s Roteweinkuchen, a German marble bundt cake, in my long gray winter coat and eating it on the bus rides home across town after class while I was in college. I remember the way it crumbled in my mouth, the slight taste of chocolate, and the way it sustained me until I got home on those winter days.
When I was young I wanted to be a baker, and for about a minute in my twenties, I thought about becoming a pastry chef. These days I bake only one thing: a cake my mom made when I was a kid. When I make this cake, I think of times I baked with my mom when I was 9 or 10. I remember feeling happy, and proud of my work. I remember the sweet first bite of a perfectly made cake, however imperfect in appearance it might have been.
Lauren Winner also wonders what memories and thoughts and feelings God has as she prepares food for us.
What does God remember?
Surely, we are on her mind. Surely, God thinks of where it is we will find a safe place to stop and eat. Surely God is concerned that we’re eating enough and makes plans to provide us with enough to see us through to the end of our journey.
Finally, I wonder, what do we remember when we eat the bread of life?
It is no coincidence that it’s also Communion today.
When we eat this bread, what do we remember?
Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Human One will give you. – John 6:27 (Common English Bible, my emphasis)
Unlike the food and bread we spend money on, which doesn’t last very long, Jesus tells us to receive the gift of food that never goes stale. Jesus is this bread of life and verse 27 ends in the NIV by saying “on him God… has placed his seal of approval.”
I can’t help but read this and picture a “seal of freshness” a “guarantee of life” on the bread of life we eat on occasions such as this.
When Jesus told the crowd that God desired to give them true bread from heaven the crowd replied,
“Sir, give us this bread all the time!”
Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Communion is when we gather as friends of Jesus, as guests in the house of God, our heavenly Mother, who prepares a meal for us. We come confessing that we are hungry and thirsty and that the road is long. We come looking for spiritual sustenance, longing for our hunger to be satisfied. We come to God, who longs to satisfy our hunger and thirst, to renew our strength so we will not grow weary of doing good. Even though our bread is little more than a cracker, and our cup little more than a thimble of juice, still we pray:
Blessed are you LORD our God,
Our holy baker, our heavenly host,
grower of grain and vine,
giver of every gift.
May these humble elements we receive be blessed.
May your bread of life sustain us on the journey, give us nourishment, and help us to grow.
May our cup refresh us, may your new life course through us, and make us into springs of living water.
May your abundant and overflowing blessing cover us all.
May your grace satisfy us more than the richest feast.
LORD, bless us as we partake, bound in unity to you and each other. May our eating and drinking bind us together more firmly, and make us whole.
Amen.
Alvis Pettker is the pastor of Friendship Mennonite Church in Bedford Heights, Ohio. Born and raised in Canada to Paraguayan Mennonite parents, Alvis practically grew up at the local church. While exploring his faith in high school he “rediscovered” the church as if encountering it for the first time, and came to publicly affirm his faith in Jesus as Lord. Alvis is passionate about the Word of God in all its wonderful intricacy; loves to help people encounter God in the often-neglected portions of scripture. He’s studied theology and ministry at the Canadian Mennonite University and Conrad Grebel University College. In his spare time, Alvis enjoys spending time with his wife, Ruth, running, reading, and building Lego.