Dear Friends,
This Sunday begins a five-week series on the “Bread of Life Discourse” in the Gospel of John. I’ll try not to get too far in the weeds, but let me be clear: the preachers of All Saints did not make this up!
We follow the three-year Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), along with many other denominations. Each year focuses on one of the Synoptic (similar) Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This year, known as “Year B,” we follow Mark’s Gospel from start to finish. But Mark is the shortest Gospel, so we also hear from the Gospel of John (every year we hear from John in Holy Week and Easter, too), and in late summer we get five Sundays of John 6:1-69 where Jesus feeds people, proclaims he is the bread of life, and encourages folks to, well, eat his flesh.
But here Jesus uses a verb that is more than “eat,” much more graphic than politely chewing our food with our mouths closed at the dinner table. What he says is that we must GNAW on him, a verb used for animals gnawing on a bone. This is a fleshy, visceral, physical verb.
Often, we can be a little heady in our faith, a bit removed, separating the spirit from the body, but Jesus is a fleshy Messiah, and our faith is a question of our whole selves, our whole lives.
That’s why we’re inviting folks from All Saints to talk about how their personal faith and their public lives intersect (our first conversation is August 14 with fabulous parishioner Tina Tchen. See below for more info). That’s why churches, including ours, so often focusing on feeding people, whether at the table on Sunday morning, a potluck, or the food pantry on Tuesday nights. That’s why Christians invented hospitals: caring for people’s whole selves, body and soul, matters.
And we are to depend on God with our whole selves—gnawing on the word of God, gnawing on the communion bread, gnawing on the body of Christ found in the community at All Saints as if we were starving. For aren’t we? Aren’t we all hungry? And when we’re hungry, starving for love and meaning, to know and to be known, well, we gnaw.
So, gnaw on this: we’re starving and our generous, merciful God is the food we need.
See you in church!
Faithfully, Suzanne+