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Do not spend your whole life working for, striving for, dreaming about food that will perish, but strive for the food, the nourishment that endures eternally, which Christ offers to you.
-- John 6:27 (paraphrase)

Jesus said to them by the lake, "I am the bread of life. I am. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."
-- John 6:35 (paraphrase)

I had bread on the mind this whole week as I was studying this gospel text and preparing for this sermon. I kept thinking about bread. I like bread that has substance -- bread that has internal and external integrity. I say this not in a flippant, careless way, but I love bread. Sometimes I dream about bread. Bread can so naturally combine both the ordinary and extraordinary.

Let me tell you about some bread that I have tasted, such as the warm, thick-crusted, round rye bread from Macy's Cellar in Manhattan. Take a number from the deli counter, and get in a long line of people representing about every racial, cultural arrangement that is imaginable and then some -- a montage of people together, amazingly patient, talking to each other although strangers, joyful and all waiting for marvelous rye bread.

There are some wonderful oval, black pumpernickel loaves in a little bakery owned and operated by an elderly couple in Yorktown that test the strength and condition of your teeth, yet are always well worth the workout. And the bakers, flour on their aprons and cheeks, greet you with a smile as they offer you their artwork.

There is sourdough bread bought off small, outdoor, wooden carts on the docks in Seattle and eaten on a crowded pier with smoked salmon or a slice of pepper-jack cheese. The sound of the harbor is a part of the meal, and everyone seems to be in such a holiday mood, together on the pier -- a surprise party centered by sourdough bread.

I remember those extraordinary, slender two-and-a-half-foot long, eight-ounce French baguettes that are carried home with the newspaper after work or sticking out from bicycle baskets throughout the narrow streets of old French hamlets, long thin bread that has a shelf life of only a few hours, but with crackling crisp, golden skin and elastic, creamy interiors, alive with the flavor of fresh-milled wheat. I haven't been to Paris in years, but I keep handy a map of the downtown that marks the locations of the ten bakeries that make the best baguettes in the city as judged by the Paris edition of the International Herald Tribune. One never knows when one may be forced to make a quick trip to Paris, and I just want to be prepared.

I won't even talk about croissants; they are much too sensual for a family-friendly Sunday morning worship service.

In India, in remote, back-country temple towns, there is a crisp, flat bread that is encrusted with hot pepper spices, and served with steamy, sweet tea. In the heat of the pre-monsoon season, you can sit in the shade of a tree, tear off pieces of the bread, and with newfound friends talk about each others' families and faith.

I remember waking up early, after sleeping on a couch at a friend's brownstone on New York's West Side in the early autumn, putting on a sweater and walking over to one of the 24-hour bagel shops around 82nd Street and Columbus Avenue. They are not upscale bagel and cappuccino cafes with outdoor tables and steep prices but small shops that are mostly ovens and wicker baskets overflowing with bagels. Carrying back the bagel bag still radiating oven-captured heat within -- bagels chewy and crunchy crusted (cream cheese and lox secondary or unnecessary), provided a fresh bagel breakfast with old friends where we talked together about our hopes and fears for the future. This is one of those moments when it is all right to be off-guard, when one is accepted and loved, a guest in the home of a gracious host who serves newly born, warm bagels.

I once bought some fry-bread from three Navajo women who had set up a propane, portable stove in a park in Cortez, Colorado, on a windy day in July -- fry bread with honey. The women carefully watched us and silently hoped we liked the bread. It was a grandmother's recipe. We must have told them ten times that it was wonderful bread. And they knew, I believe, that we really meant it, and for a moment our two cultures came together over bread in a city park on a windy summer day many years ago. I wished I could have shared my grandmother's breakfast breads with them.

When we were living in or visiting family in New Jersey on our wedding anniversary, Shirley and I would often go to a restaurant in an old gabled house near the beach along the Rumpson River, just up the street from Bruce Springsteen's house in Fairhaven. It was a restaurant run by a Swiss couple who has bread flown in from France fresh each day, which seems rather excessive and wasteful until you taste the bread. It is bread worthy of blessing our wedding anniversary and wonderful marriage.

I once walked from the ancient springs that form the source of the Jordan River, high in the hills near the Golan Heights and the Syrian border. I walked toward Galilee through the green band of trees that hug the small, lazy river. Today it is a disputed border area known in Israel for its hostile diversity -- Arab, Jew, Palestinian, Druze. There are signs warning of minefields so I stayed on the path, and I came upon an old stone mill built soon after the time of the Crusades. There was a man and a woman there, Palestinians, grinding wheat with an ancient water-powered millstone. And there was also in the dark corner a blazing oven. The woman was baking large, thin flat bread. She offered me bread and yogurt. According to the scriptural record, Jesus had walked this same path, and the bread he ate along the way with his disciples would have looked and tasted like the bread I ate at that moment with a Palestinian couple with whom, all of a sudden, I felt a kindred closeness.

I have this wonderful recipe for hard rolls. It is a long, arduous process of letting the dough rise and punching it down, letting it rise and punching it down, forming rolls and painting them with egg white, then finally ending the process by placing them right out of the oven in a cold draft to get that crackly glaze. My recipe makes about a dozen rolls and the problem is that as soon as they come out of the oven, Shirley and I, with butter ready, eat them all. In less compulsive, more compassionate moments, we catch ourselves and call the children or call over some neighbors. The rolls are too good not to share.

I remember one Thanksgiving dinner, a family gathering in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was perhaps in high school at the time. The meal was a magic time to laugh, to remember, and to consume large amounts of food all shared around a large oval table. Toward the end of the meal, Great Aunt Verna went back into the kitchen to bring out the dessert pies and discovered that we had forgotten to bring her homemade rolls to the table. This would have broken the tradition of the family holiday circle. So, though filled with turkey and rabbit and dumplings and multiple expressions of potato, we said, "Bring on the rolls." They were bread but more than bread, so fresh and alive and lovingly prepared and shared. "Bring on those rolls."

At the time of Jesus, the Nabatians carved passageways and rooms into the steep, red-rock cliffs in a wilderness area on the caravan route in present-day Jordan. Today, Bedouin descendants of the Nabatians still inhabit some of these cave dwellings, and if you are climbing around in those mountains and are lucky, Nabatian families will invite you to share small bread cakes and hot tea. We could not speak the same language, but we could play with the children and share the bread. In the Bedouin culture, if you share bread you are, for that moment, a part of their family, to be protected and respected along with being fed, "one family" as you share the bread.

Let me say it again: Shirley and I were once in a forest outside of Saint Petersburg, which was then called Leningrad. It was the height of the Cold War. We were standing in the snow, in a pine forest, on New Year's Eve. We were with Russians who had had very little contact with anyone from the United States. And we had had very little contact with real-life, living, breathing Russians. It was very cold and dark in the forest outside of Leningrad in late December. But then, out of the forest (this was the reason we were all there, it was a New Year's Eve tradition) came the Snow Queen, a young woman dressed in white fur. She was bringing in the New Year with gifts for us all. She carried a large serving dish, and on the dish were the traditional gifts of hope. On the plate were salt and a large, beautiful, braided loaf of bread.

We all then quickly went inside by a fire and shared the bread and some four-star cognac; and for all of us, at last, the cold war was over.

Do you sense the universality of this bread sharing?

Before moving here, friends and colleagues wished us safe travels and asked why we decided to come to Duluth and First Lutheran Church? So I told them about this congregation -- the profound sense of Christian community and mission and the talented, engaging members -- a job description that seems to match my vision of ministry. So why did I really come here? On my second visit during the call process, in the midst of a full, even grueling day of interviews -- the members of the call committee and Shirley and I paused together for a meal in the upper commons, and in addition to some very tasty stew, there was, served in baskets, some incredible bread -- wonderful bread -- multiple varieties of braided, glazed, beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, chewy, heavenly bread, passed around the table with a conversation of good humor and Christian insight and mission, including a concern about justice and feeding those hungry due to famine or war. So why did I really come to Duluth? There is some beautiful bread here -- very fresh and alive and lovingly prepared and shared.

Sometimes God seems so theoretical, so conceptual, such a remote concept; but when we are together sharing bread and drinking the fruit of the vine under the umbrella of the empty cross, God seems very real and personal and present. God with us in the sharing of bread and the remembrance of past meals and in the hope for a loving future together. All of us -- those who have sown, tended, reaped, gathered, milled, kneaded, baked, transported, marketed our daily bread; farmers, sailors, bakers, truckers, merchants -- there is a desire in the breaking and eating of bread to bless them all, and hope that they, too, know the peace and love of God.

I am talking about bread of substance that you can touch, smell, bite into, feel good about, and share with others. Bread that you know is a grand gift that we don't really deserve but is offered to us, and then eaten in joyful community. You always want more of that bread, and you just know instinctively is good for you. Bread that you dream about -- that is physical yet gives a hint of final harmony, and that is the bread of life -- God.

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."
-- John 6:35

Jesus said, "Take and eat; this is my body given for you. Take and drink this is my blood, shed for you and for all people."
-- Matthew 26:26-28 (paraphrased)

Sermon delivered August 3, 1997
First Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota