House of Bread.

Micah 5:2-51

Hebrews 10:5-10

Luke 1:39-55

December 20, 2015

I.

On Thursday night we will be reminded again of what the name of the town of Bethlehem means.  It is a combination of two Hebrew words.  Beth, which means “house,” and lechem which means “bread.”  Bethlehem, therefore, means “house of bread.”  (In this time of year we might also note that Beth-lehem-zanjabil would mean, in Hebrew, “gingerbread house.”  For whatever direction that might take us in….)

In any case, the town probably got the name because it was a center of grain production even back before King David.  It was his grandmother, a foreigner named Ruth, who came to the area as a migrant farmworker, and toiled in the fields around Bethlehem harvesting wheat.

Bread continues to be a staple of the human diet and the very reason for civilization itself.  Bread is also a powerful metaphor.  Back in the 60’s it was a common slang for money, as was “dough” a few decades before.  Bread stands for communally produced and shared nourishment; and as bread gives physical life to a community, spiritual “bread” also feeds us with faith, wisdom, insight, and knowledge.  

In John 6, Jesus refers to himself as the Bread of Life; Peter recognizes that bread refers to Jesus’ words, or teachings.  There are a couple of hymns in our hymnal that see the bread of life as the Scriptures.  And since Jesus talks about his body, even his “flesh,” as bread, then there is a sense that the church is also bread, since we are his body in the world.

So, as we see throughout the Bible, it is never just about the literal meaning of the words.  The literal is useful merely as a doorway to deeper meanings.  To leave it at the literal level is incredibly shallow, and tends to distract us from the more powerful things that are really going on in the text.  Just because we can’t take something literally doesn’t mean it is a meaningless fairytale that should be simply discarded and forgotten.  The literally meanings are there to draw us into the story so we can gain access to the more profound meanings.  At the same time, to ignore or reject the literal altogether is to become unmoored from the framework of the imagery and spin off into the fantasyland of self-serving lies generated by our own egos.

At this point we are asking: “How does the Bread of Life come into the world?”  The answer is not just a literal referral back to the principles and practices of agriculture.  The answer begins, as the prophet Micah tells us, in Bethlehem, the House of Bread.  After all, where else would the Bread of Life emerge?

II.

Bethlehem is a small town and utterly insignificant except that it seems to be a doorway for God’s power and energy.  Not only does the story of Ruth take place there, in which God, against the paranoid and self-righteous impulses of people, clearly includes foreigners and even non-believers into the plan of salvation.  Ruth, a Moabite woman, becomes the grandmother of David, the greatest of the Kings of Israel.

The Bread of Life always and forever comes in and through unlikely and unexpected places in our souls; and through them brings us peace, guidance, security, and God’s presence.  The most fertile places are not the most grand and glorious.  Even the bread of heaven emerges with and within us as from the earth, the dark soil, the lowest, most grounded place.

The Deliverer also always comes forth from a woman, as does everyone.  Birth involves what we call, understating it as usual, “labor.”  This tells us to be ready for great discomfort, pain, trauma, pressure, and hard work.  

One of the contentious elements of our story is that the Bread of Life, the Word of God, comes into the world through a virgin, that it, without the participation of a human male.  Once again, the literal meaning is just the beginning of the story.  This is not about what is and isn’t gynecologically possible; it does have to do with what is real in a spiritual sense, which is to say really real, not somebody’s estimation of what is historically real.  

God does not come into the world from within the world and its male-dominated ego-centric structures.  When the Bread of Life emerges within us it must be very clear that we did not dream it up ourselves, that it is not a projection of our desires, that it was not a result of our penetration and will, and it is most certainly not a copy of our DNA.

The prologue to the fourth gospel clearly says about the Word, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”  The word “man” is not generic here, it refers to male humans.  Which is to say that there are no men involved when the Word comes into the world.  It reminds me of how Jesus says that in the Kingdom of God there are no fathers; fathers were considered little tyrants.  The Kingdom will have no tyrants, no bosses, no leaders, no executives, no kings… except the One in heaven.

Our role is one of openness and receptivity; the Word, the Bread of Life, grows within us.  It is not one of the many ideas, desires, needs, fantasies, fears, plans, philosophies, ideologies, or whatever, that the rulers of the world insert into our imaginations, mainly for their own benefit.  The Word seems utterly foreign to us, but it is actually from our truest and most basic identity that we have forgotten.

In Luke, the conversation is between two pregnant women, Elizabeth and Mary.  They bless each other, and Mary bursts into her famous song about how this child she is bearing is going to turn the whole world order upside down, the the proud scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted up, and hungry filled, and the rich sent away empty.

III.

We are known by our fruits, that is, by the quality of our actions, by what we produce in the world.  Just as physical bread nourishes our mortal bodies with nutrients enabling us to work and play, so spiritual bread has its own effects.  It is the Bread of Life if it leads you to see and participate in God’s other world.  It is the Bread of Life if it draws you away from the world of death and pain, and instead leads you to live in this “oppositeland” of God’s Kingdom, where earthly power, fame, and wealth is discounted.

That’s how we know it is the Bread of Life: it feeds in our hearts a kind of counter-culture of blessing, justice, and peace.  If we are still drawn by arrogance, bluster, bigotry, threats, hatred, and fear, if we are still looking for scapegoats to exclude or persecute, then we are not being fed by the Bread of Life, but merely ingesting the soul-killing, ego-fattening, processed empty calories of the empire.

The author of the book of Hebrews makes the same point, quoting Psalm 40, understanding it to be the words of Christ, rejecting the ideology of sacrifice, by which we make others suffer for our sins.  That is the vicious and paranoid response of hateful people trying to manufacture unity by positing a common enemy.  It is what evil powers have always done, and continue to do today.  Human history is strongmen keeping their power over us by warning us about those other strongmen.  

Hebrews insists that this cycle of fear and brutality has been broken by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all, an offering that sanctifies us, restoring us to our created goodness and blessing in God.  The Bread of Life is an offering that extinguishes violence, removes hatred, dissolves fear, and takes away sin… that is, it burns off and allows to dissipate like fog the illusion that we are separate from God and each other.

So now when we offer this literal bread in the Sacrament, it is to remind us of the one, final offering and sacrifice made by Jesus Christ, who gives his life for the life of the world, to remind us, who are the Body of Christ, that we are now the continual offering through whom God’s life and love flow into the world.  Now we, who are in a sense, in Christ’s name, the Bread of Life, offer God’s life to others by our acts of generosity, forgiveness, welcome, protection, inclusion, non-violence, and, yes, sacrifice.

So maybe the church is Bethlehem; maybe the church is the House of Bread, for it is here that the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ and his teachings, are shared.  It is here that Christ is born into human hearts.  There is that great quote from Meister Eckhart to the effect that unless Christ is born in us, it doesn’t matter whether he was physically born in the historical Bethlehem.  That’s why we have been concluding our worship through Advent with the words of that hymn about Bethlehem: “O Holy Child of Bethlehem… be born in us today.”

For ultimately the Nativity is not just about a memory of long ago; it is most importantly a present reality, something happening now, to us here today.  It happens when we turn away from our self-importance and self-righteousness, and realize in ourselves the small, quiet, humble, simple Bethlehem of the heart, when we are ready for the world to be turned upside down, when we are ready for the coming of the One of peace.

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