"Wonder Bread"

This is the second of two related sermons given over Zoom to the congregation of St. Andrew Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon on Sunday, August 8, 2021.

 Lessons:

1 Kings 19:4-8

Ephesians 4:25-5:25

John 6:35, 41-51

 Psalm 34:1-8

Previously

This morning I think I should begin with that word used in a television series when a new episode is released—“Previously . . .”

So let me recap briefly where we left things when last we gathered two weeks ago on Zoom.

We were exploring John the Evangelist’s account of the feeding by Jesus of the multitudes, and how God was present in the details of that event.

I also mentioned that for the next four Sundays our appointed readings would provide us with slices of what we might call Jesus’ “bread sermon.”

In the miraculous feeding we were given the experience, today we move on reflect on its deeper meaning by taking a Gospel slice from the middle of that sermon.

Sister Corita

I first started to think differently about bread thanks to a Roman Catholic nun. She was the gifted artist, Sister Corita., and who after she left her religious order in 1968, she became known simply as “Corita.”

I was introduced to her by a friend who had worked as her assistant at Immaculate Heart College, where Corita was head of the art department.

Although she died in 1986, I was reminded once again this week of her enduring influence when she appeared on the August cover of Sojourners magazine.

Supermarket Poetics

Inspired by the invigorating winds of Vatican II which swept through the Catholic world in the 1960s as well as by the Campbell soup pop art created by Andy Warhol, a spark was set off in Corita’s imagination.

At the time I met her, I had just seen her series of prints that were inspired by popular grocery store brands—her “supermarket poetics” as someone called them. [1]

One of the brands featured in her art was “Wonder Bread.” Some of you I’m sure will remember this product whose name promised so much. (It was, by the way, the first bread to be sold pre-sliced nationwide.)

But in her art Corita made use of the hyperbolic language and symbols on the Wonder Bread wrapper as a vehicle to connect her faith to everyday life.

Talking about her way of working, she said:

“When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things.” [2]

In one print which Corita entitled, “that they might have life,” she prominently placed the words “enriched bread,” which she had borrowed from the packaging.

These words were joined by a group of small circles that looked just like the colorful circles on the bread wrapper.

But to a faith-initiated eye these circles suggested the host that is offered at communion.

In between several of the circles—in her own distinctive handwriting—were words drawn from Gandhi:

“There are so many hungry people that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

Here then was the Gospel—as the bread of life—captured in a silk screen print!

Corita, you see, taught me that everyday “bread”—even a popular supermarket product with quite limited nutritional value—could serve as a pointer beyond itself to a larger field of meaning.

Although I didn’t fully realize it at the time, Corita—who was an educator as well as an artist—was introducing me to a way of looking at the everyday world with fresh insight.

She was teaching a two-dimensional understanding of life, where everyday objects—like that Wonder Bread wrapper—could be employed to point beyond themselves to a larger realm of spiritual meaning . . .

That the material world could become a channel to the spiritual—

this opened up for me, an entirely new way of seeing . . .

. . . of experiencing everyday life.

Open Eyes

Over time I began to explore what might it mean to look at the world with this kind of bi-focal vision:

Where the flight of a hummingbird flitting through a garden could be a reminder of that fragile gift of time.

Where a city skyline illuminated at sunset could suddenly be seen as a holy city.

Where the St. John’s bridge viewed from below could become a gothic sanctuary.

And, yes, where even that stranger sitting across the aisle on the bus could be seen (for a moment) as someone precious and of infinite worth.

Here I recalled those words of C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory: “There are no ordinary people . . . it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit.”

So how might the course of our lives—yours and mine—be different if we consistently exercised this capacity for seeing life bi-focally . . . with open eyes . . .

where our spirituality becomes intimately connected to our everyday world?

The Finder

Corita taught her students and followers a simple place to begin.

She would you to take a small piece of cardboard and cut out a rectangle, about the size of an old Kodak slide with the film removed.

She called this little discovery tool a finder.

You would then take your finder, covering one eye and looking through the finder, see what you could discover.

I once spent a mesmerizing evening on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with a group of students, each with a finder, exploring the world through this small lens.

The familiar world became suddenly alive in a new and arresting way.

But seeing through the finder was only a beginning, an entry into what she developed into exploring the world as both a material and a spiritual reality.

A Slice of Bread

Jesus in today’s bread sermon employs a two-dimensional approach to the world where bread—that daily necessity—provides an opening to a larger, more profound spiritual dimension.

Jesus invites his hearers to allow the miraculous feeding to be a door into another dimension. (Indeed, later in John’s Gospel, you might recall, Jesus uses those very words, “I am the door.”)

Today’s Gospel begins: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry . . .”

Now for some in Jesus’ audience, these words made no sense at all.

Although John refers to them as “the Jews,” we should remind ourselves that everyone gathered in that synagogue in Capernaum listening to Jesus’ sermon on that day was “a Jew.

So I prefer to think of these critics as one-dimensional thinkers—as those with a literal mindset.

For them bread could only be bread. Nothing more.

Jesus, the son of Joseph, they argued, is someone whose father and mother we know. How can he now say, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

For those who have eyes to see, who are open to the possibility that reality is not confined to a single plane —that the material and the spiritual can be joined together in an entirely new way--this declaration of Jesus can be heard as good news.

For so much is captured by those words, “I am the bread of life.”

John the Evangelist was writing his Gospel decades after the earthly life of Jesus had come to an end. He was writing for a community that included both Jewish and Gentile believers.

For Jewish believers hearing, “I am the bread of life” which begins with those words “I am” evokes the memory of the God of Israel who had revealed to Moses at the burning bush the divine name as “I am.”

But for all in John’s community and for those of us living two millennia later those words, “I am the bread of life,” can speak to the fulfillment we seek at the most profound level of our being. The bread of life!

Do we not all seek the life that really is life?

Do we not all hunger for the fulfillment of our restless longings?

We might in our day name these as health, security, love.

And you can add your own words to the list.

All these longings, Fred Craddock and Eugene Boring write in their brilliant commentary on this text:

“. . . All these are symbols of what we are looking for, often at a level deeper than our own awareness or ability to articulate. To all such human longings, Jewish and Gentile, religious and secular, the Johannine Jesus says, ‘It’s me.’ ‘I’m it. ‘I am.’” [3]

For the Life of the World

Thus we arrive at the final words from our Gospel for today:

“The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Here, we begin to see where the feeding of the multitudes and the entire sermon that follows is taking us (although there is still more to come in the next two weeks).

We are given the foundation for that central Eucharistic meal that has been shared by gathered Christians over the centuries.

And which we long to share together as a St. Andrew’s community when its safe to return to the sanctuary.

By receiving the bread of communion which, like the loaves that were taken, blest and distributed to the multitudes, we are become transformed into the living body of Christ for our time.

For receiving this sacrament is not a private, mystical act for ourselves alone. Or even for the spiritual well-being of a parish family.

But it is for the life of the world.

Earlier in John’s Gospel is that familiar verse--John 3:16--which I suspect many of us memorized as children: “God so loved the world.”

So we take our faith then back to the marketplace—to the world—to do the work that God has given us to do:

To strive for justice, to create beauty, to care for creation, to build up and heal the human family.

So like those round images on the bread wrapper, we have now come full circle.

We began with the five barley loaves to feed the hungry multitudes gathered to hear Jesus.

Our eyes have then been opened to see in that bread another dimension, a spiritual sign, of the one who came to be for us “the bread of life,” the bread that truly satisfies our deepest longings.

And finally, we have this bread of life given to us in material form as a sacrament that very soon (God willing) we can share together,

a gift that returns us to everyday life,

where, nourished and strengthened, we can serve and create, giving ourselves in Jesus’ name for the life and the well-being of the world.

Through all of this together we are being transformed . . ..

and bread has truly become “Wonder Bread.”

______________________________

Endnotes:

[1] Richard Meyer in Corita Kent and The Language of Pop, edited by Susan Dackerman, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Art Museums, 2015), p. 131.

[2] Quoted in Cassidy Klein “A Joyous Revolution, Sojourners, August 2021, p. 25.

[3] M. Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary. (Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 310.