A Sermon in Lent

Wonder. Bread!

Exodus 16:1-15

John 6: 24-35

Those of you in the Howdy Doody generation – you know who you are – will remember the commercials for Wonder Bread: You know: “builds strong bodies 12 ways.” It was enriched with vitamins and it was soft and white, fluffy almost – in our house the complete opposite of the substantial biscuits and cornbread that were the usual fare. In fact, in my part of the South, white slices from a bag are still called light bread.

But whether our daily bread is soft and white, or biscuits, pita, or pumpernickel – we still call it the staff of life. Even the cruelest diet contains bread and water. And despite all our sophistication and abundance, the prediction of a big snow storm still sends hundreds of people out to stand in line to buy milk and….bread.

If you doubt the wonder of bread, think for a moment about the feeling you have when you smell a freshly baked loaf of bread. If you think bread has become unnecessary, try to imagine all your Sunday dinners with no fresh rolls, Mexican food without tortillas, March 17 without soda bread. If you think bread is not important, consider this Table without it. Bread is essential for life – the life of the body and the life of the soul.

It has been this way for thousands of years, all the way back to the wilderness and even before that. Bread is strength for the journey. So it is not surprising that when the children of Israel found themselves out in the middle of nowhere without any bread, they were anxious, upset, and angry. They were hungry. And they complained about it. In Egypt, they were slaves and they were forced into backbreaking labor, but at least they had known what to expect. At least, they had something to eat. Not like this.

In Egypt, the people were dependent on Pharaoh for bread. In the wilderness, they had to become dependent on God. It was a hard transition.

But just as God had noticed their slavery, so God noticed their hunger and sent manna. It was strange stuff, like nothing they had ever seen before. "When [they] saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?"" (Exodus 16:15a). "What is it," which in Hebrew is man hu. And so this bread from heaven was called manna. It covered the earth like dew in the morning. Moses told them what it was, bread from God, and they ate it.

Think about the courage to do that, the act of faith it took to eat this stuff that they had never seen before, this stuff they could not even name.

But they had no choice, really. They were hungry, they were in the wilderness, they ate, and it satisfied their hunger. It was sufficient. It was enough for the day.

But it was not to be hoarded. When they tried to save it up, stockpile against the future, it bred worms and was spoiled. This wonderful manna was food for the present. And if it required an act of faith to taste it for the first time, it also required an act of faith to believe that there would be enough for tomorrow without hoarding what was offered today. After all, they needed this bread to live. And it was hard to leave it there, hard to be confident that there would more in the future.

There in the wilderness, they had to accept what God would offer, on God’s terms. They had to trust that what God offered was life itself.

To be given bread when you are really hungry is to be given all you need. As Mother Teresa once said: "We give dying people bread because they hunger and perish not just for bread but also for love. When we hand them bread, we are also giving them love." ." (Sunday Dinner, Willimon, p 65) That is what God did with those hungry, complaining people in the wilderness. God gave them food – and love.

And Jesus did the same thing, multiplying the loaves, feeding those who had followed him into the desert. They thought they understood the power he had. He had them eating out of his hands, after all. They thought he was a second Moses, sent from God to give them bread. But they were wrong. They misunderstood his power. His power had little to do with their stomachs and everything to do with their souls.

The bread that mattered was not the bread from his hands but another kind of bread, something new and wholly different. It was the bread of life. It was his own life.

Remember: To be given bread when you are hungry to the point of perishing is to be given love. It was true for those in the wilderness, it was true for those with Jesus in Capernaum, and it is true for us, too.

We, too, may know something about the wilderness. It is a place where the fear of scarcity can easily turn to complaining. It is a place of hunger and emptiness, sometimes of anger. The wilderness is a time of being pushed out of all that is familiar, of being uprooted, of having nowhere to turn -- except to God. The wilderness is that experience of learning to depend on God because you can no longer depend on anything else. The wilderness is the place where you live from day to day, and there is enough, just for today. In the wilderness, you have to trust and obey God.

And whether we know it or not, we are praying a wilderness prayer every time we say: “Give us this day our daily bread.” What we are asking is this: God, give us enough for one day. Give us what we need for the present moment. Keep us from hoarding your gifts. Teach us to trust that you will provide.

This is not easy. We live in a world where every message is about being self-sufficient, taking control, maintaining independence. It is a hard transition to move from the message of the world to the message of the Word. It is a hard transition to give up our reliance on ourselves and what we have stored up, and learn instead to rely on God. It goes against so much of what we have been taught: don't be a burden, pay your own way, save for retirement, be responsible. Those actions are worthwhile, of course, until and unless they get in the way of God. We can become so focused on looking after ourselves that we forget to look for God. We can become so intent on saving ourselves that we miss out on life.

Life comes from one source: Jesus, sent by God to satisfy the deepest hungers of the world, for those in the wilderness, for the starving, for those who are afraid and angry with God; Jesus, offering his life to us and for us, and showing us the way to receive the gift. Not by hoarding what we have as a hedge against the future, not by longing for the old days of Pharaoh’s plenty, not by becoming paralyzed with the fear of not having enough. We receive the gift of life by reaching out in faith and obedience, seeing that God in Christ is giving us what we need, but also recognizing that it may not look like anything we have ever seen before.

It may raise more questions than it answers. It may make us wonder. Like those in the wilderness and those around Jesus, when we are confronted with God's strange provision, it will require an act of faith to take it in.

The bread we share here comes from the hand of God – God who gives us all we need for life, God who gives us Jesus Christ. This bread builds a strong body, the body of Christ, in more ways than we can even imagine. And that is cause for thanksgiving, for trust and gratitude, for awe and for wonder.

And Jesus still says to us, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”

And may it be so. Amen.

(c) Martha C. Highsmith

Praying in the Produce Aisle

Grocery shopping can be a chore: something on the weekly to-do list, necessary but not especially rewarding or exciting. I suspect it is safe to say that most folks don’t approach this task as an occasion for prayer -- but perhaps we should.

The next time you are in the produce aisle, take some time to reflect on the bounty before you. Even a regular grocery store will have at least six varieties of apples, maybe eight different lettuces, five kinds of tomatoes. Kale comes in two or three forms, each one colorful and interesting; there are red, yellow, orange, and green sweet peppers, and small fiery chiles. For relatively small amounts of money, we can have the fruits of someone else's labor in unimaginable array.

When I am in a hurry, tired, stressed, it is easy to miss the extraordinary beauty and abundance in this ordinary place. But instead of mentally griping about the high prices or the hassle, I am trying instead to engage my shopping chores with a sense of gratitude and thanksgiving. I am trying to be mindful of the care and provision that God makes for all creation, understanding that as pure grace, and rejoicing.

And I am also reminding myself of those unable to partake of the bounty because they are poor, disabled, ill; because there is no real grocery story in their neighborhood; because they have to ride a bus to shop. I am reminding myself to offer prayers prayers of intercession on behalf of the hungry in my own area and then concentrating on putting those intercessions into action.

And finally, I think that produce aisle might also be a call to repentance. There is enough food in the world so no one has to go hungry and yet people are still starving to death. The problem is not lack of food, but lack of will. Might we repent of our self-focus and turn our skill and ability to repairing the structures that keep the hungry from being fed?

Physicist Brian Swimme writes about the creation of the universe as “a titanic bestowal, a stupendous quantum of free energy given forth from the bottomless vaults of generosity.” All that gift is played out in microcosm right there in the midst of the squash and the celery and the peppers. Let us pray that we may be part of realizing that overflowing abundance.

49 million

From the New York Times, that is "the number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to food in 2008," the highest number since the US Department of Agriculture began tracking the data 14 years ago. Maybe those millions of people are not hungry all the time, but they live in a state of food insecurity. "In about one-third of those households, lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point. The rest had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods or by relying on government or private help."

On this day the centers on food, when we gather around tables everywhere to give thanks, maybe we should also pledge to share what we have. There is enough in the world to feed the world. It is not the earth that holds back or fails to produce; it is us. A true celebration of God's abundance would mean that we do what we can to make sure all can experience it.

So today, eat, drink, be merry, enjoy family and friends. Give thanks for the blessings of God's good earth. And remember that all the free turkeys distributed by churches and food banks and others will be gone by next week. But the need will not.

A Toothache

I have a toothache. The dentist knows which tooth hurts but I can’t exactly tell. He says it is because of “referred pain.” It is an interesting concept, isn’t it? The source of the pain projects itself somewhere else, so that I think it is another tooth that needs work. And I wonder if maybe that is the calling of the church – to be the source of the world’s referred pain. Maybe we are to be the location where the pain of homelessness and hunger, war, and the impact of natural disasters lodge. Maybe we are the place that registers the pain when all other places are numb or in shock or oblivious. And if we do, indeed, feel the pain of the world, then we also must respond. Pain, after all, is a sign that something is wrong, that there is a danger that can threaten or cause damage. Pain is a message that action is needed. What would it be like if the church responded to the referred pain of the world by taking steps to ease that pain, to treat the source of the distress? I think we do that at our church by working to feed the hungry. I don’t think there are many folks who show up on Sunday morning with rumbling stomachs, but I do think that some come with souls that are growling because they share the hunger of the world. This month, our offerings go to the local food bank. That is a good thing. And it is also good that we are the nerve that feels the referred pain of the world around us.

Sermon, November 18

"Good News!"

Isaiah 65:17-25

Luke 21:5-19

How do you get your news: TV, radio, internet, or the old-fashioned way – out of the paper? We are awash in news—or what passes for it – these days. And our news is a depressing mixture of the truly tragic and terribly trivial. But God’s news is different, and ironically, there is nothing new about it.

God says: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” That seems like enormously comforting news to me. When you look around at our world, all you see is a mess, isn’t it? The mess covers our earth and extends to the heavens. We have poked holes in the ozone, we have polluted the air and the water, we have dug up the deposits of the ages and used them the fuel our fancies – big cars, big houses, big appetites for entertainment.

And it seems that Jesus must have been looking far into the future when he spoke to his disciples, when he said: “You will hear of wars and insurrections. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plague.” That sounds like our earth and heavens, doesn’t it? And worst of all, most of the mess is of our own making. And so it is to our time, as well as to an ancient time, that God speaks: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.”

Imagine these new heavens and new earth, this new creation, for a moment. There will be no weeping or distress. There will be no infant mortality, no lives cut short. There will be no working poor. Those who build the houses will be able to afford to live in them. No one will be homeless. Those who pick the fruit and harvest the vegetables will not go hungry. People will have good and productive work, enough to be satisfying but not so much as to be exhausting and overwhelming. Those who do good will not feel that their work is in vain. No child anywhere will grow up in the shadow of calamity and terror. There will be peace. The wolf and the lion and the lamb will dwell together in harmony. And so will humankind. That is God’s new creation.

But it isn’t really new at all. This is, in truth, God’s old creation. It is the vision that God had for the world at the beginning of time, when the whole earth was like a green garden, when plants and animals and woman and man lived together, and the earth and the sky formed a great and beautiful dwelling where everything that was needed was available in overflowing abundance.

We have forgotten that vision of God’s good creation. It has been eclipsed by what we see day in and day out. But in the midst of our mess, the word of God still comes: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth like the heavens and earth at the beginning of time.” This is God’s news, this is good news. And it is not some abstract hope for a return to the good old days. It is a present reality, a reminder that the God who made the universe is still at work in our world. And it is a call to us to join God in that work, to be co-creators with God.

So against this backdrop, let me read you some of the news, our news, from the Hartford Courant, this week, on Thursday (November 15, 2007).


More than 35.5 million people in this country went hungry in 2006 as they struggled to find jobs that can support them, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday. Single mothers and their children were among the most likely to suffer, according to the study. Of the 35.5 million, 11.1 million reported that they had “very low food security,” meaning that they had a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat. For example, among families, a third of those facing disruption in the food they typically eat said that an adult in their family did not eat for a whole day because they could not afford it. (Section A)

And God says: “They shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not plant and another eat. They shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain.”

And God says: “What will you do about it? How will you testify to my good news; how will you demonstrate my new creation in the world?”

A man charged with killing a two-year-old in Groton told police he held her face against jets in bathtub then left her there and went to watch football, according to a search warrant unsealed this week. …. He told police he got angry when the baby threw up and then cried while he bathed her. Police said: “He stated that he knew what he did was wrong but that he did not care.” (Section B)

And God says: “No more shall there be an infant that lives but a few days. No one shall bear children for calamity.”

And God says: “What will you do about this? How will you testify to my good news; how will you demonstrate my new creation in the world?”

Nearly a third of Americans have at one point worried about becoming homeless and many more are taking in friends and relatives needing a home, a survey found. The homelessness issue has touched more than those who are living on the streets, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. “When people read the news and read about bankruptcies, home foreclosures and auto plants being closed, they worry that they may be next. (Section A)

And God says: “They shall build houses and inhabit them. They shall not build and another inhabit.”

And God says: What will you do about this? How will you testify to my good news; how will you demonstrate my new creation in the world?

The military is making backup plans in case the unrest in Pakistan begins to affect the flow of supplies to American troops fighting in Afghanistan, the Defense Department said Wednesday. Said Lt General Carter Ham: Certainly, any time there is a nation that has nuclear weapons that is experiencing a situation such as Pakistan is at present, that is of primary concern. (Section A)

And God says: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

And God says: “What will you do about this? How will you testify to my good news; how will you demonstrate my new creation in the world?”


That’s the news – just part of it and just one day. And I’ve got news for you. Changing things will not be easy. Some of the powerful institutions that we have built and invested so much energy and effort in maintaining may need to go. When Jesus spoke of Herod’s mighty temple being tumbled, that might have been a prophecy for his time and a parable for ours. What we have made for ourselves, done for ourselves, constructed for ourselves will not matter – unless it gives us an opportunity to testify, to show with our very lives that we believe and trust that it is God’s way, not ours, that will prevail in the end.

Jesus told his disciples that the words and the wisdom they needed to do this would be given to them, and that is both a promise and a challenge, for us, too. It requires that we engage in radical trust, trust of the other, trust of God, not only of ourselves. As the old saying goes: It requires that we pray as though everything depended on God and work as though everything depends on us.

And I see that happening here. You feed the hungry; you support social service agencies that help the poor; you give money here that is used to promote economic and social justice in New Haven; you work for change in laws and policies; you speak up for what is right even if doing so is uncomfortable. You are at work with God.

And let me suggest a way to do this even more intentionally. However you get your news -- TV, radio, internet, newspaper -- use it as an occasion for prayer. Pray for the people and the tragic situations that are daily before you. Pray for our wounded world. Pay attention to what is happening around you. And then try reading the paper as you would read the Bible, as though it is God calling you to be at work in the world. Because it is.

God is still at work, with us, with creation. And what God’s creation is all about is shalom. We often translate that word as peace, but it has a more expansive meaning than that. It means wholeness, completeness, the full realization of God’s intention for the world. It means new heavens and a new earth. It means creation as God intended it to be all along. God is doing that, even here, even now. God is restoring shalom. And we are called to be part of that work.

God says: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth.” And that, dear friends, is really good news. May it be so. Amen.



(c) Martha C. Highsmith

The World is About to Turn

This morning after church, I walked around Georgetown for a couple of hours. I had never been there before and it was a lovely day for a stroll. Georgetown is a shi-shi (is that a word?) kind of place. There are old buildings, quaint and charming, alongside expensive shops and upscale restaurants. I didn’t buy anything expensive, just a couple of used CDs, but just about anything you can imagine was for sale. There were Barney’s and Kate Spade, with the palm reader upstairs; rare books and the Egyptian store; Godiva and Subway. It was crowded with tourists and maybe locals, too. There were old people and babies being wheeled around, people, like me, consulting their maps, and folks just looking for a nice place for Sunday brunch. And there were a lot of street people. One woman was on the corner, dressed all in white, holding a basket with a hand-written sign that read “Giving is a blessing.” All she had in the basket was pennies. There were men, many of them, with paper cups held out, some of them sitting on the sidewalk, others on overturned milk crates. I remember thinking that there were so many more of these folks than there are back home. And then I wondered if that is really true. I wondered if I have just gotten so used to seeing them in my own setting that I don’t even notice them anymore.

The anthem at church was the Canticle of the Turning. It has these words: “From the halls of power to the fortress tower, not a stone will be left on stone. Let the king beware for your justice tears ev'ry tyrant from his throne. The hungry poor shall weep no more, for the food they can never earn. These are tables spread, ev'ry mouth be fed, for the world is about to turn. And my heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. Wipe away all the tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn.”

And that was the song that was running through my heart all afternoon.