The words of Jesus to the effect that He is the bread from Heaven who gives true life and the spiritual drink by which no one shall thirst remains to this day one of the most confounding and controversial of His sayings. One can very easily sympathize with the Jewish faithful who hadn't the foggiest clue what He was talking about, since it isn't much clearer now. Because of that, there are countless multitudes of explanations and interpretations, some contradicting each other while others compliment. As I mentioned, I am a Lutheran, and so my understanding of this passage is bound up in a Sacramental spirituality: I'm taking Jesus literally here, in that He offers Himself up in the bread and wine of Communion as a very real presence. But even that doesn't clarify things necessarily, since it then defers the question to how the bread and wine of Communion give those gifts of eternal life and spiritual sustenance of which Jesus spoke.

To arrive at some kind of useful perspective on this saying, it is necessary to meditate upon the nature of the gifts themselves rather than the mode of the giving. The idea of eternal life seems straightforward enough, but what exactly does it mean to live? That is the real question which may help to resolve this theological difficulty. What is really living, the kind of living that endures for eternity?

In our society, based so heavily on external values and so many economic -isms, "really living" seems to be a synonym for seeking and holding on to greater and greater degrees of affluence and comfort. At the beginning of this sermon of Jesus', He observed that the people sought Him out not because they were seeking His teachings or way of life, but because they were hungry. Immediately before this He had performed the miracle of loaves and fishes, feeding over 5000 people and leaving 12 baskets of leftovers. When He made this observation, it was a recognition of our limited idea of living. Whichever way one cuts it, the pursuit of material well-being isn't very far removed from the pursuit of bread... It's just eating finer and finer bread on more and more elegant tables.

This pursuit isn't especially fulfilling though, as the endless toil for bread - and the ever increasing levels of affluence and material comfort it symbolizes - has the tendency to leave us spiritually drained. Instead of a means to an end or a natural blessing stemming from our way of life, bread has become an end unto itself. In being an end unto itself, being the purpose for our lives, we tend easily to fall into patterns that don't add to our sense of wholeness, like working jobs we hate just because they let us buy the things we want. Jesus noted in another teaching that we cannot serve both God and wealth, because we will inevitably grow to serve one to the exclusion of the other. When bread becomes our single-minded goal, we can easily forget about God, Who has a grander purpose for us therein offers us a life truly worth living.

This choice between God and bread was the one given to Solomon, as recorded in our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures. Just try to imagine the temptation present in God offering to give you anything, absolutely ANYTHING, you wish for. It would be very easy to satisfy our limited idea of living by asking for an extension on our lives, for affluence and material comfort, for money and cars and things to fill our houses. It would even be very easy to ask for God to satisfy our own vision of order in the world, like asking for world peace the way we think world peace ought to be or equality the way we think things ought to be equalized.

To make such a request would be empty though, because it comes from the same externalistic motivations that our day-to-day concerns do. We wouldn't be asking for God to give true life in spiritual fulfillment, but for God to do what we wanted and give us what we wanted. Or what we think we want, to be more precise. It might only be once we have everything that we find ourselves to be empty, surrounded by things but having nothing inside.

It is said that purest prayer of all is simply to ask for knowledge of God's will and the strength to carry it out, and this is the request wherein we can find true life and real fulfillment. After all, our purpose in life, our purpose as Christians and followers of Jesus, is to be in reconciled relationship with God and through the outpouring of God's love to spread the infectious joy of reconciliation with others. We are to live with love and grace and mercy, being the meek of the earth and seeking peace and justness for all.

This was the essence of Solomon's request of God, since the wisdom he asked for was not political shrewdness, but for God's guidance in being a facilitator of reconciliation, helping to bring the kingdom he inherited together in the unity of love and being able to discern between good and evil. The wisdom was for knowledge of God's will and the strength to carry it out. And in response, God not only gives him this wisdom, but gives him the material blessings which he did not ask for, the riches and honor. This response of God's begins to clarify the picture of Jesus' saying for us.

God doesn't operate on arbitrary principles. As the supreme, loving, all-knowing and all-powerful Creator and Sustainer of the universe, God has bound everything together in a tightly woven network of causes and effects. We are not punished for our sins, for example, but BY our sins, as the term "sin" is merely Christian shorthand for any way in which we injure reconciled relationships with God, other people and Creation. These broken relationships are the very substance and cause of suffering, and no arbitrary lightning strike from on high is necessary. Nor is God angry with us for breaking a cleverly devised set of rules and dogmas. The principles we are called to live by are for our own good as a means to lead these reconciled relationships. When we fall short of them, God is filled with compassionate pity for us because of our brokenness.

The inverse of this must then hold as well: when we live in reconciled relationships, then the goodness of life will come to us. By being agents of healing in the world, we receive the benefits of that healing... When there is food for all, there is food for us. When there is peace for all, there is peace for us. When God has worked through us to bring spiritual fulfillment to others, we find ourselves immeasurably filled. In the words of the peace prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, "it is in giving that we receive, in pardoning that we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life." When Solomon asked for wisdom to lead his people in justice and goodness, he enjoyed the natural consequences due to a person in his station: the adoration and tribute of a people grateful for his wisdom.

This theme of releasing our fears and our wants and trusting fully in the will and ways of God occurs often in the teachings of Jesus. One of the most well-known examples is in His Sermon on the Mount, when He preaches "do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?' For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

Preceding this, Jesus teaches us a now familiar prayer in which we ask that God's Kingdom may come and that His will may be done, and that He give us our daily bread. When we ask here for bread, we are not asking for bread for its own sake, but that She might give it to us as it pleases Her so that we can continue our work of reconciliation, of bringing about the Kingdom of God. Understanding this keeps us from a sort of "Gospel of Prosperity". I'm not saying here that by following God we are promised the riches of Solomon, for we are not promised riches, but richNESS... All the richness of a life worth living. With riches as our goal, we are given to see large sums of them as the best possible thing. But when we pursue God's will, our values and priorities change radically. Instead of chasing after everything, we come only to desire enough, because we know that life's fullness is not found in volumes of things.

Now we are drawing closer to the meaning of Jesus' statements about the Bread of Life. When we embrace the kind of life handed down to us from the world, the life of materiality and affluence and externality, then we receive only what it ultimately promises us, which is the death of our material bodies. We will have lived lives chasing after things that we cannot take with us, neglecting the whole time the eternal spark within us. By neglecting it, the pursuit of material gain is melancholy indeed, grasping for more of what we know doesn't fulfill us.

By seeking the true Bread of Life, we are seeking Jesus Himself and the path He has shown us. During His earthly ministry, Jesus lived and breathed and taught and became a new way of life... Of life lived in intimacy and reconciliation with God, with other people and with Creation. In so doing, He lived the very fullness of life, in all its joys and sorrows, all its happiness and all its pain, and He embraced all of it and every one with the most powerful and certain thing in the whole universe: love. By embracing love, we embrace life. To have love and to be overflowing with love is what it means to be really living. And to live in love is to live for eternity, because we know that love is this most powerful and certain thing. We know this because of the central affirmation of our faith: that God's love conquers all hatred, greed, violence, vanity and death. Love emerged victorious over the cross, when Jesus was killed for being this new way of life but simply stopped being dead. In love, God will remember us and recreate us in resurrection.

It is in love that we gather here today, gather around the altar, the Lord's Table... A motley assembly of the unlikely, people of all races and cultures and genders and orientations, people from many places of many ages, united in sharing the Bread of Life. When we come together in this way, we both prefigure the eternal life to come and become a present and tangible manifestation of life worth living. It is love that break downs all barriers and love that brings us together in this community of reconciliation. It is love that fuels true life, and love that will extend it into eternity.

Amen.