There is a deep spiritual reality being set before us,
but it is being explained metaphorically.
An inward and invisible truth is being presented through an undeniable physical fact.

Why this talk of flesh and blood, and bread?
Because there are few things more essential than eating.
Without eating, we will certainly die.

There are few things more intimate.
When we eat, we take something inside us
and it becomes a part of the very fabric of our being.

What we ingest, literally or figuratively, changes us.
We can be either nourished or poisoned by what we take in.
We can grow or starve depending upon how frequently we choose to dine.

Our decision to participate in weekly communion is part of how we are sustained.
We do as Jesus commanded.
We eat the bread and drink the wine, in memory of him.
They represent for us his body and blood.
But there is more than memory here.
There is the invitation to a fuller life ­ the kind of life which Jesus,
in all his humanity, represents.

"Give us this day our daily bread," we say in the Lord's prayer.
The bread for which we are asking is not simply baked wheat to fill our bellies.
We need the kind of bread that Jesus offers too­ the bread that is himself.

This is not mere manna, sustenance for one day alone, with death waiting in the wings. This is an undying nurturing relationship offered by, and through, one who has conquered death and therefor has the authority to offer abundant life.

Jesus has already arrived at the place he is promising to bring those
who take him into themselves.
He is the means to the destination.

We can have eternal life within us by truly consuming what Jesus offers
and allowing ourselves to assimilate him into our very being.

Jesus knows we must choose how we will attempt to fill our appetites.

When the Tempter met the hungry Jesus in the desert,
he said "turn these stones into bread so that you might live."
It would have been an empty action, containing no real nourishment.

Changing stones into bread is the work of magicians.
Changing hearts of stone into hearts of flesh is the work of God.

Jesus went hungry in the desert so that he might have the strength to feed you and me.

Jesus did not succumb to an empty temptation.
He retorted, "Man does not live by bread alone
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God."

Jesus is both the bread from heaven and the living Word.
This is food indeed.
In this food ­ this flesh and blood God/man ­
is all that is needed to utterly transform the nature of our lives and our selves.

We exist day by day.
Whatever our life span may be, it goes by one day at a time.
The outward features of one life resemble another.
We are born. We grow and learn. We work, play and sleep.
We interact with others, to a greater or lesser degree, until one day we die.

Sketched out in this existential and schematic fashion,
life looks as grim and pointless as a voyage to nowhere.

But when we reach for our daily bread the journey is transformed.
It is not the outward shape of things that determines our experience of them.
We can be sustained and nourished all of our days,
what ever may come, through what we take into ourselves.
That which is inside of us conditions how we see and experience our life.

Yesterday I was at a wedding. There was the usual collection of people of various ages, occupations, and temperaments. People had come carrying some remnant of the earlier morning. They were tense, happy, harassed, focused or distracted, unpleasant or gregarious. We milled about outside and then it was time to go in.

I watched the nineteen-year-old son of one of my friends get married.
I saw this young man and his new bride say their vows, and mean them deeply.

They stood in a crowded church full of people who had been asked to believe
that God was present .We were all taking that request seriously.
When we were asked, we promised to support this young couple in their new marriage. We prayed that God would be with them, and us, come what may.

Then the bride and the groom brought the bread and the wine to the altar. Like Alpha and Omega they stood on either end while the words of consecration rang out and bread was more than bread and wine was more than wine. We remembered that Christ had died for us, and rose again.

So we stood. We came forward row by row.

"The body of Christ, the bread of heaven," the priest said
The warmth of his hand touched each upturned palm,
and the upturned faces at the rail reflected the light in his eyes.

The bride, resplendent in glistening white, held the flashing silver chalice in her hands.
She was a light on a hill that cannot be hid. The cup was a beacon drawing us forward.
She beamed at each wedding guest as they came to the rail.
"The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation," she said.
Over and over the words were spoken
as the paten and the chalice traveled from person to person.

An immensely pregnant women towing her young son came to share the bread of life.
The boy pawed the ground with one foot and gazing around absent-mindedly.
The woman's six-year-old daughter reached for a wafer
while holding a half-naked Barbie doll in her other hand.

It was a holy moment.

It was like being present at the manger with its rich confusion of angels and livestock, with the living Christ in the center of it all.

Behind this holy family was a very elderly couple.
Even with his cane the man could not make it up the step to the altar rail
so Barbara, our deacon, who was kneeling at the rail, received two wavers.
She brought one to him.

I remembered the words from John as the old man took the wafer.
"This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate,
and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever."
The man and his wife were in the time of life when these words
take on a more immediate meaning. Then Barbara brought the cup of salvation.
The man reached out with his wrinkled hands to connect, again, with the heartbeat of God.

Bread was given to babies, and children, and teenagers and middle aged folk.
We stretched across the timeline of human experience from near the beginning
to close to the end and Jesus encompassed it all.

"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,
and I will raise them up on the last day."

And he will raise us up on a Saturday in August, a foggy fall morning, a starlit Christmas Eve ­or whenever we rehearse that which was, and is, and ever shall be. He will raise us up today.

Give us this day our daily bread.
Give us each day our daily bread.
Help us to know what is being offered to us
and give us the grace to choose eternal life.