One Wafer To Feed the World

by Lance Helms in Sermons

Preached at Gentle Spirit Christian Church, Atlanta, Ga.
Reading: John 6:35, 41-51

As usual, Jesus is doing a lot here. He’s talking about bread, a powerful symbol of sustenance – but one that could also accidentally kill – and also one that’s incredibly democratic. Everyone in that time ate bread. Back then, having a bit of bread was the ultimate proof that you could go on for at least one more day.

And isn’t that exactly how it feels when we realize we have God on our side? Our faith is proof that no matter what else may be tugging at us in the world, we have the strength to go on for at least one more day.

Bread doesn’t mean quite the same thing to an American as it did to the people of Jesus’ time. But the imagery of bread still resonates. It wasn’t that long ago that “bread” was an accepted slang term for money. And as it turns out, that’s an idea that actually goes all the way back to ancient Egypt.

Here are some fun facts about bread from the website of Damascus Bakeries, a Brooklyn baker of flatbreads such as pita and lavash.

  • Breads, and particularly flatbreads, have been around for centuries. Flatbreads date back to the Ancient Egyptians. Pita bread has been in existence for at least 12,000 years in Middle-Eastern countries.
  • Bread was so important to the Egyptian way of life that it was used as a type of currency. Even more interesting is the fact they revered it so much they would often place it in the tombs of their dead.
  • Bread knows no cultural bounds. Across nearly every race, country and religion, bread is seen as a peace offering, and is used in countless religious ceremonies.
  • The name “sandwich” came from the Earl of Sandwich. He granted the use of his name for this novel concept of meat between bread way back in the 1700s, and it’s persevered as a favorite food of people around the world.
  • The worst idea since sliced bread? Banning it. In 1943 a member of the U.S. government decided to ban sliced bread, for reasons that still remain unclear. It was an unpopular idea to say the least, lasting only a short time.
  • But sliced bread hasn’t been around forever. In fact, it won’t celebrate its 100th anniversary until 2028.
  • Most cultures have a starch that sustains them. It’s often rice or some other grain, and it’s no accident that beans and rice are a centuries-old staple, because together they can provide a complete protein comprised of the nine essential amino acids.

For other cultures, potatoes might be that starch. We Americans consume lots of potatoes in the form of french fries while still being deficient in consumption of vegetables (including non-fried potatoes) with real nutritional impact.

And even though the average American eats about 124 pounds of potatoes per year, the average German easily outpaces us, eating about twice as much, according to the Idaho Potato Museum.

According to a CNN report, Germans have more bakeries and eat more varieties of bread than most other countries in the world.

According to the bread register of the German Institute for Bread, there are now more than 3,200 officially recognized types of bread in the country.

Bread is a staple for most meals in Germany: at breakfast, break-time (sometimes called Pausenbrot, or “break bread”) and dinner or Abendbrot, literally the “bread of the evening.”

“It sells like sliced bread” is a German proverb describing fast-selling items.

There are German standards for bread quality and sizes, and each year the German Institute for Bread announces its “bread of the year.”

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But what happens when a staple that is so critical to the diet of a people becomes scarce? Does that trigger a famine? It can, with a little help. Here’s how.

According to the global Christian humanitarian organization World Vision, a food crisis becomes a famine when there’s so little food in the region that it causes large-scale malnutrition, starvation, and death. Not all food crises become famines.
A famine is declared when the following criteria are met:

  • At least 20% of households in a given area face extreme food shortages with limited ability to cope.
  • More than 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition.
  • At least two deaths per 10,000 people occur each day as a result of hunger or a combination of hunger and illness.

These criteria constitute Phase 5 of a now-globally recognized standard in assessing a country’s food security. Those phases being:

  • Minimal or no stress in finding food
  • People facing stress
  • Food crisis
  • Emergency
  • Catastrophe or famine

Everyone here is old enough to remember the famine in Ethiopia of the 1980s. I was listening to the song “We Are the World” not long ago and marveling at how many amazing musicians gathered in that recording studio to “Make a better day, just you and me.”

If we were asked by a young person what happened to cause the famine, I think most of us would answer that there was an extreme drought that left many people stranded in areas where they didn’t have access to food. And we’d have fond memories of how the world rallied to alleviate the suffering.

But that’s not the whole story. Yes there was a recurring drought, and failed harvests, and food scarcity. But there was also a years-long civil war underway, and by the mid-80s the Ethiopian government had collectivized agriculture in such a way that it left the food system vulnerable, according to the Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights. Then the droughts came.

Once international aid started arriving, both sides in the conflict figured out how to weaponize it. The government, which in 1985 received 90 percent of all the international aid, took the opportunity to resettle and displace rebels into famine relief camps. The relocation effort alone resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.

Meanwhile, the rebel groups sold food shipments and used the profits to buy weapons.

# # #

Fast-forward to today, and a UN-backed assessment says almost half a million Palestinians across Gaza are still facing “catastrophic levels” of hunger and that a “high risk” of famine persists as long as the Israel-Hamas war continues and humanitarian access is restricted.

However, the report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the authority on those five phases I talked about a minute ago — says the available evidence does not indicate a famine is currently occurring in northern Gaza.

The previous assessment in March had projected that one was imminent in the area.

The amount of food and other aid allowed into the north has increased since then, and nutrition, water, sanitation and health services have been stepped up, the report says.

But it warns that food availability in the south and central Gaza has been significantly reduced due to the closure of the Rafah border crossing and the displacement of more than one million people from the city of Rafah since early May, when Israel launched a ground operation there.

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said the report “paints a stark picture of ongoing hunger” and showed the critical importance of sustained humanitarian access.

United Nations officials have blamed the situation on Israeli military restrictions on aid deliveries, the ongoing hostilities and the breakdown of law and order.

Israel insists there are no limits to the amount of aid that can be delivered into and across Gaza and blames U.N. agencies for failing to distribute supplies. It also accuses Hamas of stealing aid, which the group denies.

Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, more than 37,650 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

# # #

For the people suffering in Gaza, what is the bread of life supposed to look like? How exactly is the bread of heaven supposed to help a people who are literally starving to death? And what, by the way, does the bread of life mean to a Muslim? Would it magically be able to fill all 2 million of their bellies if they were Christians?

What, in this seemingly intractable situation, are we called by God in the name of Jesus to do?

For starters, we’ve learned that any narrative we’ve internalized about famine being a thing that only happens when nature fails humanity isn’t the full truth. Instead, the good and bad news about famine is that it’s a state of human suffering that most often has its roots in human behaviors — and not individual ones, but collective ones. The ones done in the name of some political goal.

Remember this saying? “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

The bread of life is in that statement. The power of love happens between two people. The love of power happens when a few people want control over many people. If you had a piece of bread and a hungry person were in your midst, what would you do? But there are hungry people all over the world right now, sharing the same planet with wealthy nations, and somehow these nations can’t figure out how to be their sibling’s keeper.

This is in a world where you can get almost anything in the world delivered to your doorstep. A world where a chef got so frustrated with the failure of international aid to simply feed suffering people that he started cooking meals in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.

That effort quickly became an organization now called World Central Kitchen, and thanks to Chef Jose Andres, they’ve contributed to the provision of meals in Australia, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, the United States, Turkey, Syria, and Palestine.

In January 2019, they opened a restaurant on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, D.C., to feed federal workers that were furloughed during the government shutdown. They also lost seven employees in Gaza — where they had provided more than 32 million meals by March — and one in Ukraine, where at one time they had 8 kitchens operating.

I don’t know what kind of food they’re cooking, but I know it’s the bread of life. Chef Andres’ Twitter bio says simply:

We all are Citizens of the World. What’s good for you, must be good for all. If you are lost, share a plate of food with a stranger… you will find who you are.

We’ve talked a little in this congregation about what our stance on the situation in Gaza might be. And I think it’s fair to say that if anyone asked us if we were on the side of the people of Gaza, many of us would say yes. And if anyone asked us if we were on the side of the people of Israel, many of us would say yes. But where we might struggle is if someone asked us if we were on the side of Hamas, or on the side of the Israeli government.

After all, I’m not even sure I’m on the side of my own government. Here’s what I mean by that: I’m on the side of the American people. The government’s job is to be of the people, by the people and for the people. The president and all the other folks who we expect to bring that into being don’t swear an oath to the government. They swear to uphold the Constitution. And the Constitution lays down some very important ground rules for how we’ll all relate to each as we strive to live in a more perfect union. The only entity who can really make that happen is the American people. It’s you and me.

# # #

Do you ever wonder why communion wafers are so bland? One explanation is that it’s to reinforce the simplicity of the gift and to encourage us to look beyond ourselves. Another is that it’s to underscore the Passover themes in the biblical accounts of the Last Supper, in which the bread would have been unleavened.

Another is that the unleavened bread symbolizes sincerity, purity and integrity – in opposition to the sin, impurity and hypocrisy supposedly symbolized by yeast or leaven.

Every Sunday when we struggle with the packaging of our communion wafers and the grape juice that accompanies them, I think about how unassuming that little wafer is, and then how by the end of our worship service it becomes both holy and also universally available to anyone who comes to the Lord’s Table.

So if the physical wafer itself brings no flavor, what exactly does the bread of life taste like?

I think it tastes like what happens in our hearts, minds and souls when we ingest that tiny, fragile little wafer and spend at least that moment — which by the way is an eternity to God — not just believing in the Transfiguration and experiencing God’s presence, but also allowing ourselves to be transported far away from what we thought was important before we came to that Table.

Instead, we get closer to the love of God and a faith that the real truth of this moment is that we have to be the ones who stand firm and say that we will never be on the side of those who go to war for power — whether they do it in the name of Hamas, or Israel, or Russia, or the United States of America.

For me, the bread of life tastes like anything but a flavor. It tastes like the feeling of a hug, it tastes like the sound of someone whispering in your ear that you are loved just as you are, it tastes like the smell of a plate of food served to someone who is hungry, it tastes like the feeling of looking at someone who is a child of God with nothing but unleavened love.

The bread of life comes to us in many forms, and we gather here to experience it first-hand. We experience it in the Word, we experience it in the fellowship, and we experience it at the Lord’s Table.

And with the bread of life sustaining our spirits, is there really anything we can’t do once we walk away from this place?

I take inspiration from James Baldwin, whose 100th birthday would have been last Friday, who once said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

With the bread of life to sustain us, is there really anything we can’t face?

God bless you this morning.

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