Fifty Years of Living Bread

Scripture — John 6:51-58 (NRSV)

Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 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.”

Devotion

If you want to know why on this particular upcoming Sunday, instead of continuing our progression through Mark, we take a little vacation to John 6, you can read a devotional I wrote in 2021 which also contains one of my all-time favorite stories that really happened. It’s called “When Alan Ate Our Sins.” And if you want to read a bit more about the theology behind John 6, you can check out another devotional I wrote in 2021 while discussing John 6, called “Bread of Heaven.”

I don’t actually remember my very first Eucharist, but it would have happened as a child in a Methodist church in Northern Indiana. I could tell you which church, in fact, because we attended there from the time I was six months old until I was eight, and I was certainly taking Communion by the time I left. (Methodism does not have any particular “age of accountability” or First Communion requirement; it is up to individual parents and children to discern when they are ready.) About all I can tell you is that we had tiny cubes of bread and individual glasses of grape juice, passed around on trays.

When I was a pre-teen, I used to sit in the balcony of the church we were then attending with my brother—my dad was the pastor and my mom was the choir director, and they trusted us to sit there during the service while they were both up front. We mostly behaved ourselves, but we did sometimes take extra cubes of bread at Communion (and once we went into my dad’s office after church and ate all the extra Jesus bread. We got a small theological lecture.)

When I went to college, to a Lutheran school, I had wine in Communion for the first time. I remember walking back to my seat feeling as though someone had taken the top off my head.

In seminary, I began to learn about the history of the Wesleys and their belief that Christians should receive Holy Communion as often as possible as an aid to their spiritual journeys. (I wrote about that at more length here.) At the beginning of 1995, inspired by the example of John and Charles Wesley, I began to receive the Eucharist weekly. More or less, it has been about 1500 weekly Eucharists since.

And then I became a pastor. My first Lord’s Supper presiding as a Methodist pastor was in the fall of 1997. I can still feel the way the load of bread felt as I broke it in my hands and held it up.

When my husband and I got married, twenty-one years ago, we wanted the Eucharist at our wedding. It was an ecumenical affair; my dad performed the ceremony, but two other Methodist pastors and a Mennonite assisted him, and our wedding party included Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and a Roman Catholic. Much discussion ensued over whether we would use wine or grape juice in the wedding Eucharist. (We ended up using grape juice.) That debate eventually formed the impetus for my dissertation, book, and much of the rest of my academic life.

Then, in 2016, through a lengthy story that is much too long to tell here and which wove through a number of these Eucharists, I became an Episcopal priest. At my first Eucharist presiding as a priest, I accidentally consecrated the entire container of Communion wafers instead of the twenty or so actually needed for the service. So much extra Jesus! (After all, God is extravagant, right?)

If you asked me to explain everything Jesus means in John 6, I am not sure I could tell you. But for over fifty years I have eaten the flesh of the Lord, and I have drunk the blood Jesus shed for me, and I have abided in him, and I have faith that I will be with him forever.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Jesus the Bread of Life (John 6).