Whenever I think about food and cooking, I think about my mom. My mom is an excellent cook. In fact, she is one of the best cooks that I have ever had the pleasure to meet. Our sons also thinks that mormor is the best cook, and as we recently visited Denmark we once again were spoiled with her wonderful New Potatoes, Roasted Chicken and the crispiest Karbonader.
My mom has been cooking her whole adult life. She was trained in the kitchen of a manor house and then she continued to educate herself, always trying new recipes, spoiling her family and guests, and bringing smile and comfort to the eyes and mouths of all the helpers and workers who came to her kitchen as helpers on the Chicken farm. They were always treated with a homemade cake or buns – and when they very rarely experienced a stale bought cake due to mom’s business elsewhere, the disappointment was impossible to hide.
Maybe I am biased – because she is my mom.
Maybe I am biased because the food prepared by my mom not only was and is food for the stomach, but even more comfort food for the soul, for the sense of family and belonging. If there is something stable and unifying through my childhood, it has always been my mothers cooking.
My beautiful mom is getting older, in fact she is a young 80-year-old going on 81 in September beautiful woman, and I do know that she probably has done her share of cooking, serving and experimenting with recipes. She cannot entertain and cook like she used to, but she still loves to cook, to serve, to prepare a table for her family. And I love being seated at that table.
Food is not just food.
Food is daily bread.
Food is nourishment and proteins and vitamins, not only for the body but also for the soul.
Food is comfort for body and soul.
Food is sharing and caring.
I know and witness that both of my sisters and I have been blessed with the same kind of cooking, sharing and caring DNA as mom. We are not as good cooks as her, but we try to be, and we tend to our families through our slow cooked loving meals. Maybe not as often as mom did, but the best meals are the homecooked, the slow cooked, the long seated, the talking meals, the family or friends’ meals. As our boys always say with teasing eyes, when I have them both home at the table: “Now mom is happy!”
As I quoted last Sunday from the table grace of Benny Andersen:
“Give me my daily bread to butter,
soft and strength shall meet in my hands
and the sunshine of the butter
shall overcome the darkness of the bread.
Let me touch what we live by:
brown bread, yellow butter and love.”
Yes, I do believe in bread as the living bread, the comforting bread, the sustaining daily bread, the communal bread, the confessional bread, the shared bread.
“I do believe in bread” This is the words of a beautiful and meaningful affirmation of faith suitable for Communion or any service where the primary focus is bread.
Affirmation
I believe that bread comes from grain
that grows in the wind
and the rain
with the farmers’ help
far from the eyes of city folk.
I believe that bread comes from love
the love of God
the love of the farmer
the love of the baker’s hands
the love of those who bring it to me.
I believe that bread can be
and should be broken
and shared
and given to all persons
until all have enough
and then some.
I believe that Jesus loved bread
and took it
and broke it
and blessed it
and fed his disciples
and asked them to feed us forever.
I believe enough in bread
to want it from Jesus
to want it to nurture me
to want his life through it
to want to give life through it.
I believe that his body as bread feeds me
and as part of his body
I want to be bread for others.
I believe the Spirit will help me
as well Jesus’ people. Amen.
I believe in bread, and I do believe that there is a reason for these Bread Summer Sundays. For any of you who have attended the last Sundays in Church you will have noticed that there is a lot of talking about bread!
An endless stream of bread centered gospel readings. Todays is the third bread reading in a row and guess what… there are two more coming! We are not going to run low on bread….
I do believe in bread, and I do believe that the metaphor of bread brings us so much more than crumples to dust of our tables.
I do believe that bread comes from the earth, from grain that grows in the wind, in the sunshine and in the rain with help from farmers far away from the cities and the city folks who sometimes forget how connected we are: grain, rain, sunshine, earth, harvest and table.
I do believe that bread comes from love and with love: as the bread of life, love, and heaven from God, as the bread of life and love from the farmers hard work, the bakers kneading hands and the life and love from all the ones who brings it to us from manufacturers to moms.
I do believe that bread is so much more. I do believe that bread can be and should always be broken and shared and given. In families, in communities, in humanity.
I do believe that Jesus loved bread. I do believe that Jesus loved bread, took it, broke it, blessed it, and shared it, - and asked us to do the same.
I do believe in that bread, is what I want from Jesus, to nurture me, to sustain me and to uplift me.
And I do believe that that bread, given, broken, blessed and shared by Jesus, is a bread that feeds me and wants me to feed others.
How can this be, we might think with our minds of reason and tangibility?
Isn’t it just bread?
“God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives. God does not meet us outside of life in an esoteric manner. Rather, he meets us through life incidents, and particularly through the sacraments of the church. Sacrament, then, is a way of encountering the mystery.” Rachel Held Evans “Searching Sundays.”
We might think that with our current Covid19 restricted communion, seated apart in our pews, struggling to open the lid of the prepared communion set, eating the stale wafer and drinking the nonalcoholic juice, - might be a sad or lesser celebration of communion compared to our usual connected, communal kneeling at the altar.
But no – the words, the symbol of the bread, the promise is the same. Because that is the purpose of a sacrament, - urging and helping us to see, to point to the bread and the wine, the flowers and the food, the lunches and coffee, the fellow congregants and say: pay attention, this matters. This is the bread of life.
The grand esoteric themes of theology have their place, but love takes root in those specific moments when we voluntarily and intentionally enter one another’s lives… and give, bless, share and make our lives holy.
We sing about that bread and that faith every time we have celebrate communion here in church:
By your hand you feed your people
food of angels, heavens bread,
for these gifts we did not labor,
by your grace have we been fed.
In this meal we taste your sweetness,
bread for hunger, wine of peace,
Holy word and holy wisdom
satisfy our deepest need.
Send us now with faith and courage
to the hungry, lost, bereaved.
In our living and our dying,
we become what we receive.
Christs own body, blessed and broken
cup overflowing, life outpoured,
Given as a living token
of your world redeemed, restored.
In our living and our dying, we become what we receive.
These words always struck me when ever we sing this communion hymn. In life, in dying, and in death we become, and we are what we have received, what we have been given, what has been shared with us, and how we have been blessed.
By daily bread, by our mothers cooking, by fine meals of family and belonging, by church lunches and precious communions.
We are fed with the bread of life.
The Reverend Michael Curry, Episcopalian Bishop, tells a story of a young woman who became an Episcopalian in the 1940’es. One Sunday, she invited the man she had been dating to join her at morning service. Both were African American, but the church they attended that day was al white, and right I the heart of the segregated America.
The young man waited in the pews while the congregation went forward to receive communion, anxious because he noticed that everyone in the congregation, was drinking from the same chalice. He had never seen black people and white people drink from the same water fountain, much less the same cup.
His eye stayed on his girlfriend as, after receiving the bread, she waited for the cu.
Finally, the priest lowered it to her lips and said, as he had to all the others “The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which has shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.”
The man decided at that very moment that any church where black and white drank form the same cup had discovered something powerful, something he wanted to be a part of. The couple was bishop Curry’s parents.
This is the power of the bread of life.
The is the power that I do believe in. That we become what we receive.
Amen.