Where Soul Meets Body

Sermon for The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14

Saint Peter's | Arlington, VA

John 6:35,41-51

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever…”

It’s no coincidence these words follow after the feeding of the five thousand, which we heard just two weeks ago. A lofty discourse is paired alongside a tangible sign. It is something abstract rooted in something concrete.

In this morning’s lesson, there’s a kind of collision between what is material and immaterial. For the Hebrew people on a journey through the desert, as Jesus references, the collision is between the bread that falls from heaven to keep them from starving and the promise of life beyond the scarcity they’ve known while enslaved in Egypt.

And for this crowd Jesus addresses it’s much the same. They’ve literally scrambled up a mountainside in pursuit of hope. Seeking something that will once again bring liberation. But after being in a deserted place for some time, they’re hungry. So, quite naturally, Jesus provides loaves of bread to feed bodies in need. Because it’s not enough to merely nourish the soul while ignoring hunger pangs and food insecurity. People need to eat. But that’s not all... Because “We do not live by bread alone,” Jesus begins to lead the crowd toward a much more expansive way of nourishing life.

We of course have some experience of our own with this, too.

Each month, a team of volunteers distributes food throughout Arlington. For many years now, the community of Saint Peter’s has faithfully partnered together with Meals on Wheels to ensure our neighbors have food to eat. I had the privilege of joining alongside this steadfast team earlier this week—and you can too: on the first Wednesday of every month, more specifically. 10:30am. Additional volunteers are always needed!

Delivering those meals is a remarkably simple-and-yet-profound act. Bringing food to nourish bodies but doing so as an outpouring of a love that is eternal. When those meals are lovingly prepared and distributed, something of heaven meets something of earth. It is an act of love that nourishes both body and soul.

This intersection is actually quite integral to who we are. For church folk like us, holding both corporeal and incorporeal realities together is what we do. In our faith we claim that we are bodies and yet more than bodies—and at the center of it all is belovedness.

This is really no small thing. Because all-too-often we hear different messages.

One story suggests persons are no more than bodies. So, they are reduced to appearance, or worse, to mere chattel. Things go off the rails pretty quickly. Soon enough it’s suggested that only some bodies matter and human hierarchies are constructed: as though there isn’t enough belovedness to go around for everyone.

Another story suggests we’re actually no more than spiritual beings. That our true selves are trapped in these physical prisons of skin and bone. It would have us believe that all flesh is wicked and merely a hinderance to real transcendence. So, in the meantime, as this story goes, there’s really no need to care for bodies or even the earth for that matter. Because it’s all gonna burn up eventually and we’ll just fly away—“oh glory, by and by.”

What both of these stories miss is that God loves the world. And when human persons were created in enfleshed bodies, God looked and said “it is very good.” That’s the story we hold to. It’s our bread and butter, if you will.

In the gospel this morning, Jesus addressees those with a hunger they can’t quite put into words. Perhaps for a sense of dignity, perhaps for transcendence from the challenges of life. Whatever the reason, Jesus says “I am.” And in evoking God’s divine presence revealed to Moses in a burning bush, he declares himself to be what reveals a source of life that will sustain for eternity. But because he cares for people in their temporal existence, too: it is not merely an empty claim. Quite literally, but has some skin in the game.

Both this divine identity and the way in which he lives make know to us the way to eternal life. It’s this fusion together of spiritual presence and embodied action that Jesus has in mind when he says “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

This living bread guides us toward a new way of being in the world. Rather than just a spiritual quest seeking release from the body, our faith calls us to fully enter into the matter and matters around us. It is a call to inhabit our lives in such a way that the whole of this world becomes inhabited with the very Spirit of God. To become our selves living bread that is lovingly blessed, broken, and freely given for the life of the world. Even here and now in this time.

Much like the incarnate body of Christ, the fullness of life for which we are created is one where the soul meets body. As the writer of Ephesians neatly summarizes: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

Amen