Ephesians 3.14-21, John 6.1-14
Written by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Ancient Faith blog, 1 August 2011
edited by John Davies
for The Ninth Sunday of Trinity, 28 July 2024, Austwick, Keasden
Today’s service falls at Lammastide. Lammas is that ancient English Christian custom, celebrated on August 1st, of baking a first loaf of bread from the flour of that harvest and then bringing it to church to have it blessed. It’s been rather eclipsed by our harvest festivals these days, but as we all know, harvest time comes earlier than September or October, and our farmers have been busy in the fields and the lanes over recent weeks.
“Lammas,” is a compound word formed from the phrase “loaf mass.” A bit like Michaelmas for the feast of the Archangel Michael in November, or Candlemas for the feast of Christ’s Presentation in February, or of course Christmas, focussing on the feast of Christ’s nativity. Today is Lammas, a day to focus on bread.
Blessing a loaf of bread in church may sound a bit odd to some. What’s so special about bread? Well, maybe the point is this: there’s nothing particularly special abut bread. It is bread’s very ordinariness which makes it so blessed.
When Christians remove God out of the ordinary, we lose something valuable from our faith. Just as damaging as a denial of God or even a rejection of coming to church, is the relegation of spiritual things to one compartment of our lives. When we easily understand why God would bless someone’s heart and soul, but fail to grasp why He would bless salt or a loaf of bread.
Yet, if we think about when God touches us in the Church most clearly, it is precisely through objects like this, in the most primal, elemental, basic and foundational stuff of everyday life: water, wine, oil, bread, cloth, hands, hair, dirt, stone, language, fire, wax, wood. All of these are to be found in the sacramental, mysterious life of the Church, and it is through them that the divine presence is communicated to us. Through these things, we connect to God.
The ancient Celtic Christians had prayers for rather ordinary things. Newborn babies were washed by dipping them three times in the water, while saying the names of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - it was like a kitchen-sink baptism. They also had prayers for rowing boats, walking, giving birth, looking after the cows, and lighting fires. It is a joy of our Christian life to experience this sense of God’s presence in the mundane, ordinary moments of life.
So bread, along with wine, is one of the two physical everyday things at the very centre of what it means to be Christians in communion with our God.
With a couple of exceptions in scripture like God sending Manna from heaven and Jesus feeding the five thousand, bread is always the result of the work of human people. It is baked in an oven, tended by a baker, who has formed the bread out of flour, salt, water and yeast. And the flour is from wheat, which is harvested by people. The salt is distilled from the sea or dug out of the ground, the water is drawn from its source, and the yeast is collected and propagated. At every stage, human activity is required for there to be bread.
Yet there would be no wheat without God, nor would there be water, salt or yeast. Even the strength and knowledge of the baker find their ultimate source in God, to say nothing of his very existence. And God created the physical laws according to which the matter of the universe normally operates. So it is clear that at every stage of its development, divine activity is required for there to be bread.
Bread is a sign of God and man working together. Far from solely being our Creator and our Lord, God also joins us as our co-worker, standing next to us in the most basic and ordinary moments and tasks of life.
Bread is also our nourishment. Nearly every diet in every culture in the world includes bread in some form. Even the most meagre of diets - bread and water - includes bread. Bread goes to the very heart of human life.
It is therefore no coincidence that when the Lord chose the means to make His Body available to us as food, as the divine Eucharist, He chose to do it through bread.
This bread we are about to receive. It was made with the hands and the knowledge of a baker, and at the same time, it is the fruit of the divine Energy of God in His creation. And it is this ordinary product, which comes from the ground, from the water, from the air, and from seed, which is transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, but in synergy with the prayers of the holy people of God, the royal nation of priests which is the Church - this is what now holds the awesome mystery of the wholeness of the Godhead within itself.
Christian life truly is so very intimate. Its power is that it spiritually intertwines the uncreated God with the created world. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the most basic, fundamental, everyday things become for us the vehicles for the communication of what is truly beyond our ability to describe it.
In the miracle we’ve heard retold to us today, maybe the greater lesson is not so much what Jesus did in turning the boy’s five barley loaves into enough for 5,000 and more, but in what the boy did - offering up these ordinary modest things of life to be used for divine purposes.
Maybe that is all that God asks us to do - to offer up to him the ordinary modest things of our lives, in faith that he will take whatever we offer in the middle of each ordinary day, and use it for his divine purposes.
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