Ephesians 3.14-21, John 6.1-21
Ninth Sunday after Trinity 29 July 2018
Keasden (United Service)
When Barbara the Methodist minister was told her church building was going to be sold off and not replaced, she had to use her loaf.
“I want you to carry on serving in the centre of Liverpool,” said the Methodist superintendent. Lacking the usual ingredients for a ministry: no building, no congregation, Barbara had to start from scratch.
So for two years, commuting into the city, Barbara spent each day walking the streets getting to know the homeless people, sitting in coffee shops getting to know the office workers and the retireds, popping into the university refectories to get alongside students and staff, spending not money, but time with people in the city centre shops, chatting with taxi drivers waiting at their ranks.
Then one day the word ‘bread’ popped into Barbara’s head. She wasn’t sure what it meant at first, but she knew where it had come from. And so she kept it there in her head, this image of this bread, and she let her encounters with the city’s people moisten and stir the idea, in prayer she kneaded it, through contemplation and consideration of the scriptures she leavened it; and so this image of bread in her heart and her head rose, until the day when the opportunity came for Barbara to rent a room - a room which, she was sure by then, she would bake bread in.
The room was offered to Barbara by a feminist cooperative, a group of women who ran a radical bookshop: unlikely allies, maybe, who found in Barbara and her bread idea some common ground.
Funding to install a catering-size kitchen came along with the miraculous discovery that almost the exact amount she needed had been left in a legacy for Methodism in the city centre.
And so was born what soon became known as ‘The Bread Church’.
Who came along to The Bread Church? The people Barbara had got to know on the streets, in the coffee bars and cafeterias, at the shop counters, over the preceding years.
And what did they do at The Bread Church? Coming and going as their lifestyles and timetables led them, through every day of the week they baked bread together. Sitting down around a large central table, each lunchtime they shared in a moveable feast, of the bread they’d baked together and the soup they had prepared.
And what did they talk about as they sat alongside each other, homeless man and college professor, shop girl and business lawyer, transgendered musician and Catholic nun? Anything and everything, finding common ground. [1]
And for those who wanted it, at a certain point in the ever-shifting day, there would be very simple prayers or reflections which drew all their disparate conversations together and blessed them even more.
Some time back Barbara moved on to another role in the Methodist Church, with the Touchstone project in Bradford; but the Bread Church - which is actually named ‘Somewhere Else’ - carries on daily gathering people from across all sorts of cultural and social divides to knead and shape the bread and explore their experience together. Each day they are encouraged to bake two loaves: one for themselves and one to share with someone else as they feel led, to take away and give away to another person of their choice. [2]
That was a story about Barbara using her loaf. She was thrown into an unprecedented situation and she responded in the simplest of ways - by befriending, listening … and taking bread together.
It’s a great story for helping us think about how we can be faithful Christians in our place here, today. We’re a long way from the multicultural inner city but the simplest of ways still apply here. Befriending, listening, and sharing bread. There’s nothing complicated about living out the Christian life, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ where we are. We've overcomplicated it over the years by, for example, turning a simple meal to which Jesus invites everybody into a pious ceremony with terms and conditions on those who can take part. Maybe we should simplify our communion.
Who are we in the story of the feeding of the five thousand? When Jesus asks us the question, how can we feed these people? often in the church we respond like the disciple Philip, by worrying about practicalities and obsessing about finance, saying, “we’ve never done that before so it cannot work,” “we’ll never be able to afford it.”… But there was the disciple Andrew, getting himself out among the people, befriending, listening … and finding bread and fishes in the backpack of a young boy. Could he be our model here?
Or perhaps we’d rather see ourselves as the young boy himself. One of the crowd, going about his day. Maybe on his way back from an errand for his mother with the family’s food supply. Everyday Christians, we don’t see ourselves as being any great shakes in the work of bringing the good news of Jesus to the world. But Jesus has other ideas about you and me, and us. Jesus will take what we have, however modest or unformed that may be, our own character, our own gifts; if we’re willing to share them then he will use them to feed the people.
There's a saying in Liverpool, "Use your loaf even if it's half-baked.” That’s what I’m talking about here. Be confident that you as an individual and we as congregations, already have all we need to to effectively be the Christian presence in these parts. It may not be perfect. But it is enough for Jesus to use in the miraculous way he does.
How do we show and share the love of Christ in this place? It’s simple. By befriending, by listening … and by sharing bread together.
Notes
This is a rewrite of a previous sermon, The bread of life 1: Barbara uses her loaf (Somerset, 2015),
[1] Barbara Glasson, I Am Somewhere Else, tells the story of the beginnings of ‘The Bread Church’. I’m writing about it here from memory so any inaccuracies are mine. Despite my Amazon links here, please support News from Nowhere, Radical & Community Bookshop, Liverpool.
[2] Details of the current activities of ‘The Bread Church’ can be found on the Somewhere Else website.
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