“Constant Craving”
Psalm 78:23-29
1 Kings 19:4-8
John 6:30-35
As you may or may not know, we generally follow the scripture readings of the Revised Common Lectionary—in our Sunday School lessons and our worship readings and sermons. The lectionary gives us a three-year cycle of four scripture readings for each Sunday; some Sundays it’s easy to see the connections between the readings, . . . and other Sundays it’s hard to imagine what any one reading has to do with any of the others.
There’s a lot to be said for this practice, especially for people who have a pretty good knowledge of the Bible and folks to come to worship each and every Sunday. It connects us to the rhythms of the church year and to the wider church.
But for everyone else—which may well be most folks—this structure can feel disjointed. The lectionary’s tendency to jump around a lot can make it difficult to see the larger themes of our scriptures and how they connect to our lives. And when the lectionary does try to string together over several weeks readings with a common focus, preachers can be left in the lurch, wondering how to say a different version of the same thing several Sundays in a row.
This is why I have chosen to pull together for today readings and stories from a few different Sundays. Because, while we may not want to hear week after week the stories of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness or Jesus feeding huge crowds with next to nothing, it is absolutely worth noticing and reflecting on our tradition’s many different stories, rituals, and sacraments that involve feeding, being fed, and sharing food.
Think about it. We’ve got:
*Adam and Eve’s attraction to the fruit of the forbidden tree;
*Abraham feeding the three strangers;
*Esau making incredibly bad decisions because he was famished;
*Joseph and his brothers reunited by famine and food and need and power;
*the Israelites wandering in the wilderness—hungry, afraid, and complaining—and God hearing their pleas and covering the ground with manna in the morning and quail in the evening, enough for each day;
*the messenger of God feeding the despairing and exhausted Elijah with angel-food cake and water—not once but twice;
*Elijah saving a widow and her son from starvation;
*Jesus feeding the five thousand and the four thousand with a few loaves and fishes and then having more food leftover than they started with;
*Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, which really upset the religious folks;
*Jesus eating with the disciples on the night before he was executed;
*the Risen Christ made known in the breaking of the bread at Emmaus;
*and grill-chef Jesus serving the disciples a redemption breakfast on the beach.
Is it any wonder that one of our two sacraments involves food and drink?
Is it any wonder that churches delight in coffee hours, community suppers, receptions, and taking meals to the sick and grieving?
Food connects us. Food restores us. Food sustains us. Food delights us.
Which is why we might do well to consider whether all those biblical feedings, all those stories that resolve around eating, being fed, and table fellowship, are literal or metaphorical—whether they are about real food or spiritual food, the kind of food that we put in our mouths to feed our bodies or the kind of food that we take in through connection to the Holy to feed our souls.
Or both.
For all our scriptures have to say about physical hunger, they also speak of another kind of longing, and mystics and saints of all traditions have spoken of it for millennia.
St. Augustine said our hearts would be restless until they reset in God.
Julian of Norwich and St. Teresa of Avila spoke of our souls’ yearning to return to the Absolute Love we come from, a deep inner need for “inning” or divine union.
The Hebrew prophets and the Sufi mystics spoke of a mutual longing—God’s for us and our mostly unrecognized longing for something we can’t always name.
The Canadian singer-songwriter KD Lang called it a “constant craving,” and self-help guru Brene Brown speaks of her own spiritual homesickness, how it has been a constant in her life and how she is finally learning to recognize her need to spend time with the God within her.
The problem for most of us is that often we don’t recognize our hunger for what it is, and so we try to fill it with other things. It has been ever thus, apparently.
In the 55th chapter of Isaiah, God says—again speaking of food:
Hear, everyone who thirsts;
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread
and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
Seek the Holy One while he may be found;
call upon God while she is near.
And still, most of us, more often than not, try—mostly unconsciously—to fill our inner emptiness with things that don’t ultimately satisfy us: things like busyness, success, activities, stuff, and assorted addictions. Not that there’s anything wrong with the people, purposes, and things that make us happy and give us meaning, mind you—but they alone are not enough to heal us, transform us, empower us, sustain us, and fill us with peace.
For that, every spiritual tradition tells us, we need to connect with Spirit, to partake regularly of spiritual food, to seek and nourish a deep connection with the Source of All Love.
We need, says spiritual writer Mirabai Starr, to reclaim our longings. Instead of seeing our longings as problems to be solved or holes to be filled, we need to revere them as gifts from God and honor them as sacred places to be explored.
Jesus tells us that what we most need is not just any bread, but the Bread of Life. That what we need is not the world’s ways of power, greed, and division, but God’s ways of connection, love, compassion, inclusion, and justice for all.
And, until we’re able to more fully live into those kingdom values, God will keep feeding us—meeting us where we are and giving us what we need.
The psalm tells us that God overlooked the Israelites’ ungrateful whining and gave them what they craved.
Elijah went in the strength of that angel food and a couple good naps for forty days and forty nights.
What we need, our scriptures tell us, is to trust in God’s goodness, seek connection with God, and receive God’s gifts. And, as with eating physical food, this is best done on a daily basis, perhaps even—as our Jewish and Muslim siblings teach us—several times a day, through prayer, attention, intention, and connection.
Our God, who is, among other things, apparently like the very best grandmother, loves nothing more than to be with us and feed us until we are full.
And today, as ever, God invites us to share a love feast at Christ’s table. Let us gather with open, grateful, and joyful hearts to receive the Bread of Life and the Cup of Blessing.
Let us take into our hearts and souls the richest food, and then go on our way rejoicing.
