Yesterday’s Gospel reading was one of the bread readings – I am the bread of life, Jesus said in the Gospel of John. I think that if He were to have first appeared in China, He might have said “rice” – in Ireland, maybe “potato.” Much of what Jesus said about Himself and the Kingdom of God/Heaven was a metaphor. He broke the bread and poured the wine as a mystical/tangible representation of what was about to happen to Him. Doing God’s kingdom-building will often get you killed, and Jesus knew what He was doing. The problem is that we don’t really understand all that was going on in His mind, and that is where we often go wrong.
I think the bread metaphor is about sustenance. If you aren’t a Christian, the idea still works for God. How are we fed? How does our earthly existence thrive? How are we sustained by our relationship with God? Jesus showed His disciples that He was more than they believed or hoped for, and that wasn’t always a good thing. He hinted at dying at the hands of the Romans, and Peter, who had just called Jesus the Son of God, protested. The way we relate to God often has to do with our faith flavor – God is judge, friend, protector, vindicator; God is a mystery in too many ways for any of us to be sure about how God will respond or what God thinks. To say we know the mind of God is to lie to ourselves; nobody has a direct line to God.
But to be sustained by God is, to me, a step in the right direction. God isn’t our servant or our lapdog; God is the air we breathe and the bread we eat. God isn’t going to favor anyone; God offers guidance and hope to everyone. God isn’t a weapon of war or a device of torture; God is a safe place to land. Our congregations would be wise to consider what God truly might be. In the privacy of our prayers, we can talk to God in any way we choose, but in our public faith lives, I think we need to offer a God of compassion and welcome. To be clear, though, a God of inclusion is not a weak God; there are times when we need to stand strong against those who would use God to injure or attack. God is not a bully, nor is God a wimp. God is…way more than any of us can know.
God can be a whisper or a shout – a place of comfort one week and challenge the next. God can be more than one thing, and God is. We who try to live as followers of God would all be better off if we stopped trying to defend our versions of God at the cost of other people’s rights and freedom because I doubt that God likes being used. After all, one of those 10 Commandments that some Christians are trying to force on America is “You shall not use God’s name in vain.” God doesn’t belong to one church or nation or religion, because God was here first, and we all come from that fount of living water. We never own or use God for our own benefit; we only share God’s love for the benefit of others. That’s our call.
Prayer – Holy God, You have given us Yourself in so many generous ways; we are here to share that generosity with others. Amen.
Today’s art is an x-ray of Supramolecular assemblies of six rubidium and one iron atom. Scanning tunneling microscopy revealed the clear signal of the one iron atom. (Ajayi et al., Nature, 2023).