Ben Hicks

From “Got Questions Ministries”

This Sunday is about Communion and Jesus bringing bread from heaven

The Gathering of Manna, Bernardino Luini, c 1520

“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. … This was my first communion. It changed everything.

“Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all but actual food – indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.”

-Sara Miles, Take This Bread

The God of Surprises

“This, you see, is the sacraments. Communion and baptism are God’s external and objective words of love and forgiveness, given in a form which we can receive, for, as we said last week, the sacraments are God’s physical, visible words for God’s physical, visible people…

“But God, you see, our God rarely does what God is supposed to do. For our God is a God of surprises, of upheavals, of reversals. And so rather than do what God is supposed to do, God does the unexpected: instead of pronouncing judgment in the face of our sin and selfishness, God offers mercy; instead of justice, love; instead of condemnation, forgiveness; instead of coming in power, God came in weakness; and instead of giving us a miracle, God gives us God’s own self. For as Martin Luther would remind us, the whole of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are summed up both succinctly and eloquently in the two words we hear when coming to the Table: “for you.” This is Christ’s body, given for you. This is Christ’s blood, shed for you.”

Read more

– David Lose. President of Luther Seminary  

“What is manna? Is it a Hebrew pun on mah hu, or as Everett Fox suggests, “Whaddayacallit”: What is this stuff? Is manna mountains of sweet insect excrement, as proposed by some scholars, or the stuff of legend, of a tale told over the generations about how, in some mysterious way, God gives us life? The New Testament’s version of this question is “Who is he?” – and Christians have told one another, over the generations, that in some mysterious way he is the life that God gives. Our manna is Christ.”

–Gail Ramshaw, Christian Century, July 28, 2009  

At the table

“Blessed are you Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.”

– from the Roman Eucharistic Liturgy

Verse 35 this Sunday is the first of the many “I am” statements in the Gospel of John. Jesus uses the “I am” statements (bread of life, 6:35; light of the world, 8:12; door, 10:7; good shepherd, 10:11; resurrection and life, 11:25; way, truth and life, 14:6; true vine, 15:1) to reveal the dimensions of his relationship to humankind.

From Catherine’s sermon Aug 5, 2012

“The crowd is looking for Jesus after having been fed last week in the feeding of the 5,000. This time they have trailed around the lake to the new location on the other side. The new location is going to provide a new context for the interpretation of the miracles from the previous text. The crowd is still struggling with what happened and Jesus is finding they didn’t get the point.

“Where do we find God? In wonders? In some mighty achievements of our own or of others? John reduces the options to one: we find God in relationship. That relationship is established when we believe that Jesus is the message and messenger from God.

“This relationship is the source of life, eternal life. Belief is involved, in as much as we need to believe that Jesus really does play that role. Faith is then acting on that belief in trust and becoming part of God’s life in the world.

Read more

“The way that I most connect to Jesus through my faith is sacrimentally – a piece of bread essentially transformed into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ that is available for me. It is the opportunity for me to literally to have communion with God himself. And I don’t deserve it, but I get it anyway.” – Jonathan Roumie (“Jesus” in the Chosen taken from the show “Jonathan & Jesus”).

"So the sacraments hold this unusual place in the Church, in that they are both central to our life of faith and yet also can be so very confusing. In an attempt to clarify the connect between the sacraments and our daily lives, I’ll start with a phrase from St. Augustine: “visible words.” I find this phrase attractive because it helps me appreciate Baptism and Communion as the visible, physical counterpoint to the preaching and teaching of the church. That is, the sacraments are the embodiment of the proclaimed and heard gospel in physical form, the gospel given shape in water, bread, and wine. They serve us, then, as physical reminders of what we have heard and believe simply because we are physical creatures and remembering and believing can be so hard. And so we have the gospel preached to us so that we may hear it, and we have the same gospel given to us so that we may taste and touch and feel it with our hands and mouths and bodies.

Read more