Bread for Life

I once had a look at the Thanksgiving edition of Gourmet magazine.  It featured – guess what? – an exquisite turkey dinner on the cover. Inside this special holiday edition were upscale recipes for, guess what? Stuffing, cranberries, squash, green beans, and pumpkin pie. Although a few snooty ingredients were scattered throughout the magazine (Shitake mushrooms, black truffles), no matter how you stuff it, Gourmet’s Thanksgiving dinner feast was still just good old turkey with dressing and all the trimmings.

At other holiday celebrations, family tastes, traditions, and creativity can alter menus drastically. But not Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving refuses to change. Know anyone serving spaghetti and meatballs today? A Greek salad instead of sweet potatoes? A Caesar salad instead of cranberry sauce? Thanksgiving is the most unrepentantly traditional of all our holidays.

Thanksgiving has also resisted commercialization better than any other feast day. Except for putting a few of those fold-open, accordion turkeys in the middle of your table already groaning with goodies, there are no extraneous gifts to buy or alternative secular deities to appease. Thanksgiving is still today what it always has been: gathering together with good food, good friends, and close family to give thanks for all that life offers.

Although turkey is the star item on today’s menu, most of us will also have a little bread – dinner rolls, perhaps, but most definitely the stuffing inside the bird.

Of course, bread itself is not primarily a holiday food. While it has a place on the Thanksgiving table, it’s also a basic staple of meals all year long. In fact, in the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, we’re told to ask, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Jesus also says, “I am the bread of life.” That’s because Jesus is the foundation for a healthy diet. Sure, we can feast on other things as well. Lord knows I’m looking forward to today’s big feast.  Nothing wrong with indulging in turkey and pumpkin pie.  There’s lots to be thankful for.

Some folks try to live by turkey alone, so to speak. They think they can do without the bread of life. Thanks to Dr. Atkins, we have learned that it’s possible to live without eating actual bread or almost any carb-bearing foods. But the Atkins diet is no friend of athletes.

Stan Purdum, author of two books about bicycling (Roll Around Heaven All Day and Playing in Traffic), was trying to lose some weight a few years ago. So he tried the Atkins diet. A few days into it, he set out to ride his bicycle on a 15-mile route that he’d ridden many times before. He tells what happened:

“From the first push on the pedals, I noticed that I felt drained. In fact, in the first mile of this ride I felt the way I normally feel at the end of a 50-mile jaunt. Nonetheless, I persevered, thinking my energy might kick in, but after about three miles, riding seemed like a terrible idea, and I took a direct path home, logging a total of less than five miles for the entire excursion. To use a car metaphor, I felt as if I were hitting on only two cylinders instead of the usual eight. I had similar experiences on two more rides I tried during that diet; long rides were out of the question and even short ones were enervating. I soon gave Dr. Atkins the boot.”

Likewise, it’s possible to be a spiritual (though not Christian) person without eating the bread of life, but such spirituality tends to be limp, unfocused and lacking in the kind of energy that Jesus provides. Certainly one thing Jesus did mean when he said he was the bread of life is that our most basic and important human longings are met in him. He is the foundation for a healthy spiritual diet.

To be a Christian, we need Jesus. Sounds axiomatic, but you’d be surprised at how many people would love to be Christians without having to deal with Jesus, at least a Jesus who claimed, or for whom claims were made, to be the Son of God.

Another possible distortion of our spiritual lives is that we eat so much junk food that the bread of life ceases to be our mainstay. This is different from the previous distortion of not eating any bread at all in that in this case there is no deliberate attempt to avoid bread, but rather that we fill up on so many empty calorie delicacies that we leave no room for truly nutritional things. Thus, while appearing to have eaten too much, we actually are starving for the nutrients we need.

In terms of the spiritual life, we do the same thing when we give lip service to our faith, but don’t bother with such ways of dining on the bread of life as praying, Bible reading, intentionally doing good deeds, giving to the church, participating in the Lord’s Supper, and partaking of the other means of sustenance that God provides through Jesus.

Through means such as these God has made it possible for us to be continually nourished by the bread of life. On this Thanksgiving Day, we will sit down at tables laden with all sorts of delicious food items. We will give thanks for all of it. But we’re not going to be eating turkey every day for the rest of our lives. For the next two weeks, maybe. But not the rest of our lives. We’re not going to be eating cranberries again for perhaps another four weeks at Christmas, or maybe not until next Thanksgiving. And yams? Are you kidding?

So we’re thankful for all of these things. But we’re thankful most of all that we have daily bread, both in a real sense, and in a spiritual sense. We get blessed in so many ways — but the one constant we can count on is Jesus, our daily bread. Jesus is the most nutritious food of all – and we better not try doing without him.  So remember to invite the Bread of Life to your table today – and every day.  Bon appetit! And Happy Thanksgiving!