The Best Bread

Did you know that there is a Museum of Burnt Food located in Arlington, Massachusetts? That’s right – the Museum of Burnt Food. It’s home to around fifty thousand specimens of charred food. Celebrating the art of culinary disaster, they say you’ll have a smokin’ good time when you visit. There’s no accounting for taste – no pun intended.

One exhibit is titled Free-Standing Hot Apple Cider, aka, Hot Apple Cinder.  The artist had left a pot of cider brewing on the stove, then was distracted by a long telephone call.  When she returned to the stove and cleared away the smoke, she discovered a gem: solid, free-standing apple cider inside a totally blackened pot.  This hot apple cinder became the very first exhibit in the Museum of Burnt Food.

So if you happen to be a master of disaster in the kitchen, consider donating one of your culinary fiascos to the Museum of Burnt Food.  Art aficionados can then enjoy your creation for years to come.

Food is very important in our lives, isn’t it?  I agree with the wit who said, “Coffee makes it possible to get out of bed in the morning. Chocolate makes it worth it.”

Last week we saw Jesus feed 5,000 hungry men and an unknown number of women and children with just 5 barley loaves and 2 small fish. Naturally, the crowd was amazed. In fact, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”

Then John adds, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.”

But many of the people got in boats and came after him. When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”

Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils,” he said, “but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”

Do you know what it is to hunger for the food that never spoils – that is, the bread of life? Not the bread you buy at Publix or Whole Foods. Do you hunger for the bread only Christ can supply?

You know what physical hunger is. Of course, the hunger pangs that most of us have known have only been a minor inconvenience. But we do know a little about physical hunger. Some of us barely finish lunch before we start thinking about dinner. Obviously we get hungry a lot. But do we get hungry for that which will truly satisfy us? We know about physical hunger. But do we know about spiritual hunger?

Many of us have a deep emptiness within that nothing physical will ever fill. There is something missing from our lives and in its place we have substituted all sorts of other things – material things, power, sex, accomplishment – but none of these ever really satisfies. We always want more.

Jack Higgens, author of such successful novels as The Eagle Has Landed, was asked what he would like to have known as a boy. His answer: “That when you get to the top, there’s nothing there.”  That’s been the experience of many high achievers.  “When you get to the top, there’s nothing there.”

Many people today look deep within their hearts and find nothing but a deep emptiness there. They ask questions such as: Why are we here? Where are we headed? What does it all mean? For some folks there are no satisfying answers to those questions.

Back in the ‘40s and ‘50s there was a brilliant French writer who spoke for many of the best-educated young people of his generation. His name was Albert Camus. Camus’ view was that life is ultimately absurd. There’s no reason to life, he concluded, no meaning, no purpose behind it all. His contention was that it was foolishness for any person to try to predict the way their life will go. We are at the mercy of blind chance.

Camus’ own death seems to have been a weird fulfillment of his contention about life. It was his plan to board a train for Paris, but was convinced to travel by car with his publisher instead. Not long thereafter, his mangled, motionless body was found sprawled on the back seat of the car after his publisher had attempted to swing a curve at ninety miles an hour. The brightest light in French literature, a Nobel Prize winner, went out in a moment and the Parisian newspapers carried this headline: Absurd!

If we believe that we are dependent solely upon reason, we, too, must admit that Camus was right, that life is ultimately absurd, that there is no reason in it.

About the same time Camus was writing, theologian Paul Tillich was reminding us that three fears have gripped mankind. Before the Christian era it was the fear of death. During the middle ages, it was the fear of guilt. Today, Tillich said, it is the fear of meaninglessness. The mad search for escape, for nirvana, for death itself, is the result of that fear. There is no joy, there is only fun. There is no peace, there is only aspirin. There is no hope, there is only alcohol or some other form of narcotic.

If life is absurd, no matter which way we turn will turn out to be the wrong one. That was the basic philosophy of Albert Camus. It is sad that Camus did not turn to Jesus.

For it was to fill this emptiness, this meaninglessness, that Christ came into the world.  “I am the bread of life . . .” says Jesus. You can search all over this earth to find that one thing that is missing in your life, but until you feed on Jesus, you will never be satisfied.

A woman and her young son were standing in line at Walmart one day. The boy was unhappy because he saw something he wanted and his mother was not allowing him to get it. His disappointment began to crescendo, and she suddenly blurted out: “What can I tell you, Brandon? Life sucks, and then you die.”

Imagine having that as a truth on which you were operating your life. The kind of truths we tell ourselves, and our children, are molding us and the future generation. The truth is that God created a good world, and life is good!  When we live it for God and base our lives on his Word, life makes sense because it is based on the truth.  And because your life is based on the truth, it works.

“I am the bread of life,” says Jesus. What does that mean to you? Author Max Lucado gives us a new interpretation of the meaning of that phrase. He writes, “The grain-to-bread process is a demanding one. The seed must be planted before it can grow. When the grain is ripe, it must be cut down and ground into flour. Before it can become bread, it must pass through the oven. Bread is the end result of planting, harvesting and heating.

“Jesus endured an identical process,” writes Lucado, “He was born into this world. He was cut down, bruised and beaten on the threshing floor of Calvary. He passed through the fire of God’s wrath, for our sake. He suffered because of others’ sins, the Righteous One for the unrighteous ones. He went through it all – was put to death and then made alive – to bring us to God.” Jesus lived up to the title of Bread of Life. But an unopened loaf does a person no good.

Have you received the bread?