Jesus: The Breakfast of Champions
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14
Fr. Thomas C. Seitz, Jr.
Jesus: The Breakfast of Champions
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Children’s sermon:
When I was your age, one of the most popular breakfast cereals was Wheaties because it claimed to be the “Breakfast of Champions,” and who doesn’t want to be a champion! It could boast that it was the breakfast of champions because Wheaties are made from toasted 100% whole wheat flakes to help keep you fueled, along with B vitamins to help unlock your energy so that you can be a champion too. Many champion athletes who eat Wheaties are pictured on the front of the cereal box. I’m sure that some of the athletes who won gold medals in this year’s Olympics will be pictured on future boxes of Wheaties.
Muhammad Ali is pictured on the front of this Wheaties box because he was a three-time world heavyweight boxing champion and a champion for the dignity of every human being. He ate Wheaties to help give him the energy he needed to become such a champion.
Today we heard about an even more remarkable breakfast food that angels prepared for Elijah to eat. The cakes that Elijah ate were so full of energy that he was able to walk 200 miles through the desert for forty days without eating anything else.
This would normally be impossible with Wheaties or any other natural food. Jesus explains how it worked. The cakes that Elijah ate were out of this world. They were unique, supernatural, super-cakes. They were the bread of life. You can’t buy those cakes at Publix. You can only get them here at God’s own heavenly training table or at any other training table where bread is offered, broken and shared in remembrance of Jesus, who gave his life so that we might consume his life and become more and more like him. Jesus is not just a picture on a box of cereal or on a package of breakfast bars or on a loaf of bread. Jesus is the cereal, the energy bar, the bread of life.
Continues with adult sermon:
Jesus commanded us to eat bread in remembrance of him so that he might live inside of us so that we would be able to do even greater things than he did. And that’s promising a lot! Many people thought Jesus’ promise was too big to swallow. But for those of us who do believe, the most important meal we can ever enjoy is the one we share here each Sunday.
Like Elijah, the bread we eat is so full of energy that it gives us the strength to do whatever God asks us to do in the week ahead, to be his champion at home, at school, and everywhere else we go.
Elijah reminds us that being a disciple of Jesus will, at least from time to time, exhaust us completely: physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, socially. Elijah had just pulled off an incredible, single-handed, victory for God over Jezebel, the pagan wife of king Ahab, slaughtering 850 of her fertility prophets on Mount Carmel. Jezebel vowed immediate revenge for the catastrophic loss of her pagan supporters, which prompted Elijah to flee for his life, stopping to rest a day’s journey into the desert wilderness, some 200 miles from God’s life-saving presence on Mt. Horeb. Elijah despaired for his life. “I’m throwing in the towel, God. Take my life and let me die here and now. I have no fight left in me. There’s no way I can reach your safe refuge on Mount Horeb.” It’s at this point that the angels direct Elijah to eat those supernatural cakes, the very bread of life itself, enabling Elijah to do the impossible, to walk 200 miles over forty days, and, to complete God’s victory over his enemies, to continue to be God’s champion by returning to his country and anointing Elisha to be God’s next-generation champion.
I think we can all identify with Elijah. The last eighteen months have been an exhausting challenge on several levels. Yes, there will be battles that must be fought each week that will demand everything we have to offer in the cause of Christ, but today is Sunday, the day of the Lord, the day of the resurrection, the day when we can rest in Jesus’ victory over sin and death and be refreshed and strengthened by eating of him as the bread of life. As Paul said in his letter to the Philippians, I can do all things through him who strengthens me. Sunday is our halftime. This is the Lord’s training Table where we receive the nourishment that only God can provide, the very life of his risen Son, so that we can become Christ’s fellow champions.
The reason that most Episcopal churches celebrate the Lord’s Supper early in the morning on the first day of the week, usually at 8 o’clock, is because it makes it easy for us to eat the bread of life before we consume anything else. Breaking our fast at God’s “Breakfast of Champions” training Table on Sunday morning is an act of faith in the life-sustaining power of that bread, and of our vital communion with one another as members of Christ’s Body, and of God’s words of encouragement more than anything else we might do to prepare for whatever the challenges of the coming week might be. Though I don’t always observe that discipline in my own rule of life, especially in the summer when our service begins at 9:30, for those who do, it is an act of faith that what was true for the cakes that the angels provided Elijah will also be true for the bread of life that Christ offers you and me.
Let me also note Jesus’ response to those who question his claim to be the bread of life in today’s gospel, those who think that because they think they know where Jesus comes from, from Joseph and Mary, that it is therefore impossible for him to also come from heaven, to be the out-of-this-world bread he claims to be. He tells them that no one can come to him and discover that what he says about himself is true unless drawn by the Father who sent him. And just how does the Father draw us to Jesus? What it is that prompts us to give Jesus a try, to take a bite of what he has to offer? Our spiritual hunger for God is how God draws us to Jesus. That’s how.
In his Alpha Course, Nicky Gumbel observes, in line with today’s gospel, that human beings have two stomachs. One stomach is for the material and physical necessities of life, for food, clothing and shelter. The other is for spiritual necessities, for love and forgiveness, for justice and mercy, for peace and righteousness. You can stuff your material stomach full, but you’ll still be spiritually hungry because your other stomach is still empty. You’ll still feel dissatisfied with your life because life is always more than what sustains our physical life.
That’s how God draws us to Jesus, through our spiritual hunger. We can try to fill our spiritual stomach with a peace that is no peace, with a love that is not love, with a righteousness that is not righteousness, but if we want to be totally satisfied, we must consume Jesus as the bread of life, as the breakfast of champions.
Jezebel, for example, was convinced that human sexuality and natural fertility could satisfy every human need. It can’t, though it is an essential dimension of the goodness of God’s creation as far as it goes, within its own limits. Our spiritual stomach, the one that God has placed in us, will still be empty, or will know that it has consumed a poor and adulterated substitute for the real thing, for the bread of life, Jesus. That’s how God gets our attention. Jesus is simply telling us today, “I’m what you’re looking for. The proof you are looking for is in the pudding. Try me. Taste and see that the Lord is good, good for you and a spiritual nourishment that tastes sweet, certainly at the beginning of our spiritual walk, like the sweetness of a mother’s milk, until we grow stronger and can begin to cut our teeth on a more varied spiritual diet like the one Elijah had to chew on and swallow in confronting the empty calories and debilitating diet of Jezebel and her allies as the means of promoting the healthier diet of God’s grace.
I hope you are planning to take advantage of the Alpha Course. Perhaps you know someone you can invite to join you who is dissatisfied with their spiritual diet, who is hungry enough to give Jesus a try. The course is a nutritious and tasty offering, a reminder of how blessed we are to receive and share the bread of life as the “Breakfast of Champions,” giving us the energy to face the spiritual challenges of the coming week. AMEN.