Taste and See
Jesus said, “I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” That is such a strange thing to say. How can his flesh be bread?
What does it mean to taste the bread of life?
I’ve shared a couple of stories with you from mission trips to El Hogar, a school for the orphans and the poorest children in Honduras. One day on a trip in 2015, a girl named Andrea came running up all excited. My Spanish is pretty good, so I understood what she was saying but, it didn’t make any sense. “Come! Bread is meat!” So I went with her to the kitchen where they teach the kids to cook.
Andrea, a girl named Wendy and a boy named Rene were involved with a science fair project. It was fascinating and I didn’t believe it was possible at first. The project was to extract gluten from flour, then concentrate it into a meat substitute. From that, they were going to make soup, stir fried rice and hamburgers.
Read More
Jesus: The Breakfast of Champions
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.
Read More
Signs and Destination
Each year we meet a group of old friends for a weekend at Cocoa Beach. It’s a great time and we’ve watched each other’s kids grow up. One of the traditions that has developed is that on Saturday morning I make a run to Krispy Kreme. It is about a 30-minute ride each way, but that’s ok. Usually I have the company of Brian Hall, our friend’s son who I’ve known since he was an infant and he’s now 23 or 24.
The key to Krispy Kreme is to get there when the “Hot Now” light is on. Then you get the hottest, freshest donuts. They are good, but fresh is best. And sometimes if you’re buying several dozen, they’ll offer you one while you wait. You watch them take a straw and hook the donut up off the conveyor, stick it in a little piece of paper and oh, man, is that good! The hottest, freshest donuts right off the line melt in your mouth. You can almost smell them!
If I’ve done my job with that opening, you are now thinking about donuts, really great donuts. Now carry that into today’s Gospel. Jesus has just fed the 5,000, which was really great but it has the potential to create one problem and expose another. Remember that the people’s hunger was merely the presenting issue, which Jesus shaped to God’s glory. It established an eternal witness to his own identity that has been shared ever since. We are still talking about it and it has been translated into almost every language. There are people right now translating the Bible into obscure dialects and languages.
Read More
