Dan Joseph 

Yesterday I was walking through town and walked past a huge tent that had been put up in the city centre. It was Hovis doing a big promotion for their new super soft white bread. And they were standing there just giving away free samples. They were just giving away loaves of bread.

It was odd to see people’s reactions, did they circle round and try and get a second; as we walked past the homeless shelter in town we saw bags and bags of it piling up, clearly there were teams at work. When we popped round to some friends last night it appeared everyone in the house had been hovis’d so their kitchen was awash with loaves of bread.
It seems, it doesn’t matter if you’re well off or not – free bread is free bread and not many of us would turn it down.

Over the last few years there has been an increasing trend for us be challenged over what we eat. Every mouthful seems to involve a moral decision, a choice being made.
Welfare of the animals / wages being paid to farmers /the effect of transport on the environment / pesticides ...

The reality is that every mouthful we take is a choice – do we support the little bakers down the road or get our bread from the supermarket, everyone is faced with these choices and everyone draws the line in their own place.

The choices we make with food say something about us, they speak about the way we want to interact with the world.
Jesus understood the value and importance of food, especially to those who were at the poorest end of society, eating could literally be the difference between life and death, ensuring your household had enough to eat could be a moral choice even then.

In our reading today we hear how Jesus picks up the imagery of the bread that the Israelites ate in the desert and he reinvents it as the new bread of life given by Jesus.
John says that, in the person of Jesus, there is a new Word of God and a new bread from heaven. The Word of God has become flesh; and the new bread of heaven is the very life of Jesus himself. To eat this bread, says John, is to have a share in the life of God's own self, and to share in his eternal life.

Do you have those days where you’re so incredibly busy, that you just ‘forget to eat’ – I have what I call 90 mile an hour days at work, where you’ve got problems and people coming at you from all directions and you just don’t stop and then hours after you should have taken your lunch you realise that you haven’t eaten. Or if you’re engrossed in a really good book and you lose track of the time. Even if you’re having a really busy day, sooner or later our stomachs tell us when it's time to eat.

We may think that the meal Jesus invites us to share is a different type of meal, but inside us we feel that hunger - that need to be one with our creator. The communion service is a celebration of thanksgiving for what Jesus has done; a chance to remind ourselves what he has done, we assemble to hold that memory sacred. We keep the memory fresh; we celebrate it anew; and in celebrating, we receive new life for our own journey of faith.

When we make a choice to buy in a way that says “I’m letting my conscience influence how I shop”, we feel a little better about our place in the world, even if it is only a little.
The act of communion in our worship service holds a far deeper significance for us because somehow it nourishes our own journeys of faith.

When we celebrate communion we recall memories of betrayal, suffering, death and resurrection. Jesus’ radical values that put him in opposition to so many of his own people. His teaching about God and heaven; his commitment to peace; his insistence on forgiveness; his willingness to die to overcome sin.

Then during supper with twelve of his friends, on the night of his arrest, he tried to show them how bread which is taken, blessed, broken and shared could become his broken body, and how wine which is taken, blessed and shared could become his blood –he told them to do it in remembrance of him. Chances are at the time they didn’t fully understand what he was asking them to do.

We believe that by receiving the body and blood of Jesus we become his body in our world; in communion, we share with Jesus and one another; and we become one with his memory which lives in us.

Whatever our background, however we see our own status, we come together as a community to declare that what Jesus did for us has a continuing importance.
Our celebration of communion helps us to focus our gratitude towards God for loving us so intensely, so absolutely that he sent Jesus to us.

Through his sacrifice and our continuing memorial of it, Jesus offers himself as our freedom food. When we consider stop to consider the welfare – we are appalled by the way he was put to death. If we wonder if the Trade was Fair, then again we find that so much was given, that we can never repay.

Sharing in this meal and in what it both is and what it symbolises, helps make us free. We need to be continually nourished with his freedom food. We must take the food and the drink that is the message and person of Jesus Christ and feed on him in our hearts by faith. We have to openly celebrate our new lives for we are God's children. There is a world out there that is hungry for free bread – people from all walks of life will queue up to collect it – we have to be the ones who are ready to share it.

(Dan Joseph)