Transcript
Jesus said, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Please be seated.
I must admit, I have sought, quote, “The Bread of Heaven,” or bread — the kind that sustains a person. Not the kind of bread that goes really well with a tomato sandwich (and yes, it has to be Duke’s Mayonnaise, no argument), but the kind of bread that feeds the soul, that gives nourishment to the heart, that propels a person through life on a journey that has meaning, significance, passion, and joy.
In fact, I’m sure we all have sought out bread that will feed our deepest needs. And maybe, if you’re lucky, when you sought out that kind of bread you found Jesus first and foremost. Or maybe, if you’re more like me, maybe you wandered a bit, almost like Elijah and the Israelites and Moses in the desert, like we have been hearing in the Old Testament readings this summer. I think if anything, my story, my seeking of that bread, definitely is more like wandering in a desert and a lot less like the direct path to the altar of the Lord.
You see, growing up I always wanted to be a performer, maybe an actor, definitely on Broadway. And that slowly materialized into what I thought would be a career in the dance world. In fact, I started at Old Dominion University — yes, my undergrad is from ODU — I started at ODU as a dance major, ballet to be specific. After all, as a senior in high school I was in this special program where I went to ballet studio for two hours in the middle of my school day. And then during my sophomore year of college I had to get my ankle reconstructed. Luckily, it’s much better. So I guess ballet, the stage — well, that wasn’t quite the bread of life that would let me live forever.
So I changed directions, wandered a little bit in a different direction, this time international. I finished a degree in international communications, and one month after graduating from ODU I left for the Peace Corps. I figured that’s a pretty good first step into Foreign Service or other international aid related jobs. I served in a village in the country of Georgia, over by Russia, not Atlanta. I was there from 2007 until August 8th, 2008, when Russian troops marched through my village. I was evacuated from an active war zone, and let me tell you, seeing the sky light up red outside your bedroom window will certainly reframe life.
But that wasn’t it Foreign Service, foreign aid, a life of international intrigue — not the bread of life for my soul. For one, it left me with a lot more questions than anything. And two, it brought me back to the church. You see, I didn’t grow up in necessarily a Christian household. I mean, yes, we did put out a manger scene every year before Santa came, and I got to wear a really pretty dress and a brand new bonnet every Easter morning for church and brunch. But Sunday mornings were not spent at church, except for maybe those three years where I was in middle school and I would walk by myself to the local Episcopal Church.
Anyway, getting evacuated from a war zone led me to the church, and it led me to pursue a masters in peace operations from George Mason University. A degree in peace operations means I’m really good at conflict resolution at the global level. Thinking I was still going to bring about world peace, I figured that was the next step. I worked for six years on Science and Technology side of nuclear nonproliferation. It sounds really fancy, but basically I partnered former Soviet scientists with US National Laboratories to keep nuclear knowledge off the black market. A great idea in theory, but the only way to know if you succeeded is if you actually failed and nuclear knowledge made it to the black market. That’d be a pretty big world peace failure too.
And then one evening, about 3 days before Christmas in 2011 — oh man, I was so full of myself. I was rapidly rising in the industry, had my own office on the 10th floor of an office building in Rosslyn, Arlington, Virginia, floor to ceiling windows looking out across the Potomac River and up the Georgetown waterfront. And there, under construction spotlights (there had been an earthquake earlier that year), was the National Cathedral, like the star on top of a Christmas tree. And I leaned back in my desk chair and I put my feet up on my desk — I told you I was full of myself — and thought, “Yeah, life’s not too bad today.” And then I heard a voice, and I felt someone, a man, in my office. “You will be a priest,” the voice said.
So after I picked myself up off the floor, cuz yes, I totally fell out of my chair at that, I ran to the man who was my boss at the time. I still talk to him quite a bit. He was a little old Jewish man who was absolutely brilliant. He had seven PhDs, four of which were not even in English, and he was so Jewish that he ate extra bacon with his club sandwich. I asked if he had been in my office, and he said no and asked why. And I told him what I had just experienced, and he looked at me and he said, “I think you need to go back into your office and pray about it.” Okay, so I did. I went back to my office and I sat down at my desk, and it took maybe 30 seconds until I thought, “Oh, I think I need to become a priest.”
You see, I had been pretty active in my Episcopal Church at this point, but it was just a hobby. I led the youth group at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Herndon, Virginia, and I served at their altar, and I worshiped there every Sunday. But it was just a hobby until that moment, when the Episcopal Church was no longer just a hobby for me but a calling, when it became the bread of life. Of course, just to be sure, I called my three best friends at the time, and they were like, “Yeah, of course, makes sense.” And I called my priest, and his response was, “It’s about time.” And I kept thinking, why is no one saying no? And no one said no because this — this, this is my bread of life. This is the true calling God had for me from the very beginning.
When I finally stopped questioning, when I finally stopped fighting, when I finally stopped thinking that I knew what was better, when I finally got out of the way and listened for God the Father, for Jesus Christ, I finally found the bread of life: the true bread, the living bread, the bread that comes down from heaven, that gives life to those who eat it. And not just life, but life — life, passion, joy, hope, and most of all love.
Love for one another and love for God, a God who loves so unconditionally that the word unconditional doesn’t even do justice to the kind of love that God has for each of us. A love that is so absolute that God sent God’s son to be bread of life, to offer himself as the paschal lamb, the sacrifice for all of us, to live forever ever in a kingdom where we aren’t trying to find some other way to feed our souls, because all we know the one true bread, the source of all, Jesus Christ.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll get a few more Gospel readings about Jesus being the bread of life. By the end of August, if you don’t know that Jesus is the bread of life, we’ll have to have a private conversation. But I also hope, not just over these next couple couple of weeks but over the many years that we get to spend together, I hope we can all support one another in our own journeys towards God’s call for each of us, as individuals and as St. John’s. Because the bread of life isn’t just for one or two of us, it’s for all of us, and it gives life eternal, not just to each of us — to all of us. And I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what we do next.
Amen.