Bread of Life
As I worked on a sermon for today I decided to Google for some food quotes. After all Jesus is talking about bread and The Bread of Life and food and Food. Here's some of what I found:
In general, first there’s the Spanish proverb

-- The belly rules the mind.

Then the Jewish proverb

-- Worries go down better with soup.

How about one on the wonder of good fresh food, one quote I found says

-- It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.

As for bread, one writer said that:

-- Bread deals with living things, with giving life, with growth, with the seed, the grain that nurtures. It is not coincidence that we say bread is the staff of life.

Then finally, in a quote that fits Jesus' theme, Gandhi said:

-- There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

Gandhi got the two sides of this important message. First feed the body. To the poor and hungry such is the way God first comes to them. A deeper hunger cannot be satisfied if it is being overpowered by the physical hunger.

But it goes beyond that.

We easily forget that life has a spiritual hunger that also must be fed. It is a both/and. Too often we choose one or the other. We used to separate this with ideas like "social gospel" vs mission and evangelism. Until we see them as two parts of the same movement, physical food and spiritual food, we will never satisfy the needs of our own soul let alone those we seek to serve.