It’s for dinner

Over the past year, we have heard a great deal about the baking of bread, the processes, the craft to master, the therapeutic and meditative benefits of baking while isolated during the pandemic. We have been encouraged to think of it as a metaphor for the work we do in this parish.

But the point of baking bread is not the satisfaction in mastering the technique or the therapeutic comfort of occupying oneself in isolation. The point of baking bread is to feed someone who is hungry. Bread is for a meal.

We know that Jesus spent a great deal of time at the dinner table, and this Sunday, you will hear him advise in Luke’s Gospel on how to throw a dinner party: “Do not invite your friends or your brothers or you relatives or rich neighbors, in case they might invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed because they cannot repay you.”

Baking bread is to feed the hungry, and in this parish, we know who the hungry are the hungry for food, the hungry for housing, the hungry for education, and the hungry for justice. Just as we invite people to come to the altar to be fed at the Eucharist, the preview of the banquet to come, we are called to go out where the hungry are, to offer them what they crave, what they so badly need.

On Homecoming Sunday, September 11, we will come together after more than two years of isolation, to greet, celebrate, and to be fed again. And to be reminded why we came here and what we are here for.

We do not bake those loaves just for ourselves.