Bread Coming Down From Heaven

John 6:35,41-51 Ephesians 4:25-5:2 Numbers 11:4

Just round the corner from my school was the Penfold Road  Sweet Shop and we all used to crowd in there on our way home. Pushing and shoving, trying to get to the front, to make up our minds about what to buy.

Sherbert Dabs and Jamborree Bags. Flying Saucers, Black Jacks and Fruit Salad. Milk gums, Trebor Chews,  Psychadelic Gobstoppers and fireman’s hoses, and big, big jars full to the brim of every type of candy you could imagine.  We’d just gaze at all this sugar heaven – “erm! Erm! we’d go as we decided what to get with our sixpence. It was like a wonderland!

It must have been a bit like how the Garden of Eden was. All that colour, all that life, rained down from heaven upon the newly formed earth. Imagine, God under every step you took. God in everything you could set your eyes upon. So many ways for his love to reach you and touch you that all you could do was dance.

A consequence of our freewill and the misuse of it has been that we’ve done our best to cut God’s blessing down to size. Only in these special people, only if you keet all these laws, only if you see things this way, and so over the centuries people became less expectant of God’s love as something to be found on every street corner and in the eyes of every person walking along.

God was still raining down his love upon the earth, walking in the garden in the cool of the day and crying out “Where are you” – but the people became inclined to shelter from his glory rather than let themselves be drenched by it.

So Jesus came on the scene like a cloud burst. “I am the bread of life” he cries “I am raining it down from heaven”.  He wasn’t  just talking about crusts and loaves when he said that.  He wasn’t just talking about the place where you next meal is coming from. It was like an echo from the old days when the people were a wilderness people – God did rain down Manna from heaven, to literally feed those who were on the way to the promised  land – but Jesus as this bread goes even  further than that.

It’s as if he want to get us back to the Garden of Eden again – to the place where his blessings coming pouring down in 3D and everyone knows it.

Nourishment from God comes in more ways than we will ever know – if you follow me and are prepared to have your eyes opened – be prepared for a deluge of possibilities, says the Lord.

So Bread came raining down from heaven in the form of a man dying on the cross, raining down in the form of twelve disciples with no previous experience, raining down on a day called Pentecost when the streets were awash with his blessing. Raining down upon everyone who ever got baptised or whispered their “Amen” to a prayer. Raining down upon everyone who has ever said “I love you” or who has cried after the loss of that love.

When people come to be married in church – or have children baptised in church – or just want to come to church – often there is a struggle to really say why. Perhaps what we hold in common is the hope  that it might not be a dream , but the deepest of truths.

I am the bread of life then, in as many different ways as there are people on the planet

Like hundreds of different sweets in an old fashioned sweet shop, like a newly made world fresh with the dew from God’s hands upon it. Here, there and everywhere his blessing is offered for those who wish it – and we, we rejoice in the variety of the gifting.

Today Mark and Christine are going to have their marriage blessed right in the middle of our Sunday service.  Theirs is a love known only to them, there is a pathway from the heart of their love for one another right to the heart of God which only they will walk – but it’s a path that criss crosses over those of the rest of us – as God meets us where we are to be that bread of life for us.

Sometimes, I wouldn’t buy anything from the Penfold Road Sweet Shop. I’d just go there and gaze round at everything and breathe in the common aroma of all that candy.

Breathe in here then – the aroma of the bread of life which has its source in God made man for us.

God made man to touch us where we are, in our unique and beautiful  place  – and then swirling together to build up our common life.

RH 9.8.09