Can you imagine? "I am the living bread ... whoever eats this bread will live forever." Yesterday in the heat of the noonday sun, we buried the remains of Evelyn Brotko in our Memorial Garden, some thirty yards behind me. What a wonderful promise to be able to share with her sons and their families: "I am the living bread ... the one who eats this bread will live forever." A wonderful promise to share and a comfort to embrace.

You know the term "comfort food." It seems to be a relatively modern concept, but it may go all the way back to a piece of fruit in a certain garden called Eden. A comfort food has to do with those foods which may or may not provide nutritional support. That's not the purpose. It is emotional support we seek from comfort food. In our culture, sometimes people turn to food as medication, if you will, for a hungry heart. Some argue that our nation's problem with obesity has a lot to do with people seeking solace through food - seeking to feed, not the tummy, but the heart. We are a nation of hungry hearts. With that concept in mind, the comforting words of Jesus, "I am the living bread ... the one who eats this bread will live forever," these words make that living bread the ultimate of comfort food. At least it meant a lot to a grieving family gathered at our tiny cemetery to the south!

One of the speakers at the youth Gathering in New Orleans a couple weeks ago, shared a powerful story about bread which speaks to our text this morning. After World War II, the Allied armies in Europe gathered up thousands of homeless, orphaned children and took care of them in camps while trying to figure out what to do with them. The children were well fed, tended to by loving men and women. But they were so traumatized by what they had seen and what they had already lost that they simply could not fall asleep. Finally, someone in one camp started giving each child a slice of bread to hold while they slept. There was plenty of bread to eat when the children were hungry, but this one piece was just to hold, so that their deepest inside parts might rest in the assurance that there would be more food in the morning.

Now maybe this story for you means what it did to me: the bread was more than flour, yeast, butter, sugar and salt - common ingredients for ordinary bread. The bread represented security. And for children traumatized by the ravages of war ... security was likely their deepest hunger. When Jesus taught his followers to pray, "Give us this day, our daily bread...," he too knew our deep need for security - we who are sometimes traumatized by life: those things that keep us awake into the wee hours. Our traumas may differ, but they likely have something to do with concerns for family and friends; illness and mortality (theirs and ours); the still shaky economy which threatens our jobs and has us concerned about the future of our children.

Ah, those wee, small hours. Sinatra once said, "Basically, I'm for anything that gets you through the night - be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels." I'm thinking that those caretakers in that refugee camp were on to something - a simple slice of bread - comfort food for a hungry heart.

We call it the Sacrament of the Altar. Holy Communion. The Eucharist. Its centrality in the life a Christian cannot be overstated, nor should it be underestimated. A woman spoke quietly of the death of her father. He had been a proud man, she said, a man who spent all his work days tilling the soil of a Carolina farm and all his Sundays praising God for life and seed and family. A final bout with cancer sent him to the hospital never to come home again, and in the last week of his life the disease provided the added indignity of a stroke that robbed him of his speech. As his family visited his bedside, his eyes would moisten with frustration and grief as he tried in vain to speak to these people he loved so dearly.

On his last day alive, the attending physician had issued the signal, the family had gathered in his room - the daughter and her two brothers. With strength fading, the father motioned to his son that he wanted a glass of water. The son hurried to the sink and returned with a full water glass, which he held toward his father's lips. But the old man pushed the glass away and moved his finger from the glass toward his son, as if to say, "You drink it.''

Hesitant and uncertain, the son lifted the glass to his lips and drank from it. Then the father motioned toward his daughter, indicating that she should drink some, too. Sensing what his father wanted, the son passed the glass to his sister, and she drank. Now the father, pointed toward the other son, and the daughter realized what was happening. With a voice full of awe and emotion she said, "Dad is serving communion." There in the face of death, this father summoned a sacramental water glass to administer the feast of life. There in a wordless act of worship, the promise of the resurrection came home.* This story has added meaning as we realize that the self-proclaimed Bread of Life, once called himself Living Water.

This sixth chapter of John's Gospel is all about bread. The Bread of life. The Bread of heaven. Jesus feeds 5,000 with just a little bit of bread; it will be a foretaste, as it were, of the feast to come. Sometime later, Jesus feeds twelve at a last supper, three days before Easter - a mere twelve. And then on Easter afternoon, in Emmaus, Jesus feeds only two. Two wounded men with hungry hearts because Jesus had been crucified. But in the breaking of the bread, these two recognize Jesus ... and their own hungry hearts are healed. And they no longer fear their own deaths ... for they recalled the words Jesus had spoken in Galilee, "the one who eats this bread will live forever."

Of course, this theme of bread is not confined to the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. We all know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and we recall Bethlehem, Beit Lehem, means: House of Bread. The Bread of Life born in the House of Bread. Coincidence ... or design? And when Jesus was born, his very first cradle was a manger. The animals in the stable are to be excused if they wondered, "What in God's name is a baby doing in our feed trough?" The Bread of Life, born in the House of Bread, placed in a feed trough. Later in life he invites his followers to, "Mange, Mange," and promises that, "the one who eats this bread will live forever."

In a couple of minutes, two of our newest friends at Grace, Emma and Brendan, are going to be Baptized. These are two happy, well-mannered and confident children. Seeing kids like Emma and Brendan make you realize anew just how horrific war is and what it can do people, especially the children. Please God, may Emma and Brendan never be traumatized by life ... nor by war.

This morning they become more than our friends, they become our sister and our brother - related as we are through Baptism. We underline our kinship each time we share together the Bread of Life. Communion. The Eucharist.

So welcome to our bakery this morning. Receive the bread as nutrition for the journey; bread as the nourishment of faith. Comfort food in the deepest sense, feeding our hungry hearts. May you find that comfort in the words of the one who proclaims, "whoever who eats this bread ... will live forever." Can you imagine?

* Related by Tom Long in "Whispering the Lyrics"