The Bread of Life

 8/1/21

Peace statue from Korea in memory of and solidarity with the enslavement of Koreans as "comfort women during the Second World War...

Just back from 10 days in Berlin visiting with family and friends. Another city struggling to deal with the continuing reality of Covid 19.  I had to prove  vaccination to get there and be tested negative to return home, But home I am again…and reflecting with Beverly Church on the Bread of Life…

’'Bread of Life”

Just one week ago, I was spending a long and wonderful day with my two grandchildren at the Berlin Zoo.  The first time I had seen my grandchildren in two years. My little grand daughter, now over 2 1/2, has become a little girl  with her own unique personality. 

As usual, much has happened since least we were together. I was in Pittsburgh for the memorial service, long delayed, for a good friend who had died of Covid last November. So many people came out. It reminded me of what Oz saids to the Tin Man…the quality of a heart is revealed not in how much you love but in how much you are loved. 

Yes Covid is  still with us. This new variant spreading fast. While much remains mysterious, one thing is clear…vaccination does work. And still….and still…I had to have a negative test three days before my flight in order to return to the US. 

The Olympics are happening.  With no spectators.  And we continue to reopen, step by uncertain step. Smoke from west coast wild fires wafts over New York City.  And we go about our own lives, each in our own struggles. And of course, my friend and our sister Geraldine is in the hospital. 

And just this week, we lost a great Presbyterian, Don Shriver, former President of Union Seminary, a child of the south who was a tireless witness for faithful following in the path of Jesus for justice and righteousness, spiritual mentor to a generation…

So what do you think about when you think about bread?  I have to say in Germany, they take bread seriously. It’s thick and it's dark and crunchy with seeds. My son goes out most mornings to bring fresh bread back from the bakery. 

I can also still remember the smell of fresh bread at the bakery I would go to with my grandfather as a little boy in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.  Or the fresh  baked bread we use to wipe out the apple butter pots at our annual family event.  And how many of us got into sour dough and other bread baking during the pandemic?

What we’re here to talk about today’s the  bread of life.  Having fed 5000, Jesus and his  disciples need a break.  But the crowd finds them anyways and wants to know “when did you get here?” Literally they were asking “How did you come to be here?” Which could be an even deeper question.  It was the same verb used for his Cana wedding wine event and the question about being “born from above.”  Look…they’re trying to figure out just who this Jesus is.

Jesus suspects that they’ve followed him not because they have understood a “sign,” but because he’s just fed them. So they want to know what signs? Like feeding 5000 wasn’t enough? We’ve always got this “what have you done  for me lately Jesus?” thing going on. 

Like faith is transactional. Like in the impeachment hearings…looking for quid pro quo. You do this for me, I’ll do this for you. 

The great Kentucky poet Wendell Berry says we have a “one night stand” culture, consumption without responsibility or relationship. 

I suppose we could ask ourselves, what are we looking for?

Jesus does what he does not out of a desire to “wow” us with magic tricks…or spectacular performances like David Blaine…he does what he does what he does in response to real human need. In the doing, he shows us who he is and more, who God is….and we see, but….

Look he says, Moses didn’t send the manna, God did..

Even Jesus didn’t provide food for 5000 or more, God did.

And Jesus is showing that what God gives goes further than any king, ruler, political party our President, past, present or future.

Jesus did not come here to make us feel better. He came to invite us into a new way of life. A new way of being …

Let me ask a question….why do we want people to come to church with us? What do we have to offer? What do we ask of them? It’s worth asking ourselves…

Ultimately, it has to be about God’s invitation, God’s desire, God’s offer…of abundant life for the world. And God provides us the means to that life…in the love of self, others and God….we must always see those together….THIS is the true BREAD of which Jesus speaks…which sustains us always …even when bread is hard to come by…

When Jesus announces I am the Bread of Life, that is the first of 26 I am statements he will make in John…

As we share in Holy Communion this morning, we take part in that Bread of Life…we celebrate our participation in a global, timeless community of abundant life…one commentator has said (Robert Foster?) that in this communion there is a new a Trinity….Jesus is the table, the food and the waiter…

As we join together today, each with our own elements, let us look at our bread…see it as part of one loaf we all share…

35Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever com

es to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Let those with ears to hear, hear…..We pray for each other. And ourselves. And for the healing of the world. And then each in our own place share in our virtual common loaf and cup. And then go out to our own lives....until we meet again

John 6: 24-35

24So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.

25When they found him on the other side of the lake, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" 26Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." 28Then they said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?" 29Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." 30So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'" 32Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." 34They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

35Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."

Berlin 7: But all are responsible

2/12

Neue Synagogue

Characters posing in front of the Brandenberg Gate. Mickey Mouse. A very short Darth Vader. The inevitable soldier uniforms from the Soviet Union, US and DDR. Just like Times Square. Of course tips are expected.

Wander again through the monument for the murdered Jews of Europe. Impressed again at its abstract portrayal of feeling overwhelmed. Lost. As you enter into the center. 

Memorial to murded  Sinti and Roma

The new memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma (gypsy) people. Outside the glass walls, an old Roma woman sits and plays the accordion. Later my friend Hans who works with asylum seekers will tell me that it is ironic that we erect a monument to murdered Sinti and Roma while deporting  them back to hard conditions in the former Yugoslav republics. He reminds me that average life expectancy for Roma women is 48 as compared to a Euro average of 76-78. Of course, the accordion’s sound is plaintive. 

A walk down the Unter der Linten, the old king’s parade ground now a public thoroughfare. Past the Dome and Museum Island to the Neue Synagogue of Oranienberg Strasse. It’s Moorish style blue domes, trimmed in gold, glisten in  the sun. For the Jews who built the synagogue, it was to symbolize the golden era of Jewish , Muslim and Christian cooperation in Andalusia. But for anti-Semite critics of the day, the architecture was a sign of the power and aspiration of the Jews seeking to dominate the skyline of Mitte Berlin with their alien Oriental towers.  

Zeljko and I walk up to the top of the tower to look out over the city.

Back downstairs, a woman staff person, about my age, wants us to understand that the reconstruction work began in 1988, before reunification. That it was the DDR that began the work. I have encountered many times this combination of defensiveness and pride wanting us to know something good about the DDR.

The Tachliss Art Squat has finally been shut down. Gentrification marches on while the very thing that drew the tourists and gentrifiers disappears, driven  out by money. Happened to the Upper West Side of Manhattan once. And now creeps through New York City neighborhood by neighborhood. 

at the wall

We stop by one of the last remaining sections of the wall. Ready to cross back into the Kreuzberg neighborhood of old West Berlin. 

Hans is another of our extended family. He came with the group of asylum workers who came to the US in 2009 to meet with colleagues involved in humane border work in Arizona then to New York to look at the situation of immigrants in our city and meet with those who work with immigrants in New York City. Finishing with a visit with our friend Rick at Stony Point. I was proud that our little church provided home housing for all our guests, Hans with Jim and Holly near Yorkville’s vestigial German neighborhood. 

The situation in the Mediterranean becomes more and more perilous as the fortress europe becomes all but impenetrable. Spain is effectively walled off.  Turkey erects a separation wall on the border with Greece.  German courts will no longer deport migrants to Greece as it is considered a collapsed state.  Italy grows closer to that situation. And still people continue to come. Like crossing the desert from Mexico.

Hans lives in an old DDR neighborhood in an apartment built for government officials. Some still live there, elderly, retired. Some are very nice people,neighbors, says Hans. His neighborhood was named for a German noble, then Lenin ,now the United Nations. He took pictures of the day they tore the Lenin statue down. And also another statue of Soviet occupation officer. Hans said that he was a good man, one who wanted the schools reopened, to make sure that people in his neighborhood  had sufficient food and their   medical needs responded to. We don’t have to tear down everything  that was Soviet, he says, that’s dishonest to history. We would not have defeated the Nazis without the Red Army. They paid a great price...       

 2/13       

Crushing the Swastika

Riding the tram through old DDR neighborhoods to Treptow Park. A cold, overcast day.Through a archway we walk and then down the path to the Memorial to the Soviet War Dead. Overwhelming in size. Ringed with weeping birches with a second ring of evergreens behind. Beginning with a weeping mother looking towards a modernist  arch of stylized Soviet flags and two social realist kneeling soldiers. Through a long central courtyard with 16 sarcophagi, one for each Soviet Republic. Ending with a heroic 12 meters tall statue of a Soviet soldier holding a child with one arm and a sword in the other while crushing a swastika. There are wreaths and red flowers laid different places around the memorial. Who brings them? Who remembers, is thankful?

There are maybe three other people in this massive area. It’s sheer size is breathtaking. Almost overwhelming. Walk up and look inside the giant statue. There’s an Eastern Orthodox mosaic depicting the different ethnic people who made up the army. 

Memorial at Treptow

The massiveness is appropriate to what it commemorates. Some 80,000 Soviet soldiers died in the Battle of Berlin. Some 7000 are buried here. And then you remember over 20 million Soviets died in World War II. Almost incomprehensible. It’s easy to understand the sense that Americans never fully appreciated the depth if Soviet loss.  We didn’t. You think about what kind of a scar that could leave on a nation’s psyche, that level of loss. And how can you fully understand the Cold War without taking that experience into consideration?

The quietness. The bare trees. The massive size of the  monument. Humbling. And moving. For a moment, I ponder history. The strange narrative it is. Events and forces flowing by, drawing people into the streams. Could the builders of this monument have imagined a day without a Soviet Union?  Micah points to how strange it is to have a monument to the country that defeated you in your own country. 20 million. maybe it desn’t have meaning, it just is.

                                            * * * * *

There’s a disturbing tendency on some post reunification monuments and historical displays to elide the narratives of Nazism and communism as if they were two totalitarian sides of the same coin. Not exactly.

One of the columns at Treptow reads:

The strength of the Red Army was that it had none, and could not have any, racial hatred neither towards other peoples nor the German people and that they were raised in the belief of equality of all peoples and races, and in the spirit of respect towards other's rights.      

              Joseph Stalin

Acknowledging its history, communism was rooted in a radical vision of a world without racism, exploited labor, a world of justice and equality. That's what attracted the volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Or men like Paul Robeson. The vision was humane and inspiring.

The Nazi vision was one of racial superiority, the natural right of superior human beings to rule over those of inferior peoples. Not the same, not the same at all. 

Of course we have to acknowledge the pain and suffering caused by Communism. As we do that of imperialism. And religion. We are not all guilty.But we are all responsible. 

So many memorials. So much death here. But now, so much life.

Uli and Zeljko

Time for one more coffee with Zeljko, wth Uli. Then home. Home.

                                                                                                      

                              

Berlin 1: a day in Wedding

2/7

Badstrasse Wedding 

As I write today, I am in Berlin, Germany. Usually when I write, I keep my view from the steps focused on what happens in and around the world of West-Park Church. I have decided to send some reflections from Germany as they touch on our life and people here in Berlin who have been part of our life in New York City. I am staying with my son Micah. I will also spend time with my friend Uli, a long time friend of West-Park, and Zeljko, the filmmaker from Serbia whose movie The Second Meeting, was screened at West-Park last fall and is being screened here as part of the Berlinale Film Festival. We will also be working on our Dream.... film project. 

                                        * * * * 

 On the bus ride in from the airport, I notice that the canals are filled with chunks of ice. Ther’s a cold wet grayness about everything....

Exploring my son Micah’s neighborhood of Wedding. The demographics are well known: 26% unemployment, 27% below the poverty line, 17% on social welfare and 30% foreigners. It would be easy to make a lot of assumption s about what you might find here. 

What you do find is an  urban neighborhood that is a vibrant mosaic of color and sound and cultures. Turkish,Palestinian, Balkan, Greek, African, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean shops and restaurants all next to each other in no particular order. Like my own Upper West Side but funkier and ungentrified. And on street corners old German working class pubs. And the ubiquitous sports bar betting parlors, electronic casinos and shishah bars. And tiny ethnosocial clubs with names like international, tolerance, friendship....where old men sit and play cards. Every culture with its own barbershops, hair weaving places. 

We have a Palestinian breakfast, a Turkish lunch. Shopping for dinner takes us  through Turkish, Palestinian and Vietnamese markets. 

From the 18th century on, this has been a working class neighborhood, known as Wedding Rot (Red Wedding) and the Schnauze mit Herz (nose, as in attitude... and heart) of the working class. And so during the Nazi era, this was a place of fierce resistance. Not only among workers, but church people as well.

From the deck of one of the remaining world war II defense bunkers overlooking the neighborhood, (an odd place for a sculpture honoring reunification), you see the red brick of the Capernaum Church. A center of the  Confessing (resisting) church, it had over 380 Confessing members, admitted only by presentation of a red card. The church was destroyed during the war and rebuilt in 1952 in the same Romanesque style and color and had one of the first women pastors in Germany. 

There are shopping malls like those that ring the old mill towns of rust belt Pennsylvania. Except for the language, my mom would feel right at home. 

Raises questions about what it means to live poor. Doesn’t have to be misery or desperation. What is different than what I see in New York is intact families, parents, children, multi-generations. And clothing stores, groceries and the other services you need right around. Internet cafes and satellite dishes  everywhere to keep you connected to home. Mothers, often in scarves and long coats, with their children. The Turkish and Vietnamese who came here on guest worker programs were not urban professionals, they were often from smaller towns, countryside, workers and so come from the socially more conservative sectors of culture. All these help shape a neighborhood. A place to live.