Bread Enough for All: A Day1 Guide to Life

INTRODUCTION

The Bread of Life for Your Life

"For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and succeed in the thing for which I sent it."

Isaiah 55:10–11

The human soul hungers for the bread of life, the Word of God. Throughout recorded history, people have yearned to hear, read, learn, and follow the way of truth and light. And ever since he walked dusty roads with his twelve hardy yet bemused companions, the teachings of Jesus have provided life-giving spiritual sustenance for all who seek it.

God calls a diverse lot to preach and proclaim the message of love in action, to make it real and livable to their listeners. Every Sunday and throughout the week, from one corner of the earth to the other, souls gather to be fed by God’s Word.

And there is bread enough for all.

For three-quarters of a century a weekly radio program has played a significant role in this life-giving phenomenon of sharing and responding to the Good News. Beginning in 1945 as The Protestant Hour and since 2002 as Day1, heard now on more than 200 radio stations, online at Day1.org, and through podcast apps, the program provides a media pulpit for outstanding preachers representing the historic Protestant denominations.¹

As the prophet Isaiah revealed, God’s Word is not simply cast out into the void. No, it moves souls. It heals wounds. It fills hearts with love. It acts in the world. It causes change. It reverberates forever, not unlike broadcast airwaves beaming through the infinite heavens.

Day1 preachers do their best to make sure listeners not only hear God’s compelling message but respond to it and put it to work in their lives.

That’s the spirit in which we’ve put together this "Day1 Guide to Life." It offers just a sampling of the wide range of Protestant Hour and Day1 preachers representing a diversity of denominations, geographical areas, ages, years, races, and identities on a dozen important topics of faith and life that you find yourself dealing with daily.

You can use this book as a daily devotional, taking time to meditate or journal with the questions provided at the end of each topic. We encourage you to read the scripture texts included with each excerpt. You can also use this as a resource in your small study group or Sunday school class, allowing the questions and group activities to guide you into fruitful conversations about the important matters of life with the help of these trusted ministers. And it’s the perfect book to share with friends and family members celebrating birthdays, graduations, or holidays, or recuperating from illness, to give them a spiritual boost.

To continue the journey, you can listen to Day1 each week on the radio or your favorite podcast app, and find even more inspiration through our immense archives of sermons, blog posts, and video and audio resources at Day1org.

All of us at Day1—staff, trustees, advisory board members, and our vast host of preachers—pray that this collection of insights will inspire you to follow the way of God more passionately. And invite others to join you on the way.

The Rev. Peter M. Wallace

Executive Producer and Host, Day1

Day1 Listeners Affirm There Is Bread Enough for All

» "I enjoy listening to Day1. The sermons and interviews are a breath of fresh air in the current political and social world."

—Topeka, Kansas

» "Day1 is my most frequently listened to podcast. I value the good preaching, different perspectives, and thoughtful, responsible, and mature guidance on the Christian faith."

—Farmington, New Mexico

» Thank you for being a part of my listening meditation each Sunday for decades. Your staff and speakers have allowed my faith to grow and strengthen my grace through many trials.

—via e-mail

» God bless you for your service on the radio on Sundays for those of us who no longer drive or have a way to get to church.

—Wymore, Nebraska

» "Congratulations to Day1 for the longevity of this amazing program. It’s a breath of fresh air to listen to when I can’t make a church service or just need to regroup and refocus."

—Peachtree Corners, Georgia

» "Every Sunday, Day1 gives me a message I can carry throughout my week. Listening to the programs brings the messages alive and speaks to my heart."

—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

» "There is not another program like Day1 that gives you so many wonderful ministers from so many denominations, and allows you to hear the word of God from so many gifted voices."

—Minneapolis, Minnesota

» "Day1 is a remarkable aid, not only for a fresh look at a particular text, but as a means to challenge me in my own faith development. I am grateful and indebted for the many and varied insights from competent and outstanding preachers across the church universal."

—Vernon, Texas

» "I start my Sunday worship with the Day1 program. It prepares me for my church experience, but more than that it speaks to my heart and gives me the message I need for my Sunday school class."

—Marietta, Georgia

» I commend your terrific program. It brings hope and refreshes faith in these perilous times.

—Washington, DC

» Your program got me interested in church again after a long absence. It is just better than other religious radio programs.

—via e-mail

» "Thank you so much for making Day1 preachers available to those near and far. It is a blessing to hear such a variety of gifted preachers from across the breadth of Protestant tradition."

—Canada

» I listened to this program one Sunday morning in the midst of a load of personal, family, and professional difficulty. Thanks be to God for this wonderful message.

—Atlanta, Georgia

» "I very much appreciate what you guys do at Day1 in being a mainline Protestant voice. We need your voice."

—The Dalles, Oregon

» "I listen to the Day1 broadcast and read the sermons as a devotional during the week. Thank you."

—Wisconsin

» "I am a faithful listener of Day1 radio. That is the way I begin my day. Always fortified with a special message as I leave the house for Sunday school and church."

—Georgia

1   See the Appendix for a brief history and overview of The Protestant Hour and Day1.

1 | Life

Life—a rather big topic. It encompasses everything that makes us human beings, children of God, with the web of relationships and experiences that make us the individuals God created us to be.

There are two contradictory tensions about life that we often struggle to reconcile. On the one hand, some would say the world takes no interest in our well-being any more than it is concerned with any other creature’s well-being. According to this understanding, our life is governed by natural forces over which we have no control, so the cold calculus that determines whether one individual, or even one species, lives can be brutal. As we have come to learn in recent decades, humans have little regard for taking care of the world in which they live and so compete viciously for scarce resources. The selfish and brutal nature of life means that the span of life for many, if not most, creatures is short.

On the other hand, biblical teachings promise an abundant life, filled with beauty and holy resources to ensure a life in which all needs, physical and spiritual, are met. The paradisiacal garden in Genesis and the heavenly city in Revelation give us images of the perfection and fullness of this abundant life. In the gospels, Jesus feeds those who are hungry, who are feeling firsthand the brutal nature of life.

To illustrate even more clearly that most people associate abundance with the satisfaction of physical needs, Jesus calls himself the bread of life. Some Christians have associated abundance with material prosperity and wealth, hoarding for themselves much of the food that could feed others, and thereby creating a life that is often nasty, brutal, and short for others.

Yet the Bible affirms there is bread enough for all, in every sense of that phrase. It exhorts us to live life abundantly, recognizing our inextricable roles in the web of life around us. At the same time, Christians recognize that God has created and breathed this life into them, which means that our life, in some sense, is really not our own. So it is imperative to take care of others and the world around us, for abundance can exist only in a world in which some are not diminished for the sake of others. The loss of one species, for instance, creates a world with fewer resources and less diversity. Such losses affect all the living, even if the consequences might be imperceptible to many creatures.

How, then, do we live our lives? What elements are required to live an abundant life? What is the relationship between our daily lives in this world and the eternal life that the Bible promises? What does Jesus mean when he calls himself the bread of life? How do baptism and communion symbolize our abundant life?

The Day1 preachers in this chapter provide inspiring reflections on life—and how to live it more abundantly.

Bread Enough for All

Diana Butler Bass • August 12, 2018 • John 6:35, 41–51

In 2016, Netflix produced a series called Cooked, based on food-writer Michael Pollan’s book about how basic ingredients are transformed into food through the four basic elements of fire, water, earth, and air. Although the series was full of surprises regarding the history of food, it is fairly easy to imagine how fire, water, and even earth create the food of myriad human cultures. But, air? Pollan admitted at the outset that air as transformation is the most mysterious, perhaps the most spiritual, of all the ways in which we cook. Despite the mystery of it, air has also given us the most basic of all food: bread.

Bread was a bit of an accident—about six thousand years ago in Egypt, some observant Egyptian must have noticed that a bowl of porridge, perhaps one off in a corner that had been neglected, was no longer quite so inert. In fact, it was hatching bubbles from its surface and slowly expanding, as if it were alive. The dull paste had somehow been inspired: the spark of life had been breathed into it. And when that strangely vibrant bowl of porridge—call it dough—was heated in an oven, it grew even larger, springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an airy, yet stable, structure that resembled a sponge.²

With bread, everything changed. We learned how to turn grasses into food human beings could eat, store, and transport. We learned how to cultivate grains and manage fields, how to harvest and mill and leaven and bake. We created agriculture. We developed entire communities—entire civilizations—devoted to the making of bread.

No wonder that in Arabic the words bread and life are the same word. And in cultures where the words are different, bread is so basic that the term is often used for food in general, and later, when modern economics were born, we even nicknamed money bread.

And Jesus said, I am the bread of life.

Just the day before he said these words, Jesus and the disciples had fed the multitude with only five loaves of bread. The disciples had handed Jesus those few loaves, and after they quieted the crowd, Jesus took the loaves, and gave thanks. He probably prayed the ancient Jewish prayer traditionally used before a meal:

Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe,

Who brings forth bread from the earth.

The bread is broken and shared and, as the story goes, all were fed, fully fed, sated, satisfied. The disciples gathered up the leftovers, and there were twelve whole baskets of remains from the original five loaves.

Jesus’s words, I am the bread of life, fit into a larger story—Jesus has set a table on the hillside where there was little bread, and abundant bread appeared. There were blessings and thanks, and all were fed. This is Jesus’s miracle of abundance, the echo of the manna in the wilderness, where God’s people were fed real food, a food that sustained them when lost in the desert.

This is God’s long dream for humankind—that we all might live without lack, that our world might not be one of scarcity, but one of abundance.

Jesus said, I am the bread of life. And then he added, Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. When we modern people hear those words, we think that Jesus sounds narrow, exclusive—only those who believe in this bread and eat of this bread will be saved. But that isn’t the point at all. Jesus is reminding his followers that bread is for everyone. That God is the source of abundance, the One who promises that in the age to come no ruler, no Caesar would control the bread. Instead, there will be bread—bread for all, bread that will not lead to death, but abundant bread, the bread of life. Jesus tells us to pray for our daily bread, a radical vision if ever there was one—that bread shall be at the table, every table, every day, the gift of God.

And then, Jesus says, that age, the Age of the Bread of Life, has arrived, For the bread of God is the one descending out of heaven and imparting life to the cosmos (John 6:33). Bread shall no longer be a tool of empire, a product of toil, the reminder of slavery and sin. Bread will be again as it was intended, the life of the cosmos.

Bread is real food, and bread is the spiritual food of the Age to Come. In the same way that actual bread is transformed by air, so Jesus’s bread is transformed by the Spirit. The bread of life descends from heaven; it is cooked with spiritual leaven. In another gospel, Jesus says: The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough (Matthew 13:33).

As an inert porridge becomes infused with life, its dough rising, so the cosmos, now sluggish in sin, are surely, slowly being yeasted. The bread of life has come, it sparks and bubbles among us, the table is set, and the blessing proclaimed. This is the wisdom of God, the miracle of Jesus: that all will be fed, that the ills of a world based on scarcity are passing, and that the time of abundance is here.

Life Is Short

Brett Younger • August 7, 2004 • Luke 12:32–40

Christ calls us to amazing lives. Jesus tells the disciples to give up wanting more, share the wealth, be constantly awake for God’s presence. Jesus describes a life of loving one’s enemies, turning one’s cheek, serving others.

God invites us to live in Christ’s way, knowing that our sins are forgiven, knowing that despite what we might think of ourselves or what others might think about us, we are deeply loved by the one who created us. The value of our lives is not to be measured by our bank account, not by how we look, not by our standing in the community, not even by the amount of good we’ve done, but simply by this: that God values us highly enough to give us joy.

We live the good life out of gratitude. We live in the way of Christ, the way in which, by faith, forgiveness triumphs over revenge, hope over despair, joy over sorrow, generosity over stinginess, love over apathy.

God calls us to be watchful for the ways in which joy is breaking in around us. Christ is always coming. The clouds are always descending. Stay alert to how God draws near in the mighty injustice that grabs our attention and begs for our passion. God draws near in the spiritual awakening that puts us in touch with a heart that we had forgotten we had. God draws near in the thing of beauty that reminds us that the world is more than just its ugliness. Who knows what form it will take, this reign of God that is always drawing near us? Be watchful for it. Look for it in the midst of the routines.

Wake up to whatever your life is bringing you. Wake up to pain because we can’t be healed until we admit that we’re hurt. Wake up to the love we won’t let ourselves feel, because we’re afraid our hearts will break. Wake up to the job we’ve been given—watching for God’s presence.

My Life Has Never Been the Same

Scott Gunn • March 10, 2019 • Luke 4:1–13

A friend of mine told me how she came to be transformed by an encounter with God’s word. As a child, she grew up in a household that went to church, but she didn’t get any exposure to an actual Bible. Visiting a friend’s house—a home where the family was very involved in their Baptist church—my friend saw a Bible. She was curious, and she somehow turned to the first chapter of John’s gospel.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14).

It is, I think, the most beautiful chapter in the entire Bible. My friend was captivated. She copied down that poetic chapter onto a piece of paper and kept it with her for years. Through the words of scripture, the Word made flesh transformed her. Her life has never been the same.

During Lent, I encourage you to decide how you might use this season to turn to Jesus, to reject those things that draw you away from him.