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​As most of you probably know Caren and I just returned from three weeks in England and Scotland.  It was a fantastic trip … three days in London, a couple of days in York, then a 10-day tour of Scotland, and a final week in Edinburgh.

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Last Sunday we considered the Gospel theme of Jesus as the Bread of Life.  And now, in the Gospel today, we hear Jesus say that he is the “Living Bread.”  For me, this is absolutely the essential heart of our worship together as we share the Holy Eucharist, our Holy Communion. It helps to begin to understand what Jesus is saying if we keep in mind that Jesus knows that he does not have much time left to be physically present with his disciples…and we can hear his yearning for them to know his Real Presence continuing even beyond his life upon this earth.

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For no fewer than five Sundays, of which this is the third, the Gospel readings are from this same chapter of John’s Gospel, which has many references to the image of Bread.  They explore the theme of our Lord as Bread for our very Souls.///  In today’s Gospel we hear Jesus say, “I am the Bread of Life”.  Those who heard him say it -  did not understand and   the author probably knew that people of all time would have a problem understanding it.  But there is so much about this in this Gospel, that we know there must be something pretty important about it. Certainly it is pretty important for US, considering that we worship together with the Eucharist as our central act of worship.  We hear “The Body of Christ/The Bread of Heaven” at nearly every Eucharist as we receive Communion. //////  The message of Today’s Gospel is clearly that our Lord is trying to bring the disciples toward a deeper reality of what his teachings mean.  We can probably find ourselves among those disciples.

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As we consider our Scripture readings for today, I would like to share my reasoning for focusing on the First Lesson we heard this morning with the continuing saga of King David, rather than the Gospel.  I could never overlook the Gospel with its emphasis on Jesus as the Bread of Life, since our entire liturgy, our worship together, centers on that gift for us.  But, since the last verse of today’s Gospel is the first verse of next Sunday’s Gospel, I will focus on that message next week…and today see what more we can learn from Second Samuel.  But, just before that, I want to bring before us the message from Ephesians because it is so powerful and I don’t want it to be lost in the melodrama of our Old Testament reading.