Bread of Life: The Sourdough Version

This summer I am attempting to make sourdough bread from scratch. While surfing the internet a month ago I found a website called foodwishes.com. In it were instructions and videos on how to make sourdough bread from starter to finished product in eight easy steps spread out over a week. Well I couldn’t resist the possibility of making my favorite bread in the whole world so I embarked on this project wholeheartedly armed with the simple ingredients of flour, water, salt and sugar.

First I made the starter. I mixed water and flour together in equal parts and left it alone for twenty four hours. For the next two days I fed the starter once a day by taking out some of the original mixture and replacing it with more flour and water in equal parts. On the third day I had a bubbly mix which would help the dough to raise. I then added more flour and water and left it sit for another day.
Then came the fun part, the kneading of the dough; I took the dough that I had mixed the day before and began working the flour into the original dough in a systematic manner, this is called kneading. I used the fold and push method. I put a bit of flour on the dough, worked it in, folded the dough and push. Then I repeated. Sounds easy doesn’t it, but it is harder than you think. After folding and pushing the dough for over a half hour I began to feel like I’d had a full work out at the gym.

Once the dough was fully kneaded I had to put it aside and waited for it to rise. That was where I had hit a wall in the bread making process. I was not able to get the dough to rise. I decided to bake the bread anyways hoping against hope that it still will turn out. Instead of a luscious crunchy loaf of sourdough bread, I ended up with the equivalent of a battering ram. The loaf was flat and hard. I sliced it as best I could, almost breaking my bread knife in the process and ended up with slices of sour biscotti. I bit into my first slice of “bread” and though it tasted fine, the substance in my mouth so hard and chewy that I was unable to swallow it. My first attempt at bread making, was an ultimate fail.

Imagine what it was like for the people of Jesus’ time to bake bread. I had the modern conveniences of store bought flour, running water and an oven to make bread. Research in biblical archeology has found that it was back breaking work for the women at that time to make the daily rations of bread for their families. Using conical clay ovens, fired with wood located out in the back of their houses they made bread in all kinds of weather, hot humid weather did not keep them from the daily task of bread baking because bread was the staple of life for their families. According to biblical archeologists findings they found that bread baking began, “Early each morning, the baker-women would sweep out the ashes from the day before and stoke the ovens with dry sticks. They’d light the fire and direct a child to keep feeding dry branches into it, until the required temperature was reached.

While this was happening, the women would go through the familiar ritual of bread-making: preparing the dough from flour and water, kneading it, adding a leavening agent and waiting for the dough to rise, then pounding it down, only to have it rise again. When it reached the desired consistency, the bakers would press it out flat and slide it into the clay oven. What came out was a warm bubbly loaf very much like pita bread. It was the staff of life indeed, for those people. Other food items might come and go with the seasons…but bread was the staple that got them through seasons of feast and famine alike.”

Unlike my situation of bread making as hobby, for the women of first century Palestine, bread making was a matter of survival. The only thing I lost in my attempt at bread making was some flour, water and my pride. If a baker of Jesus’ time failed at baking bread, it meant that their family would go hungry.

So when we think about the intense labor it took to make bread in Jesus’ day, hearing the verse, “I am the bread of life.” takes on a different meaning. The purpose of the Gospel of John was to encourage its audience to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. The early Christians whom the evangelist John writes to were part of the Jewish community but in conflict with them because of their belief that Jesus was the messiah sent by God to be the embodiment of God’s grace and love. They were expelled from their church home, the synagogue and so they had to carve a new church home for themselves. This was a painful separation from the Jewish society to which its members belonged. It is important to remember that when John speaks of “the Jews” it refers not to the Jewish people as a whole, but to the synagogue authorities of a particular time and place. The book of John was written to help this community maintain their belief in Jesus as the son of God rather than converting outsiders.

For this community who are trying to make a new way, the words “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me shall not hunger, he who believes in me shall not thirst.” are of great comfort to them. Cut off from the synagogue, they feel that they’ve lost their source of spiritual nourishment; their bread. However Jesus promises them that they can find sustenance through belief in him as the son of God.
“Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Today we have mixed feelings about bread and Jesus. In a culture of easy access to we have fallen off the edge into excess. Many of us are struggling to maintain a healthy weight and so we turn to such things as the South Beach Diet and the Atkins diet in hopes that it will give us a quick fix to our weight problems.

Unfortunately because of these diets, we have come to believe that bread is bad for you and that elimination of carbohydrates is essential in the task of losing weight. However we forget that whole grain which is contained in bread is a staple of good nutrition. If you look at the food pyramid provided to us by the U.S. department of agriculture, you will see that the bread group is the foundation of a good diet.
Now I do acknowledge that not all of the bread that is available to us is nutritionally sound or that it’s ok to eat bread in excess but what I am saying is that when eaten appropriately, bread can provide the necessary foundation upon which the rest of a healthy diet can be built. The same thing can be said for faith and religion.

It is said that a full 16 % of Americans claim to have no religious affiliation. For the first time in the 62 generations that have come to pass since the beginning of the Christian Church, we have a generation of people, mostly 35 and under who were not raised in the church. When asked about their faith life, these folk were more likely to say, “I am spiritual but I am not religious.” They long to have a connection with something which is greater than themselves, something that lets them know that they are accepted, that they are loved. But they are disenchanted with organized religion because they believe it to be exclusionary and narrow-minded and can you blame them? In the time that the Christian church has grown, the radical nature of Jesus has diminished. Like processed food, his message of God’s great desire peace and social justice through has diminished through the years and we are left with a white bread religion of quick fixes and easy answers that tells us if you just follow the rules, God will bless you with prosperity. Jesus’ ministry had more substance to it. It was about radical hospitality and God’s realm being built here and now. Jesus associated with the outsiders of his society and he invites us to do the same. He ate with the sinners, the prostitutes, the lepers and he called them friends. Jesus’ relationship with God was not based on how closely he held to the religious rules of his day, but on how close he held God, so close and abiding that he called God father.

In it’s purest form the teachings of Jesus are about God’s love and God’s call for us to be the hands, feet and voice in the world in building God’s realm here on earth, where the hungry are fed, those who mourn are comforted and those who hunger and thirst for justice, well they are satisfied. This, my sisters and brothers in Christ is the bread of life whole, hearty and nourishing. “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die….whoever eats of this bread will live for ever.”

May it be so. Amen.