“Life Giving Bread” based on UMC Social Principle on “Food Justice” and Matthew 4:1-11

Welcome to Lent, let’s talk about the temptations the Tempter was tempting Jesus with. 😉

The last one is obvious, I think. Jesus is tempted with worldly power, and instead chooses Godly power. That one is a big deal, after all most of the expectations of the messiah at that point were for the messiah to restore Ancient Israel to its worldly power. And power over others is highly valued in a lot of places – but Jesus was into the power with, into relationship, into the well-being of the collective – not into using people to benefit himself.

In the middle one we’re told that Jesus is tempted to test God. But that one has never made sense to me. I’ve never had a temptation to test God by engaging in self harm and expecting God to change the rules of physics to protect me. And, really, we’re talking about Jesus here who ends up being killed by the powers of the world, so…. What? My guess is that this is a story of early Christianity, when people had come to believe that Jesus was “special” and maybe even started to think of Jesus as “God” and then thought he’d have temptations to excuse himself from the laws of nature.

But is actually the first one that confuses me the most. The stones into bread one. The idea here is that Jesus has been fasting and he is famished. So the temptation is to … well… eat. To feed his body. To stop the pains of hunger.

Jesus responds that he is in need of God, not of physical nourishment and that’s really lovely and all but the fact does remain that he would have been REALLY hungry. So I got to wondering about this. I started to wonder what would be so bad about breaking a fast with some bread. Particularly if we suspect disbelief and think about it as if Jesus could ACTUALLY make stones into bread. What would be wrong with that?

And then I realized that to make stones into bread to break a spiritual fast would pretty much negate the purpose of the fast. Fasting is meant to be a way of CONNECTING, that every time a person feels hunger they use it to remind themselves to turn to prayer rather than food. But it has to be a choice, simply being hungry and not having access to food isn’t fasting. That’s being hungry, whether the person is spiritual about it not.

In traditions that use fasting regularly, the end of a fast is as intentional as the rest of it. Part of the temptation here is to circumvent the process and meet the bodily need before completing the spiritual process.

But the other thing that occurred to me is that in real life, bread is INHERENTLY communal. To make bread you need: flour, water, salt, and a leavening agent. In the time of Jesus the leavening agent it would have been sourdough. NONE of those ingredients are things that exist in a vacuum. To have flour you need land, and seeds, and time to cultivate and knowledge. You also need a way to grind grains into flour, which is pretty challenging to do. Water required a well in those days in that part of the world. Salt required harvesting and transportation. And sourdough … well, truthfully it dies sometimes and you need someone else to give you some again. Oh, and you need an oven, which is a thing that has to be build, and heated, which requires fuel.

That is a long way of saying – you can’t make bread by yourself. Bread is communal.

Then I got thinking about how it may look like bread is less communal today – after all we aren’t standing around a grinding stone with our neighbors or buying salt from the person who harvested it- but it takes many MORE hands to eat bread today than it did then!

I buy flour in a paper bag from the co-op. So to get it to me involves the co-op, roads, the company that grinds and sifts it, the farmers whose grain they grind, the people who make the equipment the farmers use, the seed companies, the water systems for the land, AND the people who made the paper bag, and the glue. And the paper company, glue company, co-op and flour company are places that have finance departments and HR departments and hire custodians and gardeners. Also, to buy the flour I participate in the finance system of the US, using a card, connected to my bank, all based on the worldwide value of the US currency.

I get water from my tap. Which is a miracle. And involves the city water system, those who maintain it, those who budget for it, the NYS regulations on it, the EPA regulations on it, the lawyer who are suing the EPA to keep regulations on it, the engineers who designed it, the workers who installed it, and the work of the plumbers I call if it goes wrong in my house!

I get my salt from the co-op too, I notice it has a metal spout and think about how many humans’ labor that spout adds. And I think about the work of maintaining the roads to get it to us, and the labor of doing it and the machines required and the labor of building and maintaining and dreaming the machines.

My sourdough I got from my brother’s college roommate’s stepmother, a lovely woman named Kathy who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, and could trace her sourdough to the time when Russians were in charge of Alaska.

The oven I use … oh my. People designed it, tested it, marketed it, transported it, and installed it. Others had to run electricity for it to work, and people connected my house to electricity and other people maintain the electrical grid. Oh, and the people who created, designed, perfected, transported, and installed the solar panels that sometimes provide the electricity for the house! I won’t go into it but most of the time when I make bread, I use olive oil too, and bowls, and pans, and tools! 😉

So when I “make my own bread,” I’m indebted to the labor of more people than I can fathom. And for those people to do their work, they need others too! Someone helped birth them, someone took care of them as children, people got them the medicine they need, people taught them, people wrote books they’ve read, people acted in shows they like and movies they make sense out of, someone recorded their favorite music, and someone is ready to answer the phone if they call 911. So, by the time we really think about it, the capacity for me to “make bread” requires …. a society.

To eat bread is to be nourished by the abundance of creation, the energy of the sun, the gifts of mother earth herself AND to be nourished by the interconnections of humanity itself.

Which means that magicking stones into bread is skipping out on the people and connections and communal wisdom and societal implications that are actually all a part of getting bread. If you skip out on that part, you’ve taken care of yourself in ISOLATION, taken care of only yourself while bypassing all the people who should be a part of it. You take your needs out of the community you live in. And when you take your needs out, you take your gifts out too, and you aren’t a part of the community anymore. To turn stones into bread is to act as if you can thrive in isolation.

And that’s why one shouldn’t make stones into bread – if one could.

And while we’re at it, stones don’t actually nourish, kind of like the cheap, self-stable food that many are forced by circumstances to rely on. Food that is high in sodium, low in nutrients, specially designed to make you overeat without being satisfied. Stones. And, what our society offers people as “food.” Because each loaf of bread we make is inherently dependent on others, and yet many of the others the bread depends on aren’t able to access good bread itself.

Our Social Principles make a strong point about the importance of local control over food justice. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we actually can participate in the systems as justly as possible. This church was an early adaptor of Equal Exchange Coffee, when that was the only way people could access fair trade coffee and ensure that some of the costs of coffee were used to provide for the people doing the work! Now, we’re more able to access fair trade coffee in more places, as it became clear that “fair trade” is something that people want! We don’t want food systems that oppress, food systems that dehumanize, nor food systems that make us sick! We want just systems! We want those who labor to be able to eat – and truthfully, we even want those who don’t labor to be able to eat!!!! We want the abundant resources God has provided in the earth to be used to feed God’s people.

So, I’ve been thinking about where we are able to make a difference in these sometimes really complicated systems of our society. Which means I’ve been thinking about the wonders of food co-ops. When I arrived here I was told about the Niskayuna Co-op by a church member and I’ve loved it ever since. I’m also really excited about the Electric City Food Cooperative that is supposed to open this year. From their website, ““Community-owned grocery stores … are jointly owned and democratically governed by their member-owners – by the people, for the people.” They operate differently than grocery stores. Co-ops are “where Profit serves People and Planet, rather than the other way around.”

Because, “in conventional supermarkets, financial profit is the bottom line.  In these companies, profits are distributed to shareholders or private owners. For corporately-owned grocery stores, the primary legal responsibility of the business is to generate profit margins to be redistributed to shareholders (typically people who are disconnected from the local community served by the store). Profit margins in grocery stores tend to be low compared to many other businesses and most corporately-owned supermarkets are only willing to establish stores in places where they can be assured that the population’s spending power and trip volume is high enough to generate profit for their shareholders and executives.  They tend to favor car-dominated suburban areas more than locating in urban neighborhoods.”

“Research shows that community-owned grocery stores like co-ops are the best recipe for increasing access to nutritious and healthy foods, especially in areas like downtown Schenectady that have a history of disinvestment and are currently experiencing economic revitalization.  Cooperative management models paired with significant community engagement with local government and nonprofit support make the difference.”

To my delight, it is about to get EASIER for people in our city to access good quality food, that connects us to local food sources, and distributes wealth more equitably! That is, while we can’t solve it all, we can do our best and maybe have the bread we eat that connects us to each other do a little more good along the way. And, more people will be able to access life giving bread. Thanks be to God for every single step towards food justice! Amen

February 22, 2026

Rev. Sara E. Baron 
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 
Pronouns: she/her/hers 
http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady