We all have our traditions that we associate with the holidays. And some of those traditions are cornier than others. What makes a tradition obviously corny is when a lot of people are taking part in it. This was the case every Thanksgiving at 8 am at Highland Park Baptist Church in Austin. The other ministers on staff would head off for the Thanksgiving week, leaving this youth minister at the time to head up the early bird service on Thanksgiving morning.

Most of the tradition involved in that 8 am service was good, and even though I was up leading a service at that ungodly hour, I did look forward to certain parts of it. Part of the service involved people standing up and sharing with those gathered what they were thankful for. Another part of the service involved a moment of silence in which names of people in our congregation who had died over the course of the year were read aloud slowly and reverently. But the part of the service that still baffles me was in a liturgy that we read every year. The congregation would read in unison this prayer of thanksgiving that spoke metaphorically about bread, and it gave a list of different kinds of bread that we were apparently all thankful for. So you had some 40 or so people standing up, reading from a piece of paper in unison, going: “God, we thank you for breads of all kinds: Wheat bread, rye bread, sourdough bread, poppy seed bread, yeast bread, unleavened bread, pumpkin bread…”

And it was all I could do to keep from laughing, because while we’re reading this prayer together, I’m having a Forrest Gump moment where I’m picturing Bubba scrubbing the latrine floor with Tom Hanks’ character and spouting off a litany of different kinds of shrimp: “You got fried shrimp, broiled shrimp, popcorn shrimp, grilled shrimp, shrimp kabobs…” That was a typical Dan moment.

But I reminded myself that bread is a metaphor to be taken seriously, because Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” We gather around this table every Wednesday evening to share in that offering of Christ: the bread of life. But it’s not a means to an end. We don’t eat this bread so that we can have the bread of life for ourselves for another week. We eat this bread so that we can be filled with Christ’s righteousness, and thereby notice how God is brining us closer to Christ in our daily lives. When we’re filled we can better see how God might be drawing us closer to mercy, justice, empathy, love and the many faces of Christ all around us.

Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them.” Even Jesus knew and Jesus proclaimed that it’s not all about him. It’s not all about Jesus. Jesus is life, truth and love, but no one comes to see and know all that Jesus is unless they’re drawn to that life, truth and love by God. That’s what those different kinds of bread are in our lives: God drawing us closer to truth.

When I served as a youth minister, the church where I served was located right next door to a restaurant. And I would eat there on occasion, but one day I finally met A.J. A.J. was a hostess, and she seated people at tables, gave them menus and said, “Enjoy your meal.” But A.J. wasn’t your typical hostess. A.J. was 18 years old, and she had a mental disability and slight down syndrome. She was disabled enough to be substantially disabled, but not disabled enough that she wasn’t aware of her disability. She had the learning skills of a child and the emotions and physical development of a teenager, and she was angry. She knew who she was, and she was angry.

I went out on a limb and invited A.J. to attend our church’s youth group, which she began doing religiously—pun intended—joining us every Wednesday evening, every Sunday morning and every Sunday night for youth activities. The group of teenagers was cordial to her, but they were uncomfortable with what A.J. would say and how she would behave. During discussions about gray areas in life, the group would share their opinions about when it might be appropriate to maintain confidences or not reveal complete truths; and A.J. would chime in with a one-liner that left everyone feeling guilty: “Honesty is the best policy,” she’d say. Or when we’d be talking about when you need to let somebody know when they’re being hurtful or mean, A.J. would derail the discussion and blurt out, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

But her anger would come out more in her behavior. A.J. would chastise the group publicly during opening assembly before we would break off into Sunday School classes, accusing them of not including her, or the group not taking her into consideration. One time A.J. had a birthday party, and a couple of the girls in our group showed up, but instead of thanking them for coming, she berated them for not bringing more people from the group, and even more so for not bringing any boys.

Eventually A.J.’s anger became contagious, and the other kids in the group started getting upset. Their compassion started to give out. They’d had enough of A.J. raking them over the coals for not listening to her, for not always including her, for not agreeing with her point of view in discussions and, basically, for not understanding her. The next thing I knew I had office visits from teenagers wanting to vent their anger over how A.J. had pointed out their faults and shortcomings. And our group discussions almost always had one instance of me stopping an argument from happening between A.J. and the entire room. Now everyone was angry.

I found myself praying to God asking, “Why did you bring me to this person? Why, Lord, is A.J. in my life? What am I supposed to do with this situation? Why did our paths cross?” Do you have anyone in your life like that? Have you got someone at work or at school or in the church that you find swimming in your thoughts and prayers, and you just say, “Why?”

Well, the more I prayed about it, the more I started to see God’s purpose in bringing A.J., me and the youth group together. I was able to put even more value on patience and how I’m supposed to listen to the cries of others. A.J. helped me to not only see her anger but to feel it, and that helped me share the pain that she felt at the hands of a world that often viewed her as the militant retarded girl with nothing good to offer. The group was able to do what is so difficult for teenagers to do. They were able to take healthy looks at themselves and how their own anger can be used for constructive purposes. They were able to see how they could be less cordial and more purposefully loving. And A.J. was able to eventually accept the group as they were, and also accept herself for who she was. She even made the decision that she wanted to be baptized.

At that point in my life I’d never baptized anyone, and we did it by immersion, where you go completely under water. But A.J. had Spina Bifita, which would make it difficult to dunk her. Well, the day came when A.J. would be baptized. The youth group gathered on the front row on one side of the aisle, and A.J.’s family and co-workers from the restaurant sat on the front row on the other side. I donned a white robe, as did A.J., and we met each other in the baptismal pool in front of God and everybody. I said a few words about the significance of A.J.’s decision to come forward for baptism, and then I tried to actually put her under the water. It being my first time to do it, I was not very forceful in getting A.J. immersed, and her back wasn’t cooperating either, so A.J. didn’t go under all the way.

Suddenly an old church cartoon I’d read flashed in my mind where a preacher and another man are in a baptismal pool, and the preacher says, “Once you are baptized, everything that goes under this water belongs to God.” And in the next frame the preacher dunks the man, but the man holds his wallet above the water. It was another typical Dan moment.

So, I said out loud, “Let’s try that again.” And with that A.J. easily slid under the water and rose back up to face the congregation, and everyone cheered and A.J. smiled. In her baptism, all of us had been brought to God again, and all of us were filled with thanksgiving.

Jesus is the bread of life, but God offers us different kinds of that bread all around us, different faces and hands of Christ that help us see how we need to be drawn to God. It is our calling to seek out that bread of life in all places, in all times and in all people, for we are all children of God, and each of us is filled with the bread of life. I thank God for A.J., for all of you. Amen.