Here is a list of links to all (?) of my posts that are specifically about the Eucharist, for quick reference and for those who might like to have one!
Real Presence (some thoughts and stories about the meaning of real presence)
Intimacy for Mission (a reflection on the readings for Corpus Christi, Year A. Eucharist, memory, and freedom)
It Takes a Village (reflection on the feeding of the multitudes in Mark, and a understanding what Scripture might mean by, "they did not understand the meaning of the loaves.")
The Hand of the Lord Feeds Us (first of seven posts about John 6, the Bread of Life discourse, as proclaimed in Year B)
Liberation and Transformation (second of seven John 6 posts, about our call to collaborate in the liberation and transformation of the world)
Taken, Blessed, Broken, Shared (third of seven John 6 posts, reflecting on the four movements of the Eucharistic action seen in the NT, and picked up by Henri Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved.)
Giving Thanks Always, for Everything (fourth of seven John 6 posts, this one on Eucharist as thanksgiving, bouncing off Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything) To Whom Shall We Go? (fifth of seven John 6 posts, with more about "real presence" and food, but getting at why we stick with the Christian way of life even when it seems like we're getting nowhere.
Looking Beyond the Manna and the Man (sixth of seven John 6 posts, this one about transcendence in the Eucharist, Where is the heaven of the 'bread from heaven,' and what kind of God brings us to it?
Sign and Foretaste of Heaven (final of seven John 6 posts, more about the meaning and location of the "heaven" we share in the experience of Christ in the Eucharist)
All Are Welcome—To What? (part 1) This essay reflects on the quandary of the open table, who's an insider, who's an outsider? Hint: there's no real answer.
All Are Welcome—To What? (part 2) More about the meaning of the barriers to communion, and what kind of thinking and action might begin to break them down.
Being Augustine's Infantes as We Prepare for Corpus Christi(first of three posts from 2017's series on Eucharist, slightly expanded, that appeared in St. Anne's Sunday bulletin, the Clarion.) Eucharist and Conversion (second in the series, this essay briefly considers how the Eucharist, a sacrament of initiation, is a continuing call to conversion, and how we miss what that means sometimes.)
Are You Being Served? (third in the series, the connection between Eucharist and service, both inside and outside the Sunday assembly)
This week we trained a few new Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion (EMs for short), and as part of that training I ask them to reflect on what brought them to the ministry. How did they experience the call to become an EM? Was it from a family member? Something they heard or saw at church? Some change in their church life (for instance, confirmation)?
There are as many answers as there are people, but generally they describe their experience as a “call” in some way, either organically, in a natural progression, say, from childhood service as an altar server to a new ministry as an EM, or as part of a larger shift in life, a desire to get more involved in church, a yearning to know more and participate more in faith life, a deeper experience of God.
“Call” is just the right word, because what Christ is doing through the Eucharist, and what God is doing through Christ and their Holy Spirit, is calling us to participate in saving the world. Christ is the face of God's loving desire, God's mission. As 2nd Corinthians put it in today's (Thursday's) first reading, it is
"…Christ, who is the image of God
For God…has shone in our hearts to bring to light
the knowledge of the glory of God
on the face of Jesus Christ."
Christ is the face, the "outward sign," or sacrament, of the invisible reality of God saving the world. What we do without God’s help is imitate one another in selfish desire for and consumption of whatever we think will make us happy. And that’s what we all want, and wanting the same things ultimately leads us to conflict and violence. We start seeing the world as “us” and “them,” “friend” and “enemy,” “insider” and “outsider.” Jesus, the human face and voice of God, baptized us into a different vision, a different faith, a different way of life. Jesus brings us into the family of God, where everyone is “in,” “friend,” in fact, family. Brother and sister. We begin to imitate Jesus, who imitates God, who loves everyone, who lets the rain fall and sun shine on good and bad alike, who is so wonderfully generous that God created us like God's self, a race in God's likeness, daughters and sons together in the garden.
Belonging is what we experience as members of the body of Christ, the Church. The Spirit of God makes us, many though we are, one. We have many different gifts, but they’re all given for the good of the whole body. We belong to Christ, and so we belong to one another. But in this community of the church, this belonging pushes us outward as our vision deepens, and we begin to see that we’re not really whole until everyone is in. So we receive the Spirit’s mission to do what Christ did: “as the Father sent me, so I send you” to preach the gospel, and help people understand that they have one Father, and they are all brothers and sisters. Belonging, in the community of the Church, leads to mission. As in the Trinity whom we celebrate as God, unity and diversity are one and the same thing. That is the image of God in which humanity is made.
Jesus himself “did not deem equality with God something to be grasped.” Instead, he became like us. He left, in a sense, the “belonging” of the Trinity, and went on God’s mission. “I did not come to be served,” Jesus said, “but to serve.” It’s a different kind of God we have. The more like God we become, the more we are drawn to serve one another, both in the church and its liturgy, and outside the church in the rest of our lives of family, school, work, politics, and economy.
We call our worship event a “service.” But whether or not we are liturgical ministers, and I hope everyone considers this according to their gifts, we are all called to serve one another in our lives, and serve the mission of God made visible by Christ. Life is a banquet that God serves to everyone. If we’re doing it right, while we’re being served, we’re also learning to be waiters. That’s what ministry is: being a waiter, a server, at the banquet of the Lamb, the Lamb of God who came not to be served, but to serve.
More and more in recent years, I’ve been seeing liturgy in terms of conversion, mostly because I’m understanding all of Christian life as a process of “turning around” from what we’re taught is normal to what Jesus taught. Most of what Jesus taught is not really normal at all (in the sense of "business as usual," but it is actually more real. We might wistfully be glad Jesus is teaching all those bad people to be more like us, but unless we're understanding from him that his words both comforting and challenging apply to everyone and not just to those who're different from us, we're rewriting the gospel to fit how we're already living, and not really taking seriously its radical departure from the organizing strategies of the world.
We learn everything (we learn what is "normal") by imitating other humans, starting with our parents. We learn to walk, talk, eat certain foods with certain utensils, everything, all by observing and imitation. We’re taught who is good and who is bad by those around us, who we’re like and who we’re not like, who is better than we are, and who we are better than. "Normal" is learned behavior. Because of that, we all learn to want the same things, whether it’s certain toys, clothing, or cars, or whether it’s security, power, authority, or property. And often it leads to conflict, so “civilization” (the way things are, and have always been) has organized us into bands of people who define themselves by who we aren’t, who we belong to, to whom we owe allegiance, and who is an enemy. Religion often participates in this “civilizing” influence. And civilization does a pretty good job of organizing us into competitive groups and keeping something like peace, unless we happen to be in the out-group, which is where it’s dangerous to be. We might look different, believe differently, live in a different country, not have enough money, any number of things that separates us from the dominant culture. Suddenly, we can easily be identified as “the enemy” and disposed of however enemies are disposed of. And in case it doesn't occur to you right off, everyone is in several "out" groups, as well as in groups. It's not just an us vs. them world, it's more like everyone vs. everyone else.
But Jesus came to show a different way. His teaching suggested a question, something like, “How’s that whole thing with (the Roman god-man) Caesar’s civilization working out for you? How's normal for you? Happy? Let me show you a different way, a different authority. A different kind of empire, and a different kind of God.” He laid out the essentials in what we heard earlier this year, and also in the Lenten weekday readings, in the Sermon on the Mount. Call God “our Father,” because we’re all brothers and sisters, and what God wants is a family, and it’s a family that God will care for. Do unto others what you’d like them to do for you. Turn the other cheek. If you have two of something, give one away. Love your enemies. Don’t even call people names. If you want to be great, be like God, and serve everyone else.
Then the way he lived this out, with the words “Follow me,” was to eat and drink with everybody. Nice people, not-so-nice people, good people, throwaways, rich people, poor people. Everybody. This was such a “Jesus” thing that it became the way that his friends remembered him, and spread the good news he entrusted to them, after his death. In both Luke's and John's post-resurrection stories, Jesus cooking and eating with the twelve continues to be part of the story of presence and recognition.
Eucharist reflects all of this and more. It’s a meal for a new creation. Enough for everybody, and everybody gets the same. God provides, we share God’s goodness in the gifts we’ve been given. No one is privileged above others in the community of Jesus. Leadership is service in the Eucharist. In the liturgy, "follow me" becomes "Go and announce the gospel of the Lord," or "glorify the Lord by your life." The liturgy announces itself to be a sacrament, and outward sign of a reality we are living the rest of the week, month, year, the rest of our lifetime. What happened here, the liturgy says, go make that real in the world again. Take the nourishment this gathering, God's word, and the bread of heaven has given you, and share it with everyone. Go, team God. Peacefully. See you next week.
But for a lot of people, those who believe in the competence and expediency of normal civilization, those whose idea is that power is control, that might makes right, and that one's own "in" group has priority over all others in everything, including access to the good things of the earth, and freedom, and happiness, are not interested at all in the message of Christ. They will always push back, either by ridiculing the very idea of the gospel, or rebaptizing it in the name of their own gods, and turning it into a gospel of prosperity, or a gospel of nationalism. Those who believe otherwise are reduced to irrelevance, or worse. Persuasion and example take too long. We can sacrifice other people and their children so that our children can be safe. Better yet, we can assure ourselves that God will take care of them after they die, and feel better about ourselves. The end justifies the means. The gospel is an ideal. Muscle is real.
“When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, Lord, until you come.” Caesar and those in power know exactly what the new empire is all about. The Romans thought they could put a stop to it. But the early church had experienced the resurrection. They understood, with Jesus, that God is life, for whom death does not exist. There would be no death for the word of God, no death for the gospel. We who eat and drink the body and blood of Christ need to know that our future is the same as that of Jesus and the martyrs if we choose his way. But to be part of the “kingdom of God” means leaving behind the deathmaking, regret, and sorrow of “normal” civilization, and beginning here and now to live in the world of the resurrection. In the Eucharist, the Lamb who was slain by the normalcy of violence lives among us and shares the infinite life of the Spirit with those who gather to turn and follow him to live, here and now, in a different world. Blessed are those who are called to the table of the Lamb of God.
Over the last year and a half, I've been writing a weekly piece in our parish bulletin, The Clarion, going through the liturgy from beginning to end, just offering a little catechesis on the parts of the mass. In a happy coincidence, the communion piece is about to end on the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord next week. I did about six weeks on communion itself, with another four or so on other aspects of the Communion Rite, beginning with the Lord's Prayer. On three of those communion weeks, I shared my blog post on "Real Presence" in three installments—I needed a break from trying to be original. 😁
So I thought it would be a good opportunity, in this week after Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, preceding Sunday's solemnity, to expand those shorter articles a bit here, and share them more widely. You've already seen the "real presence" article because I repost it every year during Holy Week, so I'll just work with the new essays from the Clarion.
Notice, in the imaginative exercise I give below, how it is that the great St. Augustine teaches about real presence in the Eucharist, in a clean and pristine form. Christ is present in the Eucharistic meal in order to transform the many into one. The transformation is real, Augustine says, so act like it! There is, thus, already present in Augustine's teaching a nascent sense that the healing (salvation) of the world is a participatory event. It is announced, prepared, and nourished by God, but requires our opting-in. In Tutu's words, "Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not." (see endnote)
I’d like to invite you to a little exercise for your imagination to begin this reflection on the Eucharist.
It’s early in the fifth century CE in northern Africa, in the cathedral of St. Augustine, on Pentecost, the fiftieth day of Easter. Augustine is gathered with his people at the end of the Easter season. Try to imagine the joy in the room, the noise and wonder of the infantes, not babies, but new Christians, people we'd call neophytes or the newly baptized, and the joy of everyone that the austerity and fasting of Lent, and now even the seven weeks of Easter celebration are coming to an end. There may even have been more baptisms during the vigil overnight before Pentecost, we don’t know, but the homily may refer to them. If so, the room would be redolent with the smell of chrism scented with frankincense, and maybe the honeyed fragrance of new candles.
I think that presupposition is that there was not much direct catechesis on the Eucharist before baptism because, in its pristine form, catechesis comes after experience. The word "catechesis" even shares a root in the word "echo"—catechesis catches our experience and interprets it in the light of the gospel, letting God's word and the gospel bounce around inside of us like an echo, reverberating off the walls of our days. Early catechesis would happen after the liturgical experience, like the best catechesis does today. Rather than say, "This is what's going to happen to you, and this means this, and that means yadda yadda &c &c", the style would have been to say, "what just happened? How did you feel? What did the word, the community, and the meal say today?" The catechist, in this case, the homilist-bishop of Hippo and, later, Doctor of the Church, would then do some teaching based on the experience and the people's reactions.
Augustine, their popular bishop, speaks to them with his famous voice, and this is what they hear:
What you see on God's altar, you've already observed during the night that has now ended. But you've heard nothing about just what it might be, or what it might mean, or what great thing it might be said to symbolize. For what you see is simply bread and a cup - this is the information your eyes report. But your faith demands far subtler insight: the bread is Christ's body, the cup is Christ's blood. Faith can grasp the fundamentals quickly, succinctly, yet it hungers for a fuller account of the matter. As the prophet says, "Unless you believe, you will not understand." [Is. 7.9; Septuagint] So you can say to me, "You urged us to believe; now explain, so we can understand." Inside each of you, thoughts like these are rising: … “How can bread be his body? And what about the cup? How can it (or what it contains) be his blood?"
My friends, these realities are called sacraments because in them one thing is seen, while another is grasped. What is seen is a mere physical likeness; what is grasped bears spiritual fruit. So now, if you want to understand the body of Christ, listen to the Apostle Paul speaking to the faithful: "You are the body of Christ, member for member." [1 Cor. 12.27] If you, therefore, are Christ's body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord's table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! You are saying "Amen" to what you are: your response is a personal signature, affirming your faith. When you hear "The body of Christ", you reply "Amen." Be a member of Christ's body, then, so that your "Amen" may ring true!
But what role does the bread play? We have no theory of our own to propose here; listen, instead, to what Paul says about this sacrament: "The bread is one, and we, though many, are one body." [1 Cor. 10.17] Understand and rejoice: unity, truth, faithfulness, love. "One bread," he says. What is this one bread? Is it not the "one body," formed from many? Remember: bread doesn't come from a single grain, but from many.… Be what you see; receive what you are. This is what Paul is saying about the bread. So too, what we are to understand about the cup is similar and requires little explanation. …
Remember, friends, how wine is made. Individual grapes hang together in a bunch, but the juice from them all is mingled to become a single brew. This is the image chosen by Christ our Lord to show how, at his own table, the mystery of our unity and peace is solemnly consecrated. All who fail to keep the bond of peace after entering this mystery receive not a sacrament that benefits them, but an indictment that condemns them. So let us give God our sincere and deepest gratitude, and, as far as human weakness will permit, let us turn to the Lord with pure hearts. With all our strength, let us seek God's singular mercy; it will deepen our faith, govern our minds, grant us holy thoughts, and lead us, finally, to share the divine happiness through God's own son Jesus Christ. Amen! (from Sermon #272, Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, [354-430]).
The great bishop and teacher's inspiring words ring down the ages. We are meant to live in peace, meant for unity and mutual love. The mystery of the Eucharist is an invitation to be made more and more aware of the innate unity-in-diversity that is the human race, made in the image and likeness of the triune God, whom we celebrated yesterday as unity-in-diversity. We've got the diversity part down, all right. We're nations, races, belief systems, non-belief systems, states, families, and individuals, all clamoring for our rights to be separate and free agents of our own happiness. But the Eucharist teaches that happiness isn't true unless it's happiness for everyone, and while diversity is clear and true, unity is equally true, but more difficult to achieve, because it requires surrender. Unity requires service to one another, care for those considered to be "outside" of our circles of belonging and support, and ultimately, love of our enemies. The gift of diversity is given, like all gifts, for the good of the whole, of unity.
Endnote: from God at 2000, quoted in Marcus Borg (ed.), page 131. Tutu may have been quoting or paraphrasing St. Augustine's sermon 169, Qui ergo fecit te sine te, non te iustificat sine te. ("So he who made you without you will not justify you without you."
Rethinking our idea of God, learning God’s ways based upon the Jesus of the gospels and not upon Baal or Zeus or the human emperors whose wealth and power we crave, will necessarily cause us to rethink our idea of what heaven is. It can help us get an idea of how the eucharist is a “foretaste of heaven,” since heaven, we imagine, describes the dwelling of God, or the realm or sphere of divine presence and influence. And I keep coming back to that hymn in Philippians that Paul quotes near the outset of that letter, “Though (Christ) was in the form of God, he did not imagine that equality with God was something to be hoarded. Instead, he emptied himself, and took the form of a slave.” Whatever else we say about God, it must include this central notion of our faith that God empties himself, does not cling to divinity, in order to love and serve. Clearly, already, heaven must be more like the kitchen than the banquet hall; more like the servants’ quarters than the throne room; in the image of the venerable British drama, more like downstairs than upstairs.
The god for whom Jesus was mistaken in the narrative of John 6 and in the other multiplication gospels enters history on a white horse to disrupt it, breaking the laws of physics, casting aside the harsh reality of laboring for daily bread, setting things right by giving everyone a winning lottery ticket and free meal pass. But Jesus had rejected that sort of messianic mission, as the stories of the temptations in the desert suggest. The God of Jesus is not like Pharaoh or Caesar, nor a magician who produces abundance by legerdemain. The true God enters history with all its unfairness, violence, and ungodliness, subverting it from within through solidarity with us, and showing us by example how the greedy and violent dynamics of history can be overcome by agape, the selfless solidarity of other-centeredness.
There is a familiar metaphor for heaven that works for me here. It’s an image in which heaven and hell are exactly alike, with people sitting across from each other at great banquet tables laden with rich food and drink. Angels bring plate after plate of wonderful dishes to the center of these tables. The trouble is, the forks are all three feet long. The people in hell are starving, the food is turning, because they can’t reach from their forks to their mouths to feed themselves. Those in heaven, on the other hand, are laughing and full, because they are feeding each other. They’ve learned the lesson of the kenotic Christ, who came “not to be served, but to serve.” He is the image of the invisible God.
In the letter to the Ephesians we heard during these Bread of Life weeks, St. Paul asks believers to “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us.” To “live in love,” we have been shown by Jesus, is to serve the other person, to “enter history on behalf of the poor,” in Nathan Mitchell’s phrase, and not to cling to our correctness or status or imagined “goodness” if it gets in the way of solidarity with the other and putting the other’s needs above our own. Within the community, this means we ought to remove from our lives “all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling...along with all malice.” Imitating God means living in agape, which is focused upon the needs of the other at our own expense: “be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” To St. Paul, it doesn’t matter who is right and who is wrong, it only matters who does right, and doing right is a matter of imitating God, emptying ourselves into history “as Christ loved us and handed himself over to us.”
Solidarity with others at this level, being-like-God when God is a servant and not a despot, is a dangerous business. The food that strengthened Elijah in the desert came to him because he was in flight from the persecution of Queen Jezebel and her husband, Ahab. Jesus and his disciple Paul both experience capital punishment at the hands of the empire. That having been said, this political nature of eucharistic life and solidarity among us is not a coercive or violent movement, but a movement of people who choose life. It surrenders rights, rather than claims them; this is how God is, not even hoarding the status of divinity, but surrendering divine right and rightness to be God-among-us. I say this as a way of countering any claim that the Eucharist is essentially a “spiritual” exercise: it is, quite to the contrary, a sign of the integrity of humanity, body and soul.
Maybe that’s why we have the Eucharist, finally, as a meal. It is God emptied into bread and wine, but it remains real food for real people, bodies and souls, confronted by and then surrendering to a divine presence that transforms us into someone we could never become on our own: Christ. In Christ, humanity becomes divine. But this is not to say that we rise to some new kind of superiority or splendor: it is to say that we are more and more transformed by agape into servants of the world in the image of the God by whom we were created. The sign and foretaste of heaven brings us ever closer to the dwelling place of God: with the human race. We arrive at the beginning, in Eliot’s phrase, and discover it for the first time. Christ, as he did with Zacchaeus, has come to stay in the house of a sinner. Our house. Heaven, the dwelling-place of God, is with the human race.
Buddhists talk of their teaching as a finger pointing at the moon—we're meant to see the goal, not the finger.
At the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, recorded in some form in all four gospels, there is a story about the John-baptized Jesus being driven into the wilderness for trial. In the more detailed narratives, the evangelists tell of dialogue between Jesus and Satan, who, in one case, tries to get Jesus to turn rocks into loaves of bread. In these lessons in “how to be a bad messiah,” Satan attempts to make Jesus into the very kind of messiah that people will actually want, will root for: one who can feed them when they get hungry, rule over their rulers, and manipulate God into answering whatever prayer might be on their lips at the time. In every case, Jesus not only rejects the suggestion of the tempter, but, using God’s own word, demonstrates that the kind of actions Satan suggests were never God’s idea in the first place. Satan, foiled in this attempt to divert Jesus from his calling and from his elevated status as God’s beloved, goes away to try again later. “Later,” we are to understand, is the darkness of the cross.
The cluster of sayings and dialogues gathered and redacted into the sixth chapter of John are dense and weighted with references to the feeding of the Hebrews wandering in the desert with manna, “bread from heaven.” What does “bread from heaven” mean? Is it like “pennies from heaven,” a kind of panis ex machina that is like winning the hunger lottery? I think to answer this question, we have to come to terms with what kind of God it is whom we worship. If “heaven” is the abode of God, or the sphere of divine influence, then the kind of God we worship will determine much about what heaven is like. For instance, if we believe in a God in the likeness of a human monarch, then heaven will be somehow like a castle, with royal attendants, rich fixtures, a throne, “golden crowns upon the glassy sea,” and so forth. But what if, as I have often been advocating here and in my music (not my own idea, but gleaned from other readings) that Jesus Christ “is the image of the invisible God,” and that our best glimpse of God, and therefore of heaven, is to consider Christ himself? Might not, in the end, this be something like what Jesus means when he says, in words laden with connotative references to the exodus narrative, “I AM the living bread which has come down from heaven”? In other words, My work is the work of the God of Exodus, the living God, the God of freedom and equality. Abba gives me to the world, as Abba gave the manna in the desert to your ancestors. To be fully alive is to take me inside of you, to take me to your heart, to become who I am. This, too, is the gift of Abba.”
Jesus keeps urging the crowd to “look beyond” Moses, and see that the wonder worker was doing the work of the One who led them out of Egypt. In the same way, he wants the crowd, along with both his disciples and detractors, to see that it is God who feeds them. And how did God accomplish this? Are we to believe that, after a miraculous multiplication of food in front of thousands of people, there would still be incredulity? Well, we are a tough crowd; I suppose it’s (barely) possible. But what kind of God would be revealed in such a miracle, a god who feeds this crowd, today, and another one? Not a hungrier one, for instance, of which there are plenty. Wouldn’t such a miracle reveal a god who breaks all the rules set up at creation for a moment of glory? Being this kind of messiah, wouldn’t Jesus just be doing what Satan had tempted him to do in the desert, when he reprimanded the Divider by saying, “People don’t live on bread alone”? Is it more likely, as some have imagined, that the preaching of Jesus about the empire of God, about an alternative to greed, gain-centered labor, war and competitiveness in the invitation to live in agape, might have moved the crowd to open its burses and pockets, stimulated by the sight of a boy surrendering his five loaves and two fishes, to share their food with one another?
What kind of bread, from what kind of “heaven”, might that be? What God might dwell in a heaven that is other people, that is a spirit of shared life, that is about acknowledged mutual value and equality as children of one family? Wouldn’t that kind of bread feed more than just the belly; yes, the belly, but also the heart and soul?
The paschal mystery of God demands that kind of bread. It is not bread that changes our life like a winning lottery ticket, but it’s bread that changes our life like spring rain and sunlight, spread over the whole earth so that the earth itself brings forth enough for everyone. It’s bread that changes everyone’s life. The God whom we worship as a community of persons in eternal mutual surrender and service is revealed by a messiah who turns a crowd of hungry seekers into a table of plenty.
In the Buddhist parable, the seeker is warned not to miss the moon’s beauty by concentrating on the finger pointing at the moon. Jesus’s message to the crowds is much the same: it’s not the food that is so important, and it’s not even the one who brings it to the table. What’s important is the God who sends the bread from heaven. Knowing that God, knowing the divine economy of abundance that shines out when we stop coveting and hoarding and praying for a miracle and start opening our picnic baskets and sharing, that might be the important thing. Looking beyond the gift to the giver, sharing the bread from that heaven, we begin, in St. Augustine’s beautiful words, to become what we eat, not through any work of our own, but because the Holy Spirit fills the bread of agape with the very life of God.
Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. (Jn 6:26)
Finishing up (for now) with the Bread of Life discourse, I thought I'd just say a few more words about real presence, and recall Joshua's words and Peter's statement, "Lord, to whom shall we go?"
I've written a lot about "real presence" before, most thoroughly here. As I was reading about yet another homilist rail against the remnant about the bogus statistic that "only 40% of Catholics believe in the real presence," I was thinking to myself, well, Father, why don't you say a little bit about human experience of how food changes when we gather around it, and about the ability of God, being God, to change things completely? Yes, it's a mystery. But it's not incomprehensible. It's just too much to completely comprehend, ever.
One example of this came to me as I read Nathaniel Philbrick's engrossing little book called Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. In this book, Philbrick, the historian of Nantucket Island and its whaling past, gives us a popular historian's view of the settling of Massachusetts by the Pilgrims, their encounters with the indigenous peoples of the area, the first Thanksgiving, and King Philip's War, all of which happened within the span of a single generation or so. The reference to Thanksgiving made me think about human presence and the way we are capable of transforming food. I mean, turkey is just turkey. But in 1621 when a group of sorry settlers already decimated by disease and hunger were befriended by a group of Pokanoket Indians and their chief, Massasoit, the blessing of the autumn feast at the end of their first year in Plymouth made turkeys enter the world of myth. Even though turkeys, indigenous to the New World, had been brought to Europe by the conquistadors and were introduced in England eighty years before the Pilgrims sailed from Holland, it was this singular feast, marked by a hesitant attempt at a cultural exchange, that made the roast turkey a symbol of a nation's thanksgiving.
But it was people, gathered around food, that changed food into something more than just, well, charred bird. I can't even look at a turkey, or smell a turkey cooking, at any time of year, without thinking of Thanksgiving, pilgrims, my mother, my family, and my country. The food was changed by presence; yes, the presence of pilgrims and Indians around food that first Thanksgiving, but also by the remembrance of that event in millions of households for nearly four hundred years. Is the turkey just turkey? Well, yes. Certainly a farmer from Mongolia, a schoolboy from Delhi, or a Masai tribesman from South Africa might only recognize the bird. But to many, including many who have only read about American history, folklore, and mythology, the roast turkey is more than just a bird. In an important sense, to Americans, the "accidents," that is, the sensible parts of the turkey, remain the same, but the "turkey-ness" of the bird, the essence, or what Aristotle would have called its "substance", has been changed, at least in a way that we can generally agree to on some level.
As I said in my previous post, the important thing that faith brings to the table, as it were, is that in the Eucharist, it is not just human persons gathered around the table. It is human persons baptized in the Holy Spirit, who are joined in mystical union as a body with the Lord Jesus as the head of the body, who are gathered. It is God who is gathered with us. If human presence can transform food in the way I tried to outline above and in my previous post, isn't it true that, when God is involved in the gathering and in the food, the food can be seen to have changed completely? It is God who is creator, by whose word the heavens and earth were made in all their parts. "God speaks, and it is done," says Psalm 33, a sentiment strongly echoed in Isaiah 55, when the prophet writes, in God's voice,
"For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down
And do not return there till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
Giving seed to him who sows and bread to him who eats,
So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it."
God's word, God's Word, changes food completely, making it, and therefore those who eat it, a new creation. It's not our doing. Only God can do it, only God can invite to the table. "No one can come to me unless the Father beckon." The thing is, God invites everyone, and is waiting for us to spread the invitation. Again, that great line of Archbishop Desmond Tutu comes to mind: "We can't do it without God; God won't do it without us."
Finally, a word wrapping up some thoughts from last time. Joshua, in today's first reading, renews the covenant between God and people at Shechem. Again, the covenant with the God of life is renewed in the context of freedom. The new life that the former slave nation was to experience in Israel was a life of freedom, they were called to it by the God YHWH—"I am"—who had given them bread from heaven, manna. Jesus, in the discourse just concluded in chapter 6 of John, recalls that very God when he says to the crowd "I AM the bread of life," "I AM the living bread which came down from heaven." Jesus is the new manna, the bread of life, the bread of freedom, who reveals God as a God who wants freedom for all people. The meaning of this freedom Jesus will further demonstrate at the Last Supper, which is only represented in the fourth gospel by the washing of the feet (about which Jesus says, "as I have done, so you must do"). Further, in his appearance before Pilate, Jesus admits to being a king, but not in a kingdom like those of this world, where hordes of followers would put up a fight to prevent his trial and execution. In the kingdom of life and freedom, swords are sheathed, and life is freely given so that the freedom of others to choose is not thwarted. The bread of life, the bread of freedom, lets us enter into the very life of God, whose inner life is one of self-gift, shared power, and eternal dialogue. This, too, is a great mystery.
"Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life." You alone have the words of utter freedom, you promise and make a world of peace, as hard as it seems sometimes to listen to your word. How often I have repeated those words to friends and family members when we get into the discussion about the Church, about how hopeless our leadership can be, how sinful we ourselves are, how nothing ever seems to change, how, some people see it, the world isn't about to turn, in spite of what my song says. Lord, to whom shall we go? We are part of a people, simul justus et peccator, as the old saying goes, both God-like and sinful. We have no dependable access to Christ other than through a community. Revelation requires discernment, discernment requires other people, if you want to be at least fairly sure that the voice you are hearing is not some food that disagreed with you, or a phlegmatic chemical in your brain, or your own wishful thinking. I may want to go it alone, but Christ has made a covenant with us as a people, not as individuals, but as a body. Like Groucho, I may not want to be part of any group that would have me as a member, but here I am, not here because I chose Christ, but because Christ chose me. I have a list of reasons as long as my arm for leaving this crazy church behind, but then I remember that God has a list as long as her arm about why I shouldn't be allowed to stay, and God's arm is much longer than mine. Irascible and still allured by the pretty but empty covenants of death, I have much of which to empty myself as I try to find the road, the truth, and the freedom who is Christ. I hope I never settle for anything less than transcendence, for a sense that what I am involved in and to whomever I am immediately and utterly present has a reality and a truth that goes beyond my ability to entirely grasp it, a meaning and finality that will endure beyond the grave. That is what Christ offers. I've seen it again and again in my life.
Tomorrow we may ask ourselves again why we do what we do, why we seem to be the dance band on the Titanic, why we work so hard to have it all cut out from under us by a pompous cleric, or a bitter, fearful reactionary, or the carelessness of those who ought to care the most about the liturgy. And again, I'll try to remember those words, thankfully a little closer to the forefront of my assaulted memory: Lord, to whom can we go? You alone have the words of everlasting life.
On to Sunday's readings, the fourth in the "Bread of Life" Sundays. I had a number of thoughts to share about this, but for today, I thought I'd start off with this thought, which I've used in a few workshops over the last dozen years since I came across Bill Bryson's great book of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything. To get into this a little bit, here is what St. Paul says in the passage we hear in the second reading Sunday from the end of the letter to the Ephesians:
...Be filled with the Spirit,
addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing and playing to the Lord in your hearts,
giving thanks always and for everything.
Words like that make us pastoral musicians smile, of course, and affirms us in our ministry week after week. But in the context of these Sundays on which we hear proclaimed the words from John 6, which, from our historical vantage point, we associate with the Eucharist, the call to "give thanks" (in Greek, eucharistountes) is particularly poignant and ripe with meaning. The singing at Mass these mornings has been wonderful, even when I'm trying to introduce some new mass parts! Some days, it just seems to lift me up more than usual. These Sundays are like that.
So, I was giving thanks this morning for the last two weeks of my life as I was going over the couple of hundred pictures I took at MMA and on vacation with Terry's sisters in Keystone, CO. Meeting new friends and the youth participants at Music Ministry Alive, seeing old friends and laughing late into the night, being smitten again by Fr. Ray East ("love on legs") and Fr. Alapaki Kim from Hawaii, and Joe Camacho, and Bonnie and Tim and Lori and Kate and Matt and all the other folks who made the long work days not just bearable but blessed and magical. I'm giving thanks for the indescribable beauty of Colorado and the gift of being with the fabulous Donohoo sisters (most of them) and their families for a week, the "serenity of the clear blue mountain lake," the night sky crammed breathtakingly full of stars, the smell of the pines, the rush of the wind in the pines and aspens—it was all too much, over and over again. Then to come home to my beautiful parish, and the choir, and the young people who sing in the evening—it made the transition to reality a little easier!
You have your own list of gratitudes, I'm sure. And yet, that barely begins to scratch the surface of all that you and I have to be thankful for as we gather to break bread in the name of Jesus. The very bread and wine themselves are made from the energy that made the stars, fed by elements whose origin is hidden in prehistory and dust from the Big Bang, "fruit of the vine, work of human hands," sown, harvested, transported, ground, mixed, baked, packaged, transported again, and sold by human endeavor, all for the benefit of our blessing. And in a sense, when we gather at the Eucharist, this is bread's Big Moment, it is wine's Time to Shine. It's actually here, in the new creation that is the Eucharist, that bread and wine really become what they were created for. Now, at last, bread can really give life, can really nourish the whole person, body and soul, in time and for eternity. Now, finally, wine can warm the whole person, give gladness, health, and well-being to the whole body, mind, heart, and spirit. Both give themselves into the hands of Christ, who makes it possible for all humanity to come to a new awareness of itself as an organism that lives both in time and in kairos, not a collection of individuals adrift in a heartless cosmos, but part of a body whose life is the breath of God.
Now, that's not what Bill Bryson has to say, but he sure gets you thinking that way. This is from the first chapter of his book, and I offer it to you in the hope that you might enjoy it and be drawn to buy his book, or get it from your library, and gain a new or deeper appreciation of the universe that God has made, in one way or another. When we begin to realize the length of the hazardous journey that DNA has made to get to this day, and to the individuation that makes you you and me me, it's cause for a new kind of thanksgiving, and in a way, a kind of thanksgiving to which only science can give us a real entrèe.
For today, I'll leave you with the text. At the end of this blog, you'll see a link to the book on Amazon if you're interested in reading more. For now, enjoy this beautiful summer day.
I’m delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.
To be here now, alive in the 21st century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most, 99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on earth, you see, is not only brief, but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
The average species on Earth lasts for only about 4 million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to changed everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly…To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over….So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground and lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts and you might now be licking algae from cave walls, or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
You have (also) been extremely – make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it’s life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.
GATHERING: Look Beyond
KYRIE/SPRNKLING:Kendzia
RESP. PSALM: Taste and See (Kendzia)
KID PSALM:O Taste and See (Haugen)
PREP RITE: Blest Are You (Haugen)
FRACTION: St Aidan (A)
COMMUNION: I Myself Am the Bread of Life
SENDING FORTH: Table of the World (Nettleton/Alonso)
Being given away is part of the eucharistic "deal."
Last weekend, we finished the week of music and mentoring that is MMA, Music Ministry Alive!, the wonderful work of David Haas and Lori True and many, many others that took place July 26-August 2 at St. Catherine's University in St. Paul. Part of my work there was a set of four sessions with the adult track participants on the four movements of the Eucharistic action that are generally identified from scripture as "taken, blessed, broken, and shared." In the short term, David suggested these movements as an outgrowth of his delight in Henri Nouwen's work, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World. Nouwen's little book is written as a love letter to a friend, a secular Jew who challenged Nouwen, a prodigious writer on spirituality, to write a book that young, secularized people like himself could use to make meaning out of their lives. Nouwen's principle was an attempt to invite people to understand themselves as beloved by God, and called to a kind of life that recognizes that belovedness and acts on it. To his friend, the work ultimately failed because of its presuppositions and assumptions about God and Christ, but the work still stands to anyone by whom Nouwen's assumptions are also assumed in the simple rigor of it message. As part of his entree into his subject, he tries to help the reader see the movements of being chosen (taken up, as it were), blessed, broken, and given away (or shared) as part of being God's beloved.
That's the call I got when I was asked to be a presenter/mentor at MMA. Of course, I'm not stranger to that fourfold template of spirituality. Those who know me know that one of my most well-known songs, "I Myself Am the Bread of Life," makes that dynamic explicit in the chorus, which sings,
I'm quite sure that John Gallen, S.J., either planted that mantra in my head, or awakened it from its slumber since liturgy and New Testament classes in college, when Gary and I were taking classes with him those two years in Phoenix at the Corpus Christi Center, or I heard them from Mark Searle or Ralph Kiefer or one of the other giants of the liturgical awakening at one conference or another in the 1980s. But it's not the song I wanted to talk about the day so much as the dynamic itself,
When I entered "taken, blest, broken, and shared" into a web browser, I got half a million hits. Half a million. So this is no recent addition to the catalog of scriptural buzzwords. This one has been around the block, and I'm guessing that there's not much new to be said about it, however brilliant my insights might seem to me when I'm hyperventilating my way down the lanes of my hometown in the humid 80º morning sun. But one little possibility jumped out at me as I was thinking about it in preparation for the week.
First, just to be sure we have the same starting place, those verbs in that order possibly represent a catechetical code for the eucharistic meal. They appear in the first part of John 6, the feeding of the multitude, on the first of the five Sundays in year B that present the "bread of life" discourse, this year, July 26. It came like this:
Jn 6:11 Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted.
You will notice that the notion of "breaking" does not appear in this version of the story. In the first gospel, Jesus is always in control of events, and the mandatum to and commission to "feed my sheep" are associated with the passion and resurrection narrative, as the mission is passed on to the church. In his feeding narrative, John also uniquely introduces the idea that "the Jewish feast of passover was near," juxtaposing this event with the Last Supper and marking it as a significant moment in the Lord's ministry. But notice how, for instance, Mark, the earliest gospel writer, describes the same event (6:41)
Then, taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them to [his] disciples to set before the people; he also divided the two fish among them all.
Now, the gospels were written late in the first century CE, into the second. However, the earliest reference to the Eucharist in the Christian scriptures comes from St. Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians. He is addressing certain abuses in the community's way of life that are showing themselves in their celebration of the Jesus meal. So he tells them what the genuine tradition about the meal is, in this letter which predates John by three or four decades, and Mark's gospel by perhaps two.
1 Cor 11:23-24 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
The sharing (giving) of the food seems to be understood here, since it is in the context of the meal.
Compare this rhythm to Mark's description of the Last Supper:
Mk 14:22-23 While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it.
...and also to Luke's story of the meal at the end of the Emmaus story, a post-resurrection narrative:
Lk 24:30 And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them.
The NT writers use the same vocabulary each time to describe meals which have very different apparent context, but we have to conclude that using the same verbs to describe the action means we're supposed to hear them as a whole, describing something in the life of the community that is still finding its way, surviving now some twenty to seventy years after the death of Jesus. "Take, bless, break, and share" has come to describe the way that the community celebrates the meal that identifies them as followers of Jesus, the table-sharer, how they "do this in memory" of him. And we see from the letter to the Corinthians that the first thing we know about Christians in the Greek cities is that they are already doing it badly. They are not living in community in a way that expresses the meaning of the Jesus meal, and Paul is trying to correct that in this first and formative and invaluable letter.
Now the thing that occurred to me was that the servant songs in the book of Isaiah (really, in Second Isaiah, probably written in the late 6th century BCE at the end of the Babylonian captivity and redacted to its current state in the 3rd century BCE) trace this same pattern of God's taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the Servant for the life of the community. In Isaiah 42: 1-7, the first of the great Servant Songs, we hear language later used in the gospels to describe Jesus, but which is used here to describe the nation of Israel, or some of its people, as the Servant. And notice the language of "taking" or "choosing" and then blessing by God ("I have put my spirit"), all "for the people." Then in the later canticle, the fourth Servant Song in Isaiah 53, the missing piece, the being "broken," is told in all its painful and familiar detail, but ending in that new and surprising "givenness" of the suffering: that it is not in vain, but, somehow, "for our sins" and "our iniquity," and that by it we are made whole and healed.
Isaiah 42: 1-7 passim
Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen onewith whom I am pleased. Upon him I have put my spirit; I, the LORD, have called you for justice, I have grasped youby the hand; I formed you, and set you as a covenant for the people,
a light for the nations,
To open the eyes of the blind,
to bring out prisoners from confinement,
and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness. Isaiah 53: 3-5
He was spurned and avoided by men,
a man of suffering, knowing pain,
Like one from whom you turn your face,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.
Yet it wasour pain that he bore, our sufferings he endured. We thought of him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted,
But he was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishmentthat makes us whole, by his woundswe were healed.
Just "how" we were healed by his wounds or it was our pain that he bore is beyond the purview of this article, but I would say two things. Insofar as we might apply the Isaian servant canticles to Jesus, we are seeing the concavity of the impact of the paschal mystery of God, that is, the utterly transcendent and beyond-our-understanding God directly acting in our world, revealing everything about the universe in the death and resurrection of Jesus. "No one has ever seen God," writes John, but the Creator leaves a big footprint, and this is the biggest, clearest one. At his baptism, Jesus heard the voice of God call him "beloved Son (with words that recall the "servant," note the parallel in Mk 1:9-11 to Is. 42:1-2 above). After wrestling with his vocation in the desert, Jesus accepted the call to proclaim a different way to "civilize" humanity, an empire based upon a universal awareness of our belonging to one family, sisters and brothers with one abba, and we're supposed to act like that. It is giving away that brings greater life, not hoarding. It is loving enemies that brings security and peace, not armies and organized murder. It is healing the sick and feeding the hungry that fulfill the law, not laws and rituals that restrict and impoverish the soul. And when Jesus was eventually rejected by "church" and state and subjected to capital punishment for his treason, he was so full of the creating, life-affirming presence of Abba that the grave could not hold him. In raising him from the dead, God again spoke from heaven, "This is my servant, whom I uphold. Listen to him."
What is really critical for Christians to understand is that definitively through baptism and confirmation repeatedly and normatively through eucharist we ourselves are made part of the body of Christ, of which Jesus is head and the Holy Spirit is the breath and soul of life. The belonging of being called into the family of God is transformed and completed by a mission, God's mission, the mission of the messiah (i.e., of Christ) to announce the alternate vision of civilization, the "peaceable kingdom," the empire of God. We rehearse that mission week by week, every Sunday, as we, with the gifts we offer, are taken, blessed, broken, and shared by Christ in the meal that is the Eucharist. We see ourselves in the eucharistic bread and cup—our history, our giftedness, our sense of vocation, our forgotten and forgiven sinfulness—we see ourselves, together, taken up by Christ, proclaimed as blessed with God's presence and beloved, broken into pieces and shared and consumed for the life of the world.
Then, we are told, "Now, darlings, go on. Get out of here. You have work to do." Being sent, given away, is part of the deal begun with being taken up with unconditional love and named God's "beloved," part of the same body of Christ that rose up sparkling from the waters of Jordan two millennia ago. To the extent that we are faithful to our calling to act as brothers and sisters, children of abba, to the extent that we practice enemy love, heal the sick, feed the hungry, and announce the good news of empire of God by our living, we participate in the mission of the Messiah. God is inviting humanity to join together in saving the world, and through us, through the the Holy Spirit, the world can finally become aware of that, by seeing us at our loving work.
Eucharist at its best, it seems to me, should engender some cognitive dissonance in the Christian. We are awakened, when liturgy is good, to the Good, to God, to who God really is, and also to who we really are. Good liturgy reveals the dominion of God, the "peaceable kingdom" in which the poor and wretched, the meek and peacemakers are the blessed, and throws light on the dark dominion of the "world," which is to say, wherever people have opted for other gods: security, power, money, pleasure, property, consumption, etc. Having revealed the dichotomy of these worlds, the immanence of God's reign and its availability to those who embrace solidarity with God in Christ, the liturgy calls us to metanoia, to a change of interior direction and a change of life-orientation, that quickens the pulse to the new creation, allays fear, and rallies the ragged remnant around the fire.
This, I think, is the "life" that Jesus is talking about in John, whether he's talking about the "bread of life" in John 6 or the living water with the Samaritan woman, or the "resurrection and the life" with Martha and Mary or the "road, the truth, and the life" with Thomas and the twelve. It's the life that is enigmatically but forcefully summoned by John's use of ego eimi, the Greek equivalent of the tetragrammatic name of God from Exodus, YHWH, in all of these and other passages. By invoking the Name from the story of Moses and the Exodus, and by the association in the gospels between the death and resurrection of the Lord with the Passover, we are called to equate "life" with the God of Exodus, the God of freedom. Not just freedom for me and for you, but for everyone. "I am the bread of freedom, the water of freedom, the road, the truth, and the freedom to pursue them, I am the resurrection and freedom even from death and its dire consequences. I came that they might have freedom, and have it completely." Those who had manna still got hungry; those who drink water from the well will get thirsty again; but if you eat me, if you drink me, you will be completely free.
Free from what? Well, we go there together every year in the scrutinies, right? Free from the ethnic hatred and prejudice like that which was the birthright of Samaria and Judea. Free from the restrictive laws of religion that oppress, or put ritual ahead of peoples' genuine need. Free from the fear of the death that drives us to choose lesser goods, counterfeits of freedom and life. Freedom from gnostic and arcane pursuits of the divine that do not lead through the road that is Jesus, good shepherd, gate, person of truth, and Son of God.
Still, the sobering truth is that, in the words of Pope John Paul II, we Eucharist-eaters still allow "the tragedy of hunger which plagues hundreds of millions of human beings, the diseases which afflict developing countries, the loneliness of the elderly, the hardships faced by the unemployed, the struggles of immigrants. These are evils which are present—albeit to a different degree—even in areas of immense wealth. We cannot delude ourselves: By our mutual love and, in particular, by our concern for those in need we will be recognized as true followers of Christ (cf. John 13:35; Matthew 25:31-46). This will be the criterion by which the authenticity of our Eucharistic celebrations is judged." (From the Apostolic Letter Mane Nobiscum, Domine, 2004, 8.) The Eucharist, even the Spirit's presence that transforms bread and wine into the living Christ, cannot change the way we act toward one another. The legendary Benedictine liturgist and patristics scholar Godfrey Diekmann has been quoted as positing the disturbing question, "What if the bread and wine change, and we don't?", a question which renders theological arguments over the modality of the magnum mysterium meaningless.
Collaborating in the divine work of transformation means surrendering, means sharing, means gently embracing the freedom of others and committing ourselves to discovering together a common path to God's reign. We know that the path is Christ, who is the road, the truth, and freedom. Christ exposed the truth of the cross, of surrender, as the path to God, who is love, the creative fullness of freedom in self-emptying. The Eucharist, with Christ as the main agent uniting all of us in his eternal act of self-emptying adoration of the Father, exposes our world of counterfeits, violence, and greed for what it is, and introduces in us who have been seduced by its empty promises a redemptive dissonance, awakening us to the truth of who we are. Claimed for Christ in baptism and branded with the cross, we are summoned in our gathering to rehearse, however timidly, the right relationships of God's dominion, to hear the Word of truth, and to break the bread and share the cup of freedom. Thus we are taught to walk with the poor and wretched, to be roused by the word that wakens us to the often invisible structures of injustice and domination, and to start living now, in this world, in the blessed bounty and peaceable solidarity of the the living God.
Some apparently random thoughts after encountering John 6 for the first four times at mass this weekend.
With my eyes barely open this morning, I already had plenty to be thankful for. And it was all reinforced, literally reiterated, since I was at mass last night as well, by the liturgy this morning. But it made me realize again how liturgy isn't separate from life, it's on the continuum of life, a place to which we come to celebrate what has gone before and then be pushed out into an altered future.
First, I'm grateful to the wonderfully crazy Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber for her sermon at the ELCA's worship conference, "Called to Be a Living Voice." She was preaching on the same readings we heard, particularly the feeding of the five thousand in John 6. There was so much to like in her words, but for me it was a call to own up to the fact that the good things in my life are not always explainable by logic or hard work or even genetics. Sometimes they are just miracles, even though they are accomplished by ordinary people using ordinary things like food, water, time, and love.
For one thing, I had to play for the 7:15 am mass this morning (yawn), which I usually have to do once or twice a month, but today promises to be an unusually long day on which we'll be arriving in Minneapolis about 10:30 tonight to begin preparing for Music Ministry Alive. I was expecting to have to cantor as well as play piano, which I can do with a brief apology to the assembly at that hour but which isn't my forte or my first choice. I walk in with my sunglasses on and my eyes still at half mast, and who walks into the church but my friend Patty, who is cantoring at the 9:00 mass, smiling and saying, "I was up, and thought you could use some help." Now, this is not a miracle if you know Patty, but it is cause for gratitude on my part, because "the hand of the Lord feeds us, he answers all our needs."
For the second thing, and this happened even earlier, "for he gives to his beloved in sleep," I received a text message overnight. It concerns another good friend of mine who has been weakened recently by symptoms that have turned out to be Parkinson's disease. One of my friend's choir members is a nurse at a research hospital, and her love and concern for my friend led her to research all she could find on Parkinson's. She sent me a long text message this morning, describing an event yesterday that on the face of it may not be miraculous, but does at least demonstrate that sometimes God orchestrates the events of our lives in ways we don't perceive, but which are too strange to be considered accidents, at least by me.
A quick digression: about eleven years ago, as many of you know, I was diagnosed with cancer, and my surgeon thought it was ok to delay surgery for a while (the diagnosis was in the summer) but not indefinitely. Now, about a year previously, my friend Gary Daigle had been the victim of some injustice in his parish workplace, and was fired from his parish job. He had a wife and children, and was in danger of losing his benefits, and it was not a good time in church life in general. But I approached my pastor, and asked if we could put Gary on 30-hour full time in order that he could get benefits, and he would could continue to supplement his income with producing recordings and doing appearances etc. My pastor, a fellow whose nature was to put people's needs before just about every other consideration, said yes. So when this cancer diagnosis happened, Gary had been in the parish a year, knew the choir and other people there, had a good feel for our music program plus more talent than anyone has a right to, and simply slid into the work of running the liturgy and music program during the time of my surgery and recovery. Oh, I forgot to mention: my surgery was two weeks before Christmas, and I wasn't able to get back into the musical saddle, as it were, until three weeks into January. Things went seamlessly through the holidays. So you tell me: was Gary's misfortune an accident, or his joining us at St. Anne's? Were they a coincidence? Or was it creation from nothing? And a few months later, Gary joined the staff at St. Edna's where he has been ever since, as music and liturgy director.
Back to the original story about my friend and the nurse: her text to me was about an event at the hospital where she works, involving a patient diagnosed who also had Parkinson's. He had not taken proper care with an implant, and had developed serious, even life-threatening complications. The nurse's research on Parkinson's had emboldened her to advocate for surgery for the patient with doctors who may not have been listening to or consulting with one another, and they listened to her. Her advocacy led to a much better mental and physical state for the patient almost immediately, and the doctors told her she saved the patient's life. All of this because of her love for and devotion to my friend, going the extra mile with her research, and then speaking up to her peers in a way that improved life for a completely different patient. So you tell me: was the nurse's involvement in my friend's case an accident? A coincidence? Or was it creation from nothing? I suppose people of good will, even people of faith, may differ on their answer. It sounds like Genesis to me. It sounds like feeding five thousand from the fish and bread one little boy brought for his meal.
One lovely insight that came from Nadia's sermon, an insight I've seen noted in other commentaries on this passage, is how she sees the miracle of feeding the five thousand as an act of creation from nothing, that is, something that only God can do. I'm a modernist. I believe in science. But I'm also a post-modernist, at least in the sense that I am certain that facts are not the same as truth, that there is more to reality than what can be seen or proven. We have to be very modest about what we say about what can't be seen or proven, but neither does it make any sense at all to deny our experience of the good-that-is-invisible, because that good is for everyone, it binds us together. That good wants the good of everyone even more than we do, and finds a gentle way to break through our worship of facts and the clamor for personal rights and freedoms above the common good and all of our unevolved habits of coercion to let us see what things might be like if we learned to drop our rivalry and love one another.
So my suggestion is, think about your life. Think about those startling little "coincidences" that changed the water of your life into wine—the actions, words, and touches in which everything was instantly transformed by love. You are part of the continuum that is life in the universe. Grace has sustained you in every breath, made the miracle of evolution and natural selection that resulted in you possible, let you first hear the stories of creation, manna, exile, and enemy love that blossomed into faith. Christ in God wants to take your memory and transform it into life for the whole world. Christ is fashioning salvation through your participation in the mystery of God. Let the meal of Jesus feed your longing and open the eyes of your heart to the miracle of your life, and to the realization that every life around you is just as miraculous and beloved of God. It is then, when we finally walk out of church with our vision and humanity transformed again by grace, that in everything we touch or hear, in everything we taste, in everything we see, we taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
. In this book, Philbrick, the historian of Nantucket Island and its whaling past, gives us a popular historian's view of the settling of Massachusetts by the Pilgrims, their encounters with the indigenous peoples of the area, the first Thanksgiving, and King Philip's War, all of which happened within the span of a single generation or so. The reference to Thanksgiving made me think about human presence and the way we are capable of transforming food. I mean, turkey is just turkey. But in 1621 when a group of sorry settlers already decimated by disease and hunger were befriended by a group of Pokanoket Indians and their chief, Massasoit, the blessing of the autumn feast at the end of their first year in Plymouth made turkeys enter the world of myth. Even though turkeys, indigenous to the New World, had been brought to Europe by the conquistadors and were introduced in England eighty years before the Pilgrims sailed from Holland, it was this singular feast, marked by a hesitant attempt at a cultural exchange, that made the roast turkey a symbol of a nation's thanksgiving.
. To get into this a little bit, here is what St. Paul says in the passage we hear in the second reading Sunday from the end of the letter to the Ephesians:
. Nouwen's little book is written as a love letter to a friend, a secular Jew who challenged Nouwen, a prodigious writer on spirituality, to write a book that young, secularized people like himself could use to make meaning out of their lives. Nouwen's principle was an attempt to invite people to understand themselves as beloved by God, and called to a kind of life that recognizes that belovedness and acts on it. To his friend, the work ultimately failed because of its presuppositions and assumptions about God and Christ, but the work still stands to anyone by whom Nouwen's assumptions are also assumed in the simple rigor of it message. As part of his entree into his subject, he tries to help the reader see the movements of being chosen (taken up, as it were), blessed, broken, and given away (or shared) as part of being God's beloved.
