SongStories 50: (I Myself Am the) Bread of Life (Mystery, 1987; Change Our Hearts, 2000, OCP)

(I Myself Am the) Bread of Life is dedicated to the people of St. Jerome Parish, Phoenix, Arizona. When I was writing this song, it must have been a Mark (B) year in the lectionary, probably mid-1985. I remember sitting with the leaders (late high school, college age and some adults) of the youth group, talking with them about the Eucharist, and what an expansive theology of real presence was available to us in our tradition, and that we ourselves are the bread of life for other people, not because of anything we did, but because in baptism it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us, by the presence of the Holy Spirit. They told me to write a song about that, so I did.

We were still in the midst of a kind of liturgical renaissance in Phoenix at that time. We had been blessed with some kind and enlightened liturgical leadership over the years in Phoenix, notably by people like the late Sr. Anthony Poerio, IBVM, who headed the Office of Worship for many years, and also (Fr.) Michael Martinez, who oversaw liturgy at the Cathedral of Ss. Simon and Jude, where I had directed the choir for a time. Daniel (now Rev. Cyprian) Consiglio and Fr. Dale Fushek had done fine work at St. Jerome's in the early 1980s, as had Fr. Bob Voss and others. The Franciscans at the Casa de Paz y Bien, or the Franciscan Renewal Center (FRC), as well as many of the local clergy were trying to do imaginative things with the liturgy. But what really reconnected Phoenix liturgy with the heart of the tradition as well as with the art community in the city was the arrival of John Gallen, SJ, as liturgy director at the FRC, and his subsequent hiring of Gary Daigle as music director, followed very quickly by his establishment of a "liturgical center" in a downtown Phoenix mall that he called "The Corpus Christi Center for Advanced Liturgical Study." Gallen, in collaboration with the diocese, offered there a two-year certification in liturgy, and brought in some of the real lights of the renewal to teach classes: Virgil Funk, Kevin Irwin, Robert Taft, SJ, Austin Fleming, Fr. Ronald Pachence, John Baldovin, SJ, and Robert Rambusch among many others. John's classes opened up my heart, already full of delight with the liturgy and liturgical music, to new insights and an even deeper theological grounding. It was from this matrix that the songs from Mystery arose, and everything that I've written since.

Since I've written more about this song than probably any other song, I don't see any reason to change my mind about it! Early in the life of this blog, I wrote a couple of posts called "Theological Tempests in Musical Teapots," one of which was devoted to "Bread of Life." I won't rehash what's in that article here, but if you  want a survey of the kinds of things written to and about me regarding this song, and my response, you can click the link. The purpose of the "Tempests" post wasn't to talk about the origin and use of the song, but to answer some of the angry and divisive polemic leveled against it over the years. As I said there, if your pastor or a vocal group of well-meaning parishioners has an issue with the song and are not persuaded by our appeal to scripture, the liturgy, Saints Paul and Augustine, there's no use causing a rift in the community or losing sleep yourself over a dumb song. Just sing something else. I'm grateful beyond words to both NALR for publishing it originally and OCP for continuing to include it in their worship aids up to the present day, under the watchful eye of the BCDW.



Since the song was published, I have written verses that use language and imagery from the "Bread of Life" Sundays in Year B, but of course they may be useful to you at any time, if your communion processions take longer than the original three verses provide for. If you'd like to see those verses, there is a graphic available for download here for assembly, and a PDF of the choral parts here. I think I might have altered the choral parts a little accidentally: just fix them up the way to which you're accustomed.

Bread of Life page at OCP

(I Myself Am the) Bread of Life 

by Rory Cooney 

I myself am the bread of life.

You and I are the bread of life,

Taken and blessed,

Broken and shared by Christ

That the world might live.

This bread is spirit, gift of the Maker's love,

And we who share it know that we can be one,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Here is God's kingdom given to us as food.

This is our body, this our blood,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Lives broken open, stories shared aloud,

Become a banquet, a shelter for the world,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Supplemental verses written in 2012

Full cup of blessing, free as the rain and sun,

Is passed among us, gathering all to one,

A living sign of God in Christ.

We, like Elijah, hunted, afraid, alone,

Receive in slumber food for the path unknown,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Taste Wisdom's table, spread with the richest fare.

The poor and simple dine at her calling there,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Sent from this banquet, strength in our hearts restored,

We go together, summoned to serve the Lord,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Copyright © 1987, 2009 by NALR, published by OCP, Portland, Oregon. All rights reserved.

Second Thoughts: Love is not jealous (A13O)

I suspect a lot of gospel readers would have liked to have skipped the first half of last Sunday's gospel. I know for sure a lot of us would rather not have listened to it. It's not that I want the gospel to say what I want it to say, that I don't agree with Jesus. It's that what the gospel actually says can't be what I heard, because it would indicate inner contradiction in the message of Jesus. The first half of the gospel would be teaching that Jesus is a jealous lover, a rival for the affection of the disciple with the very people that God put into one's life for all the reasons that we know family and friends exist. The second half would indicate that there is a "reward" at the end of the stick of obedience, both taking the gospel out of the realm of love (i.e. to do a thing for a reward is not doing it for love) and creating a debt that God has to pay for people doing what they are supposed to do. Both of those things are abhorrent to me. 

The juxtaposition of "love me" and "worthy of me" just doesn't work in English, and it certainly doesn't work in any language coming out of the mouth of the same Christ whose Sermon on the Mount (echoed by a passage a couple of weeks ago) told us that God cares for us more than ravens and sparrows and lilies, and we shouldn't worry about anything, and God is like a father to us, that, in fact, 

I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.

So what does this egalitarian love have to do with worthiness?

As I said last week in my Wednesday post, we know from experience that the best kind of love we've ever known has exactly nothing to do with worthiness. It's a bolt out of the blue, as the saying goes, that stops us in our tracks and has us babbling "Hallelujah" like David and Samson and the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen in the eponymous and ubiquitous tune of the same name. What we know is that love doesn't depend on the beloved, it comes from the lover, and it is a gift, and in its only genuine form, requires nothing in return, and doesn't even nod toward worthiness. Nobody is worthy. Or rather, everyone is worthy because of the created spark of the divine in every person, but when the lover is in touch with that holy fire, worthiness isn't even up for discussion. It's a complete non-issue. Love is given without restriction, it is created from nothing like the best and rest of the universe. It shares in the Being of the one from whom all loving flows. Love, in the beautiful, if Gertrude-Steinian poetry of a joy-drunk Lin-Manuel Miranda, "is love is love is love is love is love is love." Love empowers a response, it doesn't demand it; love enables change, it doesn't expect it. 

Love, says St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, is not jealous. It is unthinkable that Jesus, the "visible face of God's mercy," would have placed such a strange restriction on his love to his closest disciples. If "love is not jealous" is meant to describe the relationship among members of the Corinthian church community to whom St. Paul was writing, certainly it is an attribute of the God who is love. God is patient. God is kind. God does not put on airs, is not jealous.

So what is Jesus saying when he says…

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,

and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;

and whoever does not take up his crossand follow after me is not worthy of me.

This whole section of Matthew must be tied to the message that MT is trying to get to the church for which the gospel is being compiled. Perhaps, as John Meyer suggests, the community is split along generational lines, causing rifts in the church, during a time of persecution. Chapter ten of Matthew began with the commissioning of the disciples to preach the gospel, with a no-nonsense warning that they should not expect to be received with universal praise. Ultimately it is not about Jesus that the warnings are given, but about the gospel that he is preaching, and how it is received or not by the community. To all the warnings in this chapter about persecution and the possibility of being rejected, Jesus gives the divine advice from the Jewish scriptures: Do not be afraid. 

For me, the second section of the gospel is just as problematic: the promise of reward for doing good. On one hand, this is straight Deuteronomic morality: if you do good, you get rewarded. If you do evil, evil will befall you. Jesus does not usually teach this way, in fact, his teaching about God in chapter 5, quoted above, is that God lets the sun and rain fall upon the good and bad alike; he makes a parable about weeds and wheat growing together until the final harvest when God will sort it all out with a wisdom more discerning than our scythes and uprooting. Jesus is always more aware that bad things happen to good people, and bad people sometimes seem to be the ones blessed. His concept of God and morality is much more nuanced than the most popular brand of Judaism. As one teacher put it, with the book of Job (and much of the wisdom literature), the Deuteronomist should have died a quick death in the 3rd century BCE. But we seem to be hard-wired for the reward and punishment schema, and we just can't quit it. 

It seems to me that a way of reading "reward" might be to understand it as the natural result of acting the way we were made to act. We're children of God. We're made from love, we're made to love. We're made for generosity, to look out for one another. When we act according to the way we're made, we're happy. It's not a reward. We're just not kicking against the grain. We're floating on a downstream river of loving energy, not swimming upstream and doing everything we can to torpedo our destiny and betray our nature. "A good tree can't bear bad fruit, and a bad tree can't bear good fruit." It's not a matter of reward and punishment; it's a matter of being who we are meant to be, and we are all meant to be sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, who care for each other and the world in the way we wish we were being treated, even if we aren't being treated that way, and we act that way toward everyone, even if they're not in the same game. 

Finally, by the time the gospel of Matthew was written, the "normalcy of civilization" was beginning to swirl back around the path through the sea that Jesus and the gospel had opened up. Human beings really don't want a God of distributive justice, a God of freedom and love. We want a god of talion justice, who takes at least an eye when an eye is taken; we want a god who gives us ours, whether or not it has to be taken from someone else. We've been treated badly, we think. We deserve better. God will give it to us, and just to be sure, we create a god who do just what we want. This god, probably an Assyrian-Egyptian-Greek-Roman hybrid with a big army, a palace with a prison, and a phalanx of accountants and torturers, was ready to step in and fill the void. Jesus who said in the Sermon on the Mount that "whoever calls his brother a fool shall be liable to judgment" became the Jesus who called the scribes and Pharisees fools, murderers, and whitewashed tombs. Jesus whose parables proclaimed that God will sort out the good and bad in the end cursed, in the same gospel, towns and villages and fig trees. The further we get away from Jesus, from Paul's letters to the Corinthians and Romans, and from the gospel of Mark, the more the message contains hints of compromise with Rome and gospel of Caesar, of an expedient if bloody peace on earth through violence, and a Jesus who sounds, now and then, like the petulant, narrow-minded preachers that overpopulate the airwaves of the twenty-first century. 

But the resurrection happened, and the Risen One came back without any word of revenge, still proclaiming God's merciful love and universal forgiveness at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The Spirit of God was visibly loosed upon the world in a few fallible women and men utterly changed by their experience of their rabbi, dead and risen. Empowered by their experience, they went out to persuade people everywhere that there was a better world available to anyone willing to turn toward their neighbor and see a child of another God. The "reward" of conversion, of turning from the worship of Caesar to the God of Jesus, was life in a community of equals, of living in a new family that lived in faith of God's distributive justice where all were meant to have enough, and in whose world there is enough for all when it is shared. 

The rich young man in Mark 10 wanted to know the secret of getting in on eternal life, and when Jesus told him it was as simple as sharing what he had and trusting he'd have enough, he "went away sad." Gospel life is its own reward; opting for any other way is its own punishment. We were made for each other. Gospel life is living in the awareness that the world belongs to God, and every person is made in God's image.

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

God is love is love is love is love. That is the good news, no matter what the gospel may seem to say to the contrary!

SongStories 49: Come to Us (Do Not Fear to Hope, 1985, and Change Our Hearts, 2000, OCP)

"When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, 'Have faith and take your troubles to God.' Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help -- only yourself." (Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov, quoted in Tales of the Hasidim, by Martin Buber.)

There is a pretty strong motif, especially in my early writing, that presses the Pauline metaphor of the body of Christ to wider interpretation. What I mean is, I said things like, "I myself am the bread of life," by which I meant "I-me-the-singer," not simply "I-Jesus." The song "Like You" from Mystery prays the prayer of John Gabriel Perboyre, CM, the Vincentian martyr of the French revolution:

"Let my hands be your hands, Jesus, please.
Let my heart be your heart.
Think your thoughts in me."

The identification of Jesus with his disciples and Christ with the church in St. Paul and certainly in the gospels of John and Matthew is a binding thread of New Testament christology. It is a physical identification, or rather, a complete human identification. "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me," and "I live now no longer I, but Christ lives in me," and "Whatever you do to one of the least of these, you do to me," and other sayings articulate a truth about the intimacy between the Lord and us. We know that the scripture says these things, but we don't always play them out for their moral consequences.

As a composer and liturgical minister of the word, I want to try to help the assembly understand itself as the ministering Christ, celebrate that reality, and when necessary appreciate the dissonance between the theological reality implied by baptism and the way we actually live once we get out of the church doors. Of course, God is love, forgiveness, and understands our weakness, but we need to be awakened sometimes to the world of escape that religion can provide. We aren't allowed to imagine that worship is a substitute for compassionate action, for the work of distributive justice. We cannot say to the poor and confused, "Go to Christ." We need to learn to say, "Come to us."

Empowering this kind of behavior in our parishes will call forth a certain type of minister who makes connections between the needs of some and the gifts of others. This is exactly how the Church is supposed to work, as St. Paul suggests in 1 Corinthians, when in his metaphor of the body he suggests that "gifts are given for the good of the whole body."

The singers on the version heard on Do Not Fear to Hope were all members of a family who used to sing at St. Jerome, the Denks: Gary, Pamela (Parafiniuk), and Maria. The version we recorded on Change Our Hearts was our usual trio with a few extra singers.

I wrote "Come to Us" after being inspired by a homily preached by Vernon Meyer, my second pastor at St. Jerome and a fine biblical scholar, on the gospel for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, from Matthew 11: 37-42. It must have made an impression on me. I remember that some time after that day, I was backing my car out of the parking lot after work there, and a man was walking along barefoot, or maybe with cardboard on his feet. This is, in Arizona, crazy, both in summer and in winter. I thought to myself, "Well, I have another pair at home," so I called out to him, and said, "I have more shoes, would you like these?" And he happily received them. I was about to pull away, and he asked me for the socks too. Of course I handed them over. What was I thinking?

Now, that stands out in my head not because I'm generous and do that all the time, but because I'm selfish and I don't ever do that. But we need to let the gospel work on us and change our behavior. Sometimes, even I do.

Come to Us

by Rory Cooney

Come to me, come to us,

You who are burdened; 

Come to the word, and come to the meal.

Come without question, or pressure, or price;

Come, be embraced by the body of Christ.

Come to me, come to us,

Pilgrim or stranger,

Looking for change, or challenge, or light.

We are the people whose calling is care,

Bearers of mercy, nourished in prayer.

Come to me, come to us,

Broken or building,

Come with your children, your choices, your chains.

All are invited to friendship or rest,

To share in our struggle, our call, and our quest.

Copyright © 1986 NALR. Published by OCP. All rights reserved.

Arrangement by Patti Drennan (J. W. Pepper website) (Hope Publications, SATB with keyboard & flute)

Handbell arrangement by William Lieven (GIA website)

Come to Us on the OCP website. (Special bonus! My picture!)

The goodness of the Lord (A13O)

This weekend and next seem to ask us to reflect on the how kindness and hospitality are both acts of gratitude on the part of those who practice them and sacraments of God's goodness and faith in divine abundance.

No wonder we sing, "Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord." We keep discovering the breadth, height, and depth of that goodness, an ocean of incomprehensible, universal benevolence. We just get the song started and there's more to sing about than when we began. The "goodness of the Lord" is life.  It is "life to the full," life in abundance. God's love is utterly beyond our understanding. And we have a hard time believing in it, being much more Deuteronomic in our outlook. We like covenants of reward and punishment. We don't trust anyone or anything that gives it all away and asks for nothing in return except consciousness.

The first reading from the Elisha cycle in 2 Kings is a story about the ongoing kindness of a couple who welcome the prophet and his servant into their home. For the hospitality they are shown, the prophet promises the woman, who is advanced in years, a child by the time of his next visit, a promise which comes to pass. The dynamism of God's generosity in the story of Elisha and the Shunammite woman is echoed in the words of Jesus about the life of service to the reign of God. That "the generosity of God is never outdone" is the way this usually gets spelled out in  homilies, but it doesn't help us hear this in the language of reward and worthiness, which isn't the language of the reign of God, but of the world. Agápe is not concerned about worthiness or reward. Love doesn't discern that way. Love discerns on behalf of the receiver, not the giver. Love makes worthy. Love is its own reward. It's not what we want though. Reward and punishment seem to be hard-wired in us, but they're not. They're the result of thousands of generations of going the wrong way.

I'm afraid we can get caught up in the language of the gospel of Matthew, with its rhetoric of worthiness and reward. And for much of life, when we consider ourselves as measurable by a hierarchy of needs, I suppose that kind of thinking does serve a purpose. "Thou shalt not steal" is a good rule to live by, at least until we learn to respect the rights and works of others as our own, but it serves us less well when we see it as an absolute, and apply it, say, against the theft of bread by a starving person. Once we move on to the Golden Rule, "Do to others as you would have them do to you," or to "Love one another as I have loved you," we are not concerned any more about reward and punishment, legalism, or the breast-beating unworthiness of slaves.

"Worthiness" and "reward" are not part of the vocabulary of love. When we hear Jesus's words in the gospel today, we might try to hear the word "reward" in the sense of "the fruit of surrender." That is, the reward is not for "being good" or doing something good. It's the natural result of living the way we were meant to live in the first place, caring for one another, looking out for each other's needs with attentive kindness. "You're beating your moral heads against the wall," says the gospel. "Just stop it. It feels really good. Stop with the self-promotion and greedy hoarding and get with the way you were made to be, in the image of God: generous, creative, nurturing.

It is St. Paul in the letter to the Romans who gets to the heart of the matter here. God has already given everything to us in Christ, who showed us the way, who is the way, to the reign of God. In his death and resurrection, he trusted in God's absolute vivacity, and God flooded him with life. His life demonstrated an option for all time to the deadly "normalcy of civilization," and by living it for the reign of God, he got the "reward" of living life as it was meant to be lived, living for others. Created as a man in God's image and likeness, Jesus walked like God in his life, spreading healing love and generous hospitality all around, and life worked for him. St. Paul reminds us that baptism, and the calling to faith that brought us there, binds us to Jesus, so that we too live in "newness of life" when we live our baptismal life, which he spells out later in chapter 12 of the letter, here quoting from The Message adaptive translation:

Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle. …Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality. (Rom. 12: 9-10, 12-13)

We've been watching the Hulu production of Stephen King's 11.22.63, the story about an attempt to use a kind of time travel to stop the Kennedy assassination. The protagonist discovers in the story that the past "pushes back" against any attempt to change it, throws up sickness, accidents, violence, and other roadblocks to anything that might change the outcome. In a sense, that is what the cross is: an instrument of the violent pushback with which the normalcy of civilization greets the gospel. The present, it seems, also doesn't want to be changed, and so the cross is something to be expected by the believer. In times of distress and rejection, we need to keep our eyes focused on the "rewards" of the gospel--the joy of giving and receiving a cup of water, the joy of community, of hospitality, and of service. This deep joy is born from the love that makes and sustains the universe, image and likeness of the servant God who placed human beings in a garden and walked with them there. Every act of hospitality and kindness is a sacrament of God saving the world, an act of the risen Christ bringing forth the reign of God in this world. In our loving service of one another, even more surely than in our song, we sing forever the goodness of the Lord.

What we're singing this week at St. Anne:

Come to Us
Psalm 89: Forever I Will Sing
Where Your Treasure Is (or Whatsoever You Do)
Faithful Family
All Are Welcome

When the Way gets rough (A12O)

“Fear no one...

What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light;
what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.

And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul...

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?

Yet not one of them falls to the ground
without your Father’s knowledge.

Even all the hairs of your head are counted.

So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”



They’re beautiful, faith-worthy words, but don’t you wonder how people get the courage to keep speaking up, speaking God’s truth, when the current is running the other way, and they are staring down the business end of AK-47s or police dogs? Folks like Archbishop Romero (above), Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the “little” people whose courage under fire and duress is invisible to the world and goes unseen and unsung. Starting with the prophets, at least, like Jeremiah in today’s first reading but including Isaiah, Elijah, Daniel, certainly Jesus himself, taking the side of a “King” other than the one sitting on the throne of one’s own nation is dangerous business. It sometimes feels like the rest of us are just pretending to be believers, hoping that no one notices and we can just get by in peace.


Context is important, and chapter ten of Matthew is organized around the missioning of the Twelve to preaching Galilee. Notice that the author of the first gospel narrowly circumscribes the mission to Israel, not the pagan territories or Samaria, while we find other instructions elsewhere in the gospels. It's the dangerous key proclamation that is worth noting: they are to say in their travels, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." We can imagine that, when explaining what that means, they will use Jesus's own terms, incorporated from John, that the expected reaction from believers is to "repent and believe in the gospel." He tells them it's not going to be easy, that they are to expect persecution.

That core message never changes: people are being duped by false gods, gods like money, expediency, and power. The real God is nothing like that. The real God shares life, does not take it away; the real God serves, does not lord it over the universe; the real God is loving, patient, and healing, not in a rush to make things easy. Everybody is "in" with the real God, there are no boundaries, tribes, or favorites. Everybody is "in." But the false gods do fight back. And yes, it is going to be dangerous to say that there's a new god in town, even if it's a God of love, a God of peace and justice. They're going to come after you, ask you what you're doing, and make you choose your leader.

But don't be afraid. You know the truth, the truth is inside of you, the Spirit will tell you what to say. And words don't matter much anyway: it's what you do that counts. Be together, be for one another. God will be with you. I will be with you. Do not be afraid. Everything that is not justice and love will come to dust and ashes. Call everyone to the table of God's reign. Eat together. Have a conversation. Share life. Good things will happen.

Here’s what we’re singing this Sunday at St. Anne’s:



Gathering: Be Not Afraid (Bob Dufford, SJ)  “Be Not Afraid” needs no introduction, except maybe that Bob wrote this song for the missioning of a woman religious who is a friend of his some 35 years ago or so. Where we’ve come to think of it as a song for a funeral maybe, it was conceived as a song to reflect on a gospel like today’s and the preceding Sundays, gospel of missioning. “Be not afraid” was a favorite saying of the late Pope John Paul II as well, who encouraged young and old to stand firm in the faith against all kinds of pressures in the surrounding culture, some hostile, some just blasé.

I for one feel inadequate to the task of loving my enemies, especially armed ones, since I have a hard time loving and forgiving people I see every day who are no more dangerous than a file clerk, and unarmed save when they’re behind the wheels of their cars. But I know that we’ve been given immense gifts for understanding God’s word, it’s been written in us and we’re stamped with it, more, we’re being conformed to its dynamic, incarnating it. So I don’t mind praying explicitly for it even as I not-so-secretly hope I’m never called to stand against the wind.



Psalm 34: The Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor (John Foley) This is a substitution for Psalm 69 from the common psalter. We did do a version I wrote for Psalm 69 three years ago, with the refrain adapted to the proper antiphon for today (“In your great love, O God, answer me”), but with summer schedule and other things on our plate I just decided to make thing easier for everyone. I think that this psalm of lament captures the heart of the liturgy of the word, anyway, though I think in retrospect if I had given it a little more thought I should have stuck with the proper psalm.



Preparation Rite: Stand by Me. Tom Kendzia’s song, inspired by the gospel song “Stand by Me,” asks God to be near “when the storms of life surround me,” and “when the tyrant wields his terror.” “His Eye” is obviously taken from its inspiration by the gospel today. I don’t see how anyone who knows the song and has it available in the repertoire would not use it today. I expect vigorous participation, even though we don’t use this song more than once a year or so and the range is extraordinarily high. People just sing it.


Communion: Blest Are They (Haas) I return to David's setting of the Beatitudes (and Darryl Ducote's as well) during Year A to help keep in mind the Sermon on the Mount, so that we can hear its words echoing through the rest of Matthew's gospel. The core message of the Beatitudes is that, contrary to what the world sees and believes, God is already present in the poor, the meek, the merciful, the persecuted, and those who hunger and thirst for justice. All of those markings seem like God's absence to the world. We don't want a God like that. But that's the one we have, if we believe Jesus. The ultimate test of this came to Jesus on the cross. Faced with death as an enemy of the state and its god, Tiberius Caesar, he was faithful to his mission, and God, with him in death as in life, raised him from the dead. "Yours is the kingdom of God" means, "There is nothing but life for you. Don't be afraid."


Recessional: The Summons ("Will You Come and Follow Me," John Bell) We end the liturgy with John Bell's reminder about our vocation to follow the Lord wherever that road takes us, and sing together our willingness to go there, for another week. For today, at least?



Some blog posts on the Eucharist (2017 Update)

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)

We Proclaim the Death of the Lord (the connection between Eucharist and the death of Christ)

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)

Eucharist: Are you being served? (Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ)

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.