In my homily last week I made an observation about our deep needs as human beings and I left us with a couple of questions. The observation was that there is within us, a hunger, a longing for something to fill the empty, isolated spaces of our lives. I postulated that modern spiritual life is like having lunch at the A-1 deli with way too many choices and an abundance of treats that may comfort us in the short run, but have little lasting value and that there seems to be something missing sometimes in our efforts to find meaning in our lives. I left us with these questions: Is it possible that the sustenance we need – the bread, the wine, the hopes, the dreams for wholeness stand before us in this son of Mary and Joseph who claims to be the Bread of Life? Is it true that God has come to be with us, to live and die as one of us, to be for us the very source of life and to transform our lives to be disciples of Christ?
Now I am going to assume that since you are here this week that you will most likely answer the first question in the affirmative. We are here because we do believe that God has come into the world as one of us in the person of Jesus Christ. The harder question may be how do we live into that belief. The most visible way we do this is the sharing of bread and wine with an understanding that this bread and this wine are for us, this community here gathered, the Real Presence of Christ and that as a community gathered in Christ we are called to be Christ’s Body in the world. In this 6th chapter of John, Jesus assures us that by consuming his body we are transformed, we are nurtured and changed in such a way that we can go out from this place and transform the world—moving it from fear of death to joy of life, from the depths of despair to hope. And moving the world from a place where some are excluded to a place where all are welcomed, from a place of judgment to a place of grace and mercy.
In that poem that I read last week by George Herbert you might remember that Herbert expressed the poet’s feelings of inadequacy in being welcomed by God to the Eternal Feast and God’s response of unequivocal love for the poet as God’s child. God gives an admonition to him to enter fully into that love by taking it deeply into the center of his soul. I invited you to consider this poem in the context of the 6th chapter of John from which our lessons have been taken for several weeks now. So I am curious would anyone like to share something from those meditations?
For me it seemed that there were connections everywhere I turned. When I got home last week and opened up the globe there on the front page was an article about how we as a culture are desperately seeking to find some tangible way to reach to God. I don’t think that it was by coincidence that Michael Paulson wrote a front page piece on the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament during this time of the Bread of Life readings. Now it is not a common practice of the Episcopal Church to hold such vigils, but we certainly skirt around the practice. On Maundy Thursday last, in this church, we dusted off the Monstrance and held a vigil before the Blessed Sacrament. And each time we celebrate the Mass here we reverently consume the remaining elements, avoiding a mixing of consecrated bread and wine with the sewage or the trash. Clearly we who partake of the sacrament of the Eucharist see it as something different, something special, something holy. The Paulson article and the many comments that have come into the Globe concerning it are, I think, indicative of the deep need our society feels to know God intimately.
The other big news story that caught my eye was the avalanche of comments on healthcare reform and the idea of paying providers to speak with patients about end of life issues. Sadly private and personal conversation between physicians and patients are once again thrown into the political fray. Now it is not my place to delve into political debates in the pulpit, but it is my place to proclaim the Gospel and in this Gospel today Jesus has a lot to say about both how we live our life and how we look to the end of our life. Jesus is calling us to a place of faith in Christ as the source of our life. He says to us, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you…” but if you do Jesus says you will have eternal life. I think that this lesson is more about how we live than it is about how we die. Do we live in fear of death, trying to control its parameters or do we live each day marking our life to the life lived by Christ – caring for the weak, loving each other, sharing our blessings of abundance. And then do we look toward the end of life, not with fear, but with confidence that God’s love will envelop us forever in the mystery that is Christ? John reminds us that whoever does these things abides in Jesus and Jesus abides in them.
Whether we come during a service of Benediction and sit in silence before the Host or whether we make the effort each week to come in humility and in gratitude to hold out our hands and take the offered bread and wine, we do so seeking the Real Presence of Christ, seeking intimacy with God that comes to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
We come silently, in humility, and with grateful hearts because these are postures of openness and vulnerability. They allow us to enter into the mystery, leaving behind our world pride and avarice – waiting and anticipating the invitation from God. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest for whom contemplative practice and social action are one discipline, says, “We can never grasp a mystery; we can only allow ourselves to be grasped by it. That kind of surrender … is needed if we are ever to receive the gift of Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist.”
For the community of John in the second century Palestine and for us today the call to discipleship required a radical commitment. Jesus tells us that in order to make that commitment the source of our strength, joy and perseverance must be truly divine. To eat and drink deeply of God’s Love and abundance through prayer, worship, and communion is to become aware of the blessings of God’s Grace to share in the life of Christ. That Life that Jesus brings to us is the resurrection, the ultimate triumph over suffering and death. In the Paulson article one of the participants at the service of Benediction said in coming to sit in quiet and to pray brings him into the presence of Jesus in a real and tangible way and “Any time you come in contact with Christ you are changed.”
We come here, we eat this bread and drink that wine because we long to know God. We long to be loved and to love. We come here because we know that there is nothing else that can endure out there in the world and that we need that mysterious melding of God with us. God desires us and we desire to be with God. Through the Eucharist we are made ready and able to be Christ to one another, in a hurting world. This feast, this sacrament is the place and the time in which we receive God as bread, and then joyfully share God with the world as the body of Christ.
Herbert wrote many poems, but the most beautiful ones are the ones in which he reveals the intimacy of his relationship with God. In one called The Altar, Herbert describes his heart as a spiritual altar, one that is broken open by suffering and tears and then that has been honed and cut by God so to be connected to all creation and to sing unceasingly in praise of God.
The Altar
A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.
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