Is it really blood? August 15, 2021

Year B, 12 Pentecost                                             John 6:51-58                                                                            

            One of the things I was able to do on my sabbatical was sit in the pew with my 5 year old son.   He had lots of questions.  On the one hand, I welcomed the questions because they were relevant and it was a way for him to engage in the service.  On the other hand, I didn’t want it to be disruptive.  One question that came up fairly often occurred during the Eucharistic Prayer when the priest held up the wine and said, “Drink this all of you, this is my blood of the new Covenant.”

            “That’s Jesus’ blood? Are we drinking Jesus’ blood?”  Now this was not the first time someone has asked me this.  Especially growing up Roman Catholic, I would get that question a fair amount.  But this was the first time I attempted to explain it to a 5 year old.  The typical Episcopal answer would be, “Well it’s a mystery.  We know God is present, but we don’t know how.” I knew this answer would not go over well.  So I just said, “No----but it helps us remember Jesus.”  Now, this was hard for me, because the answer is so much more complex (and would probably be deemed heresy by many, but this was the best I could do for someone who takes everything literally.

            I know that you all have been hearing about the bread of life for several weeks now.  It would be easy to assume that today’s Gospel reading is just a repeat of the past readings. It certainly has elements of previous verses, but it’s different.  In the verses for today Jesus got a lot more literal and the people listening were not pleased about it.

            Talking about “flesh and blood” might seem unusual in today’s context (that is if we were not celebrating communion.)  However, it was probably not that jarring for Jesus’ original audience.  That phrase is a Hebrew idiom that refers to the whole person (hearts, minds, hopes, dreams, everything.)  Therefore it wasn’t that strange for Jesus to be talking about flesh and blood.  But where Jesus got into hot water was when he referred to his blood and his body. Once he had their attention, he got even more specific: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  You know Jesus is serious, when he starts with, “Very truly.” Which makes his reference to his flesh and his blood that much more alarming and gory. 

            Of course many theologians and biblical scholars have used these words from John to debate the theology of the Eucharist, but few people can agree on the meaning. Consequently different denominations define communion in different ways.  Over the centuries, we have let our perspective on the Eucharist tear us apart.  I understand this to an extent, because it’s critical to our faith.  But it’s heart breaking to me that a sacrament that is supposed to bring us together is the one that has also torn us apart. 

            Augustine of Hippo was one of the greatest theologians of all time. He lived in the 5^th century, 1000 years before there was a split between Roman Catholics and Protestants.  That means both Catholics and Protestants get to claim him as their own. I can resolve that argument right now because he was obviously an Episcopalian.  In all seriousness, it’s a sad irony that different sides fight over him to support their denominational views because for Augustine, the most important thing about the Eucharist is the unity that represents and the unity it can and should bring to humanity. 

In the Episcopal Church we attempt to show that in our liturgy when we gather together around the altar and drink from one cup. Unfortunately, we have not been able to do that in a year and a half.  Some people worry that has negatively affected the celebration of communion. And so even those in our one small denomination have begun to debate the Eucharist with more fervor.

            We never completely stopped debating it, but we found other things to argue about.  However, discussions about the Eucharist have become prominent again because of the pandemic.  When we could not have communion, some people got creative and attempted to consecrate over the internet.  Then people like us started providing Eucharist “to go.”  Both of these methods were criticized by some. Then once we could have communion, everyone split on how to distribute it.  I was totally against using these cup/wafer combinations.  I got over that because it turned out to be the best option for our church.   Other churches chose other options. Most churches still don’t have wine.  Some are using fancy tweezers to dip the bread in the wine and then place it on people’s tongues. It’s anarchy out there. 

Yet, even I, raised in the Roman Catholic Church and rather passionate about communion, found that compromise didn’t have to mean we were diluting the sacrament.  At some point I realized that it wasn’t the presentation that was the most important thing.  The most important thing was the sacrament itself, the way it can transform us from the inside, the way it can transform our community. Augustine wrote, “Take and eat the body of Christ… Lest there be division among you, eat of what binds you together.”

            I think it’s essential to celebrate diversity and what makes us unique.  It would be wrong for us to pretend that we are all the same or that we agree on everything, or even most things.  However, let us never forget that what binds us together is constant. What divides us is temporary. Why do we spend so much time arguing about temporal things?

            No matter how we distribute or receive communion, we believe God’s presence is there, tangibly. It’s a gift that Jesus gave us and a gift that will never run out.  In a time when change seems like our only constant, my prayer for all of us is that we can cling to that which doesn’t change.  That is God’s presence with us in the sacraments of the church- God’s incredible display of love and compassion he displayed in sending his son to earth. Cling to that.  Hold on to it with all you are and all you have.  The rest will pass.  God’s love for us—God’s desire that we are unified in that love—that will last forever.

Missing Communion: April 26, 2020

Year A, Easter 3                                                                                 

Luke 24:13-35                                                                                    

            As many  of you know, I first heard a call to ordination when I was a member of the Roman Catholic Church. I felt it so strongly that I attended seminary, as a Roman Catholic, hoping to either discover some other way to follow a call outside of ordination, or find some kind of hidden loop hole.  One of the reasons that I eventually left the Catholic Church was that I feared that if I stayed, I would just be angry and bitter and no help to anyone. I remember sitting in mass, watching the Catholic priests celebrate communion and thinking, if only they knew how lucky they are.  If only they knew what it was not to be able to follow a call because of the gender that you are born into. I was incredibly envious. I am not proud it.  But what was weird, was that there was no other part of the ministry that incited my envy. I knew I could help people without being ordained. I even knew that if I could not preach, I would find some way to express myself and my faith.  But what I grieved, was not being able to celebrate communion. 

When I learned more about how the Episcopal Church viewed the sacrament of Holy Communion, I knew that I had found a new home.  When I celebrated my first Eucharist, I remember telling myself, never forget how much this means.  Never forget what it felt like to yearn for this.  But I did.  There were certainly moments when I could remember that feeling and felt rather proud of myself for remembering.  But I also took it for granted.  It stopped carrying the same weight as it once did. It stopped feeling like a gift and started to feel like a right.   I am ashamed to admit it, but there it is.

            So this time away from the sacrament has been good for me.  I have taken it for granted for too many years now.  Now I yearn for it, not in the same slightly bitter way as before, but the way we yearn for home when have been gone on a long trip. This time away has also made me wonder what it is I miss about it.   And I think what I miss the most is the act of simply placing it in people’s outstretched hands, seeing a young child reach for it before they even know what it is, bringing it to someone who has been away from church, sharing it with someone in the hospital who only has days or hours to live.  Because it is in the context of you—the church--where it has the most meaning for me.  Had you asked me before all of this what I valued most about communion, I might have given you a proper theological answer---about sacrifice or how the host does or doesn’t change.  So much has changed in the last 6 weeks.

            These changes have caused Episcopal clergy all over the country to question what we believe and what is most critical as part of our worship.  Because for so long, it was all around the celebration of communion—coming to the table together.  Now that we cannot have that, how are we the church?  This is not the first time the Christian community has needed to shift how we think.  This reading from the Gospel is all about how we encounter the risen Christ.  Typically, when we have interpreted this text, it has all seemed painfully obvious.  The disciples recognized him after he broke and blessed the bread, an obvious allusion to the Last Supper and one of the reasons that the earliest Christians interpreted scripture and then broke bread together. When this Gospel has come up in the past, it has seemed a perfect opportunity to talk about the importance of celebrating communion together, as a community. It’s a great time to remind people that this is why we come together in church. 

            Of course this is not just any Sunday.  We will not celebrate communion together.  Now what is this text about? It’s about two disciples encountering the risen Lord.  These disciples had learned how to be disciples by following Jesus, in the flesh.  What they had to figure out now was how they can follow a God who is not present with them as a human.  That must have been a hard transition for them. They knew how to be followers when they could literally follow Jesus, listen to Jesus, break bread with Jesus—but how could they do so after his death, resurrection and ascension?  By interpreting scripture and breaking bread together, Jesus was showing them a new way to be followers of Christ.  It doesn’t seem very new to us, but it was new to Jesus’ followers and the first Christians. 

For the last ten years, every church event, every conference has talked about how the church needs to change.  And I took that all in and talked to you all about it.  But I didn’t really want to change and the urgency was not yet there.  Now, we are faced with a change that has been forced on us.  We have no choice but to change.  We can grieve the loss of what we once had much like the disciples grieved the departure of Jesus. It’s ok to mourn that.  Yet what we cannot mourn is the loss of faith or God, because God is still present and faith---while perhaps more challenging, is that much more critical. 

One day, we will share communion together.  We have no idea when that will be. It could be many months and it might look different than how it looked 2 months ago. However, this is an opportunity for each one of us to discover a new way to connect with God.  It might be centering prayer, journaling, reading the Psalms or an online Bible study.  These are things we will be talking about more in the coming months. We will provide resources and direction.  This is a time to do something Episcopalians rarely talk about….develop your relationship with the one true God.  Much like we are all finding new ways to relate to one another, this is an opportunity to relate to God in another way, perhaps a more intimate way.  And if you don’t---that’s ok. This experience isn’t a test sent by God to determine who could find ways to come out of this with stronger faith. It is an opportunity.

            When we initially cancelled services, I thought, well Conor and I can celebrate communion together. That will be nice.  Then I realized I had no desire to.  That concerned me as I worried it meant it had lost its importance. Now I long to have communion.  I pass the aumbry with the reserved sacrament in our sanctuary and look at it longingly.  But I am determined to reserve communion for a time when we can share it together.  When we do, it might be in a small group.  It might be with tiny cups (gasp).  God will be present.  God will be present and I will once again remember how precious communion is.  For now, we lament our loss and we talk to God about that loss.  We wait and we pray. One day we will gather at the table again.

Be Good: August 19, 2018

Year B, Pentecost 13                                                            
John 6:51-58                                                                           

 

            One of the things I love about being a priest is that I get to spend a lot of time thinking about things and relearning things.  While in general I enjoy studying and teaching, there are some things in the church that are really hard to explain.  Every time I have to teach a communion class to children, I hit the books.  Then, I remember that the books weren’t that helpful the last time I taught the class and they are still not.  Yet still---I think---there just has to be a good way to explain this.  When I get in front of the kids, it sounds something like this:  So we eat the bread and drink the wine, but it’s not just bread and wine. It’s more.  It’s special.  It’s Jesus’ body and blood…but it’s not really the body and blood, because that would be gross.  It still tastes like bread, but it’s Jesus.  No you are not eating Jesus, but Jesus is still in you after you take communion.  Jesus is part of you because he died for you, but no- he doesn’t actually die every Sunday.  Look, it’s a mystery, we can’t actually explain it. Well….you get the picture.  It is murky.  I often wish that the Episcopal Church could achieve more clarity in our beliefs around the Eucharist, but it’s doubtful it will happen in my lifetime.    

            The thing about communion is --that at the same time, it is both the simplest part of our faith AND that most mysterious and theologically dense part of our faith.  In the early church, they argued about it endlessly, and to some extent, we are still arguing about it. Matthew, Mark and Luke all share the story of the Last Supper, where Jesus gives instructions about how we are to remember him.  We use those instructions in the words of our Eucharistic prayers (which is the prayer the priest says before we all come to the altar to receive communion).  The words we use come from the Gospels.

The Gospel of John shares the story of the Last Supper, but Jesus does not present the bread and wine as his body and blood. Instead he shares a meal with his disciples and he washes their feet and encourages them to do likewise.  The language of the body and blood instead appears in today’s Gospel reading, which comes right after the miraculous feeding of the 5000 but way before the Last Supper.  This language is rather explicit. “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day;  for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

            Flesh and blood.  It’s kind of gross. There is no mistaking what Jesus was talking about.  He was talking about flesh and blood.  Why did he get so specific? Prior to this reading for today, Jesus described himself as the bread of heaven. That is a lot more palatable.  But Jesus was never about making things easy. Notice he said that his flesh was true food and his blood was true drink.  Saying that something is true is another way of describing something as real.  Jesus wanted all those listening (and those of us listening now) to know that this was the real thing—that he was the real thing.  He was real and true, and he still is today.

            A lot of new age spirituality encourages us to find the divine in each one of us. I think that’s find and good.  We are created in the image of God, and that includes divinity to some degree.  Yet what Jesus was teaching people in our Gospel reading from today was the goodness of humanity, of our flesh and blood.  Often over the last 2000 years of the history of the church, flesh has gotten a bad rap.  Religious leaders have been critical of the flesh, saying that the body is sinful and weak.  Yet if that were true, why would Jesus make such a point of highlighting his humanity---so much so that he asked us to eat his flesh and drink blood?

Our bodies are weak. Even at their strongest and youngest, these bodies of ours are painfully vulnerable. Despite that, Jesus still took on a human body so he could experience what we experience. You know that saying that you have to “walk a mile in someone’s shoes?”  Jesus did so much more than that.  He lived a life in our bodies, so that we would never doubt that he understands our pain and that he isn’t some god stuck on high mountain judging from afar.  He is down here with us.

            By celebrating the Eucharist every week, we are remembering the realness of Jesus. We are not elevating him, as much as we are bringing him down to be with us. Then we are taking it a step further by consuming him.  One of the last things the priest says before all the people come to receive the bread and wine is, “These are the gifts of God for the people of God.” Then there is an optional addition. The priest can add: “Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving.”  I always include the 2^nd part because I like the image of feeding on him in your heart.  We don’t normally associate the heart with food, but there is no doubt that our heart and our soul needs that kind of nourishment. It’s not enough to simply consume the body and blood.  We are to be consumed by it.

  Augustine of Hippo was a great theologian of the 5^th century.  Catholics and Protestants are always arguing about who gets to claim him (which means he’s totally an Episcopalian).  He wrote a lot about the Eucharist. One of things he said was, “Come to the table to receive what you are.  Then go into the world to be what you received.” Augustine was saying that we the people are the body of Christ.  Therefore, when we come to the altar, we are receiving something we already are, but we are still being transformed by it. 

            When God created humans, God declared us good.  That never changed. Each one of us is good because we are made in the image of God. When Jesus came down in the flesh, he was reminding us that humans are still good.  In some ways, communion is another way to be reminded of the goodness that resides in each one of us.  Imagine how the world could be if we lived into that goodness---if we acted as good as we are?  So come to the table.  It will not make you good, it will remind you of the goodness that is already in you.  It will feed your body and heart.  It doesn’t matter if you can’t describe exactly what it means.  Eat the bread. Drink the wine. Then leave this church and share that goodness, because our world is desperate for that. Our world is starving for goodness, and we have an endless supply of that kind of nourishment, more than enough to share.