Hosea 11:1-11
Matthew 14:13-21
Today we will have the privilege to participate in a great mystery. After I finish my sermon, and we sing a hymn together, we will gather at this table (indicating communion table) and participate in one of the two sacraments of the Christian church—Holy Communion. When we partake together of the bread and the cup, and we re-enact the last Supper of Jesus Christ with his disciples, we are entering into what the Greeks called a mysterion, and the Romans translated as sacramentum—sacrament. We do this regularly, once a month, but how much thought do we really give to it? Do we approach this table with a sense of mystery, with an understanding that some rare and precious thing is about to happen to us, or have we so domesticated this sacrament that we give it little thought, and simply go through the motions that are expected of us? Or is the truth somewhere in between? What is behind this ritual that we do once a month, that resides close to the core of what it means to be a Christian church, as opposed to a Unitarian church, or a Jewish synagogue or a Muslim mosque? And what does it really mean, after all, for us today?
Children often get it that there is something special and mysterious about this particular symbolic meal. Sometimes they get it in a good way, and sometimes not so much. It all depends on where they’re coming from. Take me, for example. When I was growing up in a Disciples of Christ church (before I made the Great Leap to becoming a Presbyterian), we took communion every Sunday. Now, as you may know, Disciples of Christ churches practice believers’ baptism, and you can’t take communion until you’re baptized. So as a child, before I was baptized, I vividly remember sitting in the pews with my parents and watching all the adults take communion. I loved watching the gleaming silver trays go by with their little cups of grape juice and little wafers of bread. I wanted that bread and that juice! It felt special, even holy, to me, and I wanted to be a part of it. And even though I couldn’t yet take communion, I knew that one day soon I would be baptized, and so the whole experience carried a quality of anticipation for me, kind of like looking forward to Christmas several months early. I felt that way because I knew I was part of the family; I belonged there.
But I recently heard another story, of another child, who had a very different experience of communion. You see, she was Unitarian, but she was also a girl scout, and that’s where the complication came in. It all started with Girl Scout Sunday. When she was a little girl, about 7 or 8, her Brownie troop participated in a Girl Scout Sunday at the Lutheran church where her troop regularly met. During communion, they were given the honor of passing around the silver trays of what she called “shot glasses” to the congregation. What would have been, for me at that age, an absolute delight, was for her a terrifying experience. Not being Christian, she was afraid that she would be struck by lightning by a God who was angry that she, an imposter, was serving at this meal….or that a parishioner would “out” her as someone who didn’t belong there. She experienced communion as an outsider, and it was anything but a holy and comforting experience.
Is that what Christ’s holy meal has become? A marker of who’s inside and who’s outside, of who belongs in the community and who doesn’t? Sadly, for many churches, it has become just that. How tragic that Christians have taken a ritual that is rooted in the radically inclusive generosity of Jesus of Nazareth, and turned it into a weapon that can be used to literally “ex-communicate” people if they fail to pass some doctrinal litmus test. Is that really what Jesus had in mind?
Not according to John Dominic Crossan, one of the scholars in the Jesus Seminar. Crossan makes the rather controversial claim that the origins of the Eucharist lie not in a final Passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples, in which he identified bread and wine with his body and blood, but in the other feedings that we read about in the gospels, like the feeding of the 5,000 (not including women and children!) that was read from Matthew’s gospel earlier (which according to scholars meant there were probably more like 20,000 people there!). ¡ I happen to believe that Jesus did share a final Passover meal with his disciples that became the basis for our Holy Communion, but it’s clear in any case that the Eucharistic meal is strongly connected in the gospels to the other meals that came before it, meals in which Jesus reached out to feed hungry, hurting and poor people, without discrimination as to their social status or religious condition. Notice that in our Matthew passage today, the same four verbs appear that also appear in the story of the Last Supper: Jesus “took, blessed, broke, and gave.” And so, these feeding stories from Jesus’ ministry both foreshadow and help interpret Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples; they put flesh on the bones of this ritual which we participate in every month.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, as in many cultures still today, eating together carried great meaning. Who you ate with, and how you were placed around the table, and who played host, and who served, all demonstrated your social status. Sharing food together was serious business because it created a set of obligations, in Jesus’ hospitality-conscious society. Anthropologists talk about this with the term commensality, which means the rules of table and eating as a miniature model of the rules of association in society. ± Even in our own culture, think of how we feel when we’ve been invited to someone’s home for dinner. We usually feel some sense of being indebted to them, which we either help forestall by bringing a gift of food or wine with us to the meal, or deal with later by returning the invitation or sending a thank you card. (Just talking about this makes me a bit nervous because I’m thinking of all the meals I owe you all!) And furthermore, we don’t invite just anyone to our homes for dinner, do we? We are generally very selective about our guests. Now imagine our cultural context magnified by a power of ten or twenty. In Jesus’ time, mingling all sexes, classes and ranks of people together at the same table was a social nightmare, a taboo. And so, because Jesus practiced what Crossan calls a radical form of “open commensality,” or open table fellowship, he was accused of being “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” a few chapters earlier in Matthew.«
But none of this was Jesus’ concern. The religious leaders may have been scandalized, and even his disciples tried to shield Jesus at times from children, and women and other marginalized folks that pressed upon him, but Jesus had one operative principle that he consistently acted out of—and it’s right here in our text today: compassion. Over and over again, we hear about the crowds of needy people that came out seeking Jesus, and his response is always the same. He feels compassion for them, and he meets them where they are. If they are sick, he heals them. If they are hungry, he feeds them. And he calls upon his disciples to do the same. “You give them something to eat” Jesus tells the disciples in today’s passage, and later, in the book of John, he tells Peter after his resurrection, “feed my sheep” three times, for emphasis.
Now holding all of this in mind, let’s jump forward, oh, about 1500 years or so, and listen to the words of a famous Scottish churchman named Robert Bruce who wrote a greatly influential book called, The Mystery of the Lord’s Supper. Bruce does an excellent job of explaining the meaning of the Lord’s Supper in its purest Reformed Protestant form, the meaning which we in the UCC have largely inherited. Let’s listen in to Bruce’s thoughts in 1589:
“[This sacrament] is called ‘The Supper of the Lord’ to distinguish it from a common supper. This is the Lord’s Supper, a holy Supper, not a profane or common supper, but a Supper appointed for the increase of holiness, to feed the soul for the life everlasting. It is not a supper appointed for physical body, for the Lord had ended the supper for the physical body before He began this Supper which was appointed for the soul.”» And so here we have a thoroughly sanitized version of Holy Communion, or perhaps I should say, an ironically disembodied version. Gone are the crude crowds of the unwashed with their cloying physical needs, gone is Jesus’ compassion for the bodily well-being as well as the spiritual well-being of his followers, gone is the socially transgressive nature of Jesus’ feedings, and in its place we have a spiritualized ritual, safely enclosed within the walls of a religious sanctuary.
Sound familiar? It actually only took a few hundred years to accomplish this transformation; it wasn’t Bruce’s fault, he was the inheritor of a long established tradition by the time he preached in the 16th century. But what are we, now, in the 21st century, to do with this discrepancy between the meals of Jesus, as they are recorded in the gospels, and the Lord’s Supper as we have inherited it today? For one possible answer, I’d like to turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer for help. Bonhoeffer wrote from prison of the need for what he called a “religionless Christianity.” In a time of great crisis, Bonhoeffer wrote, “we are once again being driven right back to the beginnings of our understanding. Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit…, cross and resurrection, life in Christ…—all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it.”µ
I think, or I hope, that maybe this is where we find ourselves today, especially here, at Rock Spring….“in the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it.” We are indeed dealing here with a mystery. What is it that we are about to do at this table? I would like to suggest briefly, in closing, three possible ways we can experience this holy sacrament in a way that is faithful to the spirit and life of Jesus. You may be able to think of more.
First of all, this table belongs to Jesus. It doesn’t belong to any one denomination; its authority is not rooted in the power of the clergy, and its reach extends far beyond the walls of this sanctuary. This table represents the radically inclusive love, compassion and generosity of Jesus Christ for all people. One commentator says of today’s Matthew passage that the disciples urge Jesus to send the extra people away, but Jesus responds that there are no extras. Instead, at the end of the story, we find that there are no extra people, but only extra blessings, because there is more than enough to go around.¿ When we eat at this table, we are connected to all those whom Jesus loved, which is all of humanity-- indeed all of creation. And yes, we are connected in a special way to the followers of Jesus who have shared this meal together, in all times and places, as we participate in the mystery of Christ’s body given for us which we receive in faith.
Secondly, this meal represents food for the body and food for the soul; it represents Jesus’ fervent desire to minister to human beings as whole persons--embodied souls and enspirited bodies. As commentator Brian McGowan writes, “Jesus never draws too firm a line between soul and stomach. True religion always feeds both…to feed the hungry is to do theology.”ƒ
Finally, I would suggest that we think of the sacraments, both communion and baptism, as a hinge between heaven and earth. Augustine wrote that a sacrament is “a visible form of an invisible grace.” The mystery of the sacraments is that they remind us of the connection between the spiritual and the physical. Real bread and real juice, or wine, when taken in faith, actually do enable us to participate spiritually in the life of Christ. Because we are creatures of flesh, we need the things of the flesh to connect us to the things of the spirit, because despite centuries of dualistic thinking, we can never really separate the two. Holy Communion reminds us that, in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Earth is crammed with Heaven.” At this table, heaven and earth meet in this meal.
And so, Holy Communion is not only a sacrament of our spiritual feeding from God, but also a sign and symbol of our commitment to continue Jesus’ ministry of actual bodily feeding of the hungry, and care of the disenfranchised. Nourished by Christ’s body at this table, we go forth to nourish the world as Christ’s body on earth, to bring this table outside these four walls—to serve as we have been served. May it be so. Amen.
¡ - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco: 1989), 179-180.
±-Ibid., 68.
«Matthew 11:19.
»Robert Bruce, The Mystery of the Lord’s Supper, trans. and ed. by Thomas F. Torrance (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1958), 70.
µLarry Rasmssen with Renate Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 59.
¿ Wesley White, “Sermon Preparation Thoughts and Questions,” available at textweek.com.
ƒ Brian McGowan, ‘Matthew on the Margins,” available at textweek.com, http://www.textweek.com/mtlk/matt14a.htm.