Sermon on the Holy Eucharist
Part IV
In the Temple at Jerusalem there were stone altars to which the animals were brought for sacrifice. The great slabs of stone on which the living animals’ were laid down and cut, had an indentation hewn into the stone, a little canal for the blood to run down. All day long, the priests stayed at the altars, sacrificing the animals, cutting them up and then offering them to God in the fire of burnt offering. Thousands of sacrifices, day after day after day, year after year after year. Rivers of blood, huge fires, dense smoke, charred animal flesh. This was worship in the Holy of Holies, in the Temple in Jerusalem before and during the time in which Jesus taught his disciples.
Last week we heard Jesus tell his disciples: “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you. For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed.” This week we hear what the disciples say in response, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And Jesus knows that his words offend them. He is trying to tell them a truth that is very difficult to put into words. He uses the stark image of his own blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own body, to convey the depth of the commitment he has made and that he is asking them to make in response. In love, he makes the sacrifice of his very being, will they receive it? Will they eat the essential food that he offers them? Will they drink the vital fluid he gives them? Or will they refuse?
Most of them refused. The Gospel of John tells us that at this point, many of his disciples “turned back and no longer went about with him.” They could go no further with Jesus. This was just too much. The crowds disappeared, a remnant was left.
And if we understood what it is that we are doing here in the Eucharist, if we understood the spiritual power of this meal, if we tasted and saw that in this bread and wine we receive the finest food of the spirit, the essence of Christ, could we bear it?
All day long we are acting and reacting in life, smiling at the person who is kind to us, cursing the person who gets in our way, stocking our imaginations with images from the television, resonating with music from the radio, reacting to thoughts of pleasure or pain, praise or humiliation. All this is food, and all day long we are receiving and ingesting it, and also giving it to others. Every word, image, song, gesture, mood, thought, feeling that we put out there effects us and those around us. But since we don’t usually see it, we are not aware that it is going on. Jesus offers us food that is much finer than any of this fare, and he invites us to take it in reverently and deliberately, to know that he is feeding us and that we are partaking of his essence, being nourished by the most essential food there is. And lest we forget that it is precious, he tells us starkly how great a sacrifice he makes in order for us to eat.
Waking up to the spiritual dimension is not easy – and most of the disciples say no to Jesus at this point. We tend to say, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” but our ordinary seeing is not so sensitive. Our ordinary sight misses a whole lot. Police, lawyers and judges know this: eye witness testimony is actually quite unreliable, even though it holds a lot of weight with a jury. Another example of the insensitivity of ordinary sight is that we cannot see sound. Sound is an immense dimension of reality. We cannot see it. If we could, it might look like what we see when we look in an aquarium, for the sound resonates all the cells of the atmosphere and of our bodies the way the water currents in the aquarium flow through the water and the fishes’ gills and skin and bodies, the plants, a constant waving motion of currents. Sound might look that way if we could see it, but we can’t, so most of the time we assume it doesn’t have the great impact upon our environment and our bodies, upon our very molecular structure, that it does indeed have.
What if it is this way with the spiritual forces, and the spiritual foods, that we are exchanging with one another all day long? What if we could see them? We might realize just how much we need to be eating the food that Christ offers. But most of Jesus’ disciples, when it came to this, decided things had gone far enough and they left. They would rather not know what they do not know. They would rather not go any further on this path of love and truth. Just gimme that old time religion, its good enough for me. Nothing so weird and intimate as this: that God should become food for me, and that I should realize that I am actually giving out and taking in food all the time: bitter, poisonous food when I simmer in resentment, envy, self-righteousness or justify chewing someone out; fine, light food when I give away love, when I take the time to be concerned for another’s well-being and let go of that miserable selfishness.
So Jesus turns to the few who are left: do you also wish to leave? And through Peter they answer, “To whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”
The words of eternal life are the words he has just spoken, about the eating and drinking of his very being, about the Eucharist. Peter expresses it well. They are bewildered, but they are going to stay, they are going to follow this through. And although the disciples do not understand these words about the Eucharist, and are even deeply offended by them, Peter acknowledges that they cannot turn back because they know in a place far beyond words, that this is the Holy One of God. They have tasted and seen that none of the world’s endless chatter counts for anything when compared with the deep inner stillness touched by the mysterious words of eternal life.
Today we stand at the heart of the matter – communion itself. And although I’ve engaged in a vain effort to chatter on about it for four Sundays now, no words are needed for communion. It so transcends ordinary human language that no words can add to or detract from it. When you are there, no circumstance can detract from it, or add to it. No crying child, no disagreeable adult, no false note in the choir, no mix-up in lighting the candles, not to mention no news of personal loss or shame, no real tragedy can detract from the state of communion. It transcends all that and makes it bearable, even brings meaning to bewildering situations. And likewise, not even all the honors and riches and most glamorous and sought after things in this world could add a single thing to the state of communion. In fact, when you are there, all that seems small, lovely as some of it may be, it is very, very small in the context of real communion.
Because the reality of communion transcends all the ritual, music, words and the rest that we add to it and by which we try to approach it, the experience of it is every bit as rich in a prison cell as in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Last Sunday I got to partake of communion 4 times between 8 am and 3 pm. From the simplest service in a hospital room to our elaborate 10 am service and other variations of complexity, and I can tell you, the taste of communion is ever the same – it is so good, so good, that it transcends all the external details.
We can celebrate communion with the barest of elements: a tiny speck of dried bread, a drop of wine, and just the words of Jesus reminding us, “this is my body given for you, this is my blood poured out for you.” And we can catch communion, it can be contagious. Years ago a musician was in a park in London and heard a homeless man singing “Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.” He recorded that little song as part of a sound collage in the park that day. Listening to it later, that one line of a song touched something deep, so he put it on a loop and let it play over and over and over. It affected him. He put it on a CD and started to distribute it. It touched other people deeply. No one could quite say how. There’s now a whole collection of healing and miracle stories associated with this little line of a communion song sung by a homeless beggar in the park.
On the other hand, we can add all the drama in the world around communion, we can dress it up with silver and gold, beautiful surroundings, the Kings’ College Choir, processions of dancing elephants, long intellectual discourses on intricate and complex history of all these various added elements, and we can get very concerned with the perfecting of all this stuff. But communion is not about all this – the only perfecting that Eucharist is after is the perfecting of our hearts in love, and our minds in truth.
As God said through the prophet Hosea to a people like ourselves obsessed with the superficial forms of things and missing the much greater spiritual realities, “I desire steadfast love, not sacrifice, and truth rather than burnt-offerings.” And in the discourse on communion in John that we are working with, Jesus says, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert and died. I am the true bread come down from heaven and anyone who eats of me has eternal life . . . It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken are spirit and life.”
One meaning of what Jesus is saying is that we need to look for the spiritual forces operating behind everything, and not stop at the surface with the outward form of things. A beautifully crafted worship service where there is no real love is useless, it is dead. The sharing of a homeless man’s experience of real communion in a broken line of a song, on the other hand, brings life. What power there is in communion itself. I remember someone coming home from a visit to NYC and telling me, “Now if we had services like the one I went to at Trinity Church, Wall Street, then I could really worship God every Sunday.” No, actually, that’s all wrong. If we really receive the sacrifice that Christ makes for us, the overwhelming love that pours in and through us will eclipse everything else. We won’t ever need to attend Trinity Church Wall Street. We can be anywhere, in prison, in the hospital, in a cardboard box living on the street, and experience communion. When we taste the essence of Christ, we bring that sensitivity to Christ’s presence into every encounter and into every form of communion.
The response from us to the sacrifice of Jesus goes much deeper than creating an ornate and glamorous worship experience. It is this: to try to put the concerns of others first and love no matter what, to seek the higher truths of God no matter how much this challenges our old ideas and opinions, and throws off balance the stands we have taken.
How are we doing in response to Jesus’ sacrifice? Are we pouring out love for others all day long. Are we at least in love here and now? Do we look at one another, at every one who comes into this space of communion with divine love? When something challenges us, or even annoys us, do we sacrifice our own comfort in order to help others, or in order to take in new truth? How are we doing? Well, I’m not doing so well. I’m starving for this food. I need this communion, I need to be fed regularly with the essence of Christ. For me, its my only hope. I need the living spiritual presence of Christ more than I can admit to myself. After worship sometimes, I sit here and just savor the flavor of it, take it in deeply. More often, I forget. I try to savor this food in prayer during the day, during the week, letting it nourish me, letting it transform my very being. I try to remember to do that, and sometimes I even do remember to do that, but more often, I forget. And it is back to the old miserable selfish habits.
There is a story about the man who was seeking wisdom and was told to seek out a poor fisherman who lived in a hut by the river. He went and found the fisherman sorting through the day’s meager catch. He asked the man what he could teach him. The man smiled and said nothing. It was a hot day, and he stepped into the river. The seeker followed him. Next thing he knew, the fisherman had pushed him under the water and was holding him down. He thought he would die, he was desperate for air. Finally the fisherman released him, he bobbed to the surface and gasped for breath.
"When your desire to serve God is as desperate as your desire for air, then you’ll understand,” said the fisherman.
When our desire is so strong, this Eucharist will not seem optional, nor will it be something we take for granted or confuse with the outward forms we’ve built around it. It will be then as it is if we could only see it clearly now – this food is to our spirit as essential as air is to the body. No, this food is more essential than air. The body will take in air and it will die. But this food is necessary for eternal life. It is the spirit that gives life and this is our essential spiritual food.