Supplement to the
Sermon on the Holy Eucharist
Part IV
Foolishly, I thought I could teach about the Holy Eucharist in a series of 3 sermons, only to discover that by the end of the third, I had only gotten to the Offertory, and not even to the eucharistic prayer and communion itself, the very heart of the matter.
Our practice of Eucharist evolved from two ritual meals in the Jewish tradition: the seder and the Sabbath meal. The seder celebrates the Passover and tells the story of the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Like our Eucharist, it has a story to tell and it tells this story in ritual, in words, music and action. The Sabbath meal celebrates a blessed state of rest in the divine presence. Like the Eucharist it celebrates the here and now reality of the Kingdom of God in our lives. T o enter the Sabbath is to enter the Kingdom, a reality where God’s great love reigns no matter what we are fretting over at the moment. So the meal is really the heart of the matter in the Eucharist. In fact, the basic elements of celebrating communion are this: an invitation to remember the reality of God’s presence here and now (we call this prayer, among other things), a reading from the Gospel, and the ritual meal. Through the centuries, the church has tended to add all sorts of things into this, but those are the basics. Last Sunday, I got to celebrate the Eucharist four times, and these celebrations ranged from the most basic in a hospital room to a bit more elaborate at 8 am here and at Peachtree in the afternoon to fairly complex at 10 am here.
The readings from the Gospel of John these past three Sundays have presented some beautiful teachings from Jesus about the Lord’s Supper, so it is a good thing to have these gospel lessons to work with in reflecting upon communion.
And last week’s psalm, # 34, contains the lovely line: Taste and see that the Lord is good. This is a beautiful way of summing up the whole of what Eucharist teaches us – to taste and see that the Lord is good, to take into ourselves the very life of Christ and see for ourselves if this Kingdom is not good, and good far surpassing all that we had thought was good in our ordinary world of seeking after selfish pleasure and praise. In the Holy Eucharist we are invited to taste and see that the Lord is good, taste and see for ourselves, not taking anyone else’s testimony, but tasting and seeing for ourselves that the feast of love in the Kingdom of God far surpasses the most sumptious party ever imagined on the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
But in order to realize this, we have got to go much deeper than the literal level of things. One of the basic things that Jesus is always having to struggle with in teaching people in the gospel accounts is that they take things literally and get hung up there. The truths about the Kingdom of God come from a higher dimension of being and can not be transmitted literally. They come through in metaphors of real power, but if we are hung up on literal meanings, we don’t get it, and we remain entangled and confused. Jesus is also always trying to show his disciples that the inner reality of the Kingdom is what truly gives us life, not any of our external circumstances, or our projections upon these externals. Just take a moment to consider how much we try to blame our bad moods and disagreeable tempers upon the someone or something out there. And yet, when we taste and see that the Lord is good, we are able to face the worst external circumstances and be of loving service in those circumstances. The inner state is key – and Jesus knows that religious people have a great tendency to confuse the external circumstances with their internal state. He very carefully explains to the disciples that the most religious people of all, the Pharisees, are basically mistaken for they are busy trying to control things externally rather than observing themselves inwardly and repenting of the foul moods and bad tempers they indulge in their inner states. We are meant to live in a state of outpouring love, divine love, and when we remember that, we won’t want to indulge all these silly complaints and miserable laments that make up so much of our talking throughout the day. So keep these two things in mind, the inner state is most important, and this is addressed in metaphors, not in literal and externalized circumstances.
In this light, let’s look at the Gospel reading from John for today. Jesus has been teaching them that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood – if ever something was obviously not to be taken literally, this is it. He was not asking them to become cannibals. He wanted them to stop taking sacrifice literally, the way that human beings did in the ancient world, for they actually did practice blood sacrifice. The Jews did not sacrifice human beings, but they did sacrifice animals. In fact, that is what worship at the Temple in Jerusalem entailed, all day long, animals ritually slaughtered at the altar and burned in the fire, their flesh eaten by the priests, their blood poured out as an offering to God.
Now before Jesus even, there had been prophets and sages who had tried to get the Jewish people to see that sacrifice was not meant to be taken literally, that this offering of animal flesh and blood was not what God intended when he asked us to sacrifice. Listen to Psalm 51: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart.” And listen to God’s words through the prophet Hosea, “I desire steadfast love and mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of truth, rather than burnt offerings.”
Jesus teaches us that we sacrifice by offering ourselves, our souls and bodies, as living sacrifices to God. We seek to serve God and we sacrifice our own selfish ambitions. This is the sacrifice that Christ has made and makes on behalf of all of us, that we might follow in his way and sacrifice our own selfishness. This is what makes way for the love and truth of God to reach us, to reach deep into us, to heal and transform us into real disciples, real Christians, real agents of love and mercy in this hungry, thirsty world. And this world is hungry for love, thirsty for truth, desparate for mercy. That is why we are here, to serve the world with the great feast of love and truth that Christ makes for us.
So when Jesus says, you must eat my flesh and drink my blood, he knew that this was not possible to take literally. He was shocking like that on purpose. People would have to reach for a much deeper meaning to his words. They would have to stretch and change in order to understand. That was the point. And the disciples get hung up on the literal level, as we all seem to at first, and say, “this is a hard teaching, who can understand it.” They mean that they simply cannot understand it literally. And, of course, Jesus did not want them to take it literally, settle in and think they already knew it all. People who already think they know it all cannot be taught. Jesus Christ needs people who can be taught, people who come with the openness of children, and the humility to know that we do not know. When we know that we do not know, then we can be taught, and then we are willing and open to being transformed, which is what the deep teachings of Jesus are supposed to do – transform us into people whose primary aim in life is to love God and love others. And we need that transformation – the world has formed us well into people who act as if our primary aim in life is satisfying our selfish desires. To become as we are meant to be requires living by a very different identity, and telling a different story. The ego will resist this mightily, and with many defensive strategies.
The story we tell in the eucharistic prayer is very different than the usual stories we tell one another about who and how we are. The story in the eucharistic prayer, like that told at the Passover seder, is about liberation from slavery, in this case, our slavery to sin, which is an inner state of selfishness that has captured our precious attention and life energies. Like the story of the Sabbath, this story is also about the Cosmos itself, and the Creator of the Cosmos. This is a story that is so much bigger than me or you or the little world we construct in our daily round of activities. This is a story of expansive dimensions, meant to lift us out of our trance of selfishness, meant to remind us who we really are – children of God, citizens of the Kingdom.
Each Eucharistic Prayer does this in various ways. The oldest (Prayer D, adapted from the Liturgy of St. Basil from the 4rd century) and the youngest (Prayer C modeled upon ancient liturgies but written in the 20th century) make the most references to the Cosmos. Ancient Christianity was rooted in a living cosmology, and we are wisely seeking to remember that in our time. We lost our connection with this living cosmology when the church ex-communicated and condemned Copernicus and so divorced itself from the search for cosmic truth in science. Not surprisingly, the prayers that evolved during the intermediate period (A the 16th century, B a conflation of 16th century prayers put together in the 1970’s) got more focused upon the human part of the story. Important as that is, it is not the whole story. Even when we tell our 2000 year old story of redemption, and this is expansive for us, putting it into the context of the 14 billion year old story of the Universe expands things that much more, and reminds us how important this Christ story is – it is important to this immense universe, as well as important to me, a confused and very selfish person living here in this little corner of the Earth in the year 2006. In fact, this story connects little me to this immense Universe, as my true self, as a child of God, of the Creator of all this. And how humbling this is, how humbling and powerful.
Remember that as you pray these prayers, don’t get hung up on literal meanings. If we get hung up on literal meanings, we will waste a lot of time trying to make sure we have really great bread, and exquisite wine, as if that’s what this feast is about, literal food. That would be as silly as trying to eat actual human flesh and drink actual blood because we read that Jesus used those words. Remember that Jesus was always trying to draw his disciples into the deeper, more hidden meanings. And the Eucharist itself holds more mystery than we know.
So no, we don’t waste a lot of time in baking contests, trying to create paradise in a loaf of bread, nor do we run around the world to find the best cup of wine imaginable. That is for the kingdom of the ego, and leave it there. This is the Kingdom of God, where such silly pursuits are best left far behind. We are here to be fed not by literal bread and wine but by the much finer food of the love and truth that Christ imparts to us, and that the Kingdom of God is made of. That is the feast we enjoy here. And it is real, oh so real, so much more real than a taste of bread, however heavenly, that is enjoyed selfishly for a moment but transforms us in love not one bit. Do selfish pleasures ever transform us into more authentically loving people? I mean that really, consider it?
If we are transformed, even for just a few minutes, into people who live no longer for ourselves but instead live to be of service to others in the love of God, phew! That’s a heavenly banquet! That’s a meal that nourishes the spirit, and can lead to the transformation of the world.
Tune into the sublime music of this communion. Let yourself develop the subtle senses that can taste and see that the Lord is good. Tuning into this reality does mean that you’ll have to shift your attention away from all those tunes running through your head that say, “I’ve got to get mine, I’ve got to look out for number one, I deserve the best, I want this, I want that.” But by now, we ought to be pretty bored with those songs, huh? Don’t we know that station in life all too well? Christ offers to lift us to a much subtler level, where the joy comes from giving, not from getting, where joy is really possible, because it is not a passing phenomenon based upon external circumstances. This Kingdom of God is very real, and it is within you, and it is always near, but just kept away by our well-practiced selfishness. Start practicing the sacrifice of selfishness, start singing about the love of God and the love of our neighbor, start tuning into a higher station, and you will taste and see that this simple meal of wafers and wine is a real and living metaphor for something so good, for the love of God that transcends all selfishness, all pettiness, all silly chasing after ephemeral pleasures, the love of God that lives eternally, and that we too live eternally in that, not in our selfishness – we die in our selfishness. But in the love of God, we live. Beyond even the vast expanses of interstellar space, beyond even the immense reaches of the Universe in time and space, beyond all time and space, the Love of God lives in Eternity and this Kingdom of Love is an Eternal reality, one that we taste right here and now, and grow into day by day as we sacrifice the selfish nature of the ego for the selfless nature of our essential being as God’s beloved children.