Community Parson: Bread: where earth and heaven meet

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Bread: where earth and heaven meet

Proper 16 B

Aug. 26, 2012

1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43

Psalm 84

John 6:56-69

You are not alone in thinking that the images Jesus uses are indeed, as he asks his disciples in today’s gospel, offensive. Drinking blood and eating skin – not a pretty picture. Bread? Yes, wonderful. Wine? Yes, as well. Communion? Yes, we those we get. But body and blood? Why such a sacrifice? Why such a commitment? Why such a risk?

What is shocking about today’s gospel is that Jesus lets a whole lot of his disciples go. For these folks, this imagery is just too much. Is it the grotesqueness? Is it the commitment? Is it the allusion to sacrifice and death? For whatever reasons, they walk away, and Jesus gives even his inner circle that option, too. Just how convincing is Peter’s answer? “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.”

One of the earliest images of Jesus, from the earliest days of the Christian community, are images of Jesus sharing bread with his friends. They are depictions of communion, of the Last Supper. It was not until centuries later that Christians dared depict Jesus on the cross – remember that many of those early Christians faced martyrdoms and deaths of their own. Perhaps in the early days of the church they were living the scandal of the cross – of the God made human – sharing all too closely in his life and death – to want to reflect on it in art or symbol. We, now free from danger of crucifixion ourselves, can find the cross a meaningful symbol of the God who walked among us as one of us.

Our English word “companion” has relevance here. Its roots “com” meaning “with” and “pan” meaning “bread” imply that a companion is one who is with you with bread. A companion is one with whom you share your bread, your nourishment, your life, as you walk along your way. And indeed, Jesus, our divine companion, continues to share the bread of his eternal life with us, even if we, like Peter, are not always absolutely convinced that walking along with Jesus is a wise thing to do.

Full confidence in the faith is hard. Oh, that we had the confidence of Solomon, to build that Temple for God, the confidence, even to be humble enough to ask God for wisdom and not only glory. Yet to be honest, we must admit that the sayings of Jesus are difficult, and the life that Jesus bids us live carries with it costs and sacrifices.

Maybe the best we can do is eat the bread. To stand in line with everyone else, put out our hands and take a piece of that bread in faith. Maybe the important thing is getting up week after week to do this: to listen to the scriptures, to spend some time in quiet prayer, to worry about how hard it really is to follow Jesus, and then, nonetheless, get up in that line anyway and put out our hands, take the bread and eat it.

That’s the power of the sacrament, and the power of the community. We are not in this alone. On any given day, when the words of Jesus are just too hard to understand, or too difficult to follow, someone next to us will be able to. We are in this together: that is the essence of communion, of COMMON prayer, of companionship. We take, we eat – we may not be able to “get it” that day, or every day, but by taking, by eating, we DO “get it” – it’s not so much the eating, but the abiding – the Christ dwelling in us and we in Christ that happens when we stand here, side by side, hands outstretched, ready to take Christ into our selves, our souls and bodies ,whether we know what we are doing or not.

The bread of life and the cup of salvation, broken and shared, Holy Manna, bread from heaven, where earth and heaven meet.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Missional church and the arts

What if we thought about church in another way, as "a small community that [moves] into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty) ... seeking to follow Christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community -- in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on."

These are churches, as the English church missioner named Jonny Baker, "are not focused on growing big -- but more like the yeast of the kingdom that Jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. ..." Such churches, Baker says, face "the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward-focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumer church!?)"

We may benefit from thinking this way, as we explore how to connect our treasure, which is the Celebration of the Arts, into parts of the community that could use more art.

Thanks to the Patheos blog for sending this thought my way ...

"A prayer book even an atheist would love"

It does seem a teensy bit arrogant for a 21st century author to claim that he "edited" The Book of Common Prayer, but Brian Cummings seems to have added considerable value to familiar red book we find in our pews. In this 2011 volume (Oxford University Press), we can find the full texts of the 1549, 1559 and 1662 Prayer Books, along with introductions, explanations, notes and glossary. The review in the September 2012 issue of The Atlantic, gives the book a glowing recommendation -- both in its edited and "explained" form and in the original, which as the book upon which all prayer in our language is based "shaped the inner life and branded the tongue of the English-speaking peoples. Its phrases and rhythms did not merely enter the language. They largely defined the language. " Read more of the review here, and if you read it, let us know how you liked it!!

What I read - 2012

FINISHED:

At Simon's INSISTENCE I read The Hunger Games. Some parts I had to skim through, because the depictions of these young people fighting each other to the death was at times too gruesome, but it was overall well worth the read. NOW I have to get on with # 2 in the series

Dennis Lehane's A Given Day. Everything comes together in a slightly staged but effective way in 1919 Boston: anarchists, molasses, racism, repression and the Boston police strike. J. Edgar Hoover makes some unflattering cameos. I must say it is kind of Ragtime as it would be dramatized by Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ben Affleck. It was in the days when you could tell what Boston block someone grew up on by the accent. The Irish don't come off all too well. Southie is a place to avoid in this prelude to The Depahted. It's good, though a little too graphically violent and written like a movie script. Let's just say Whitey Bulger came by his proclivities naturally.

Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

quite charming and lovely; a peek into the modest domestic life and extraordinary yearnings of a summer community of Orthodox Jews in the Catskills

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Also saw the Swedish version of the first book.

The reminders of domestic terror in the most intimate sense are deeply unsettling. The author reminds of the percentage of Swedish women who are abused, beaten, left for dead, even. It is an all-too-steady drumbeat beneath human society.

Meanwhile, I found a new collection of stories, that is easier to read before bed. I heard the most astounding story on Selected Shorts: "The Mappist" by Barry Lopez. You MUST read it. Before you know it, you are in another world, that shines the most wonderful light on this place we inhabit and how we live in it.

I had a brief flirtation with a few of Joyce Carol Oates short stories. Bracing. I am always on the look-out for her perceptive comments about upstate New York.

Done with Cheever, and LOVED it. Again. If you read nothing else, read "The Death of Justina." Then again, I also like, "Goodbye, My Brother." Cheever; the chronicler of a world falling apart.

This summer ...
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This wonderful story of the intertwined lives of villagers contains the requisite English characters of pompous rectors, impoverished strivers and beautiful young women. It's like reading Trollope: you'll find someone you know in Middlemarch.
and
The Collected Stories of John Cheever. A perennial favorite. Poignant stories of families in mid-century middle America. Reading it again is a bit like Mad Men, where you are glued, almost in horror, at the train wreck you know is about to happen in these people's lives.

Responding to the Unspeakable

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, in the days right before Christmas, with the deaths of small children and the people trying to protect them, wrench our hearts like nothing else. However we respond to this tragedy -- with silence, with weeping, with anger, with resolve to work so that something like this will never happen again -- all of our reactions are understandable. We need ways to regain our footing and imagine how we will live in the world as it is now, in this world in which we experience yet more grief and sadness.

On Sunday, December 16, the Prayers of the People at St. David's Church were in the words of parishioners and preachers, some from the very day of the tragedy. Find the text of those prayers on our Forming Disciples blog.