June 9, 2013
First of all, I want to thank you all for the honor of asking me to share with you, I have a real appreciation for the Eighth Day practice of hearing from all members of the community, and I am a bit in awe when I think of some of the others that have stood at this podium
I am preaching on the readings from the Catholic lectionary from last week, which was the Feast of Corpus Christi. The readings you just heard are all about communion and the Eucharist, which is something I have been wrestling with lately,
My reflection today is from my own Roman Catholic journey and perspective. Hopefully it will speak to something truly universal about our Christian way.
The readings speak of the table of the Lord, of how we share our meals in generosity and welcoming, and how that generosity went to Jesus’ final gift of love, and how we celebrate that all through sign and symbol, or can I even go as far as saying Sacrament. You all know that I come from a Roman Catholic background, and despite many good reasons to have moved on long ago, and still belong to a Catholic parish and lead the music at one of our Masses. Meade and I have decided to try and live a little bit in both worlds, the more ecumenical and small church world of Church of the Saviour and in the larger institutional church. Partly because we wanted our kids to have a taste of both ways of following Christ, and also because neither one of us is very good at saying no or setting limits. So each of our kids has participated here at 8th Day and also gone to Catholic religious ed and gone through the formal Catholic sacraments. When I read the readings for last week—which spoke of feeding the 5000—and Paul’s writing about the first Christians’ practice of a communion meal, I thought of Grace, who this year made her first communion at Our Lady Queen of Peace (OLQP) and all the mixed feelings I have had over the years about the sacrament and practice of communion in its various forms in various Christian denominations. I find that when my kids go through anything, whether it is school, or faith or sports or music – I am forced to re-evaluate how I feel about things. They will challenge whatever you thought you had settled in your own mind. They do not neatly just follow along with the way you have come to order your world, and since they are your kids, you can’t just politely accept their different way of looking at the world, as you would an acquaintance or a stranger – but you really just can’t force them to look at the world the way you do either. Grace has made me look again at what the real meaning of this table is and how it is a practice, truly a “practice” of how we live our lives following Jesus – what does this all mean how and why?
I grew up in a very traditional Catholic family. Though my grandfather was a Baptist, my immediate family was Catholic and we were completely in. I was an altar boy and my first experience of communion was one of the ephemeral and the sacred – the traditional Catholic practice is to take the idea of communion and separate it so much from the ordinary and the profane that it becomes almost a magical thing, wrapped in gold and set a part. When I was a kid the common laity could not even touch the host with our hands – it was placed directly on our tongues. It was tied up with power and other-worldliness of the priesthood. All boys, I think, have fantasies about being a hero – being the one to rush into a burning house to save the baby or save our families – my fantasy was of running into a burning church to save the consecrated host. It loomed so large as that sacred piece of heaven, of God in our midst. The whole sense of the practical symbol, of being somehow tied to a meal, to the sharing of food - was almost completely lost. It was a magic, sacred practice…
I remember also going with my grandfather on one or two occasions when they were having communion at his Baptist church. They would sit in their pews while a plate of crackers and little individual glasses of grape juice were passed around. It felt strange and so totally unrelated to the sacred, incense clouded mysteries of the Catholic Eucharist, that it was hard for me to understand that it had the same basis and was working towards the same remembrance and symbol.
As I grew older and developed a more real sense of the Christian way, of the simple call of Jesus to live lives of love and sacrifice – the magic and mystery started to seem a bit silly, and at worst a tool for maintaining control by a celibate male ruling class. Of keeping the power of mediating access to God directly in the hands of the institution.
The tradition of the Eucharist goes way back to the very beginning of the church. Eucharist itself is Greek for thanksgiving, a point I will return to, and has been central to the Christian experience as early as there were followers of Christ. Paul speaks of it in the reading from Corinthians we just read. (as a side note – 1st Corinthians is one of the Pauline letters that current scholarship attributes to having been actually written by Paul – at least according to John Dominic Crossan’s book on Paul.)
In AD 106 Saint Ignatius of Antiochwrote: "I desire the bread of GOD, which is the flesh of Jesus”
And it also seems that, from the very beginning there was debate about what it really was and what it really meant:
In about 150, Justin Martyrwrote of the Eucharist: "… so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh Christ."
Saint Ambroseof Milan (d. 397) wrote:
Perhaps you will say, "I see something else, how is it that you assert that I receive the Body of Christ?" ... Let us prove that this is not what nature made, but what the blessing consecrated, and the power of blessing is greater than that of nature, because by blessing nature itself is changed.
And on and on through the centuries. It was a central and meaningful part of the Christian way, and as with all things that mattered, it was worth arguing about.
Over the centuries the Roman Church came to some vague consensus around what today we would call Transubstantiation. The term itself goes back to the 11th century and was in wide acceptance through the middle ages. This is the concept that “that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood – the speciesonly of the bread and wine remaining…”. And so enter the egg-headed side of human nature to this discussion. Or call it our collective left-brain. Whatever – it is the need by people and institutions to take that which is mysterious. Magical. Emotional. Experiential and define it and put it in a box. It is an intellectual attempt to describe what happens when Christians gather around the table, break bread and pour wine, in the attitude of prayer and remembrance – is something really and truly special. So they went to philosophy and theology – focusing on the bread and wine themselves and pulling in some old Greek (Aristotelian) philosophy which discusses an object’s real “substance”, as opposed to its “species” or ”accident”. It is an attempt to say – hey something important is happening here, yet acknowledging that this stuff still tastes like bread (as another aside in the 1920s my Baptist grandfather……)
So as I came of age, became educated, all this Greek philosophy started to feel a bit stretched and a bit thin. I began to agree with Martin
Luther who wrote“the Church had the true faith for more than twelve hundred years, during which time the holy Fathers never once mentioned this transubstantiation — certainly, a monstrous word for a monstrous idea — until the pseudo-philosophy of Aristotle became rampant in the Church these last three hundred years.”
What a bunch of bunk, what a bunch of ignorant, magical thinking. And worse, what a power grab by the clerical powers.
…and yet I kept coming. I was still there every Sunday, gathering around the table, and still felt my heart respond to something real that was happening…something still there…something.
And during that time, there were those who helped me realize that even though the trappings were a bit over the top, and that the communion table (like any good thing in our lives) could be used by those in power for manipulation and control, there was a core of value in the practice, even in the Catholic setting.
I remember being told by a priest that the great Amen, traditionally song after the doxology at the end of the Eucharistic prayer just before the community gathers around the table. Was the one song in the Mass that had to be song, - because if we didn’t “even the stones would cry out…”. To remember that over the centuries the people have given their lives for following Christ, the people that over the centuries have risked it all just to gather and remember Christ through this act…
And I remember the campus minister I had a Virginia Tech, Richard Mooney, who would make a very big deal about the way he trained students to be Eucharistic ministers (at this point not only could we lay people touch the sacred bread and wine, but lay people were actually acting to distribute it). He was very aware of the loneliness and alienation that many college students experienced especially at a large impersonal state school. He would tell us that, that moment, that moment of sharing one on one, bread and wine, nourishment and community was the real high point and moment of meaning. Because within the practice and theology of communion beyond the construct of Transubstantiation there are layers of symbol and meaning. It is the Body of Christ – broken - symbol of how he showed us how to love and suffer. It is the community that is the Body of Christ (as Paul wrote) and we are broken, and we are poured out. Richard would tell us that it was critical that at that moment we didn’t just hand the other student a piece of bread, but that we pressed the bread into their hands, that we be sure that our hands touched their hands and that we look them straight in the eye and say “this is the Body of Christ”, this moment of one Christian touching another, of one child of God feeding another, this particular, physical, one-on-one human interaction. Believe me for kids that were away from home, often lost on a large college campus, that had real meaning, real substance.
And I kept coming back…
And the power of whatever it was symbol or substance has stayed real, it is personal, it is political.
For those who have seen the movie Romero, remember the scene where he gets word that a village has been destroyed by the paramilitaries. He goes there and finds the church partly destroyed and taken over and an American soldier of some kind standing there. The American threatens him and shoots up the tabernacle. The Archbishop gets on his hands and knees to try to pick up the consecrated host, and is pushed away and forced out of the church. But he comes back a few minutes later, this time wearing his stole, the ancient sign of his priestly office, and begins to say Mass, begins the words of consecration and communion. It brings the villagers out of hiding and at least temporarily cows the American and the paramilitaries. It is a moment of political power, the real power of the something as ephemeral as a symbol.
There is something in the act, some power in the tradition, some deeper meaning in the symbol, and regardless of how we try and fail to wrap theology and philosophy around it, something real is there.
In my early thirties I met and married Meade, and she enticed me to move back to DC. We attended Potters House Church and I came to understand another power, or maybe the same power in different form. As you all will remember the way Potters House Church used to hold their services. It was set up to not be Church with a big C, but a simple gathering to share the word and remember. We would sit around these tables, with members and visitors and strangers all welcome. We would begin with some prayer and opening up the word, there would be a teaching and the teaching would always have one or more discussion questions. Each table would then discuss, and while discussing, share a simple meal of bread and cheese. It was informal. Very much gathering around the table to break open the word and break bread. And then when the discussion was over, the remnants of that meal, were gathered up. The pieces, the left-overs. And it was these remnants that were consecrated and shared. So reminiscent of the Gospel this week, the feeding of the 5000, where the remnants were gathered up and they filled 12 baskets. At the time I was blown away by power of this symbol, maybe because of my long history wrestling with what this breaking of the bread means, or maybe because of the innate power of what we were doing.
And then when we began to attend Eighth Day, again I was impressed by the power of what we did here. And how it resonated back through the centuries of Christian practice. A bit more liturgical. A bit more the form I was more used to as a Catholic. A liturgy of the word, and a liturgy of the Eucharist. But so simple and so powerful. An individual from the community, just a regular member. Would stand before the group and tell the story. No written script, no rote prayers. Just standing in front of us, in their own words, how on that last night Jesus took bread, just like this bread, how with his hands he broke the bread and told us about love and sacrifice…and while this regular, Christian told the story, outside that window the world went by, rich and poor, homeless and young professional, white, black and brown – all the world going on with the struggle and laughter of everyday, living life. Right there, on the street, while we sat in here, broke the bread and told the story. Wow – there was the power. That was the reason for it, to experience and identify the deeper reality behind the everyday. That is the power of symbol and sacrament.
Which brings me more or less to today. Or this year. To Grace and her first communion, How she has experienced it , and what that says to me.
As you can see at this point in my life communion, is the moment when we, simple Christians gather around the table, share simple bread and wine (or grape juice) and remember what Jesus did and who we are. So comes along one eight-year-old girl, and a religious education program that even given that it is the most liberal parish in the area, is a little too traditional at this point for me. Much of the theology about service and following Christ felt good to me and right in line. But then there was the fall rehearsal for the First Communion ceremony, with its emphasis on order, and doing things just right…There was the instructions to hold your hands just so, to “make a throne” it was a throw-back to my days of gold and incense and magic (or at least it felt that way to me), and then there was the communion dress that my Mother bought for Grace, arghh, and the final insult – Grace wanted to wear a veil – the traditional Catholic girl hair covering that, frankly I don’t know what it means, maybe the bride if Christ…I don’t know, but to me it smacked of all the old traditional, gold encrusted, incense laden days of my youth. Of Monstrance’s, and magic…this is not what I had come to believe that gathering around the table was about…
I helped with the music for the first communion ceremony, which gave me a view of Grace sitting in the front row all the way through the Mass. And that’s when it hit me. She sat through the hour and a half service, in perfect seriousness and attentiveness, it was clear from the way she behaved and the way she held herself that she understood that something important was happening here, something that mattered. I saw in her face the same sense of magic and wonder that I had as a boy and I came to understand how much that sense of the sacred and the transcendent has informed everything else I have done and believed.
It is because we treat these moments these rituals, these practices as holy and special, because we identify this act of gathering around the table as blessed moments that we can understand all the other moments of life as blessed and of God.
Grace, who is, at this point, the most Catholic one in the family, is very strict that when we leave the church we make the sign of the cross with the holy water at the door. Something, frankly which I stopped doing or even noticing years ago. She knows we are supposed to do it and she knows it is special, but then she turns to me asks “why do we do this”. Once again the challenge of a child – but I took a minute and hopefully got it right. Another sign and symbol, I told her something that I heard a long time ago. When we bless ourselves with the Holy Water we remember that we are marked with the sign of faith, that as we walk out into the world we are called to walk in the way, to follow Him. And the water, the holy water reminds us that all water is holy, all created and touched by God, reminds us to hold it all sacred to embody what our words say.
Which brings me back to Eucharist to Thanksgiving. This act of thanking God each week by feeding each other. The physical act of Thanksgiving that helps our bodies and our hearts embody the words and feel the act – each week to remind us that it is all Holy, it is all gift, it should all be wrapped in gold and held up as sacred, and it should all make us say thank you.
As I worked on this I kept coming back to something I wrote a few years ago, something I would like to end with. This is something I wrote in my Journal back in 2010.