Manna (Proper 13B)

Manna

Proper 13B
5 August 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When Elena and I were living in China, we would occasionally come back to the U.S.to reconnect.  At times we would be asked how many meals we had to eat each day, since, “a half hour after you eat Chinese food, you’re hungry again.”   We would politely smile and say gently that we had become accustomed to food there, and found it every bit as satisfying as western food.  “We eat more rice with our Chinese meals than you probably do here.   Staple foods, whether rice or bread, fill you up and stay with you.” 

Sustenance!  Sustenance with staying power!  This is what we all need.  Because of this, hunger has become a metaphor for all human needs and desires.  Bruce Springsteen sings of having a “hungry heart.”  Van Morrison sings “I’m hungry for your love.”  We say that a particularly well-staged production here in this village of theater and music is a “feast for eye and ear.” A person ready to do a job with vigor and advance her career is described as “hungry.”

We speak of “comfort food,” revealing an uncomfortable fact that sometimes we transfer our needs and discomfort from other areas in life to food and eating.  So some of us alas, become fat due to neediness we seek to satisfy as if it were hunger.

Similarly, we often experience simple physical hunger, especially when coupled with exhaustion, as overwhelming and larger spiritual need.   That is one of the reasons that fasting is such a prevalent spiritual practice in many traditions. 

Sometimes, it is hard to sort out all the various needs we feel. 

Abraham Maslow talks about a hierarchy of needs:  at the bottom are the physiological needs.  Then there are the basic needs for safety and security, followed by love and belonging. A need for esteem comes next.  This is followed by self-actualization and transcendence.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the heart of every human being.  Addressing God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.”   In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy.  There is a hole in the middle of each human heart, and that hole has the shape of God. 

This most basic and important need in traditional Christian teaching can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses through God’s indwelling spirit here and now.  This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist enlightenment and nirvana.  But where in Buddhism, enlightenment comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any need, in Christianity the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire.   The presence of God both satisfies and feeds our hungers. 

The idea is expressed well in a line in one of my favorite hymns:

Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.

... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.

Today’s Gospel talks about various kinds of hunger, various kinds of need.  In it, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me and partakes will never be hungry again, will never be thirsty again.” 

He is speaking to people who have been trying to catch up with him ever since he fed the 5,000, which we read about last week.  Remember, Jesus has to flee after he had fed the 5,000 because the people wanted to make him their king.  He secretly walks across the sea to escape them.  When they finally find Jesus, he cuts to the heart of the matter, “You are chasing after me not because I showed you marvels from God pointing to hidden truth, but because you filled your bellies with the loaves I gave you,” (John 6:26).  He adds, “Do not work hard for the food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts into timelessness” (John 6:27).

Jesus’ marvelous acts serve a two-fold purpose, addressing different needs and hungers.  At a concrete level, they set people free from tangible burdens such as illness, social isolation, physical disabilities, mental illness, and physical hunger.   But as signs, they point to things beyond themselves. They put God’s love and power on display, and thus reveal God’s reign, and give a glimpse of the beatific vision.  Jesus’ healing and awesome acts of feeding those in need point to the truth that, indeed, the Reign of God is in our midst, and that God is, here and now, fully in charge.

Jesus scolds the people who have been chasing him because they can’t see beyond his satisfying their lower needs to see the glimpse of true glory that offers in these acts.  

Do we have eyes to see glimpses of God’s glory and ears to hear whispers and echoes of God’s voice when these are offered us?

If we don’t, our relationship with Jesus by definition is manipulative and exploitive.   We are using Jesus to obtain whatever it is that we feel we acutely need.  In so doing, we shun any authentic relationship with Jesus, and miss “finding our rest in God,” as Augustine put it.  We settle for satisfying only our simplest needs, and thus sell ourselves cheap.  We chase after Jesus because he fed us loaves and not because he showed us a glimpse of God at work.  

It’s not that these lesser needs and hungers are unimportant.  It’s just that chasing after them, as if it is all that is important, misses the crucial piece of what God is up to in sending us Jesus.   

“Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts forever” (John 6:27), says Jesus.  He is thinking of the story of the manna in Exodus, where the bread from heaven spoils each evening, requiring the Israelites to gather it each day excepting Sabbaths.   “The bread that lasts forever” is for Jesus that which satisfies the deepest needs as well as the shallowest.  “I am that bread,” he says.

What’s curious here is this—this bread too must be gathered each day, though it lasts forever.  The problem is not that this bread spoils, but that this is living bread, and to nurture and foster anything living, you need to be constantly attentive.  

 

That is why the Lord’s Prayer in Luke says, “give us each day our daily bread,” or, better, “our bread for the coming day, for the morrow.”

The paradox here results from the intersection of the timeless, ever present Beatific Vision and our day-to-day, hand-to-mouth experience of it within time.  Remember the angels in the city of God in that hymn I quoted, “Still they joy and weary never, More and more desiring ever”? 

The idea is that the contemplation of the Divine Beauty is not simple satisfaction of a hunger, once felt and now managed, not simple rest found in God after restlessness apart from God.  In the timelessness of the Eternal presence, our need and our satisfaction are experienced at the same, eternally present moment.  Our hunger and our being fully satisfied are experienced as two aspects of enjoying the Beatific Vision.  It is an experience of being in the present moment, lost in timeless beauty.  And it is an experience of joy. 

Translating that into the here and now of our daily experience in time, it means that though the sustenance this bread gives lasts forever, we must be constantly feeding on it.  Otherwise, this bread is not living, and we have mistaken the Bread of Life for mere Bakery Goods.

Scots poet and minister George MacDonald wrote the following: 

“In holy things may be unholy greed.

Thou giv’st a glimpse of many a lovely thing,

Not to be stored for use in any mind,

But only for the present spiritual need.

The holiest bread, if hoarded, soon will breed

The mammon-moth, the having-pride, I find.”

Sisters and Brothers, we live in a world awash with need, inundated with hunger, and begging for our help.  We ourselves are conflicted messes of competing desires and hungers.  The very fact that we continue to have all our various needs and hungers, whether in a hierarchy or not, tells us that we are living in enemy-occupied territory.  And so the glimpse of glory, the dim hint of the Beatific Vision we gain through our experience of Jesus in the here and now, is very important. 

 

We must follow Jesus in trying to make the Reign of God present.  We must follow Jesus in trying to meet human hunger and need of all types. 

But, we must also be confident that satisfying want is not all there is. 

 

In offering himself to us as “bread from heaven,” living bread that must be partaken each and every day, Jesus offers us all his Father’s richest satisfaction of all needs and hungers.  

 

But our experience of this here and now is by definition partial, and can only hint at the glory to come.  But it is sufficient.  St. Julian of Norwich said of Jesus’ promise to feed us, and sustain us, the following: “He did not say, You will never have a rough passage, you will never be over-strained, you will never feel uncomfortable, but he did say You will never be overcome.”

In the coming week, I invite us all to do a spiritual exercise, a thought experiment to try to discover our motives.  Why do you come to Church, why do you pray, why do you serve, why do you try to resist temptation or avoid doing bad things, why do you give offerings and alms?  Why do you seek Jesus?   Identify this as best you can, and then label it as “filling my belly with loaves.”  Then image you are standing face to face with Jesus, who says, “You are seeking me not because you saw signs from God pointing to greater things, deeper needs met, but because I met this specific need for you.”    And then try to imagine him simply holding you in his arms, and saying, “But that’s all right.  I have much more to offer.  Let me show you the way.”    

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Bread from Heaven (Proper 12B)

Bread from Heaven

Proper 12B
22 July 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

2 Kings 4:42-44; Psalm 145; Ephesians 3:14-21; John 6:1-21

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The film A River Runs Through It tells the story of Norman Maclean, who grows up in 1920s Montana living with his Scots Presbyterian minister father and brother.  The film opens with the deceivingly simple line, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” 

How possibly can fly fishing and religion be connected?  Most people, I think, find it difficult to see any connection between religion and everyday life.  We generally are conditioned to see faith, holiness, and religion over here—special, sacred, and separate, and everyday life over here, ordinary, profane, and common.  The very word “sacred” means “dedicated or set apart for worship of a deity.”  If something is set apart, that means it isn’t ordinary, it isn’t everyday. 

But what the character Robert Maclean means by this becomes clearer as he tells the story of his family.  Fly fishing on the Blackfoot River is part of the rhythms of the family’s life, where the sons struggle in the shadow of their minister father to find their way of being human, of making something beautiful of their life.  “As for my father,” Maclean says at one point, “I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician, but he certainly believed God could count and that it was only in picking up God’s rhythm were we able to regain power and beauty.  Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word ‘beautiful.’” 

Today’s reading from the Gospel of John tells us a story where the holy and truly unusual intersects with everyday life.  In it, Jesus shows us that God not only can count, but knows also how to multiply.  The “multiplication of the loaves,” where five barley breads and two fish, once blessed by Jesus, feed over 5,000 people, is a story that occurs in all four Gospels.   In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the story demonstrates the power of Jesus and his role as Messiah.   In John, it forms part of that Gospel’s Book of Signs, a recounting of marvelous deeds by Jesus that point beyond themselves to inner, hidden truths about Jesus: turning water into wine shows he is the true Vine, multiplying the loaves shows he is the Bread of Life, curing the man born blind shows he is the Light of the World, and raising Lazarus from the dead shows he is the Life of the world.  The point is that Jesus gives us joy, changes us, nourishes us and sustains us, makes things clear for us, and makes us truly, fully alive. 

Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 here is a sign pointing to and embodying the truth that Jesus is both nourisher and nourishment.    Right after this story, Jesus gives the sermon of the Bread of Life, where he expands of what this sign shows:  “I am the bread of life.  The one who comes to me shall not hunger.  The one who believes in me shall never thirst.  … I am the living bread come down from heaven.  Anyone who eats this bread shall live forever.  The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.  … Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up at the last day” (John 6: 35-54). 

Where the Synoptics say Jesus took the loaves and fish and “blessed them and gave them” to the people, John alone uses the language, “he gave thanks (eucharistesas) and distributed (diedoken)” them.   Those words link this story to early Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, which, after all, means “Thanksgiving”.

St. Paul, writing about 25 years after the death of Jesus, described the origin of this sacrament in this way:  “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.   So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.  (1 Corinthians 11:23-27) 

Though Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell this same basic story, John, for his part, does not tell of a Eucharistic prayer at the Last Supper.  But that is because the Fourth Gospel removes literal references to sacraments in stories about Jesus and instead talks about their meaning.   Jesus never receives baptism by John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel; instead he works a sign by telling the Samaritan woman her background and offering her the “Living Water,”  mentions birth “by water and by the spirit” to Nicodemus, and has water flow from his pierced side on the Cross. 

Similarly, for John, there is no Eucharistic prayer at the Last Supper, but rather the feeding of the 5,000 points to and embodies the fact that Jesus is the Bread from Heaven, and the bread for which he gives thanks id Jesus made present to us.

The Bread of Life Sermon in John and the Last Supper narratives in Paul and the Synoptics brought the Church early on to recognize the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist celebration and in the Eucharistic elements themselves.   The bread and the wine were thus seen as holy things for people seeking holiness. 

An early Christian hymn by Ephrem of Edessa, writing in a form of Aramaic in the fourth century expresses the wonder and reverence of this belief well: 

Lord, your robe’s the well from which our healing flows.
Just behind this outer layer hides your power.
Spittle from your mouth creates a miracle of light within its clay.

In your bread there blows what no mouth can devour.
In your wine there smoulders what no lips can drink.
Gale and Blaze in bread and wine: unparalleled the miracle we taste.

Coming down to earth, where human beings die,
God created these anew, like Wide-eyed Ones,
mingling Blaze and Gale and making these the mystic content of their dust.

Did the Seraph’s fingers touch the white-hot coal?
Did the Prophet’s mouth do more than touch the same?
No, they grasped it not and he consumed it not. To us are granted both.

Abram offered body-food to spirit-guests.
Angels swallowed meat. The newest proof of power
is that bodies eat and drink the Fire and Wind provided by our Lord.
                                          (tr. Geoffrey Rowell) 

We live today in an age where much of the wonder, awe, and reverence has been removed from life, a world where the realm of the sacred and holy is getting smaller and smaller.  That’s one of the reasons we have difficulty understanding a statement like “in our family, there was not a clear line between religion and fly fishing.” 

But if we are to be fully human, and true to our nature, we must not lose our sense of the holy, our sense of reverence, and our ability to see the holy, to see divinity, in ordinary things of daily life, like bread and wine.

When I hear people mock belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as superstitious “cookie worship,” I question their capacity to wonder or hold anything in awe or reverence.  Part of the problem, of course, is that some people do indeed have superstitious and magical ways of seeing the Eucharist.  “Hocus-pocus” as a way to mock superstition is a corruption of the Latin translation of Jesus’ words when he instituted the Eucharist, “Hoc est corpus meum (This is my body).”   

But some peoples’ bad opinions or misuse of doctrine should not lead us to the opposite error of rejecting true doctrine.  We need to follow here the example of the young Elizabeth I, who affirmed her faith the Real Presence while declining to over-define the matter.  When queried under threat of possible torture or death as a heretic by Queen Mary’s inquisitors about her belief regarding the Eucharistic elements, Elizabeth referred to Jesus’ words “this is my body, this is my blood,” and replied with this quatrain: 

Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.
 

Key in experiencing and honoring the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is having a general idea about what a sacrament is.  It is, just as in our Gospel story today, a sign, a symbol, an outward and visible expression of inward, hidden reality.  A symbol does not just point beyond itself to something else; it participates in and embodies the reality to which it points.  It makes the reality it indicates available to us by the very fact that it is there.   It is for this reason that any understanding of the Eucharist that does not encompass a belief in the real presence of Christ is to my mind flawed.  

It is hard to express the reverence and awe I feel at the presence of Christ in the sacrament.  But hymns, like the one of Efrem the Syrian I quoted earlier, manage at times to capture elements of this awe. 
Today’s introit hymn:

“Here our humblest homage pay we,
Here in loving reference bow;
Here for faith’s discernment pray we,
Lest we fail to know You now.
You are here, we ask not how.”

“Life imparting heavenly Manna,
Smitten Rock with streaming side,
Heaven and earth with loud hosanna
Worship You, the Lamb Who died.
Risen, ascended, glorified!”

Another hymn we sing today speaks of how our worship in the sacrament of the Eucharist must fit into a larger sacrament of life for us:  

Draw us in the Spirit’s tether;
For when humbly, in thy name,
Two or three are met together,
Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluya! Alleluya! Touch we now thy garment’s hem.

As the faithful used to gather
In the name of Christ to sup,
Then with thanks to God the Father
Break the bread and bless the cup,
Alleluya! Alleluya! So knit thou our friendship up.

All our meals and all our living
Make as sacraments of thee,
That by caring, helping, giving,
We may true disciples be.
Alleluya! Alleluya! We will serve thee faithfully.

And simply, in the hymn, “Lord you give the great commission”:  “Lord, you make the common holy, this my body, this my blood.  Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward.” 

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask “give us this day our daily bread.”  But this is not simply a prayer for basic physical sustenance.   The words translated by “our daily bread” actually mean something more like “our bread for the morrow,” the bread of the great feast on the Day of the Lord, or “the bread beyond what you meant when you said, ‘man shall not live by bread alone.’”  It is for this reason that the Lord’s Prayer has always been recited as part of the Great Thanksgiving, just before the breaking of the bread. 

Friends, in the coming week, please remember to say the Lord’s Prayer at least once a day.  And when you say the words, “give us this day our daily bread,” think of the Bread of Life, come down from heaven. Think of Christ made present to us in God’s gifts of bread and the wine, at his table of plenty.  And then in your silent time, your private prayers, feed on him in your hearts by faith, and be thankful.

In the name of Christ, Amen.