Bread
from Heaven
Proper
12B
22 July 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
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
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.
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. He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.
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.
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