Pentecost 11 August 16, 2009

Pentecost 11
August 16, 2009

The last Sunday I preached before my vacation I spoke about Jesus and the feeding of the 5000.
By the following Thursday, preparing a wedding for 175 people felt like feeding 5000. I’d learned something I’d never known before—weddings are all about the food.
From Tuesday before the wedding literally until the wedding bells were sounding, we were slicing and chopping and mixing and baking and frosting.
Of course for a do-it-yourself potluck-style wedding you’re a little closer to the food issues than you might be otherwise.
But no matter who prepares or serves it, for the wedding couple, families and friends eating together comes right up there with the rings in making weddings special. Sharing food is an expression of sweetness, love, and joy, a way to act out generosity and affection. What better way to celebrate two people giving themselves in love to one another!

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is still talking to the same crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes. They loved the free food and they think they love him and they’ve followed him back to a synagogue in his home town with one idea in mind: to make him king of Israel so he can keep right on feeding them.
He’s been talking for a while and he suspects they’re not really listening. So he turns to an effective ploy for public speakers—shock.
“Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever!” ok. But then the zinger: “The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”

Whoa! Now they’re paying attention. As one translation says, “At this, the [people] started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’”
Jesus knows he on to a good thing, so he keeps pushing it: “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you.” It gets even weirder: “The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life . . . My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
It was shocking to them—especially the mention of “drinking blood” which was forbidden to Jews.
It can be shocking even now.
I’ve mentioned before how a friend brought her two daughters to my ordination. They’d never been to church before. As the bishop said the words you and I probably don’t even hear anymore we’ve heard them so often—”This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.”—they whispered to their mother, “We’re supposed to eat a body?”

When I invite you forward to Communion, I deliberately use the (I hope) slightly shocking words, “to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Because it is a constant temptation to consider sharing in Holy Communion a nice thing to do when it’s convenient.
But Jesus doesn’t want a “nice,” “convenient” relationship with us. In wedding terms, he’s after marriage not just an occasional date.
So he offers himself—himself, his own true whole and holy self to us, to you and to me in Holy Communion.

I’m not going to start an argument about what happens to the bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer and Who/What it is exactly that we receive when we come forward to the Communion rail.
I don’t know—nobody does—although there’s a wide range of thoughts about it. But I do claim to know a couple of things from my own experience:
First, Holy Communion feeds real hunger. That’s part of what Jesus was trying to tell the crowd. We hunger physically, yes. We all know what that feels like, although probably few of us here this morning have ever felt the kind of physical hunger women, children, and men experience when they have no idea when they will be able to eat next.
But have you ever felt a hunger for something “more,”? for a life that’s deeper, more meaningful, more grounded in things that really matter? A hunger for what Jesus calls “eternal life”? A hunger for a love that will never desert you?
Those hunger pangs can strike when we’re shopping or watching the Red Sox or getting up and going to work even to a job we love and we suddenly feel empty and say to ourselves, “Isn’t there more to life than this?”

Second, in Holy Communion, Christ gives himself to us to feed that deep hunger. We “become what we eat.”
The Creation story says that God created us, men and women, in God’s own image and likeness. When we spoiled it, when we humans besmirched our godly image by sin, Jesus came to live among us. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because he himself was human, Jesus knew from his own experience how weak and easily tempted we are. To become more like Jesus, more like the likeness of God, we humans need something stronger than words.
Jesus’ amazingly creative idea was to offer us the possibility of taking his divine life not just into our heads, not just into our emotions, but into our whole selves, our souls and bodies. And Jesus doesn’t hold back—he gives himself to us without reservations, without boundaries.
When we receive Holy Communion, Jesus promises us, we are eating and drinking Christ’s life. And Christ’s life is the same as God’s life. And more and more, as the sacrament works in us, nourishes us, Christ gives us the power to become what we eat—to become more and more like Christ—more compassionate, more merciful, more patient, more just, more kind.

We seem to have drifted pretty far from a wedding feast.
But I know that one big reason we were all there sharing that marvelous food, was that Hannah and Paul had both felt a deep hunger for a loving companion to walk through their lives with.
And for me, one of the most touching moments at the wedding was when Hannah and Paul fed each other the wedding cake. They were offering to each other without reservation the gift of love.
And when later I invite you to come forward to share in the Body and Blood of Christ that’s what’s on offer here at the altar rail: a full, pure, given-without-reservation gift of Love.