Proper 12b
July 25, 2021 St. Paul's, Monroe
Jesus
The church has a reputation for never changing or more precisely for not changing very much. When I was a child I somehow absorb the notion that the church was the rock, the steady rock, in an ever-changing world. I think it’s possible that in my 20s I was particularly attracted to the notion of a church that never changed. One of the things that also occurred at about the same time and for many of the same reasons was that I began to learn about the history of the church, learned what I could absorb about the changing landscape of the interpretation of the Bible and theology.
What I began to learn at that time is that the church in fact changes a lot -- and also often. What made it seem like it didn’t change was that the scale that one needed in order to see the change was much larger than would often be possible for a person in a single lifetime. I began to appreciate and continue to marvel up to the present day that the church changes course over time, but it is the kind of changing course that an aircraft carrier makes, not the kind a speed boat toy or a water skier would.
So it is that in my lifetime the church has made considerable changes related to what we experience on a Sunday morning. One of the changes has to do with the readings from the Bible at the principal service on a Sunday.
About 50 years ago the church abandoned the pattern of following a prescribed cycle of readings throughout a single year. One would have certain readings associated with Christmas, or Lent, or Easter. Then when the year began over again we would hear the same readings. That had been going on for centuries. In the 1960's, as if overnight, that changed. We began to observe a three-year cycle instead of a one year cycle. One aspect of that change was that we now hear from much more of the Bible than we used to.
We follow the three year pattern, but the number three didn’t fit with the number of Gospels in the New Testament. There are four of those. Since we read from one of the Gospels on each Sunday, it meant that if we were to hear from all four we had to mix it up somehow. What emerged was a focus over the three years on Matthew Mark and Luke. But then interspersed one would get readings from the gospel of John. So today although we are in the year of Mark we hear from the gospel of John.
And what a reading it is.
I have talked before about the differences between the gospels. In some ways they are considerable. In other ways the same basic story is told across four different perspectives and styles. Today we hear two of the most iconic actions of Jesus related in the gospels: The feeding of the multitude, and Jesus walking on the water. The feeding of the multitude is such a central narrative of the gospels that it is in fact told six times across the four gospels. Jesus walking on water is told in Matthew, Mark, and John as we hear today.
The setting for today’s reading in the sixth chapter of John is that the Passover was about to occur. Passover is one of the differences between John and the other three Gospels. John talks about three Passovers, the synoptic Gospels only talk about one. Of the different accounts of the feeding of the multitude this is one I am particularly fond of. It’s because the way John relates the story I can feel vividly as if I were in the midst of it. I can picture that boy, as if I’ve seen him before. And why does John observe here that there was a great deal of grass in the place? I am able to visualize sitting down in that grassy place.
The feeding of the multitude encompasses the basic movements that have been preserved in the Eucharist over the course of hundreds of centuries. Jesus takes the food, blesses it, and distributes it among the people. This episode is related six times as I have said, as if to emphasize the centrality of the Eucharist for the ongoing life of the people of God.
It’s relatively easy for us to imagine that it’s a short path between this miraculous episode from the life of Jesus and the Eucharist that we so take for granted within the church today. The feeding of the multitude is clearly for us a Eucharistic image. Perhaps not as obvious are the many ways in which the Eucharist has been celebrated over the centuries. Even in our lifetime there have been numerous changes, but the diversity can be astounding when we take the big picture perspective.
Common cup
I have related here before something of my own journey with the Episcopal Church. Without a doubt the Eucharist, and particularly a common cup from which the people drank, was particularly important.
It still is.
That part is important to me because it is a symbolic proclamation of our connection to one another. Our being a part of a family that extends beyond what we can even imagine. It is a mystical connection because it binds us to both living and the dead, and even those yet to come. The way we have celebrated the Eucharist with a common cup points to our being a part of the entire body of Christ. It is a profound proclamation of faith.
As such it is a proclamation of what we hope for but cannot see, as much as what we cansee before us.
And some of the ramifications of this were manifest to me one Sunday in Hawaii. I had gone to visit on one of my Sundays off a small congregation that was struggling to maintain its identification with the indigenous people of Hawaii. That Sunday we didn’t have bread and wine. We had what some in the Hawaiian community regarded as a more genuine symbol of white bread and wine is for people of European descent. We used poi and coconut water.
In some things in the church I have tended towards the conservative. I know that some in my past have thought of me as a stick in the mud. I was really caught off guard that Sunday, and was not at all sure what I thought about the poi and coconut milk.
Ultimately I decided that God was vastly bigger than the limitations that I brought to the table. God could take care of himself.
Earlier, at the beginning of my ordained ministry, I had learned another important lesson.
Controversy
One of my assignments as the rector’s new assistant was to bring communion to the homebound and to those in the hospital. It was a fairly large parish and they were quite a few who expected communion on any given week. The Rector made it clear to me that the teaching of the church for many centuries had been that the sacramental presence of Christ, both the body and the blood of Christ, or present in the form of either the bread or the wine.
There has been, as with so many things, a lot of discussion and controversy over the centuries.
We could have a good conversation, I think, about the possible difficulties of receiving the Sacramental presence of Christ in the wine for alcoholics who are in the process of recovery. 1 The various issues are complicated and many-branched.
As with the divisions in our country at this time, issues of Eucharistic conviction can be fighting words for some. 2
For myself, however, indulging in divisions and controversy over such a central experience of the risen Lord in our very midst is the scandal. The feeding of the multitude was a miraculous coming together, so that the People of God can be fed by the Lord. When we make controversies we prevent the body of Christ from being fed.
The church has been living through utterly extraordinary times in the past year and a half. It has required extraordinary responses from us. A miraculous and breathtaking nourishment that Christ has given us over the course of millennia is too great a thing to be placed on the chopping block of impatience.
Elijah
Let me share with you another experience I had related to the Eucharist and the cup in particular. I may have shared with you something of my experience in presiding at Seder meals over the course of the last 25 years. A Seder meal is a sacred ritual done in Jewish families at the time of Passover. One of the things that characterizes those meals is a series of cups of wine. It is clearly the case that the 4 cups of wine that participants drink contribute to the festive nature of the Passover meal. But at each Seder there are 5 cups of wine poured. The 5th cup is poured but never drunk. It is called Elijah‘s cup. The symbolism and meaning of this cup has been richly debated for centuries by the rabbis. But we can certainly say that special status of the prophet Elijah is represented in that chalice of wine that is not drunk.
There was an expectation of the return of Elijah in the first century. That expectation is reflected in the New Testament. One aspect of the ongoing expectation of the return of Elijah is the interpretation given to the Hebrew account of Elijah‘s death. One could read it as describing Elijah ascending to heaven without experiencing death. Thus we have an expectation of Elijah‘s return one day. Such a belief has lasted for millennia in the Jewish community.
For myself, living my life with an expectation of the return of the Messiah is a part of what gives my life meaning. It is an aspect of making the future -- which I cannot see -- present in the world which I can see.
I realized four weeks ago at Christ Church in Lancaster South Carolina that the cup of wine that we leave unconsumed on the altar is a perfect Elijah‘s cup.
I don’t know whether our current practice will last a short time or a long time. In the same way I don’t know what the future will bring. But I live my life with the conviction that whatever the future brings we will be in God's hands.
Closing (Ephesians)
Our second reading today comes from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. It is a work that is rich and for me full of the energy of hope and expectation. I see and hear in it glory.
Would that we could hear the word of God with that kind of Messianic expectation all the time. We don't. But sometimes it breaks in -- if only just a little.
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Notes
Lectionary
- http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp12_RCL.html
David
- time when kings go into battle
- Bathsheba
- Uriah the Hittite
- Rape? Betrayal? Dishonesty? Manipulation?
cf. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/theliturgicaltheologian/2017/07/12/reflections-on-communion-in-one-kind/.↩
this article seems to provide evidence that Thomas Aquinas had received the teaching of "the perfection of the sacrament lies in both", thus placing it to at least the 12th-13th c.↩
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