Proper 14B
Listen to the Sermon for August 12, 2012
Read the Sermon for August 12, 2012
Category: Ashland
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Companions For Ever
While reviewing study notes in my file for the coming Sunday, Proper 14B in the Revised Common Lectionary, I came across the following handwritten entry:
“The New Testament knows no more meaningful act for affecting and witnessing to the relationship of Christians with one another and with Christ than eating together. Whoever removes eating from the list of profoundly religious acts will have great difficulty with the Gospel message.”
If these are someone else’s words, I failed to footnote them. I would like to give whoever wrote or spoke them credit. If they are words that came to me in a moment of inspiration when I was reflecting upon Jesus “Bread of Life Discourse” in the sixth chapter of the Gospel According to St. John, good! Wherevery the words came from, I believe they are words of wisdom.
On the same note card, I had also listed the words “companion”, “companionship”, and “company.” Perhaps I did that because the etymology of “companion” relates to the substance of my note about Christ, Christians, and meals. The origin of the word teaches us that food fuels relationships. The word “companion”, from the Latin com “with” and panis “bread”, reminds us that food and meals we share with others satisfies more than physical hunger. To share a meal with someone implies a level of comfort and a sense of security with another person or group of persons. The English “companion”, the Spanish “companero”, the Italian “compagno”, and the French “copain” all come from the Latin root that means “with whom one eats bread.”
Is it any wonder that the heart of the Church’s worship is a meal, that the presence of Christ is known in the breaking of bread, and that eating together at other times is such a central part of life in Christian community? Is it any wonder that we are spending five Sundays in a row exploring the layers of meaning in the sixth chapter of John?
I remember a story told by an Episcopal Priest concerning an experience early in his ministry. He came home from a very difficult vestry meeting in which he was denied pursuit of a vision about which he was passionate. He put his little daughter in her high chair, tied her bib around her neck, opened a jar of baby food, and proceeded to feed her. During the meal, his mind was still on his profound disappointment and he began to weep. His daughter, who could not yet speak, understood the language of her father’s tears. She picked up her spoon, scooped up some baby food, and held it up to his lips. After he opened his mouth and tasted his daughter’s offering, she picked up the napkin and wiped the tears from his eyes.
In the course of a meal, without words but with signs and actions, a little child brought compassion and helped the healing begin in her father. Jesus Christ does that with us each time we feast at his banquet table and whenever we break bread with one another in his Name. He did for the multitude on the hillside, for his first disciples in the Upper Room, for those two pilgrims at Emmaus, and he does it still in simple country chapels and magnificent cathedrals. He promises to gather us at a great banquet in heaven. We are his companions in this life and the life to come.
"Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh" (John 6:51).
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A Topic for a Month of Sundays
In Year B of our Eucharistic Lectionary, the semi continuous reading of the Gospel of Mark is interrupted by a sequence of five excerpts from the sixth chapter of John on the Bread of Life. This happens once every three years and when it does, people in the pews ask why we spend so many Sundays hearing about Jesus Christ as the Bread of Life. It’s a great question and I hope my attempt at an answer will be almost as great, or at least helpful.
Each one of the three synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – has its own year in the three-year Revised Common Lectionary. John is sprinkled around during Lent, Christmas, and a couple of other times. Because of this, there is no really suitable niche for the important teaching on the Bread of Life. Since our lectionary is a Eucharistic lectionary, it would be inconceivable for those who developed the lectionary to omit this important discourse in the three-year cycle. They decided to interrupt the semi continuous reading of the Gospel of Mark at the point when Mark is about to recount the story of the feeding of the multitude in order to give us John’s more elaborate account.
We are a Eucharist-centered Church and we need the instruction provided by the Bread of Life Discourse of John’s Gospel in our Eucharistic lectionary. It is so important and so powerful that we have devoted five Sundays in a row to explore the depth of its message.
Last Sunday, we read the account of Jesus’ feeding of the multitude at the beginning of the sixth chapter. As we continue to read from this chapter for the next four Sundays, we will examine John’s indirect account of the Eucharist. Bear in mind that in John’s report of the Last Supper there is no mention of the bread and wine.
The crowds that both witnessed and participated in the miracle of the loaves and fishes didn’t really understand that Jesus came to give more than the bread that satisfies physical hunger. In this discourse, he refers to himself again and again as “The Bread of Life.”
Jesus is inviting everyone to eat this living bread. The bread our Hebrew ancestors in the faith ate in the wilderness sustained them in their journey. The Living Bread, Jesus Christ, is food that sustains the cosmos – not just our tribe, or race, or nation, but the cosmos!
That means that if we feast at the table with The Bread of Life, we are not the only invitees. There are others, many of whom are not like us, some of whom we don’t like, and plenty with whom we will disagree.
Several years ago when I was a Canon at Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, Texas, I was giving a tour to a confirmation class from one of the parishes in the Diocese of Texas. We were exploring the Chancel and the Sanctuary when some of the youth spotted the needlepoint cushions on the Altar rail. I asked if they could figure out the meaning of the symbols on those cushions. One boy said, “That cross and crown in the middle is probably Jesus and the other twelve symbols represent his disciples gathered around the table with him.” That seemed like a pretty satisfactory answer, until a girl pointed out that one of the symbols looked for all the world like the symbol for Judas Iscariot. “He doesn’t belong here?” she said. “He betrayed Jesus.”
I pointed out to the class that a number of ladies from the Cathedral had painstakingly and lovingly applied every single stitch by hand on those cushions and that I would be very cautious about telling them that one of the symbols didn’t belong there. “If that’s Judas and they went to so much trouble to include him, I wonder what that might mean for us?”
After some conversation, one young man said, “Maybe it means that God’s love big enough to include Judas along with the rest of us.”
My response was to suggest that there will be times when we come to the Altar to dine with Jesus, the Bread of Life, and notice someone we can’t abide kneeling beside us or across from us. “When that happens,” I said, “remember this moment and remember that the same divine Love that welcomes you to this feast welcomes others who need it just as much.” After all, as someone has said, the bread that Jesus gives for the life of the universe (John 6:51) is multigrain.
John 6:51 says that those who eat of this bread will “live forever.” That is the consistent translation in almost all the versions of the Bible. However, some scholars point out that the literal translation of the Greek text says we will “live into the age.” The “age” – eternal life, abundant life, kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven – is a state of being where we live with God who is both in and beyond time and space. When we feast upon the Bread of Life, we are living into this divine cosmic reality. It nourishes us for the ways we touch and change that reality.
So, in this banquet, we all become one body not because we all agree or because we all are alike. We become one body because we share in one bread – the Living Bread, Jesus, who is present for us in a wonderful and mysterious way in this banquet that is happening in the here and now and at the same moment in the age into which we are living, with faith, hope, and love. This Bread of Life is our true sustenance. As we are fed, so we are sent to feed others.
It really is going to be good to spend a month of Sundays on this topic!
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Sermon at Calvary Church ~ July 29, 2012
by Deacon Diane Zwick
Proper 12B
Listen to the Sermon for July 29, 2012
Read the Sermon for July 29, 2012
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If we’ll make it available, God will make it enough!
On Sunday, July 29, we are observing Loaves and Fishes Sunday. We are asking worshipers to bring items that will be used in the Weekend Snack Sacks for clients of The Community Kitchen or make a contribution that will be used at to purchase the items needed for those weekend meals from River Cities Harvest. We’re doing this because donations of food and funds tend to drop off during the summer vacation season. But hunger never takes a vacation.
Our Gospel reading for Sunday is John's version of the story of the Loaves and Fishes. It is the only miracle of Jesus that is included in all four gospels. All four gospels agree that there were five thousand or more hungry people, that the meal started when Jesus blessed five loaves of bread and two fishes, that everyone had enough to eat, and that there were twelve baskets of leftovers.
What is the significance of this miracle? Firstly, Jesus is revealed as the Ruler of Creation, the One who multiplies food in Nature. In his classic work Miracles, C. S. Lewis shows how many of the miracles take what God normally does slowly in Nature and speeds it up dramatically as a kind of flourished signature, signifying, "the One who always multiplies fish and grain is here."
Secondly, Jesus is also revealed as the Ruler who Provides. And what does he provide here? What promise does he keep? What need does he meet? Is it the need of the hungry or is it the need of the disciples? Or is it both? He has commanded the disciples to feed the people and that elicits their admission that they are not able to do it. Then, to their amazement, he tells them to have the people sit on the grass anyway. The need being met here is not only the people's need for food. The other need that is met is the disciples' need to be able to minister! You and I are in the same position today as Jesus' disciples were on that day.
In their obedience, the disciples learned a lesson about faith, elements of which are present in every mighty work of God: Need seen + desire felt + inadequacy confessed + Christ obeyed = the opportunity for God to work miracles. It is our job to make our inadequate loaves and fishes available. It is God’s job to make them enough. Faith is the determination to obey in spite of our inadequacy, to consider our own inability irrelevant in the light of Gods ability, and to act on that basis. The more we do so, the more we will find our own paltry loaves and fishes multiplied.
In each of the Gospels, this event is a time of transition in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus now concentrates on preparing himself and his disciples for the Cross. Disciples often learn important lessons during times of transition. By the grace of Jesus Christ, those hungry people were fed by those disciples. And, by the same grace, the hungry people who are standing outside those red doors of Calvary Church are going to be fed by these disciples.