A sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 28, 2015, preached at the Church of the Atonement, Chicago.  The lectionary readings from the Book of Common Prayer lectionary are Deuteronomy 15: 7-11, Psalm 112, 2 Corinthians 8:7-15, and Mark 5:21-43.

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The other day I was at a birthday party where there were several little children scrambling among the adults. One little girl was a speed demon. It turns out that Nina is 18 months old and was testing her navigational abilities as she would run into things, fall down, and get right back up. At one point, she came near us and looked up at a stool that she obviously wanted to stand on, and so she reached her little arms up in an unmistakable request, “Help me.” Several of us saw her and understood what she wanted, so her daddy picked her up and helped her to stand on the stool.

As I watched her so easily and naturally ask for help, I wondered, “At what age do we stop doing that?” When do we begin to learn that it’s NOT ok to ask for help or that we should do everything ourselves? How often are we like that little girl—wanting something, perhaps desperately needing something—and yet, we don’t ask?

Today’s Gospel introduces us to someone who asks for help. But in order to ask for help, he must have overcome a lot of internal and external resistance. Jairus is a leader in the synagogue. He’s well known and probably successful in whatever he does. He’s someone people look up to, the sort of person you’d want running stewardship or chairing a mission project. He gets things done (and sometimes that means doing them yourself if you want them done right.) He is probably responsible and organized and runs a tight meeting.

But suddenly, with his little girl sick, he’s out of his field of expertise. He can’t control, manage, or direct. He can’t fix or persuade. He’s at his wit’s end. His daughter is getting worse and some are saying that she is going to die. Finally, out of resources, out of ideas, with no more options, Jairus reaches out to Jesus. Jairus asks God for help, and healing comes.
This story has a happy ending, but it’s the kind of story I sometimes worry about people hearing. Does this story always promise a happy ending? If a young parent with a very sick child comes to me, do I tell them this story as a means of hope, or do I carefully avoid talking about Jairus and his daughter, in case it gives false hope, in case it gives the impression that God always shows up right when we need it and that healing always comes with a cure?

Perhaps here is where we might recall that healing CAN involve a cure, but doesn’t always. If healing has to do with wholeness, with shalom, with God’s bringing things to a loving completion, then we will need to acknowledge that sometimes healing end s in death. That’s one aspect of the vast spectrum of healing, but we (and others in this room and beyond) also know that miracles of healing happen. People get better. A parishioner who risked losing her eyesight had surgery that included the doctor placing a tiny bubble in the back of her eye. The bubble filled the hole somehow and sight was preserved, a miracle made. Sometimes miracles involve medicine, and sometimes they are simply unexplained.

Miracles happen with prayer and with medical care. But today’s Gospel also points to the more mundane miracles in our lives—the ones that involve healing when someone asks for help.

After Jairus asked for help, his daughter is healed—but that’s just the most obvious part. The Gospel doesn’t go into detail about the other ways that I’m sure Christ brought healing—to Jairus, to his family, to their community, and on and on the healing circle goes. That’s the way healing works when we are humble enough to ask for help—it expands in all kinds of unimagined directions.

When I think of this kind of healing I think of a parishioner named Mary Beth. Mary Beth was middle aged and never married. She had no living family except for one or two distant cousins. When she first received a diagnosis of cancer, she began on a course that would create miracle after miracle. She asked for help.

First Mary Beth asked friends for help understanding the diagnosis. Which course of treatment might be best? What were others’ experiences? In order to ask for help, she had to get to a new place of humility of realizing that there was no way she could absorb all of the information, do all the research, and weigh every detail alone. She needed help. But that was just the beginning.

Over the next five years, Mary Beth’s health had ups and downs. She continued to invite other people to help her—doctors and nurses, but also friends and new friends from church. She had one of these amazing spirits that would smile in the face of fear and make a joke about losing her hair during chemotherapy. Each time she got a new, dire diagnosis, she would plan a trip, and that really involved asking for help. In her last year of life, the doctors told her there was no way she could make a dreamed-for safari to Africa. But she felt ok and just kept praying and asking for help. She navigated transporting her medicines across international borders. She lined up emergency insurance and medical support. She had friends praying for her. And she made her trip, taking beautiful photographs that are now shown in an exhibition at our church.

After a long series of ups and downs, Mary Beth eventually died—peacefully. In the process she had empowered friends who had no idea what they were capable of. She had raised new issues and concerns about the retirement complex where she lived, including other voices and changing procedures and rules for the future. She slowly gave her two animals (probably her very best friends) to other friends, blessing those families with new life and adventure. And she gave her priest (me) the kinds of conversations one usually only imagines in seminary: “What do you think heaven will be like? How do I pray for people who have wronged me but who are dead? Did I fulfil my mission in life?—on and on the questions went, and the conversations continue to live in my head and heart. They sustain me and guide me in talking with others.

Healing that comes from the humility of asking, from a place of emptiness. But the other side of healing encourages generosity and the expansion of inner and outer resources people never dreamed they had.

We see this kind of generosity in our first two scripture readings. The reading from Deuteronomy encourages generosity: “Is anyone among you in need?” Help them, don’t put it off. Don’t make excuses. Just offer help. “Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake.” That’s just the natural economics of helping—humility allows for the asking, but the giving creates even more generosity and blessing.

In Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, he sort of shames them by telling them about the Macedonians. Look at the Macedonians, he says. They’re poor as church mice, but look how they insist on being a part of every campaign—they’re giving and making and serving and showing up. The Christians in Macedonia had created a culture of generosity. Even though they didn’t have much to share, they shared what they had. As anyone who has ever lived or served among the poor knows, it’s often the poorest of the poor who are the most generous. That’s because they’re used to asking for help. They live more often in a place of humility, so generosity is just that much more obvious.

I hope that this connection between healing and asking for help is something kept in mind as our General Convention meets this week in Utah. After the tragedy of Bishop Heather Cook’s driving and killing a bicyclist while she was drunk, the church has jumped into high gear to try to “fix” this situation. New rules, guidelines, and processes will surely flow out of the General Convention as they hear the recommendations of a special task force and the delegates pray and think about this important issue. But I hope they’ll listen to the people among us—in all our church basements, in our pews, and pulpits—who are walking miracles of sobriety and serenity because they asked for help. The power to deal with addictions comes first from admitting powerlessness. Groups of people in recovery are places of generosity that are eager and ready to help others. Very often these communities are filled with people who have been broken and defeated. Some have lost material things (families, jobs, freedom), while others have only lost internal things (integrity, honor, or trust). But from the place of humility comes generosity and from that generosity flows the healing power of God.

This weekend is filled with celebrations for many of us: the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality, the LGBT Pride events in Chicago and New York, and later this week, Independence Day. It’s natural that much of our celebrations have to do with strength and success and perhaps newfound power.  Those can be good things and we do well to offer thanks. But also, in our own lives and in our corporate lives, may we also be clear about our weak places.  There are so many places individually and corporately where we need healing—around race, violence, families, how we age together, how we encourage the young, on and on our list could go on and on.

May the Spirit enable us always to ask for help, to reveal our deficiencies, our inability to fix everything and control everyone. May we encourage communities of generosity so that we may be a part of God’s healing and resurrecting love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 21, 2015.  The lectionary readings are Job 38:1-11, Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32,  2 Corinthians 6:1-13, and Mark 4:35-41.

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It’s been a week of tragedy and heartbreak. Any time there is senseless violence—whether because of ideology, religion, race, or some combination; we have a lot of questions. Especially since Wednesday’s violence in Charleston, we wonder how someone could do something like that. How could someone sit in a Bible Study for an hour, and then open fire? We might wonder why, if God created us in different colors, God didn’t build in a kind of tolerance and recognition of one another as brothers and sisters, all children of one creator. And speaking of God–Where, exactly was God in that church, among faithful people who loved God? Why did God let them perish?

It’s a good and obvious question that again comes up in our Gospel as we hear about the disciples who are with Jesus and there’s a storm. “Lord, do you not care that we are perishing?” But in that case, it seems obvious that Jesus did care. He woke up and did a miracle. The wind calmed. The sea settled. Jesus cared. God cared, and in that situation the miracle saved the day and restored faith—at least for that afternoon.

The Old Testament character Job must have asked a similar question. “God, do you not care that I’m perishing?” If you recall the story of Job, you remember that he loses everything. He loses family, work, possessions, and finally, even his health begins to suffer. His so-called “friends” sound like anything-but as they give advice and talk, talk, talk, and talk at him. Surely Job has brought all of this upon himself in some way, they say. Surely he’s offended God in some way. Today we might call this “blaming the victim,” and while it’s as old as Job’s friends it’s also as recent as the commentators and politicians in our day.

What’s great about Job, and one reason why we have his story as a part of sacred scripture, is that Job never caves in to the moralistic, simplistic thinking of his friends. Instead, Job goes right to the source. Job prays and talks and even argues a little with God. Our first scripture reading today is part of God’s answer to Job. It’s beautiful and poetic, but the spoken answer of God is not especially satisfying. It’s as though Job asks, “Why is there evil in the world?” And God says, “Creation IS.” But when Job asks “Why is there evil in the world that’s happening to me?” God responds by drawing closer. It’s like some of the more important conversations we might have: the content is less important than the proximity, the “being with.” God is present with Job. In storms and in good weather. In sickness and in health. In life and in death and in new life again.

What Job’s friends may have been trying to do, but did clumsily, is what Paul is trying to do with the church in Corinth in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. The Christians there had all sorts of problems – with each other and with Paul. But Paul cautions them not to lose hope—remember all we’ve been through, and the faith that has brought us this far. More specifically, Paul says, “As we work together with Christ, [don’t] accept the grace of God in vain.” Another translation puts it, “Don’t squander …[the] marvelous life God has given us.”

Here, I think Paul hits on something that was not only a problem for first century Christianity, but also a huge problem for twenty-first century Christianity. Grace has come to us. It comes at our baptism or before. Grace perhaps comes again at other times in life, but we forget. We get distracted. We are overcome by the storms of life so that all we see is the rising water and the crashing waves, the lightening and the thunder. We say to ourselves, “Sure, God calmed that storm, but what about this one.” Sure, God was with me when I narrowly escaped a car accident. God was with me on the other side of the successful surgery. But what about the complicated issue of THIS day? What about tomorrow?
When we “accept the grace of God in vain” we still think of ourselves as Christians, but it just doesn’t mean much. We forget the power of Christ. And that’s what grace is—not a soft, wispy glow that comes over us when we’re good or when God thinks we’re special.

Grace is power! It’s the power of right over wrong. Grace is the power to love in the face of hatred. Grace is the power of life over death. Grace is the presence of Christ.

When take that in vain, we’ve lost our voice, we’ve lost our power, we’ve lost ourselves.

The news this week told about a young man named Joseph Meek who was a friend of the killer Dylan Roof. Mr. Meek remembers when Roof yelled a racial slur out the window of the car. He noticed as Roof began to spin out of control. But he says he “didn’t take him seriously.” After Roof bought himself a gun, Meek got concerned and took the gun for a while, but eventually put it back. After the shooting, Meek said to the reporter, “I do feel a little guilty because I could have let someone know.”

You know what? He is “a little guilty.” We all are a “little guilty” and more than a little guilty when we allow people and systems and institutions and laws to go without comment. We are guilty when we laugh at the racial slur, or pass along the homophobic joke, or fail to (as the signs remind us) “say something when we see something.”   Many of us live in what we think is educated, liberal Northwest Washington, but even here, more likely than not, if a person with brown skin enters a room, the white folks will assume the dark person is an employee. Even here, there are jokes, and innuendo about those “outside”, and there is silence about the privileges so many of us take for granted on the “inside.” How often do we keep silent so as not to appear too politically correct, or whiney, to keep things smooth among the group at work, to get along with the neighbor, to keep peace at the holiday table? We cannot squander, hide, or take in vain God’s tremendous and powerful grace. Because it’s not OUR grace—it’s God’s intention that all would benefit from Christ’s grace and love and liberation from sin and evil. But that won’t happen if we’re timid, overly polite, or cautious in the name of “minding our own business.”

We MUST NOT take God’s grace in vain. As children of the living God, we have died to sin in the sacrament of baptism and we have been raised to new life in Christ. We have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. And that MEANS something. That MEANS everything.

Last week’s rampage was a white kid against blacks. But it could have just as easily been someone in this church when we hold a same-wedding. Or it could be our cathedral when we consecrate a female bishop. Or on, and on, and on.

All week I’ve been thinking about the famous quotation of Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). He was a Protestant pastor who spoke out about Adolf Hitler and spent seven years in a concentration camp. Niemöller was one of the first to articulate the complicity in the Holocaust and the need for repentance. He said

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

To take God’s grace in vain is to be silent or to be complicit when there is racism, sexism, or anything that belittles a child of God. To live out the full grace of God is stand up, to speak out, to name injustice, and to lead with love. To live out of grace and to show the world is what the Emanuel AME Church continues to do and what the families of the shooting victims did in court on Friday. The families told the accused shooter that they were praying that he be forgiven, and that he should pray for forgiveness, too. Ms. Alana Simmons, granddaughter of one of the victims, said this to the killer, “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, this is proof — everyone’s plea for your soul is proof they lived in love and their legacies will live in love, so hate won’t win,” she said.

In answer to the question that comes out of scripture and out of our lives, God does not let us perish. The love of God surrounds us, the presence of Christ moves us forward, and the fire of the Holy Spirit helps us go with God’s energy of love and healing. The storms of life will come. We may feel as singled out and persecuted like Job. But God’s grace is never in vain. God’s grace enables us to love, and love, and love even more.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

A sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 14, 2015.  The lectionary readings are  Ezekiel 17:22-24, Psalm 92:1-4, 11-14, 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17, and Mark 4:26-34.

If you are in way a gardener, or pass by a garden, or notice things that come from gardens—you know we’re heading into “boom time.” Things are climbing, stretching, creeping, blooming, and making fruit. The combination of warm, sunny days with occasional downpours of rain create what almost looks like ground-level fireworks. It’s a season of growth.

In the church, too, we’re heading into a season of growth.   The great celebrations of Easter and Pentecost are behind us, and so through the summer and into the fall, the scriptures invite us to think about the Kingdom of God—that commonwealth or realm of God that has as its very nature to grow, and grow, and grow.

Growth runs through our scriptures today like a vine of squash or kudzu. In Ezekiel, God plants a tree as a symbol and reminder that God tends and cares for all his creatures, no matter what storm or drought or calamity. The Psalm reminds us that those who are planted in the House of God—those who make God their Master Gardener will flourish and bear fruit and live fresh, new lives even when they are old in years. And then in the Epistle, St. Paul tells the Corinthians about spiritual growth and reminds them that like a plant that dies so that seed can create new life, Christ died giving us seeds for eternal life.

The Gospel we just heard comes in the form of a parable, or several parables. Many will recall that one of the great (though sometimes confusing) aspects of a parable is that the assigned characters in the story can shift around.  It’s never dead-set who is who. That’s probably why Jesus told so many parables—because no matter how many times someone heard it, they might hear their own place in the story slightly differently.

Because of this, whenever we read or hear a parable, there’s an invitation for us to step inside and try on some of the different characters and attitudes. Which one speaks to us today?  Which one fits best?  Which one challenges and which one offer comfort?  We can look at both parables and wonder where we are.

For example, in today’s story, you may identify with the sower, the one who plants seeds and hopes for the best.  Whether seeds or seedlings, the intention is that they will grow.  If may be an idea or a practice or a project that you’re just beginning.  You do a little to get it started, but then it’s out of your hands.  It may be taken out of your hands, or other things may grow to overshadow your project—maybe there is the equivalent of a storm, or maybe the birds in your world eat up the seeds you’ve sown.  If you are the sower, you make an investment and then over time, you have to manage your relationship to the seeds you’ve planted.  How much will you try to control?  How much will you let go?

Or, maybe you identify with the seed or the seedling.  You feel like you’ve been placed in a certain place—maybe it’s fertile ground, or it could be rocky stuff.  Maybe you’re trying your best to put down roots and yet over and over again, something comes to move you along and keep you scattered.  You’re trying to find a foothold.  You’re trying to find something that will stay still long enough to enjoy the sun, to absorb the rain, to find the energy and life within yourself to grow, to expand, to become.  You might feel as tiny and insignificant as a mustard seed.  Perhaps you have the idea of the mustard tree in your mind, but it seems so far off, and so far ahead, it’s hard to see how you might reach that place.

The sower and the seed are major characters in our reading, but there are also birds, birds that take shade.  Someone else has done the planting and the growing has already happened, and the birds are able to enjoy what has been done, safely make a nest, take advantage of the shade, and enjoy the view.  But one day, the birds too, might be called upon to add just the right component to God’s unfolding kingdom.

Jesus tells these parables to try to convey a sense of what he calls the Kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is not so much a literal place as it is every place, every place where God’s intention is allowed to take root and grow.  The kingdom is full of mystery—it grows at its own rate.  Some parts can be planned, laid out, and organized.  But other areas of the kingdom are up to God’s own good grace—we have to let go.

To me, our Gospel today seems to call us to begin to enter the Kingdom of God first by noticing, by being witnesses who have faith.  We are called to see and to believe.

And that’s not as easy as one might think, this “being a witness.” We have to be awake, to pay attention, to sort out what we think we’re seeing from what we actually see.  We’ll need to compare our view with another person’s, and then together, come up with a glimpse of reality.

The parables of sower and seed and growth and goodness remind us that God is working in our world—around us, within us, in little things and in large things—it’s for us to take note, to observe, to see.
It’s at times easy to notice the obvious and outer signs of God’s presence, but with faith, we can also see God in the hidden places. We see what initially looks only like pain and misery.  We see disease and violence and poverty.  We see a terribly distorted version of the world God has created.  But with eyes wide open, and eyes of faith, we can begin to see the seeds for compassion, for sharing, for sacrifice, and for healing. Jesus encourages to have faith that seeds will find what they need to grow.  Have faith that growth will happen in God’s good time.  Have faith like that of the mustard seed, faith that might be tiny at first, but with God’s help grows into something that helps others.

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians talks about walking by faith, not by sight.  He’s not so much opposing seeing and believing as he is pointing to the way of seeing deeply that involves faith. Paul warns about those who boast in outward appearance—see through that, Paul urges.  Christ died on the cross and to all appearances, so died the dream of God.  But for those with eyes to see, he has risen for us.  For those of us with eyes to see, to notice, to witness, our faith leads us further and as though we’re given enough to move forward through a fog, with more faith, we see more and move farther along.

Thinking about the scriptures today, I remember someone with good “eyes of faith.” About ten years ago, I went with a group on a mission trip to Honduras. Our task was to help the congregation there build some new, simple church pews, and also to build friendships and relationships with Christians who live very different lives from ours. One of the people who went wish us was a then-70-year old woman named Kathy. Since Kathy wasn’t sure how much of the construction or the climbing of hills she could do, she asked if she could primarily help with the cooking. And so, that’s what she did. She helped with the cooking, spoke almost no Spanish but was able to communicate with other women in the kitchen who spoke no English, and things went well. The week went along nicely. Most of us noticed that the people from the congregation who were handy really didn’t need our help at all, and were really being gracious to allow us to help them with a project they clearly could handle. But Kathy—there in the kitchen, saw something else. She noticed how easily and quickly the women moved in the kitchen and she began to wonder what they might do if they had a larger, commercial oven. Kathy asked the priest about this, and the priest asked the women in Spanish, and they didn’t even pause before they replied, “Oh, we’d start a business and bake things and take them to the market to sell them. Kathy was able to see a possibility, something that could grow. When Kathy went home, she got her church to start raising money. Our church added some, and the church in Honduras bought an oven and began a business.

Those who see with faith will see all kinds of possibilities, and the vision never dims. It is as Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation.  Everything old has passed away, and the new has come alive.”

Friends, the kingdom of God grows around us and within us.  It’s our gift and charge to notice, to witness and to enjoy and share the bounty.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

A sermon for Corpus Christi Sunday, June 7, 2015.  The lectionary readings are Deuteronomy 8:2-3, Psalm 116:10-17, Revelation 19:1-2a, 4-9, and John 6:47-59.

The other day I sat down in a restaurant and at the top of the menu was a quotation by one of my favorite writers, MFK Fisher. It said, “First we eat, then we do everything else.” Margaret Francis Kennedy Fisher, was a great American food writer who died in 1992. Her early books in the late 30’s and 40’s helped people make the most out of skimpy pantries and war rations. She taught how to make a feast out of simple things.

“First we eat, then we do everything else.” I resonate with her words when I think of the many family gatherings, dinners with friends or parishioners, and fundraising banquets. Even whenI forget the squabble that broke out at the table, the topic of the conversation, or the famous speaker– I can still remember many of the foods from those occasions.

Those words about the priority of eating, the importance of food, are appropriate today as we the Church reflects on Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ, the Sacrament of Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, or the Holy Eucharist.

In a longer passage, Fisher says more:

Food for the soul is a part of all religion, as . . . savages know when they roast a tiger’s heart for their god, as Christians know when they partake of the Body and Blood at the mystical feast of Holy Communion. That is why there can be an equal significance in a sumptuous banquet for five thousand heroes, with the king sitting on his iron throne and minstrels singing above the sound of gnawed bones and clinking cups, or in a piece of dry bread eaten alone by a man lifting his eyes unto the hills. [Here Let us Feast: A Book of Banquets (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986) xiv, reprinted from 1946 Viking Press.]

Fisher is pointing out that every meal, no matter what, when or how—has some trace, some slight flavor, some hint of the Holy within it. She suggests that there can be “equal significance” in all meals and from a food writer’s point of view that may be so.

But from a Christian perspective, something else entirely happens in the Holy Eucharist. The Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ shared in Communion is of a different order. At first, made of ordinary bread and wine, with the Holy Spirit, it is a meal that becomes “super-sized” beyond all imagination.

In the back of our Prayer Book is the Catechism, often helpful for reminding us of some of the basics of Christian faith through an Anglican lens. In the section on the Holy Eucharist, there’s a wonderful part that talks about the benefits of what we do, the benefits of partaking of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It says simply, “The benefits we receive are the forgiveness of our sins, the strengthening of our unions with Christ and one another, and the foretaste of the heavenly banquet which is our nourishment in eternal life.”

When we partake of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are forgiven. We are forgiven again. Our sins are washed away at Baptism, but the ongoing accumulation of sin in our life meets its match in Holy Communion. Ignatius of Antioch called it the “medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, … that we should live for ever in Jesus Christ.” Medicine can taste bitter, sometimes, especially if our tastes are accustomed to other things. But the Holy Eucharist helps us. Like good medicine, it increases our resistance level. Like vitamins, it strengthens us.

The second benefit according to the Catechism has to do with strengthening our union with Christ and with one another. In a world that often suggests we live only for ourselves, that we protect at all costs what we think is ours; the unifying work of the Blessed Sacrament is counter-cultural. But it is live-giving.

In Communion we are reminded that we need each other. The common cup and common bread underscore that we are not so different from one another, after all. Barriers of race and class and education, differences of national origin, or sexual orientation or marital status or income are all dissolved in the common chalice.

They are diluted by the cleansing water of the Holy Spirit. And the blood of Christ, which is to say the blood of God our Creator, restores us into once again being fully human even as it fills us with what is fully divine.

Finally, the Body and Blood of Christ, this holy Sacrament, gives us a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Mindful of the present, grateful for the reality of here-and-now, we are made aware in the Eucharist that we are also living toward a great feast that has no ending. Today’s reading from the Revelation to John is filled with images of this feast of praise and joy and love. We live into the salvation and power and glory of God. The voices of the faithful from all times and all places blend together in a holy noise that sounds like water rapids, like the clapping for joy of great waves, like a thunderstorm of laughter. This vision of heaven reminds us of our destination.

And so we celebrate this mystery, we step into it, we are drawn into it by God.

Dom Gregory Dix was an Anglican Benedictine who wrote an incredibly influential book on the way we think about worship and the sacraments. Near the end of his great work on the Eucharist, Dom Gregory Dix points out that, of all the things Jesus said and taught, most have been ignored. Or, if remembered, his followers (his disciples and us) have usually failed at doing them.

But there was that one command on that one night, the night before his betrayal and arrest and crucifixion, in the meal he celebrated with his friends, when Jesus took, blessed, broke, and shared in eating and drinking, he commands his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Keep on doing this, he commands. Dom Gregory wonders about this and ask, “Was ever another command so obeyed?”

He goes on to reflect, “For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it until extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.”

Dix doesn’t suggest “why” we continue to fulfill this command, but I think in part, one reason is because it’s something we can do. As Dix says,

[People] . . . have found no better thing than this to do
for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold;
for armies in triumph
or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church;
for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; . . .
or for a sick old woman afraid to die;
for a [student] sitting for an examination. . . .
for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover;
in thankfulness because a father did not die of pneumonia;
for a village headman much tempted to return to his fetishes
because the yams had failed; [The Shape of the Liturgy, (London: Dacre Press, 1945) pp. 743, 744.]

… and on and on the list continues.

But we have our own lists, too, don’t we. When we can’t control the economy, when we can’t heal the ones we love, when we can’t do so many things—we can, nonetheless turn our anger, our frustration, our hopes, our deepest desires into prayer. We can enact that prayer, embody it, and turn it into thanksgiving, into Eucharist, as Jesus did with his friends.

“First we eat, then we do everything else.” First we eat, then we’re forgiven. Then we’re brought together again into community, and after eating, we are reoriented toward God’s kingdom, God’s kingdom here and beyond.

And so, let us feast with Him who said, “They who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day ….They who eat this bread will live for ever.”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.