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The Rev. Frank Logue
Communion Imagine the river delta of a great river—the Nile, the Amazon, the Mississippi. The nutrient rich water pours out into the ocean. The delta is the end of a long journey from the source, more than a thousand miles away in a high mountain spring. I want to begin this sermon at its delta, at the end, and then travel the sermon backwards, upriver to its source. The end of the sermon, the very last words of it are this, In just a few minutes, you will be invited once again to this table to be spiritually nourished by the God who made you. And the very source of life who loves you is the one inviting you to come eat and drink in His presence once more. So the end is here at the altar, God’s table, where we receive the bread and wine of communion. This is the broad river delta, the widest spot in the river as we share this place with all those millions of people who will receive communion today. If we travel upriver, we find all those times and places when communion has been shared. Sometimes when I receive communion, I am reminded of other times and places where I have received communion, from a cathedral built on an old slave market on an island off the coast of East Africa, to a hotel ballroom in Kathmandu, Nepal. Alongside thousands of others in a conference center in Minnesota, with my new wife as part of our wedding, and at my own ordination in Statesboro, Georgia. I could go on, but you have your own places as well, familiar churches where you received communion a hundred times, or a church you only visited once on vacation, or for the funeral of a loved one. Holy communion will be offered in most every one of those places today, and many of the thousands with whom we have worshipped will come forward to receive the bread and wine again today. As we move upriver again, we find a moving passage at the end of the book, “The Shape of the Liturgy” by Dom Gregory Dix. The book is a 768-page academic text on communion. A sometimes dense text that is a standard for those who study liturgy. And as he closes the book, the monk Dix wrote of the broad expanse of our river saying this, At the heart of it all is the Eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as they were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before he died. . . .He had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning “for the [remembrance] of Him,” and they have done it always since. Was ever another command so obeyed? 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 human need from infancy and before it to 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. Men 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; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for a famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren women; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of Saint Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancti Dei—the holy common people of God. So that is the vast length of our mighty river. Week by week, month by month on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly we the children of God have been nourished by our God in this way. Even when the sermon was bad, or the music off key, God has been there and his people have been there and it has been all right. As we push upriver, we come to John’s Gospel. Written around the year 100 by the beloved disciple who inclined alongside Jesus on that Passover Night, the Gospel tells us these startling words, Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. These words and others like them are why the Romans would accuse Christians of cannibalism. Christians had been overheard speaking of eating flesh and drinking blood and outside the talk of communion, those words are downright creepy, ghoulish. But John had heard the words in context, words that must have been impossible for many to understand, for if we keep reading in John’s Gospel we are told some commented, “This is a difficult teaching, who can accept it?” John went on to note, “Because of this many of the disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” But these words mattered a lot to John. We know this because his Gospel tells of years spent with Jesus and so we know he couldn’t tell us everything. In fact the last verse of the Gospel notes, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” So knowing that John admits not everything was or could be written down, we know that a lot of words were written in all four Gospels about Jesus instituting this new ritual, a revised Passover service where what is remembered is not the Exodus from Egypt, which was the content of the Passover story. In this new ritual meal, the central story is not the journey from slavery to freedom, though that is part of it, it is the story of moving from death to life in the death and resurrection of Jesus. As we move upriver, we move past the text of the Gospel of John to Jesus himself. Jesus, the living bread who came down from heaven, who was much more than a great teacher, for great teacher’s don’t say things like, “eat my flesh and drink my blood.” This Jesus was so self-evidently a real man to all who knew him. No one doubted his humanity when he lived and taught among them. His townspeople would say, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” They knew him and thought they knew his place. And though you may have seen movies where he stands out from the crowd—taller, with nicer hair and brighter eyes, you could never miss him. Yet Isaiah had predicted, “He hath no form nor comeliness that men should desire him” and those who wanted him arrested had to hire a disciple to point him out in a crowd because he looked so much like the Galilean fishermen and the like he traveled with. But as human as he was, those who traveled with him saw the signs he did, the mighty miracles. And those who knew him best, who saw his every mood, came to believe something more. In John’s Gospel Jesus asks the disciples if they too want to leave after hearing these difficult words and Simon Peter says, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Jesus of Nazareth was fully human, but he was so much more, he was also fully divine. As Jesus said in our Gospel reading, “This is the bread that came down from heaven.” He spoke earlier in this same passage, in a portion we read last Sunday, says that he came down from heaven to do the will of him who sent me. So as we move upriver again, we move back to before Bethlehem and we find the second person of the Trinity, the Word who would be made flesh already existing from before time. For as we push upstream we get to the source of this great river of Holy Communion and find that the headwaters, the spring of the waters of life are none other than the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We find that the God who was in communion before the creation, calls us into that communion as well. And that is when the river becomes one again. For our Triune God is present to all those times and places still. We find the communion we receive is of one piece with the first communion Jesus gave to his disciples on a Passover night, it is all one thing with those earliest communions Christians took when they gathered after Jesus death. And the communion we share in just a few minutes is one with every other time you have come forward to be nourished by God. This is not our table, but our Lord’s Table and all who have been baptized into Jesus death and resurrection are welcome. This is not our table, but the Lord’s Table and the very source of life who loves you is the one inviting you to come eat and drink in His presence once more. Amen.
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