I’d like to start today with a bit of story. It may seem off base, but bear with me a minute.
When I was 21, I was hit by a car. It wasn’t just a little tap; I was pretty severely injured. The ambulance came and rushed me to a hospital. At some point in this process, someone contacted my parents. They lived about 60 miles away at the time. My father, a slow driver at the best of times, covered the distance in 30 minutes flat. While was my mother was in the waiting room going through the admissions paperwork, my father went looking for me. In talking to people afterward, I found out he pushed his way through multiple sets of closed doors, wedged past a series of doctors and nurses, then burst into my part of the emergency room. When he got there, he said quickly, before the staff dragged him back to the waiting room, “John, it’s going to be ok. Your mama and I are here.”
I think that our gospel passage, and actually the whole of the Eucharist, have some similarities to this story. Listen to this verse: “Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” On my initial read, that verse felt very accusatory. When I first looked at it, my mental picture had Jesus calling out people for their lack of life. You could reword the verse, under this initial view, and Jesus might as well have said, how dare you be so lifeless. But something about that reading felt off.
I think a better reading goes something like this. Jesus is looking at a group of people, soon after he has miraculously fed them. And these people he was talking to remained full of confusion. The feeding took care of a single, short-term issue, an important issue of course, but not a lasting one. After fixing this for them, Jesus saw that they remained confused and lost. What Jesus wanted to do above all, was to give these people a source of hope and comfort going forward, hope and comfort for when their bellies were no longer full of miracle food. He wanted to give them lasting food to fuel them for the rest of their lives. And so, to bring back in the first part of the verse I quoted before, He offered his very self to fill them. Eat my flesh. Drink my blood. Then you will be full of life.
That desire of Jesus to be with his people at all times and for all time feels a little like my dad in the story I told at the beginning. Jesus is constantly bursting through doors, shoving past any person trying to hold him back, to reach out to the broken body on the literal or metaphorical hospital bed. He is constantly saying, “I am here. You are not alone.”
Maybe why this matters might be self-evident. Nonetheless, I’d like to flesh it out just a bit more. Do you remember the end of our reading from Proverbs: “Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight." We are able to walk in the way of insight, to lay aside immaturity, in part because we recognize that we are not by ourselves when we make decisions. Each choice we make, whether to show love or hate, to promote ignorance or knowledge, to encourage or discourage, is a choice that we make together with God. God is right there with us the whole time.
I’d like to illustrate with another story. Fannie Lou Hamer was a leader in the civil rights movement in Mississippi from the 1950’s through the 1970’s One of her goals was the integration of the Democratic Party. At the 1964 Democratic Presidential Convention, she showed up leading a delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated delegation unlike the lily-white regular delegation from the Mississippi Democratic Party. In trying to figure out what to do with her, President Lyndon Johnson, who was known to dismiss her as “That illiterate woman”, sent out his Vice Presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, to talk to her. After going back and forth for some time, Humphrey, who had been a champion of integration in his own right, asked her in exasperation, what do you want? Hamer replied, “the beginning of a New Kingdom right here on Earth.” Then she said she would pray to Jesus for Humphrey, and they went their separate ways. Four years later, Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee for president, and the Democratic Party convention required, at his urging, that all convention delegations had to be integrated.
Now Ms. Hamer, despite her many virtues, was not an Episcopalian. Despite that, she lived her life boldly with this basic recognition that God was with her in all that she did. And this gave her the courage to challenge the injustices of her society. As Episcopalians, we use the language of ritual and sacrament to help us to remember the same lesson.
The Eucharist is one way that we know God is with us. The language of today’s gospel passage should be familiar, because we use it regularly during the Eucharist. The sacrament of the bread and wine is how we eat and drink of Jesus today. It is a physical, tangible way to experience the truth that Jesus was Emmanuel, a word that literally means “God with us.”
To be clear, the Eucharist means more than this. But this is a part of the meaning of the sacrament. So my prayer for all of us is that we go forth into the world as people who have been fed with food that lets us know we are not alone. God is here with us. And because of that, we can have courage to face the injustices of society today. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment