8-18-2024 Fleshing Out Holy Communion with Rev. Marie Duquette

Bread & wine is a big topic for Jesus. Why is that? Disturbing, enlightening, and mysterious meanings in the Lord's Supper. 

Transcript

I want to talk today, in today's sermon, about the bread of life, Holy Communion, The Bread and Wine, this ritual, we Christians do when we worship together. And I want to look at it with you from three places; physically, metaphysically or spiritually, and the mystery of it, because it is indeed a mystery and I sometimes think we do it so often we, we forget that part. So, first the physical part about it. This Gospel reading is about the connection between suffering, violence, and the sacrificial act of Jesus on the cross so that we might live. Make no mistake. It is a hard Gospel to hear and a hard Gospel for even a seasoned pastor like me to read. 
Flesh and blood are in these 7 verses 10 times.
Maybe you noticed. It is hard when reading it not to think of things like what happened after the plane crash in the Andes mountains, recently dramatized in the movie, Alive, or the TV Series, Yellowjackets 
Because today’s Gospel is so clear that it makes us wince: I am the bread of life, says Jesus. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. 
Consider this: the tradition of having the Lord’s Supper comes, in part, from Jesus’ instructions to his disciples at The Last Supper in which he says, Do this in remembrance of me. The Lord’s Supper, which happened just before Jesus’ was killed, violently, through an abuse of power that led to the persecution and murder of an innocent man, God's own son, Jesus the Christ. It is news that continues to shake the world today and yet sometimes I wonder if we, as members of the body of Christ, have become so desensitized to the story that we cease to consider that this is part of what we are enacting in this weekly ritual of Holy Communion? It is a reenactment of the most violent moment in Christianity, and, our language around it, the rhythm and beauty of the words as the bread and wine are blessed, the comfort to be given the bread, offered the wine…it is a holy ritual we do not take lightly. The question I'm thinking today is: should our participation in Holy Communion move us to the depth of compassion which leads to transformation and justice? Do we connect or have connected for us by God’s own Spirit reports of violence, persecution, and injustice that continue to take place every single day? 
Maybe what John is asking us to do in today’s Gospel is to remember not just Jesus when we come to the table, but to remember the violence that continues today among various groups of people for whom Jesus also died.
And then there's the metaphysical part. You might find this interesting. The Greek word that is translated as “flesh” throughout the Gospel is sarx, a noun.
Contrary to our intuition, this noun, sarx, meaning flesh, does not so much describe the atoms and molecules and fibers of flesh, but much rather the living consciousness of it. We feel and sense the world with our flesh, which means that we absorb and store information with our flesh. Flesh is not essentially physical but essentially mental or metaphysical. To understand this now, this the context in which it was used okay? Let's get a solid grip on our own consciousness. What is that? It includes things we can experience with our senses: touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell. Consciousness also includes things we perceive, or sense, somehow know, even though we aren’t always sure how we know it. Somebody here has had that experience, right? It includes our instincts our internal warning system… some of us call it our Spidey senses. So given that, what are you conscious of right now? My voice. The candles on the altar. The pain in your upper left side of your back, just above your wing, where it feels tight up to your neck? Are you conscious of the temperature in here? The fragrance of someone sitting near you? Are you conscious of a looming deadline, or an upcoming test, or the worry about tests just taken for which you have yet to get results. Are you conscious of your grief, that thing that shape shifts from sadness to guilt to regret to anger to emptiness to memories to gratitude for having a love so strong, that the grief it left behind will never really go away? Or are you just conscious about being a little hungry and thinking that Culver’s sounds good for lunch?
Now, if we combine this meaning of “flesh,” that is “consciousness” with the actual act of Jesus dying on the cross and giving his flesh and blood for the life of the world, maybe we get something like this: 
The more we partake in Holy Communion, the more our consciousness can be expanded to include things we’d really rather not discuss. Things like violence. Things like the way some people are excluded. Things like the fact that some are unable to take Holy Communion because there is a famine where they live or they would be subject to political persecution if they practiced their faith in public. Or even, because they have been a victim of violence themselves, and the violence connected to the ritual of Holy Communion is a wound they cannot yet reconcile. So, when we think about it there's these dimensions of Holy Communion. There is the physical part. There is the metaphysical spiritual part. There is comfort and

thanksgiving. Violence is attached to it in some kind of way. And then there is the mystery of 
it. In my first call, the altar guild that put the linens on the altar were

particularly… finicky. They liked it very crisp, very precise, and it never bothered me until this one day when I preached a sermon about Holy Communion, and my refrain, through the sermon, was either ‘it's about forgiveness or it's not’ and I was talking about how hard it is to forgive and how hard it is for us to forgive ourselves sometimes. When I went to pour the wine into the chalice, it hid the cup in such a way that it made a fountain and red wine went everywhere. It covered the linen. It was all over my white alb. It was on my hands. I wasn't really prepared for that to happen and the whole time all I could think of, in my very physical person was, the altar guild is going to kill me. Right? Um, but it's interesting because after the church emptied out, no one was there. I recreated what happened. I bet you I poured that wine 10 different ways from different angles. I could never make that happen again. Mystery. I want to close this part in this

sermon with part of a poem that I think really helps the mystery of what Jesus has done for us, and what our participating in this holy ritual is about. It's by a poet. His name was John Betjeman. Died in 1984, and the name of his poem is Christmas. So I'm telling you right now we're going to Christmas for a minute. Don't let it rattle you. In the first five stanzas he describes the superficial busyness of Christmas decorations, parties and shopping. In the last three stanzas, as the part I'm going to read, he pivots to the heart of the matter. Nothing you could ever claim remotely compares to the outrageous mystery of the gospel which God has gifted to us. Listen. This most tremendous tale of all, 
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall? 
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings 
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things, 
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air, 
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare — 
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.