18/8/18 St Peter’s Trinity 12
Ephesians 5:15-20 John 6:51-58
In the first verse of our gospel reading Jesus says, ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
This verse is about Holy Communion - or more accurately h/c is about this verse. What the service does is point us to truths about Jesus and why he came. Now - and I’m speaking for myself here - in something we do each week can become routine but however familiar the eucharist seems there are depths to it that we will never plumb. So this sermon, for me as much as anyone else is a reminder.
But first a short excursion
30 odd years ago - Hilary and I went out for a meal to a restaurant in Selly Oak - Birmingham. It was South American, probably Chilean, perhaps called Los Andes - whatever - a friend who knew about these things said it had been set up by an emigre family because the regime had made Chile unsafe for them, so they had come to make their home in this far country.
It felt like a family business - the staff and the other customers all knew each other, it was a focal point for the other exiles who had ended up in Birmingham - somewhere they could come to eat which reminded them of home. The grown ups talked and ate, the children messed around, had their own conversations, dived under the table to play round the legs of grown ups, somebody had a guitar and played and sang - it was as close to home as they could get in a far country. A different culture from ours, but our meal was different because of what their meal meant to them.
Back from Selly Oak to the sermon. 700 years ago a German theologian wrote ‘God is at home. We are in the far country’ ie where God is is our true home and we are not there - we live in a far country
What we have in common with those Chileans is that we too are in exile and our family meal to remind us of home is the eucharist.
So three nudges to our thinking - past, present and future though not in that order.
a) The past - The Chileans were remembering their homeland - the country that nourished them, that gave them life - a place where people talked the same language, where they’d grown up, where there ideas of what really mattered were formed. The food the songs the atmosphere all revived those memories.
How does this reminder of having been nourished work in our communion service?
Look at our gospel, Jesus reminds his hearers that God gave Manna in the wilderness, this chapter starts with the feeding of the 5000.
Jesus says ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven.’
This is a long time ago, but God has nourished us too. We don’t have the same memories of our true homeland (the place where God is) as the Chileans but we can sometimes get hints of it.
We bear the image of God so there are some things stamped into us that speak of him - we can ignore them, distort them but even so we have been created with a capacity for the eternal and sometimes we come into contact with it - it will be different for each of us - God has infinite variety - but think of the times when we realise that more is going on in life than we can explain in purely human terms.
At a birth, at a death sometimes we feel the touch of the transcendent - and feel more fully human because of it - the same can be true at less obviously significant times - a piece of music, a landscape, a meal with friends - a sense of something being fitting, a sense of receiving a grace beyond our understanding. We may not be residents of heaven yet but we get enough of a glimpse of it to know that it’s our true homeland.
There is a bitter edge to this. The Chileans had to leave their home so they could be safe. For us the far country we find ourselves in is - to borrow a government phrase - a hostile environment for living in the way that God intended us to, we can’t blame others we have helped create it through negligence, through weakness through our own deliberate fault.
It is because we needed rescue that Jesus the living bread left the place where he was at home to join us in the far country. He loved us enough, wanted our company enough to choose to share our exile.
b) The next nudge to our thinking is about the future, about returning home. For the Chileans this would have been an ever present but uncertain hope. If the government changed then some of them might have gone back home, for others even a change of regime wouldn’t have helped, and others again might have been too long away, might have made too many connections in this far country to think of leaving, might have ended up not quite at home wherever they were.
We have a better hope - the next phrase in the opening verse of our gospel reading is ‘Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever’.
Currently we get by on hints of what our true homeland is like - we see through a glass darkly - but it will not always be so - the eucharist is the foreshadowing of the great heavenly feast - when we try and imagine something utterly beyond our ken we have to rely on familiar images - like feast - knowing that they can’t be utterly accurate but trusting that God’s reality is better than our imagining - just as we know that the love we celebrate at the Communion table is more than we can properly understand. There’s a passage from St Augustine that I’ve almost certainly quoted before that I find helps to put flesh on the bones of my hope.
‘Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety , so that we may sing it one day in heaven in full security... We shall have no enemies in heaven, we shall never lose a friend. God’s praises are sung both here and there, but here they are sung in anxiety there in security; here they are sung by those destined to die; there by those destined to live forever; here they are sung in hope , there in hope’s fulfillment; here, they are sung by wayfarers; there, by those living in their own country. So then let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labours. You should sing as wayfarers do - sing, but continue your journey ...sing then, but keep going.’
c) how do we live now in the light of our communion service? At the end of their meal those Chileans went out better able to be their Chilean selves in because they had had a true taste of home. For them Los Andes had become a place where Chile happened - and to a lesser extent for us too - so that more than 30 years I’ve forgotten the food, even how many of us were in our party but I still remember the atmosphere.
The Eucharist should be a place where God happens - it should give us a taste of our true homeland so we will go out into the hostile environment accompanied by Jesus better equipped to live well.
But how? God is not at our beck and call to give us a religious experience as and when we want. What can we do so that the eucharist will have the true flavour of our heavenly home?
This far country created through negligence, weakness and our own deliberate fault, is a hostile environment for the kingdom of God - is a place where different values obtain - welcome is weakness, mercy is folly - the attributes held up as virtues - charity begins at home, you have to look after number one, you can measure the value of someone’s life by the money they’ve made - are not those of the kingdom of God.
In sending his son the Father makes it clear that he is not content to leave our world as the far country, he wants it to bear the stamp of his presence And Jesus calls us to help in his work. How should we live?
Sam quoted Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit last week - it does no harm to hear it again the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
So we have a pattern, we have resources - the eucharist comes to us like a food parcel from home - reminding us of what matters and equipping us to take part in his work. We have the Spirit of God to accompany us
Someone once said ‘Man is broken , He lives by mending, The grace of God is the glue.’ The way we live, the way we meet others can be
part of the mending
What was going on in the restaurant was in its way God’s mending. A homesick people were given a true taste of their home country so that at the end of the evening they would go home that little bit more their proper selves - and this is what the eucharist should do. This should be a place where God happens.
For Christians, to share in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, means to live as people who know that they are always guests - that they have been welcomed, and that they are wanted. It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that He wants our company.
One final thought - the overwhelming thing I took from that meal at Los Andes was that, in spite of the difficulties of living in a far country, there was an exuberance to their living - and that’s very attractive.
