A sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 15
August 18, 2024, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs
Readings: John 6:51-58
I once heard a story about preaching on today’s gospel text. A priest used today’s gospel to preach on Eucharistic theology—on what we believe happens at the Eucharist. We believe that Christ is truly present in the bread and wine on the altar. They are still bread and wine, but they are also the Body and Blood of Christ. We are fed physically and spiritually with this sacrament, this pledge of God’s favor and love given in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The priest preached that message. There was a little girl in the congregation. She came up to the altar rail with her mother. “The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.” She took the bread. “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” The little girl stared into the chalice and let out a scream. She ran down the center aisle of the church yelling, “There’s really blood in there!” The next week, the church used white wine.
If we think about it, this thing we proclaim is an odd thing, perhaps even an offensive thing. Jesus’s audience will certainly think so. Maybe that little girl’s response is the most sane response possible. She took the words at their face value. Jesus, for his part, could not be clearer. This is Body and Blood, and when we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we abide in him, and he in us.
The Eucharist is not magic. It is not like the crystals they sell on Bathhouse Row for spiritual protection, whatever that means. In the Eucharist, simple bread and wine are given. They need not be fancy. They need not be a wafer or port wine. They could be Wonderbread and Franzia. But by the grace of God and the faithful prayers of the whole body (that includes you), these simple and ordinary elements are transformed by the Spirit to contain nothing less than the real presence of Christ. They are, we might say, infused with the presence of Christ completely. They are food for the soul.
It is a beautiful thing how God chooses to take the most ordinary of things and use them to give us grace. In doing so, God does not obliterate those things. We believe the bread and wine are still bread and wine. But as John Donne, the priest and poet, once said, they are not the same bread and wine as before. For these ordinary things have been imbued with the real presence and life of the Risen One.
But we make a mistake when we think that the Eucarist is just something that happens within these walls. We make a mistake when we come here for Holy Communion, but do not seek to commune with God in the world. We make a mistake when we find Christ here, but don’t look for him outside our doors. And indeed, as St. John Chrysostom once said, if we cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, we will not find him in the chalice.
The Eucharist, blessed at this altar, gives us a pattern for our whole lives. We are called to live eucharistically as the Body of Christ in the world. Just as ordinary bread and wine are taken, blessed, and shared here, God takes us, every moment of our lives, good and bad, joyful and sorrowful–God takes our whole, real, ordinary lives; God does not obliterate who we are, but God blesses who we are; God imbues us with the Holy Spirit and presence of Jesus; and God uses us to feed, to minister to, to bless a hungry and hurting world. When we live eucharistically, aligning our lives with what happens at this altar, we see that the Eucharist is not just something we do in church. The Eucharist is how we live right now, moment by moment, even outside these walls.
We might want to run from that, like the little girl at the altar rail. It is scary. Perhaps we think we are too ordinary, too flawed, too human to be taken, blessed, and shared with the world for grace and love. How can I, the real me that only I know, be used to communicate the grace and love of heaven? Surely God would rather use something better, something more refined, something more heavenly.
My friend, God is interested in you, the real you. God is interested in taking, blessing, and using you to bless the world with heaven’s grace and love. God is interested in that because God is interested in ordinary things: in things as ordinary as Wonderbread and Franzia wine. Ordinary things–infused with the presence of Christ, the power of the Spirit, the life of God–those ordinary things are transformed by God to share nothing less than the extraordinary love and grace and life of heaven.
There’s a hymn that says, “draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord, and drink his precious blood for you outpoured.” We will do that in a moment. But I wonder if, today, we might be more aware of what’s happening. I wonder if we might see that Christ, the bread of life present on the altar, is also transforming us and our ordinary lives, bit by bit, sip by sip, to heralds of good news, ambassadors of God’s love, vessels of God’s grace, bearers of heaven’s life.
With that life of Christ that is within you, go and live as the Body of Christ in Hot Springs. Dare to be just a crumb–a crumb of life that has come down from heaven in a hungry and thirsty world. For even an ordinary crumb, imbued with heaven’s life, an ordinary crumb infused with Christ’s love, an ordinary crumb transformed by God’s grace–even an crumb of Wonderbread, like you and me, is enough to transform the entire universe into the Kingdom of God.
Storied Grace 