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"Making God present in our world," the senior sermon of Joe Behen, from the Diocese of West Missouri, given on March 20, 2007, in Christ Chapel

Luke 9:10-17

“… he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples.” The reference to the Eucharist in today’s gospel reading is fairly overt, but how does it effect the gospel message. I t seems like its one thing to make this connection but quite another ask, “So what?” What difference does it or should it make? I think that Luke is suggesting that our lives should begin more and more to take on a Eucharistic quality. Rowan Williams talks about the Eucharist as Christ making himself to be a piece of bread that is broken for the nourishment of others, and I think that Luke describes it as the life structure for his followers. In this seven-verse story we see that relationship, self-sacrifice, and imagination all blend together to form a strange but powerful image of heaven on earth.

The reading from Revelation today paints a picture of the heavenly banquet, in which “the fine linen” on the altar “is the righteous deeds of the saints.” So at a very basic level, what is done on earth matters in heaven. It’s not even suggested that a deed matters because of the results it achieves: i t simply matters to God for what it is.

Luke has the disciples first coming to Jesus with their own plan. “ The twelve came to him and said, ‘Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions.” There’s no indication that anything is behind their statement other than genuine concern for the people. But isn’t it something how we, as disciples, think that we have the plan that God needs to make good on.

Sometimes I just can’t seem to give up enough control to ask for God’s will without also praying for it to come about by my own methods. And these methods are usually an attempt to link God’s will with my own well-being. In effect, then, I am praying for God’s will with a footnote telling God how He might best pull it off. It seems to be all too often that this is as close to Eucharist as our lives get. And this, Luke suggests, is not Eucharist.

But the story continues. " We have no more than five loaves and two fish -- unless we are to go and buy food for all these people." When the disciples are set up like this by the gospel writers time after time, I wonder if Jesus feels a bit like Bill Murray in “Ground Hog Day.” They seem to have memories that are even shorter than my own. They’ve seen Jesus cure lepers, heal the dying, and provide more fish than the disciples could haul in. They’ve responded by falling on their knees before Jesus, and by leaving everything to follow him. But this time, surely we need to convince Jesus of the practicalities involved.
Those things were nice and all, Jesus, but this – this is serious stuff! Now, we don’t want to think of it as limited belief – it’s more like we’re just trying to get Jesus to “keep it real.” But what effect is produced by such moderation of faith?

I suppose that we all know why we moderate the gospel. We see time and again that what Christ asks of us is no less than everything. He gives all that he has and all that he is, and he asks us to do the same. So with that on the table, it’s no wonder that we tend to soften the sharp edge of the gospel. But both in today’s gospel reading and in the passage from 2 Kings, we are shown that God’s providing for those with nothing begins with people first being asked to give what little they might have. And when they do, God simply makes it be enough. What we offer is more than we think . I t makes a difference. But how? Why have the disciples give the few loaves and fish that they have before providing the rest? Why doesn’t Jesus just spread the table with steak and taters from nothing? Well, what if the only difference is that it was in fact offered? If so, this difference is first and foremost about relationship.

And this relationship with God makes us to be more like God is. When the disciples offer all they have for the sake of others, they look more like God’s image than at any other time. They have given recklessly without concern for themselves because, as our friend Doug Harrison might say, this is how they understand God to be. God has become present to them and to others through them, by their becoming images of God’s self-abandoning love of the other. So by asking us to give everything, God makes us more like God. God is still making us in God’s image. But our footnotes, our stipulations, and our qualifying reservations, then, are not so much like God.

So why would we prevent the Eucharist from happening wherever we are? And why are there so few saints living the Eucharist in a world that needs it more than ever? While there are certainly multiple reasons for this, I would suggest that one is simply a lack of imagination. We can’t imagine ourselves caring enough to give down to the last. We can’t imagine what we offer being blessed by God and broken for others. We often can’t imagine ourselves in a real relationship with those who are radically different than ourselves. And we can’t imagine God taking our love for our neighbor and making it into something that looks like heaven. Jesus’ disciples couldn’t imagine the resurrection even when Jesus told them directly. But they will – and they will imagine a new meaning to life as a result.

Phillip Kenneson wrote about the Eucharist that it is “the paradigm for all other actions” of the worshiping community. “ That is, the community of disciples gathered for worship seeks to have its imagination so shaped by the Eucharist, that its entire life outside the liturgy will itself be a powerful expression of the worship of God.” So, when we limit the Eucharist to a ritual that is fundamentally unrelated to life outside the walls of the church, a re we, in fact, discounting God’s desire to act out God’s love in the world? Or, do we profess a deeper understanding but simply not think much about it at all when we participate? This, Luke suggests, is not Eucharist.

One of my favorite writers shows with remarkable clarity, the connection between imagination and relationship, as he describes the impossible journey of a small hobbit and his companions. Tolkien shows the reader that their odds of success are ridiculous at best, and the odds of their survival even less. And yet, the fellowship goes. Hoping against hope, they can imagine that what they do matters.
A t the foot of Mt. Doom , Frodo is too starved and shriveled from thirst to climb the mountain and destroy the ring. H s friend Sam, however, knows that Frodo’s very life is now indiscernible from his self-sacrifice. W at is likely to be his doom is also his last grip on life. So rather than taking the ring into the fiery chasm himself, he hoists Frodo upon his back and begins up the mountain with the last of his strength. T he end of the ring is not all that matters, and Sam knows this. He sacrifices himself so that Frodo can be who he is, the ring bearer. What these hobbits do has little to do with results, but it has much to do with who they are and with what they imagine that life means. In the course of the story it becomes increasingly difficult to discern who any of the fellowship is, apart from their relationship with each other. Frodo and Sam both fail to be themselves apart from each other, but their mutual self-sacrificing relationship makes them more themselves than they could imagine alone.

After Jesus blessed, broke, and gave, “ All the people ate, and were filled. What was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces. ” It is significant that the twelve baskets contained only pieces. They are broken, not whole; they are broken because they were given. And they are excess because they were given. Our shortage is God’s excess through relationships – relationships both with God and with our neighbor. But there are no clear lines between the two. Everything seems to blend together in the sacrifice of self-giving, of Eucharist. The result of this mixture is that we have a new problem. The problem is no longer one of shortage and want, but simply what to do with God’s leftovers.

Will we dare to imagine our lives as being Eucharist?

footnotes

Kenneson, Philip. “Gathering: Worship, Imagination, and Formation.” The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics ( Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004) p. 58