Bread That Takes Us Home, The Reverend David R. Williams, Pentecost XI--Year B--August 20, 2006

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
 
We have heard Jesus say these words to us many times.  We hear the phrase, but the words are beyond the realm of our civilized lifestyle. 
 
“Your religion is one based on cannibalism,” a skeptical student says to his religion professor. “How can you believe in a God whom you believe is Jesus, who requires that you eat his body and drink his blood?  It’s barbaric.”
 
First century Christians attempting to understand the nature of Jesus may have had similar concerns. Surely we can admit to queasiness in considering the message “Eat my body, drink my blood.”
 
The language is raw and jolts our sensibilities.
 
How do we grasp such a concept? Jesus offers a clue in the comparison of his blood and flesh to the bread, the manna eaten by our “ancestors” in the wilderness. 
 
In travel from a place of bondage and slavery, the ancestors of Jesus wandered in a desert.  The people were hungry, confused and had lost their way.
 
Manna was the bread given to them in the desert.  Manna was sustenance until the end of the journey. But as Jesus implies, even though the wandering people ate of this manna, they eventually died.  Manna in the wilderness is temporal.
 
We might say the Christian Formation program of the Holy Comforter is our manna.  Our teachers and curriculum educate, sustain and nourish, yet there is the inevitable change in staff/volunteers and curriculum over time.
 
Today we introduce with pride Mrs. Kim Futrell, the new Christian Formation Director of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter.
 
The music program of the church is manna for our corporate worship. Over the next few months, we adjust to the idea that Charles Hogan, our Minister of Music, will soon move on to the Episcopal Cathedral of Cincinnati. Music, manna in the wilderness as we gather each Sunday in praise and thanksgiving, reflection and supplication.
 
The Forward Day by Day meditation booklets have for decades offered manna in our daily wanderings. The little books are seasonal, as new content is published on a regular basis. 
 
Throughout our journey, we may know (or suspect!) the constant, enduring presence of the Lord Christ himself.
 
A remarkable choice is made by Solomon when he is asked by the Lord, “Ask what I should give you.”  Imagine being asked such a wide-open question. In our own deserts, we might say “to win the lottery” or “to retire the mortgage.” In the sometimes dry desert of the Church we might dream “to receive an endowment” or “to fund a lawn mowing service.”
 
Solomon answers, “Give me, your servant, an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil.”  Solomon does not ask for something tangible or temporal.  He asks for wisdom and a proper heart and mind to lead God’s people.  The temporal desires are manna, and we struggle with them every day.  The wisdom to discern good from evil provides food for Eternal Life.
 
“Be careful,” Paul writes to the people of Ephesus, “how you live, not as unwise people but as wise.” 
 
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus says. 
 
This knowing is different from acquired wisdom.  The concrete and “real” image of blood and flesh is different.
 
Or is it?
 
At the New York Museum of Modern Art, an eighty-eight year old man sits in front of a Picasso work entitled “Girl Before the Mirror.”  
 
He does not like what he sees.  “It is like the artist is trying to tell a story using words that don’t exist,” the elderly man says. “He knows what he means, we don’t.”
 
The man is a member of a group of Alzheimer patients involved in experimental therapy. For some reason, works of art stimulate in Alzheimer patients thought processes and expressive abilities no longer evident in everyday conversation.
 
Another member of the patient group, Irene Brenton, studies the painting “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth. Imagine the figure of a young woman lying in a field, her left hand reaching out toward a farmhouse in the background. 
 
“You can’t see her face,” remarks Irene, “But, looking at her, you get the feeling she’s happy.”
 
“How do you know she is happy?” asks the therapist.
 
“Because you know she’s going to get to the house.
 
 And I’d like to go into that house, too.”
 
The mystery of being human with brains that can be probed only so far--never totally understood--still eludes us.  We are a long way from home, from the wisdom, from the understanding, from the peace, from the healing, from the eternal life offered by our Lord.
 
The great philosopher Emmanuel Kant wrote that, although our human knowledge would always be no more than perception of truth, there would always be two things to which we could look as the ground of reality:
 
“The silent stars above and the moral law within.”
 
“The silent stars above and the moral law within:” Steps closer to eternal life, closer to the offering of God’s wisdom, closer to Home. 
 
“The gifts of God…the body and blood of our Lord, for the people of God,” the Celebrant recites, raising the sacramental chalice and wafer.  “Take them…take Jesus… into your presence, into your life, into your wilderness, into your struggle, into your confusion, into your disease or  infirmity, into your wholeness… along with the manna being fed to you, take the silent stars above and the moral center of your being… as food, in remembrance of me.”
 
We are invited to take Jesus into ourselves. Jesus offers himself as our own essence. 
 
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, I in them.”
 
Time and tradition, manna and repetition have taught us the power and beauty of all that we have come to call Eucharist. 
 
Having been fed, we return from the Communion rail knowing we have tasted bread from Home. 
 
Amen.