The Twelfth Sunday of Pentecost Genesis 32: 22 – 31

Sunday, August 3, 2008 Romans 9: 1 – 5

The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 14: 13 – 21

Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.

Matthew 14: 19

Roughly fifteen minutes from now, more or less, you and I will participate in a divine drama, the holy play of God, the Eucharist. For two thousand years, people have gathered together with bread and wine and words and acted out a divine drama between God and man. People have celebrated the Eucharist in catacombs and small house churches, in cathedrals at the crowning of kings, in hospitals before surgery, in psychiatric wards, at ordinations and weddings and at the time of death. The Eucharistic drama is an event, a divine play scripted by God in which God re-creates life as communion, life with others.

The Eucharist is the way Christ told us to “remember him.” Doctrines, dogmas, even the creed came along long after people had gathered together for centuries to break bread and drink wine together. Week after week, through crisis and joy, people met together to celebrate the last supper because that is what Christ told us to do. Making eucharist in obedience to Christ’s command meant strangers and enemies, friends and lovers, children and old people, the sick and the well, all came to do one thing – make eucharist. Someone had to bring the wine, someone the bread, someone a clean linen to spread upon the table, someone to read the stories of Jesus, someone to pray the prayers, someone to offer thanks. Celebrating eucharist was and is a lived event of communion, a divine drama in which we all participate because communion is never a solitary affair.

Two thousand years later, here we are, about to do the same thing Peter and Paul and Stephen and Ignatius of Antioch and John Chrysostom and Teresa of Avila and Mother Teresa and millions upon millions of people have done for centuries. We will this day participate in this drama of Eucharist and become once more, in the words of liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix, “the holy common people of God.”

Our gospel reading this morning, the feeding of the five thousand, is a eucharist, a foreshadowing of that last supper Christ would share with his friends before his death. A crowd has followed Jesus out into the desert where Jesus has healed the sick. Evening has come and the disciples urge Jesus to send the crowds away so that they might buy food in the nearby villages. And Jesus tells the disciples: “You give them something to eat.” But the disciples have only five loaves of bread and two fish. “Bring them here to me,” Jesus commands.

Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled. Jesus takes the offering of the disciples and returns what they have offered as a great feast, a gift to be shared by everyone.

The divine drama of eucharist begins with an offering. Every Sunday, the liturgy of eucharist begins as the ushers bring forward our gifts of money and bread and wine. Actually, this procession of gifts begins way before Kathleen begins to play the first notes of the doxology. “The journey begins when Christians leave their homes and beds,” notes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. “They leave, indeed, their life in this present and concrete world, and whether they have to drive fifteen miles or walk a few blocks, a sacramental act is already taking place, an act which is the very condition of everything else that is to happen. For they are now on their way to constitute the church, or to be more exact, to be transformed into the Church of God.”

When we come to church we come to take our place in the assembly of the baptized. In baptism we are all ordained, freely given a place in the body of Christ. And in the drama of the Eucharist we each act out our part. When the ushers – more appropriately called “representatives of the congregation” - bring forward the gifts, they are bringing forward us, “our souls and bodies,” in offering to God that God might cast us in our roles in God’s holy drama of communion. To the newly baptized in the Easter liturgy, Saint Augustine could say: “There you are upon the table. There you are in the chalice.” What the disciples do in the gospel story of the feeding of the five thousand when they give to Jesus five loaves and two fish, we do every Sunday when we offer up to God all that we have and all that we are.

Already in this offering, we begin to see the difference between this holy drama and the drama of life played out in the world. In the world out there, giving away everything you have is foolish. In the world, we must protect what we have against those who would seek to take what we have away from us. In the world, we do not give anything away unless “there’s something in it for us.” The eucharist begins with an offering, freely given, in the hope that God will use us, cast us in a part of God’s holy drama of communion.

The climax of the Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving is the Lord’s Prayer, when we pray together, to “our Father,” when we look with Christ to God to “give us our daily bread.” And once again, the drama of communion parts company with a world whose script is written by those who believe we are self-sufficient, in need of no one and nothing to secure our place in the world. The Lord’s Prayer recognizes our need for deliverance, our vulnerability and our insufficiency. And so we “boldly” pray that God will give to us what we need to live.

Communion begins with an offering and continues with a petition. And finally ends with a gift. “The gifts of God for the people of God,” the celebrant says, raising the bread and the wine. You and I are given back what you and I have offered up for the sake of us. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus tells the disciples. What the disciples have is not for their sake but for the sake of others. What we offer to God is given back to us as “gift.” What we give to God, God gives back to us as “gift” to give to others.

And once again we see the difference between this drama of communion and the play the world would have us act. The world wants to assign value to us and refuses to leave that task to God. The world wants to say a brain surgeon is more valuable than a garbage collector or a doctor should be paid more than a nurse or a teacher is dispensable but the president of the United States is not. In this drama of Eucharist each of us is taken up into the very life of God and no one is any more or less valued than any other.

“What do you have that you did not receive?” writes Paul to the church in Corinth. In the eucharist we receive ourselves from God and so, can now give ourselves away to others, as one body, in the words of Paul with many members. Some of us, therefore, are teachers, some prophets, some healers, some leaders, some interpreters, and the list goes on and on. We are, in the Eucharist given the gift of the spirit so that we might be become not isolated individuals but one body with many gifts. In our assembly we see this variety of gifts as some of us read the lessons, some of us arrange flowers and iron fair linens, some of us offer our voices in the choir, some of us serve on the vestry and some of us lead adult education, some of us come into the church when no one else is here and pray, some of us faithfully fill the bird bath with water, some of us come and answer the telephone, some of us chair committees, some of us offer us the chalice and some offer the bread, some of us preach and some of us take dinner to the sick. None of us is more or less valued than any other. All of us are a part of our common life. What we have in common is a life, a life sustained by many members. And that, making of our individual particularities and proclivities a common life, is what God desires for us and why God put us all here in the first place.