Sunday, May 5, 2019

May 5, 2019 - Easter 3C



O Lord, give us this day our daily bread. Amen.
            Meals are central to what it means to be human. Of course, all animals eat, but only us humans make a meal out of getting the necessary nutrients into our bodies. And there’s nothing quite like a meal’s ability to serve as the foundation for so many different occasions. Need to close the deal with a client? Take them to a nice restaurant. Want to celebrate a romantic relationship? Open a bottle of wine and have a nice meal. Celebrating a wedding? Make sure you have a good caterer to provide for a celebratory meal. Have a friend who is mourning the loss of a loved one? Take them a casserole. Birthday parties, farewell receptions, job promotions – sharing a meal is at the center of how we mark these occasions.

            We use meals this way because we’ve figured out that a meal provides a lot more than dietary sustenance; meals also good for bringing us into fellowship, for giving a shared experience, for creating the opportunity to celebrate. It should come as no surprise what Jesus has told us to do in remembrance of him is a meal. The Eucharist is rooted in the most human of experiences, a meal, and nourishes us with the most divine of blessings, the grace of God. Isn’t it interesting, and telling, that when Jesus wants to teach his disciples about salvation and the meaning of his death, he doesn’t give them a lesson, but a meal?
            When the disciples ask Jesus how it is that they are to pray, he instructs them, “Our Father… give us this day our daily bread.” In other words, give us what we need to survive. The Eucharist is God’s response to our prayer for daily bread and in it, we receive not only the bread we need for today, but the bread that gives us eternal life. In Eucharist, we come to see that God nourishes us.
            In the Resurrection appearance recorded in John 21, we see how it is that we are fed by God. The Resurrected Jesus appears here as a chef, cooking breakfast for his disciples. God is always the host of the Eucharist, providing for us the sustenance that we need. And Jesus not only provides, but he provides an abundance. John notes that the disciples had been fishing, but they caught nothing. We are not able to provide our own salvation, our own nourishment, our own purpose and meaning. Sure, we can try to be the best version of ourselves, we can pretend that we don’t need to rely on others. But, like those disciples fishing, we’ll always come up short.
            You’ll notice that John sneaks in a little phrase to tell us what is about to come. John notes that Nathanael was from “Cana of Galilee.” Immediately, our minds recall how, when they ran out of wine at a wedding banquet, Jesus provided an abundance of superior wine. Their efforts to fish were fruitless, but Jesus tells them to try casting their nets to the other side and they end up with a haul of 153 fish. There are seven disciples present, plus Jesus, meaning there are about 20 fish for each person – a super-abundance. It reminds us of the abundant life that God intends for us in Christ.
            Up until this point, no one had recognized that this person telling them how to fish was Jesus, but as soon as their nets were full, the beloved disciple exclaims “It is the Lord.” In abundance, Jesus is recognized. So much of our lives are built on the assumption that there is not enough. We work long hours and sacrifice family and personal time because we’ve been taught that we need more money. We endlessly critique ourselves because we’ve been told that we’re not thin enough, or confident enough, or smart enough, or easy-going enough. Everything in our world has become a competition because we don’t think there is enough for you and for me, for us and for them. And so we fight, we cheat, we deceive, we steal in order to make sure that we have enough. The result is that we end up being enslaved – to the economy, to expectations, to the idol of “winning.”
            What God offers us, though, in the Eucharist is abundance. The Eucharist shows us that with God there is always enough love, enough mercy, enough acceptance, enough grace. It’s why we pray for and receive daily bread from God. Because if our minds are fixed on what we need for today, we’ll see that, indeed, there’s not only enough, but an abundance. And once we’re done with trying to get more than we need, we actually find the salvation of God.
            God’s abundance gives us freedom. Freedom from having to make ourselves worthy, freedom from worrying about the future, freedom from having to look over your shoulder to see if they got more than you. The Eucharist reminds us that God feeds us abundantly, that there is enough, that we have been given more than we can ask or imagine.
            Another way in which the Eucharist nourishes us is that in it, we are reassured of our standing before God. If you think back to the night of Jesus’ arrest, Peter tells Jesus that he will never abandon him. Jesus though tells Peter that Peter will deny him three times before the night is over and that is exactly what Peter does. I can only imagine the heartache that must have caused Peter. We’ve all been there – we had the best of plans, the best of intentions, but then we got swept up in the moment and failed miserably. For Peter, the stakes couldn’t have been higher, his teacher was being put to death and he pretended not to know him.
            Maybe you, like Peter, feel like you’ve let God down. There’s no sense pretending that it isn’t true – we let each other down. As a son, husband, father, priest, and friend, I often let people down. There’s a version of the Confession that asks for pardon when we “fail to be what we claim to be.” And that’s just how it is being human, we all fall short. But the Eucharist reminds us that we stand forgiven, redeemed, and restored in God’s eyes. As we know from the Prayer of Humble Access, “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under God’s Table. But God is the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.” The Eucharist is a place where we can be honest – where we can stop pretending to be perfect or to have our lives put together, and instead we can examine our lives, admit that we need help, and state our desires to live more authentically and in harmony with God and others.
Certainly, God feeds us in the Eucharist, but the very important antecedent to this feeding is the invitation. You are invited to this altar each week by being reminded that these abundant gifts of God are for you, the people of God. You are not God’s people because you’ve done everything right, but rather because God loves you, and that can never be taken away from you.
            And so Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him, giving him three chances to counter the three times that Peter denied Jesus. Peter is reconciled to Jesus, just as we are reconciled to God. The Eucharist reminds us that we are forgiven by the very fact that God continually invites us to share in the Body and Blood of Christ despite the fact that we so often fail to be what we claim to be.
            One theologian has said that “The Eucharist is our symbol of what it means for the Lord’s Prayer to be answered fully: God feeding his people through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which establishes that new community of the Spirit in which forgiveness is the common currency.” In the Eucharist, we all stand on the foundation of God’s gracious mercy and in being forgiven, we are freed to forgive others.
            Being forgiven, we are fed abundantly – that much we have seen so far about the Eucharist. But at the heart of this meal is love. Jesus asks, “Do you love me, do you love me, do you love me.” In that great hymn, we sing “O love, how deep, how high, how broad… For us he bore the shameful cross and death; for us he gave up his dying breath.” In the earliest Church, the gatherings of Christians around meals were called “agape meals” and “agape” is the Greek word for love. And it is this agape love that comes to us in Jesus.
            When we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, the prayers always remind us about how God lovingly created all that is, how God is full of steadfast-love for us, how God loved us so much as to come and be born of Mary to be with us, how God was willing to be handed over to suffering and death because God loves us so much. And then we break the bread and shout “Alleluia,” that great victory shout of Easter morning which proclaims that love is not conquered by death but rather that love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
            The Eucharist is that great feast that God has thrown for us in love. There is ample food and drink and even though we don’t deserve an invitation, we’ve been given the seat of honor. Jesus then tells Peter three times to feed his sheep. We’ve been nourished not only for our sake, but for the sake of the children of God. This abundance, forgiveness, and love is the meal that we take with us to give to others. It’s not that God needs our good works, but our neighbors do. We have been lavished upon at God’s table and are nourished with the bread of life, and so we are equipped and sent out to feed God’s people.
Just look around, it doesn’t take long to see that the world is hungry. We are desperate to be loved, to be accepted, to be have meaning, to have comfort. In the Eucharist, God gives us all of these things in abundance, so come and eat your fill, and feed God’s flock with it. We live with so much division, so much blame, so much distrust, so much rejection in our society. We are slow to forgive, reluctant to be vulnerable, and rarely do we give the benefit of the doubt. Our political life isn’t about having debates about who has the best ideas, it’s become about who can dig up the most dirt on each other. Our economic life isn’t creating an economy that works for everyone, it’s about more, more, more. But love is different; love has been defined as “willing the good of the other.” Through the Eucharist, each week we see that God wills the very best for us and we are commissioned to give the best of ourselves to God and to each other.
Over the last year at St. Luke’s, we’ve been using that phrase “Come and See” from John as a model for our mission and identity, and it’s a good one. When it comes to the Eucharist though, we might tweak it just a bit to “Come and Eat.” We’ve all been told about the importance of eating a good breakfast, and this morning in John, Jesus prepares breakfast for the disciples just as he prepares the Eucharist for us. So come and eat, being nourished by the abundant bread of life. Come and eat, and taste the goodness of the Lord in the forgiveness of all your sins. Come and eat in this meal of God’s fathomless love for you. Come and eat.