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.
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.
