St. Paul wrote…..
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
(From the Daily Office Readings, Mar. 20, 2012, 1 Cor. 11:23-26)
On nearly every Sunday for more than the past two decades I have repeated these words of Jesus quoted by Paul, the “words of institution” in the prayer called The Great Thanksgiving. I have said them at weekday services of the Eucharist, at funerals, at weddings, at retreats, and at conferences. Not only have I said them, but I’ve heard them at Masses where others have presided. ~ I will probably be criticized for sharing here two “pet peeves” about the Eucharist, and I’ll be the first to admit that doing so is probably not in the spirit of the rest today’s reading from Paul’s letter in which he condemns judgment and division. Nonetheless, I share with you here my annoyance at the way people read the Great Thanksgiving.
Peeve No. 1 (as the one presiding): When I preside at the Altar (a free-standing communion table in my parish), it is my custom to speak the words as naturally as possible from memory, and to display the Bread and the Wine as the words concerning each are spoken. Looking out over a congregation of Episcopalians, however, I seldom see anyone looking at these Elements. What I mostly see are the tops of heads bent down, their owners peering intently into The Book of Common Prayer, following along with the words I suppose (and maybe waiting to see if the priest is going to make a mistake). ~ Although I am not a Roman Catholic, my approach to worship is very much informed by the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. In the document titled Sacrosanctum Concilium from that Council, the Roman bishops wrote that the laity “should not be there as strangers or silent spectators; on the contrary, through a good understanding of the rites and prayers they should take part in the sacred action conscious of what they are doing, with devotion and full collaboration.” To me this suggests that, rather than following along in a text (like the BCP or some other litugical book or pamphlet), those present should be attentive to what is happening at the Table. All of those assembled ought to participate, to the greatest extent possible, in the processions, gestures, music, prayers, and actions that make up the whole of liturgy. Throughout the liturgy there are numerous moments which invite the congregant both to inner contemplative and prayerful participation, and to external and active participation, through vocalization, listening, movement, visual observation, taste, and (sometimes) smell. We miss so much if our noses are buried in the prayer book! ~ I have this recurring vision of Jesus and the Twelve at their Passover meal (let’s say it was a Seder although I recognize that may not be a valid assumption): Jesus at the head of the Table takes up the bread and instead of saying “This matzoh is a symbol of the bread of poverty and affliction our ancestors were made to eat when they were slaves in the land of Egypt,” he begins to say the words quoted above by Paul. He looks out over the table and all he sees are the tops of his disciples’ heads, their noses buried in their copies of the Haggadah. And the disciples, trying to read along, become confused, “Those words aren’t here!” They begin riffling through the pages, “Where is he? Why isn’t he following the text?” They don’t hear his next words; they miss what is happening; they miss the entire point! … Jesus weeps.
Peeve No. 2 (as one in the congregation): This complaint is directly related to the first. All too often when I am in the congregation and I look up to observe the action at the Altar, what I see and hear is a priest peering at the Altar Book (missal) and reading the words of institution as if he or she has never before laid eyes on them! Such a recitation reminds me of nothing so much as someone reading a recipe for the first time from an unfamiliar cookbook, or someone trying to make sense of one of those badly translated Chinese electronics owners’ manuals! C’mon, brothers and sisters of the presbyterate and the episcopate! These are Jesus’ own words when he changed for ever the nature and the meaning of the Passover meal! If we who stand at the Altar cannot breathe life and vitality into them, how can we expect our parishioners to take interest and participate actively? How can we expect our congregations to be vibrant and alive? My friend Bosco Peters, an Anglican priest in New Zealand, has written a book entitled Celebrating Eucharist (available for free online) in which he asserts that “it is part of the art of presiding – the way the presider uses gestures and voice – which draws in the whole assembly and involves them in this sense that this prayer is being proclaimed on behalf of all.” I agree! And we who preside can’t draw in and involve the people if we are peering through our bifocals and reading the Great Thanksgiving as if it were a banana nut bread recipe we’ve never seen before.
OK! I’m done. I’ve got that off my chest. I promise: tomorrow I’ll go back to offering exegetical meditations. Thanks for listening.
Jesus’ response to this Gentile woman who asks him to heal her demon-possessed daughter is very troubling. We are bothered, even angered that Jesus can be offensive, impatient, and rude. But Mark does not hesitate to show us Jesus as angry, sharp-tongued, and demanding. We are more comfortable with a tame, sentimentalized, gentle Jesus meek and mild. The Gospels and the extra-canonical tradition reveal Jesus to be a powerful and complex figure. He is, as tradition says, in every way as we are (yet did not sin), which should suggest that he shares all the complexity and emotional variety of any human being. In addition, we must remember that this man is the incarnation of a living and personal God, a passionate and sometimes angry God. We should not be surprised to find him displaying emotions that make us uncomfortable. ~ Moreover, this episode reminds us that Jesus was a Jew, a rabbi who firmly believed in the priority of the Jewish people in God’s eyes. He believed that there was an irrevocable covenant binding them to God and God to them. Jesus’ mission was to them: the message of liberation and reconciliation that he preached, taught, and lived was for them. ~ So Jesus was irritated and angry, and we are uncomfortable with that. However, given that anger is a very natural part of human life, and that Jesus was fully human, we should not be uncomfortable with those moments when Jesus got angry or irritated with the demands placed upon him. I think one reason we are uncomfortable is that we don’t want to think of Jesus as human, despite what our theology may say; we prefer to think of him as only divine, not given to the vagaries of the flesh. To deny Jesus’ temper, however, to refuse to allow him occasionally to be irritated is to deny him his full humanity. ~ The thing that is important is not that Jesus got angry, but that he was able to so without being controlled by his anger. This is important because of where we are at right now as a people. There are individuals (and groups) who are deliberately trying to irritate us because it helps them to earn their living or to push their political agenda. (Rush Limbaugh on the Right and Bill Maher on the Left both come to mind; they make their money by annoying their opponents and propping up their “bases”.) ~ We who follow Jesus, we who hope to conform our lives to his, need to emulate his example. We need to learn to not let our anger and irritation take control. Jesus obviously had learned ways to control this most troubling aspects of being human so that his divinity could shine through. As we follow Jesus, each of us must strive to do the same, and I believe we can with his help and grace. May each of us find ways (with God’s assistance) to manage our angers, our irritations, our irrationalities, to control those things within us that undermine the mission of liberation and reconciliation which was Jesus’ and which we have as Jesus’ disciples.
The simple answer is that fasting is going without some or all food or drink or both for a defined period of time. An absolute fast is abstinence from all food and liquid for a period of at least one day, sometimes for several days. Other fasts may be only partially restrictive, limiting particular foods or substance. The fast may also be intermittent in nature; for example, Muslims fast during the daylight hours of the month of Ramadan which is intended to teach Muslims patience, spirituality, humility, and submissiveness to God. Fasting as a spiritual practice is common to all major religions. Mahatma Gandhi once noted:
I’ve always been troubled by St. Paul’s “adoption” language. I suppose I’m influenced by one of my favorite authors, the Victorian Scot George MacDonald who, in one of his Unspoken Sermons, absolutely bridled at this notion of “adoption”. MacDonald’s problem with “adoption” is that it suggests that God is not our father to begin with. MacDonald wrote, “Who is my father? Am I not his to begin with? Is God not my very own Father? Is he my Father only in a sort or fashion – by a legal contrivance? Truly, much love may lie in adoption, but if I accept it from any one, I allow myself the child of another! The adoption of God would indeed be a blessed thing if another than he had given me being! but if he gave me being, then it means no reception, but a repudiation.” How awful to find in words meant to build up one’s faith the exact opposite effect! Better to seek an alternative translation of the obscure Greek than to be turned away from God by a poor interpretation! ~ In the New Revised Standard Version of Scripture, the word adoption appears five times, all in Paul’s epistles. Nowhere else. The original Koine Greek in all five occurrences is huiothesia, a word Paul seems to have made up! I am given to understand that the word is a compound one which literally means, “to place as a son.” One Greek lexicon defines it as meaning “to formally and legally declare that someone who is not one’s own child is henceforth to be treated and cared for as one’s own child, including complete rights of inheritance.” Perhaps Paul’s meaning might have been better expressed if this made-up word were interpreted as “inheritance” for surely in this passage that is the point he is making and emphasizes in the next few verses saying we are “joint heirs with Christ.” This seems also to be his meaning in Galatians 4:5 and in Ephesians 1:5, and one could argue that it would make even better sense in the other two occurrences in this letter, Romans 8:23 and 9:4. ~ Not everyone, of course, finds the term so off-putting. Archbishop Desmond Tutu found it reassuring: “God loves us. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more and nothing we can do to make God love us less. Our adoption is forever. We are all God’s children.” Certainly, this is the sense we find in Peter’s First Letter. Peter does not use the “adoption” motif, however; he instead uses the same metaphor Jesus used in the conversation from which comes the Revised Common Lectionary Gospel reading for today, the Fourth Sunday in Lent (John 3:14-21). In John 3:3, Jesus tells Nicodemus a man must be born again to see the kingdom of God. In First Peter we find the born-again metaphor of John’s Gospel combined with the inheritance argument of Paul: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” ~ So whether it is by adoption, or by inheritance, or by being born again, or by whatever other metaphor one finds meaningful, our relationship to God, the relationship of a child to a father, is eternal and (as we are reminded in the Epistle from today’s RCL selections for the Eucharist) “it is the gift of God.”
This conversation comes after a confrontation with the Pharisees and scribes who criticized Jesus and the disciples for not washing their hands before eating (and some commentary from Mark about washing food from the market and “cups, pots, and bronze kettles”). Jesus said to his critics, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!” (Mark 7:9) ~ Jesus is here addressing the rabbinical (as opposed to biblical) laws called the mitzvot d’rabbanan (“commandmens of the rabbis”). These are additions to the laws that come directly from Torah. These rabbinic laws are still referred to as mitzvot (“commandments”), even though they are not part of the original 613 mitzvot found in Scripture. They are considered to be as binding as Torah laws. The mitzvot d’rabbanan are commonly divided into three categories: gezeirah, takkanah, and minhag. ~ The names of these divisions give us a clue to their origins. Gezeirah derives from the Hebrew root word for “separate”; these rules are considered a “fence around the Torah”; they prevent obedient Jews from even getting close to violating the Law. Takkanah derives from a root word mean “fix” or “remedy”; these are revisions of Torah ordinances that no longer satisfy the requirements of the times or circumstances (arguably, these revisions can be deduced from and do not violate the Torah). Minhag means “customs”; these have developed for worthy religious reasons, not from reasoned decision-making, and have continued long enough to become binding religious practices. ~ We Episcopalians have plenty of all three types in our own denominational practice. We have general and diocesan canons; we have policies and by-laws; we have “the ways we’ve always done it.” ~ When we try to build “fences” around sacred things, I have a suspicion about what we are doing. Anglican history tells us that Archbishop William Laud started the Episcopal “altar rail” tradition by ordering that fences be placed around altars because he was afraid Puritans would allow their dogs to urinate on them! I think that’s iconic of what the mitzvot d’rabbanam and our own canons, by-laws, and “we’ve always done it that ways” are about – Fear! We are trying to protect that which we originally valued from that which we fear, even though we may not be able to name the source of our fear. And it is to that unnamed fear that Jesus speaks in his follow-up conversation with the disciples. Fear, irrational, unreasoning, often unnamed fear, is powerful and when it takes hold of the human heart a lot of evil can result, “for it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” It was, I believe, out of fear that the Pharisees had concentrated so much on the externals of religious practice. So intent were they on the fences, remedies, and customs that had grown up around the Jewish faith that the internals of faith, that which was originally valued, had been forgotten or even avoided. ~ The collect for this Saturday in the third week of Lent includes a petition that God keep watch over the church because it is “grounded in human weakness and cannot maintain itself without [God’s] aid.” No human weakness, I think, is greater or more powerful than irrational, unreasoning, and often unnamed fear. And there is no greater remedy for fear than the the love of God and God’s offer of freedom in Christ.
Confession time … this is one of those passages from the Pauline Epistles that makes me hate Paul. He’s such a self-important braggart! “Look at me,” he seems to be saying, “Look at all I’ve done, all the sacrifices I’ve made, all the effort I’ve put into sharing the Gospel with you! I am really the best evangelist there ever was!” ~ OK … I don’t hate Paul. I know he’s not really being an arrogant braggart in this letter … but doesn’t some of his writing sure seem that way? ~ What is going on here is that Paul is talking about flexibility! The Lord, speaking through the prophet Jeremiah, reminds us that we are clay in God’s hands: “Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” (Jer. 18:6b) It seems that many people think that once the clay is formed for a specific purpose and will never again be reshaped for anything else, but that’s not the way things work in life and especially not in ministry. Spiritual clay cannot be rigid; it must be flexible to be formed for one purpose and then reformed for a different type of work according to God’s will. When Jeremiah went to the potter’s house as God led him, he saw that the vessel the potter was making ended up being reworked into another vessel as seemed good to the potter. God then asked, “Can I not do the same with you?” (18:5-6a) It seems to me that Paul (in is own inimitable fashion) is simply saying that God worked and reworked him time and time again, and that he had learned to be flexible. ~ An old friend used to be the Altar Guild director in her church. On the wall of the sacristy she put up a poster of wheat blowing in the wind; the caption read, “Blessed are the flexible, for they will never be bent out of shape.”
In between these two sections from Mark’s Gospel Jesus teaches a great crowd of people and then feeds them with five loaves of bread and two fish; the crowd “numbered five thousand men” and who knows how many women and children. But what draws my attention today are the words of Jesus, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” and Mark’s words at the end, “He made his disciples get into the boat and go [away]” and “he went up on the mountain to pray.” Lots and lots of ministry activity bracketed by “down time”, time away from the demands of the crowd, time to rest, time to pray, times of sabbath. Mark doesn’t actually call these “sabbath times”, but that’s what they were. Part of the genius of the Jewish faith (and, by extension from it and by the modeling of its Founder, of the Christian faith) is that the human need for rest is made sacred. “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” (Gen. 2:3) “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God ; in it you shall not do any work.” (Exod. 20:8-10) Jesus famously remarked, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27) Methodist writer Leonard Sweet interprets Jesus as meaning that it’s not so much that we keep the Sabbath, but that the Sabbath keeps us. It keeps us whole, keeps us sane, and keeps us spiritually alive. In today’s story from Mark’s Gospel we tend to focus on the feeding of the five thousand (the part I left out up above), but I’m beginning to believe that the really important part of the story are the “brackets”, the times of rest. Do not neglect to “come [or go] away to a desert place by yourselves and rest a while” on a regular basis!
Every time I read this story, competing visions of the scene do battle in my imagination. First, there is the image of Rita Hayworth dancing the lascivious “dance of the seven veils” before Herod (played by Charles Laughton) in the movie Salomé (the name given Herod’s step-daughter by Flavius Josephus in his histories; her name is not mentioned in the Bible). If I recall correctly, there is a similarly sensual portrayal in the movie The Greatest Story Ever Told. The other image I see with my mind’s eye is of a much younger dancer, a pre-adolescent child. In the original Koine Greek, she is referred to as a korasion (vv. 22 and 28), the same word used in Monday’s gospel story of the healing of Jairus’s daughter. In that story the word is translated as “little girl” an applied to a child twelve years of age, a girl not yet old enough to be married. ~ As popular as the Rita Hayworth version is, I’d rather go with the little girl version. I’d rather not see the dance as part and parcel with the evil done to John the Baptist, which the lewdness of the strip-tease version suggests. I prefer to see this as a tale of innocence perverted, a child’s sweet gift of a simple dance taken advantage of by a scheming, vengeful adult, a cautionary tale (if you will) of purity sullied. Dance, in itself, should be thought of as a good thing. ~ When our son announced his engagement and then the couple announced their wedding date, and let us know that there would be a formal reception afterward with dancing, my wife and I decided to take ballroom dance classes. We discovered that dancing is not for sissies! It turned out to be darned difficult for rhythmically challenged folks like us; it also turned out to be fairly demanding physical exercise. But I enjoyed it and I’m glad we took the classes. I’m hoping we’ll take some more and make dancing a regular part of our lives. One should remember and heed the advice of St. Augustine (354-430):
There is so much in this little story! It serves as a great illustration of two old sayings: “Familiarity breeds contempt” and “You can never go home again”. Jesus’ home-town friends were too familiar with him. They’d known him since he was a boy. He’d done the equivalent of delivering their papers, mowing their lawns, playing with their kids, climbing their trees. Those who were his own generation knew him as fellow student, someone they’d sat in synagogue with, a working stiff making chairs and tables in his father’s workshop. They couldn’t accept him as anything more or different, and certainly not as religious leader! Their familiarity with him bred their contempt of his ministry, and that contempt came out in the form of old rumors and gossip: “This is Mary’s son” not “This is Joseph’s son” … those old stories about his parentage. They took offense at him and they became offensive and contemptuous in return. After this incident, Jesus left Nazareth and never returned. Despite Jesus’ ministry, his gifts for teaching and preaching, his ability to heal, in Nazareth he could never be more than his family’s and his friends’ memories allowed: he was a carpenter, how could he ever be anything else? Sometimes you can’t go home again because people are blinded by their memories and only see what was “back in the day”. Jesus realized it was time to detach with love and walk away. ~ In the Episcopal Church, we have a special prayer or “collect” that is to be said at each celebration of the Eucharist; there is such a prayer for each weekday in Lent. The collect for today includes the petition, “Grant that we, to whom you have given a fervent desire to pray, may, by your mighty aid, be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities.” Sometimes the adversities we face come from those whom we expect to be our greatest supporters, friends and family who can’t let go of prejudices, presuppositions, and presumptions. Sometimes the greatest source of comfort in those situations is distance. If we have to detach and walk away, this little story from Mark’s Gospel reminds us that Jesus has been there before and shares the pain of family separation with us.
