named Bread Sunday. The Old Testament story is about the Israelites in the desert receiving birds for dinner and

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1 Manna from Heaven, Bread of Life 13B Psalm 78, John 6:24-35, Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15 August 5, 2012 St. Luke s Joanna Seibert Without a doubt, this 10 th Sunday after Pentecost should be named Bread Sunday. The Old Testament story is about the Israelites in the desert receiving birds for dinner and bread for breakfast. The Psalm offers us bread of angels. In the gospel reading Jesus dramatically tells us, he is the bread of life. Only six weeks into the wilderness, the hungry ancient Hebrews cry out to God for real food, and God leaves them this fine flaky white substance in the morning dew. Now, we in the south know exactly what this substance was. It is GRITS. But the Israelites have never seen grits before, and instead of saying, thank you, sir, or thank you ma am, God s people say, What is it? That s what the Hebrew 1

2 word, manna, literally means, What s this? What do you call it? Manna from heaven, the unexpected, an unknown source of new food, different from what we have been eating, something we ask for when we want to break fast, when we are really hungry, / soul food. My experience is that I daily receive manna from heaven, and most of the time, my response is similar to that of the Israelites in the desert, what is this? ///One of my partners comes up with the answer to a medical diagnosis I have been working on for hours. Manna from heaven. I am crazy busy at work and a friend or one of my children calls or s me, just to see how I am doing. Manna from heaven./ We are weary and flying home. It is past 10 pm. We are late for our connection in Atlanta, but the last plane to Little Rock is still at the gate just waiting for us. Manna from heaven./ I drag in our front door after an unbelievable 2

3 day and my husband has already fixed dinner. Manna from Heaven. Carey and I go to visit someone who is critically ill in the hospital. We have no idea where the person s room is. We stop and ask a man with a housekeeping cart. He leaves his cart and walks us to the room./ Manna from heaven.// The Eucharist that is offered here today/ at this table/ is our most significant manna from heaven, the body of our Lord Jesus Christ. What we receive here is nourishing and unexpected, an actual physical and spiritual relationship with God. But centuries later we ask the same question that the Hebrews did, what is it? Louis Weil tells us that this sacrament is not known by talking about it, but by observing and participating in it. You may know this best if you have ever been denied communion at a worship service. There are not words to express what it is like to 3

4 gather with other Christians and be told that you cannot receive the Eucharist because you do not belong to the right religion or not have the right beliefs./ A group of people who can tell you a great deal about manna from heaven and the bread of life are our lay Eucharistic Ministers, who take communion to the sick from our Sunday worship. Becky and James Terry take out communion from St. Luke s the first Sunday of the month and will be taking communion at 8 to Virginia and Bernice.. Sara Garrett goes on the second Sunday, Josh Taylor on the third, Wanda and Gary Dunwoody on the fourth Sunday. Pat Loomis rides sidesaddle as our circuit rider, taking out communion often from the Wednesday Eucharist to those we have missed on Sunday. This past week we trained two new Eucharistic ministers, Jeannie Fry and Anita Gwatney. 4

5 The service they use is tucked away in the middle of the prayer book and begins on page 396. The rite is called Communion under Special Circumstances. Significantly enough, the rite begins with four quotations from the Gospel of John, two about bread, including the words from today s Gospel: I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall never be hungry and whoever believes in me shall never be thirsty. Ask Josh, Wanda and the Terrys about taking communion to Louise Mabry in our nineties, almost blind and deaf and to Virginia who suffers with dementia. Both women still recite the Creed and Lord s Prayer line by line when they come to that part./ Carey has already written about the privilege of taking communion to Lawson Anderson, St. Luke s much beloved former rector. Many have experienced a story similar to that told by Norman Runnion. He writes about going to the hospital to 5

6 give communion. When he arrives, the man from his congregation has been discharged, but the charge nurse asks if he could minister to another man on his way to surgery in half an hour. This man is lying face up in his bed with a sheet pulled nearly over his face. I ve brought communion, said Norman. The man pulls the sheet away from his face and says, Thank God. The surgery, he explains, is to try to ease immense pain. You got here just in time, he says, because I m due to go up in a few minutes. He can t swallow either bread or wine with the surgery imminent, but this long time Episcopalian tells his wife, Don t worry, I ll just touch it to my lips. And he takes the bread and dips it into the small portable chalice, and brushes the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation against his lips, and he lies back on the pillow, awaiting surgery, with a look of utter peace. // Jesus said, I am the 6

7 bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. All present at that Eucharist know exactly what these words of Jesus mean. / Many Sundays at St. Luke s as I prepare the table for the Eucharist, I look out and sometimes imagine that I am in a scene from the movie, Guess Who s Coming to Dinner? I then see a parade of diversity coming forward with hands opened for the sacrament/ or arms folded asking for a personal prayer. I also sometimes hear in my heart my Methodist and the Baptist upbringing humming that great evangelist hymn, Just as I am, without a plea.. I come, I come. Yes, Episcopalians do have an altar call. It is called the Eucharist.// I have learned much about the mystery of the unexpected here at St. Luke s by watching the children who participate 7

8 in the Eucharist. They honor the mystery of the unknown so much better than the rest of us do. They come up with bright eyes and wonder and play hide and seek with the bread of heaven. When they receive, they say Yum, or Thank you, and then ask for more. The children seem to know better than we do that the Greek word, Eucharist means, Thank you. "Efxaristo" Thank you. Brouke Reynolds and Chad Price sometimes have to hold back Garrett and Peyton at 8 o clock, they are so anxious to come to the rail./ I can t resist telling about a visit of our oldest granddaughter, Langley, to the altar when she was just a toddler. When my husband brings her up from the nursery, Langley is so excited to see the Eucharist beginning. She leans over, holds out her cupped hands, and asks her grandfather, (Papou, she calls him): Papou, may, may I do it? He responds, of course, Langley. She then 8

9 hugs him and kisses him. /Manna from heaven even before the bread is broken. /I am sure that most of you can tell similar stores, especially Ginna, Ellen, Paula, Beth, Martha, Vera, Shannon, Katherine, Marla, Jennifer who teach the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd to our young children. What do children and sick and dying people know that we do not know? Are they just closer to God physically than we are and so can be more present to the mystery and wonder of it all? Do they know better than we that our incarnate God is present to us in material things, that God is truly present to us in this bread and this wine, that in touching and being touched by these ordinary things, we are being touched by God, and that we can no longer draw a clear line between the secular and sacred in our lives? Jesus took the most common things of his culture from everybody s everyday supper table, bread and wine, and 9

10 made them sacred. I have sometimes wondered what might our communion elements be if Jesus instituted the Eucharist today in 2012 and used the most common food we serve at our meals at home. Is it possible that Jesus might choose sweet tea instead of wine and offer a deep dish pizza instead of bread? But it makes no difference. The point is that at this table Jesus is teaching us to experience the sacred in the ordinary./// The logical left brain is just about through with its work in this liturgy of the word. It is time for the right brain to train its powers of imagination and intuition on what cannot be grasped in any other way. We are about to partake in a holy picnic which first took place on a hillside in Galilee where Jesus feeds the hunger of more than 5000 people with five loaves and two fish. Jesus initiates a four-fold pattern he repeats at least twice in his life, once more around a supper 10

11 table and once on a cross where he takes, blesses, breaks, and gives away the saving bread of his body and the dark burgundy of his own blood. If you want to know manna, if you want to know what is it? if you want to experience the bread of life at this table, don t listen to me any longer, just observe children and the elderly as they come to this altar/ and learn from them. When the invitation to this Eucharist is given, leave in your seat all you have ever known before about communion. Let go of what you THINK this is all about, and EXPERIENCE Eucharist as if for the very first time. C S Lewis reminds us that the communion command is not take/ understand, / but TAKE /EAT. Be open to the surprises, the unexpected, the relationship with each other and with Jesus Christ that is offered at this table. Like holy manna, this is not the meal we would have planned, but it is 11

12 the meal God has given us, the very bread of heaven. Eat this bread, drink from this cup, and know that those empty spaces in our bodies, in our souls will only be filled when Christ is living inside of us and we are living inside of him. COME, LET S EAT: IT S SUNDAY DINNER. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, pp.32-37, Norman Runnion, Manna From Heaven, Preaching Through the year of Mark, pp Kirk Kubicek, Sermon for the Day, Worship That Works. Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, Bread of Angels, pp Louis Weil, A Theology of Worship, p CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, pp The Eucharist as an experience. 12