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TRINITY - MID WEEK - noon
March 28, 1979
Aelan dee 6:4-15

(me Lord Jesus, on the night of his arrest, took bread,
and after giving thanks to God, broke it and said, Onis is
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my body, which is for you; do this remembering me," )

Whether Episcopal, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran,
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Presbyterian, those words, or words very similar are among

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the more precious in our vocabulary .\ Across centuries and
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throughout Christendom today they are part of the Eucharist

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liturgy,\the Institution of the Holy Sacrament, theniac#s~

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MGQtebae Eom ernnnintrine te They are words best left uninterpreted,

T have always felt; unexplained. \ mey say what they mean,

and mean what they say \ But I've always wondered what the
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friends of Jesus thought about when they first heard them.

What do you suppose came to mind around the table that
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night. of the Last Supper, or later when they broke bread
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and remembered.

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"Do this in remembrance of ne. What we remember is aye Smeg’ f

him saying those words: \ the actual iggident which turned

out to be the last supper. \ss friends, however, didn't cee wt
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this remembering me"| they must have thought about other —~»
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times - other events - other occasions of eating together.

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Perhaps they thought about that day, that day none of

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them would ever torget. | They had been traveling through

Galileal\ walking from village to village; {!stopping every

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time a crowd or small group gathered;| stopping sometimes

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to talk with individuals or to watch in fear and awe as Jesus

healed the sick \ Word had_spread like wildfire; \the crowds
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grew in size;\it wasn't long before he was surrounded by
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people wherever he went;\sick people most 1y,,\ poor, old,

crippled, sad people. \ They had begun to clamor for his

attention, to demand healing, to pull at his garments.
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There wasn't time or opportunity even to eat a meal together

or to sit and rest and talk or simply reflect in the silence.
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And so they had convinced him to climb in a small fish-
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ing vessel and sail across the Sea of Galilea.\ It had been
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a quiet voyage:\ but hot as only the bright sun shimmering on
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the ocean can be. \ when they aR OG Ok 2 other side they

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were travel-weary, thirsty, hungry, hoping to find a place
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for a quiet meal and sleep.\ From a long distance out, however,
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they could see the people.\ Somehow the news that he was
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coming had preceeded them:\ people had begun to gather.
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It was late in the day when they climbed out of the
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boat and waded ashore.\ The insistent pleas, the calls for

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help began immediately.=And as he walked_up_into the hills

around the sea a bit, the crowd followed and grew steadily.
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If memory served them correctly, he had asked Philip if
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they could possibly buy enough bread for the whole crowd.
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And Philip, poor Philip, had to answer that there wasn't
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nearly enough money in their meagre traveling treasury for

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that.| Andrew, with not much of a sense of propriety or
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timeliness, in a totally off hand manner pointed to a little
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boy standing nearby and said,( "there you are - that fellow's

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got some bread and tian.) He was trying to be funny and Fach,

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"This is my body which is for you. \ bo this remembering
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me.'' | That -— that strange day is what they remembered when
they broke bread together.

The story is in all four Gospel accounts: |] the only
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miracle of Jesus repeated in each book.\ To the writers and
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compilers of the New Testament this, obviously, was a very
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significant event.| They wanted yery much for the early
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church to remember it.
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It is not fair to attribute its inclusion to the naivete,
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ignorance and scientific innocence/of those first century com-

pilers. \ Their sensitivities were as offended, I would submit,

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as ours are at the suggestion that five loaves and two fish
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became enough food to feed a crowd of several thousand.

That sort of thing didn't happen normally and they knew it.

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The literary hesitance of the Gospel writer himself is
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curious. \Fe has en his hands an event to capture the imagin-

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ation of any creative writer.\ But he never mentions what
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happened .\ The story is told almost reluctantly: \ never once

is the miraculous act described - just the fact of the
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people's hunger, the loaves and fish, and that everybody ate.
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It's almost as if the assertion is straining the writers
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credulity, even as he is writing it down.

Modern Western Christians bring to this story modern
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western sensibilities and the first thing we always ask is,
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"Did it really happen /and how?" The New Testament works
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very hard not to hang any of its assertions about who Jesus

was on his ability to perform miracles. \ But we continue to
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ask and wonder and speculate - as if it mattered, and as if
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we could dismiss him and relax about the whole business of
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Christianity if somehow, someone “could prove conclusively

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that he didn't walk on water. (ose it really happen?" )

is the wrong question, albeit our favorite. The right and

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only question is ("What does it mean? | wad is God's word
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in it for me? \what claim is it making on my life?" )

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— May I suggest two meanings?| The first has to do with

the focus of our religion and the age-old dichotomy in

religion between the sacred and holy, \the spiritual and
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material \ godly and worldly.

Jesus, I have to assume, had a number of alternatives

as he confronted the hungry crowd at meal time. \ He could
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have told them to feed themselves. \He could have chided
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them a bit for not planning ahead and having food with them.

It has always struck me as curious that they were out wan-

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dering about at dinner time without a sandwich stowed away:
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but that tells you more about my priorities than about the
pivie.\ He could also have suggested that the situation
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called for a bit of a fast.| Their religion prescribed

fasting once a year and the very pious_among them probably

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fasted one or two days per week. | surely he could have
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suggested that it was in order to exercise a little self-

denial and bypass dinner.

But he didn't He dealt with their physical hunger:
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he fed them - adequately.\ He took their physical need for

food as seriously as other more spiritual needs.\ In fact,
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he wouldn't have understood what we mean when we start
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talking about physical as opposed to spiritual. { repre
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thought did not divide the human person into tight, clearly

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defined compartments, The later c ies of body, mind
and spirit, in traditional Hebrew thought are combined into
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a whole, and it is not really possible to pull one category
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away and discuss it apart from the others. \ There is a
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physical dimension to spiritual hunger in the Old Testament;
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and a spiritual dimension to physical need.

Happily, we seem to be rediscovering that ancient truth.

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All good medicine is wholistic medicine.\ We are not the
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sum of three or four different parts labeled soul, mind,

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body .\\ We are a ion ee \ ut hi Greeks, in whose language
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and in whose“idiom the early

the New Testament was written,

Church thought, and under nia nes has
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lived for 20 Centuries, didn't See things that way at all.
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In fact, the Greeks, hapg@y divided all reality into

two separate categories: |ene phySical and the spiritual.
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The spiritual realm was the locus of the good: \the physical

was the vehicle of evi | Dudlism\is the correct philosophic

label for it. | And within its constructs the role of religion

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is to show the way to escape from nae banal evils of physical
existence.\

The Greeks gave the world a bad name, made

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physical needs suspect/ and saddled sexuality with a repytation

from which it still hasn't recovered.
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If you think religion is about the spirit and not the
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body, you're a bit of |a | If you_think some jobs

are holy and others unholy: \that some places are sagred and

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others secular.}| If you think sex is fun but a little suspect

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morally:\ if you can't imagine laughing in glee in church -

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your? a better Greek Dualist than Christian: | your religion
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has gery little to do with your_life and you probably have

a lot of trouble with this story about hungry people.

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' Jesus simply dealt with the needs of people.| He didn't
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chose between their spiritual and physical needs. \ He simply,
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in love, reached out to meet their needs.\ There was no
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choice to be made.
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How far we have strayed from that A [rere still debating
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the validity of the Social Gospel - as if there were any other
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kind. ye still wondering whether the real job of the

church is to feed the hungry or preach the Gospel - and the
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answer to both is yes:) both, concurrently.
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Helmut Thielicke wrote somewhere that even a Beethoven

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symphony doesn't sound good if you're shivering in the cold.
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The falseness of the dichotomy was caught one time by
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Charles Schultz in a Peanuts sequence. Snoopy is shivering
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in the cold, alone, miserable, hungry. \He brightens as
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Charlie Brown approaches .\ But Charlie Brown passes by, look-

ing at the unhappy dog and saying ("Be of good cheer, Snoopy." \

And the writer of the Epistle of James asks simply,
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"If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food,

and one of you says to them, \'Go in peace, be warmed and
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filled', without giving them the things needed for the body,

what does it profit." (James 2:15-16)

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The first_meaning of this story then, is that God_comes

to us in our wholeness. \ He cares about us in our wholeness,

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not just the part we label religious. \ Jesus Christ came to

redeem us - our time, our relationships, our values, even
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our physical needs.\ 11 of them - become means by which he
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loves us and calls us to full life.
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The second meaning is that Jesus Christ offers something
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we need as profoundly as we need daily bread. \ We live ina
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time that thinks it doesn't believe that:\ a culture that
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thinks it has outgrown the need for faith: \ a-Life-style that.

takes_a bath in-egotism—and—calls it self actualizatione\ what

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Jesus Christ offers is something we will do anything to
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realize - love, grace, acceptance. \Psychology knows how

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disparately we need to be loved and accepted for who we are:
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how, when deprived of that life becomes a hell of striving

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and grasping for it: \ how many of us drive ourselves twelve

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hours a day, \ seven days a week at tremendous cost to health
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and family - just to prove, perhaps only to ourselves, that

we are acceptable, Wor Wo\ "

Just as he fed the hungry that day long ago, so Jesus

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Christ offers to meet your deepest need and mine today.
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The Good News which he announced, taught, demonstrated and
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incarnated is that we are loved - loved of God;\as we are,
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sometimes in spite of what we are. \that he accepts us and
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bids us live in the joyful, freedom of that acceptance.
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That is the best of all news. \ Tt is food - bread
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and wine: \it is what we need more than anything else in life.
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"This is my body broken for you. | Do this remembering
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me,'' he said. | And before that _( am the bread of life.

He who comes to me will never be hunery."")

So remember him - today - in bread broken at a friendly

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Lunch, | or alone in solitude, \or<with the. shouts and<inéerrup-

tions—ef—your children at dinner \ Remember him as your needS
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are met - this Lord who loves you, and cares about you and

feeds your hunger. Amen.

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