"Hidden in the Soup"--October 24, 2019

"Hidden in the Soup"--October 24, 2019

"For I received from the Lord what I also handed onto 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 this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord." [1 Corinthians 11:23-27]

They say a fish doesn't know that it's wet.  Maybe that's why it's taken me so long to come around and think about the glaring way that Christ is present in the ordinary every Sunday where I worship by showing up in bread and wine.  It's been there all along--he's been there all along--but maybe I had forgotten that, for whatever else the Lord's Supper is about (and it is about many things at once), it is at the Table where Christ chooses to be present not only among ordinary people, but among ordinary ingredients, too.

Let me lay some of my cards on the table.  I come from the Lutheran branch of the Christian family tree--a tradition that revels in paradox, celebrates its earthiness, and unapologetically confesses that Christ is truly present in what we often call "the sacrament of Holy Communion," or "the Lord's Supper," or "the Eucharist."  Ours is a way of thinking and believing that is willing to bang on tables with the insistence that Christ is present, in Luther's words, "in, with, and under" the bread and the cup.  He's really there.  He's not just leaving us with a neato metaphor to think about.  And he's not just giving us an edible reminder of what happened a long time ago--Christ is really and truly present even in something as ordinary and common as bread that was baked in somebody's home kitchen earlier that morning.  If that sensibility pushes your theological buttons and you'd like to make a discreet walk to the exits for today, you are more than welcome.  But consider this your sacramental spoiler alert: beyond this point, there be dragons--well, not so much dragons, as a willingness to see Christ in ordinary flour and fermented grapes.

So, like I say, where I find myself on Sunday mornings, we share in this ancient meal of bread and wine every week, following what we think was the very same pattern of the earliest Christians, who saw every Sunday as a celebration of the resurrection and of re-creation (the eighth day of a seven-day week, or the first day of a brand-new creation).  And part of what we believe, based in part on the way Paul talks here to the Corinthians, is that Christ is really and truly present--that we can meaningfully call the bread and cup "the body and blood of Christ."  Paul seems so sure of that fact that he says you are "answerable for the body and blood of the Lord" when you share in this meal, and therefore we shouldn't be casual, glib, or self-centered with these gifts.  

Now, lots of Respectable Religious people over the years have spilled a lot of ink focusing in on that phrase about being "answerable," or about not eating and drinking "in an unworthy manner," and to be honest, I think they have missed the thrust of what Paul is really saying.  We've been so hung up on what list of dos and dont's Paul has in mind, or what metaphysical theory we should adopt for understanding what happens at Communion, that we seem to skip right over the amazing and audacious claim that Christ really there, being given out and shared, amongst ordinary ingredients from the supermarket.  That is the real headline, isn't it?  That Christ--and therefore God--chooses to be breakable like bread, pourable like wine, and also therefore shareable, spillable, and vulnerable, right in the midst of our ordinary gatherings?

Maybe we have lost something over the centuries by building official worship spaces, sanctuaries, and edifices called "churches," because we end up losing some part of the utter commonness of what is happening here.  When Paul wrote, of course, Christians weren't gathering in cathedrals or basilicas or even in rented public buildings.  We were gathering in people's homes, often in a common room or open area, in house churches that were literally somebody's home for the rest of the week.  And in the midst of what was apparently a potluck dinner, they would pause to retell the story of what Jesus did on the night of his betrayal, remember how that was inextricably tied to what happened at the cross, and then they would break the bread and pour the wine that Jesus himself had told the was his body and blood.  And it all happened in someone's living space.  Right in the thick of ordinary life.  My goodness, it wasn't even considered a religious day by the Empire or for the Jewish community around, either--Sunday was a work day in the Empire, and Judaism recognized Saturday as its sabbath.  So the early Christians met on an ordinary work day, in ordinary living space, using ordinary bread (note that Paul here doesn't even mention that it was a Passover meal in his retelling here, and therefore doesn't specify that it was unleavened bread), and they were convinced that none other than the Creator of the universe came to be present in the meal, indwelling the community like the proteins in grains of wheat become parts of your cells.

For whatever else is happening at the Lord's Supper--and yes, it is about remembering what Christ did at the cross for us, as well as about pointing us toward the promised future where we'll eat at the Lamb's Feast without end--this meal is about the God who becomes ordinary yet again, having already become ordinary in the olive-skinned flesh of a homeless Jewish builder's boy named Jesus.  And if it is true that God is willing to invade baked dough and fermented juice to be present and given away to us, then it is no harder to imagine that God chooses to show up in all the other ordinary moments and places of every day life, too.

In my tradition, that is exactly the point, in fact.  As the story goes, our older brother in the faith Martin Luther wrote to his Swiss fellow reformer and frenemy Ulrich Zwingli once that Christ "is as present in your cabbage soup as he is in the sacrament.  The difference is that he is hidden in the soup and revealed in the sacrament." But once your eyes can dare to discern the Maker of All Things being broken up and torn by hand to be placed in the sweaty hands of the old and the young at the communion rail, then all of a sudden, you can recognize that there is no place you go that is not already holy ground, permeated with the very presence of God, and filled with the presence of Christ.

And all of a sudden, the question is not, "Where should I go to find God?" but rather, "How have I missed it all this time, when I was like a fish that didn't even know it was wet?"

God has been hidden in the soup all this time.

Lord Jesus, let us see you in the places you choose to be revealed and recognizable, so that we will spot you everywhere else, too.