The Most Intense Experience In the World
Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham,
Rector
St.
Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
August
19, 2012; 12 Pentecost, Proper 15, Year B
Episcopal
Revised Common Lectionary
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever."
________________________________________
“Eating is the most
intense experience in the world. There
is no other creative moment that uses all five senses.” That’s a quote from the famous Spanish chef
Ferran Adriá. [i] When humans celebrate, we eat – a wedding
banquet, a White House state dinner, tailgating, the Thanksgiving meal. Sacred meals are important to every enduring
religion. And as Chef Adriá says, all
five senses are involved. “Eating is the
most intense experience in the world.”
That intensity and sensuousness seemed a threat to a
Presbyterian minister from Connecticut who codified a diet in 1837 designed to
help eradicate various kinds of immorality.
The Rev. Sylvester Graham was part of a reform movement that believed
that our tendencies toward vice and sin are provoked by an unhealthy class of substances
he called “stimulants.” Stimulants, he said,
wreaked havoc on the body and leeched people’s vitality, making them ill and
sinful. Alcohol, coffee, tea, sugar,
meat, and refined grains were all unhealthy stimulants, he proclaimed, because
of their distance from the “organic vitality” of nature. (Lest you scoff too much, you might listen to
contemporary warnings of the evils of processed foods; they sound very similar.)
Serious Grahamites ate whole-wheat crackers and other baked
goods made with minimal sugar and fat, along with fruits and vegetables, all
served with water. Not long after Rev.
Graham died his methods got a big boost when the Seventh-day Adventists adopted
his diet as a core of their practice.
The church was formally established in 1863 in Battle Creek, Michigan,
where Adventist leader John Harvey Kellogg found good support for his promotion
of breakfast cereals as health foods. In
1890, Mr. Kellogg started manufacturing Graham crackers for the Adventists
Sanitarium Health Food Stores.
Adventists today point to various studies as evidence that they enjoy
longer lives and better health than the common population, who tends to place marshmallows
and chocolate between Graham crackers to create a sugary, sensuous stimulant we
call s’mores. [ii] And a cracker first invented to quiet the
passions has now been transformed into something wonderfully sensuous and
stimulating.
John’s gospel today speaks of the Eucharistic feast,
something as simple as a s’more. Bread and wine – taken, blessed, broken, and
given. As we experience this simple
meal, time and space break open. We
participate in that first Eucharist at the Last Supper when a young man on the
cusp of death took bread and wine and identified it with himself and with his
coming sacrifice. He told his friends “to
do this in remembrance” of him. The
Greek word for remembrance – anamnesis
– that communicates this command is more than merely remembering something that
happened in the past. It also invites
the past into the present to be re-lived, re-enacted. Time opens and the past becomes present: We are in that upper room with Jesus; we are
at the cross where body and blood become gift and life.
Not only past and present meet in this mysterious moment,
but also future and fulfillment, as we participate in a foretaste of the
heavenly banquet where all is God and God is all.
In this simple meal the church teaches that God grants the
free gift of forgiveness, and we are born anew.
We become one with Christ, for it is his life we consume. And we become one with one another, nourished
by the same life and love in the sharing of the feast.
Our past is healed.
Our present is reconciled and made one with heaven and earth. And we are nourished to go into the world
strengthened to be Christ’s body and blood – Jesus’ hands, and heart and
voice. “The Gifts of God for the People
of God.”
Such a simple thing.
Such profound meaning. As Dom
Gregory Dix famously said:
At the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of
absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the
taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first
done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His
friends on the night before He died. He
had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning “for the anamnesis” of Him, and they have done it
always since.
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to
every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been
done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need
from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles
of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the
earth.
[We] have found no better thing than this to do for kings at
their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph
or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation
of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a
mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an
examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of
whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my
father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return
to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of
Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlements of a strike; for a
son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war;
while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk;
while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the
windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary
of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewed timber all day in a
prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of
Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why [we] have done this, and not
tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by
month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly,
across all parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God. [iii]
I contend that it is not mere eating that is the most
intense experience in the world. I
contend that the Holy Eucharist is the most intense experience in the
world. It is a stimulant of the most
marvelous kind. In it, past, present and
future unite in a physical, mystical and spiritual expression of the fullness
of life’s meaning and direction. The
past is cleansed and healed; in the present we are nurtured and united; and we
are empowered and sent into the future with renewed identity and purpose. We are accepted, invited, fed, and united. We are given an identity and mission in the
life of God expressed through Christ’s gift of himself. All of this comes through the simple elements
of bread and wine. It is more powerful
than a nuclear explosion and as gentle as a child’s open hand.
With awe I invite you to the most wonderful event on
earth. “The Gifts of God for the People
of God.”
[i]
quoted by Jon Reiner, The Man Who Couldn’t
Eat, Esquire online, August 17, 2009, http://www.esquire.com/features/chrons-disease-diet-0909-3
[ii]
What Graham Crackers Can Teach Us About
Whole Foods, by Dana Logan, Religion
& Politics, http://religionandpolitics.org/2012/08/01/what-graham-crackers-can-teach-us-about-whole-foods/,
augmented by the Wikipedia article, Seventh-day
Adventist Church.
[iii]
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy,
Dacre Press, London, 1945, p. 743
posted by Lowell @ 8/18/2012 03:51:00 PM
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