Saturday, February 25, 2012

Sermon for the Last Sunday of Epiphany
February 19, 2012
Recently, in my preaching, I have been talking about Jesus in new ways, ways I didn’t learn in my early life in the Episcopal Church.  Of course what I really have been doing is trying to reclaim some language I had ceded to some other Christian folks who I always thought were just a little too comfortable talking about Jesus.  Anyway, I have been talking a lot recently about the up-close God whose name is Jesus in ways that seem new to some of you and to me as well.  I’ve made jokes about people wondering if I have gone off the deep end, and even Mary has been looking at me a little funny lately.   But there is a way I have always been taught to expect Jesus to be present.  It is a teaching I received as a child and one for which I am very grateful.  From a very early age I was taught to expect to meet Jesus in the Eucharist.
I was taught that somehow, Jesus was in that bread and wine.  Now I have been wanting to talk about the Eucharist for a while--to do some basic introduction of what we are about in this central rite of our tradition and this seems like a good time.  There is a strong connection to the last Epiphany gospel we just heard, but we will get there in a a minute.  What I have come to understand so far about the Eucharist is that we do meet Jesus there, we do meet God there and it happens in all kinds of ways.  It happens in different ways at different times in our lives.  
Some of us have come from traditions that have very specific teachings about how Jesus is in the bread and wine.  They teach that somehow, though the elements still look like bread and wine, they are actually changed into the body and blood of Christ in the prayer at the table.  You may have been told that it is important for you to believe that.  Others may have come from traditions where communion is not celebrated often or maybe not at all, and where it is seen mainly as a commemoration of Jesus’ last night with his friends.  It is a good thing for Christians to do, but there is no magic there.  The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church and some others use a wonderfully ambiguous term to describe what we believe about the bread and wine, one that invites, intrigues and leaves a lot open to interpretation.  We say we believe Christ is really present in this sacrament.  Really present.  We don’t say or worry about exactly how that happens.  We just expect it to be true.  
And it is true for many of us in many different ways over our lifetimes.   Sometimes we come looking for strength and we find it.  Sometimes we seek forgiveness and there it is.  Sometimes we come with no idea what we are looking for and we are surprised to find ourselves renewed in some way we didn’t know we needed.  Other times we come and go without much sense of having received anything, but even those times may be seen to have conveyed something as we look back on them later.  In the Eucharist we get a little glimpse, a little taste of what God is like.  We touch for a moment the God who is for us, who loves us and welcomes us and is poured out for us.  We come to the table, we receive communion, and we go back to our seats and mostly, we never tell anyone what just happened.  We don’t often talk about what we have received--what we have experienced.  We keep quiet and we carry the experience with us as we go out from here into the world.  
It is a little like what happened to Peter, James and John.
The story of Jesus being transfigured on that mountain is always the gospel reading for the last Sunday in Epiphany.  We have been hearing other stories--the magi finding the baby, the healing stories, the casting out of all those demons--all pointing to God present in the world in a new way in Jesus.  This final story is the most dramatic.  Here, Jesus shines with the light of God in his person.  For just one moment, Peter, James and John see Jesus as he really is.  The curtain is lifted for just a second and they glimpse the reality behind the words and the healing and everything else that will follow.  They are given a great gift in this experience of light.  As they come down the mountain, they want to focus on what has just happened, they want to enshrine the moment and Jesus tells them that would miss the point.  They are not to discuss what has happened until he has been raised from the dead.  He tells them ‘the time to tell about this experience will be later, when you are living out my purpose in the world.‘   This gift of clarity will strengthen them, fuel them and remind them of what they are about as they take on the life of being the body of Christ.
Whether we climb mountains with Jesus or take him in our hands in the humble elements of bread and wine, we don’t bask too long in the experience.  We are sent out, changed and marked by the experience to be Jesus in the world.  That “changed” business is another part of what I learned about the Eucharist as a child.  It changes us.  The collect for today quotes St. Paul who says we are being changed from glory into glory until we are transformed into the glory of Christ.  The transfigured Christ is a glimpse of the true nature of not only Jesus, but of ourselves in Christ, an image we are probably not ready to see.   We come to the table week after week to take Jesus into  our hands and we go away marked in ways we may not even notice, ways we may not even have imagined to hope for.  But somehow, God is at work--Jesus is at work in the mystery that is the Eucharist.  And somehow in that process we are made new.
Our seminarian, Susan, was telling me about her trip to the holy land.  She encountered a group of monks in the desert who, when they put the bread in her hands at communion said, “become what you receive.”   In a few minutes when you receive the bread and wine at this table you will hear those words.  The response says it all.  Your line will be, “the body of Christ.”   JB