Three Meditations for World Communion
1. A Meditation on Feeding the Hungry [Isaiah 58:9b-12]
The “What the World Eats” photo essays we just viewed give us quite a picture of the abundance of the earth, the way God satisfies the hungry. But you may have noticed in the photographs of a week’s worth of groceries from around the world that the food wasn’t quite evenly distributed. This came across even though I don’t think Time magazine’s photographers gave us a true representation of the approximately 854 million people who are undernourished, most of whom live in the developing world. Hunger continues to be a scourge among humans. There is enough food, but distribution is lopsided, and we have not yet found the inspiration and collective will to solve the problem.
Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread, recalls in her book getting a phone call from a woman who was planning to do a fund-raising event for a food bank and was looking for “inspirational” quotes about food to use in her program. Sara, a Christian who had come into the church through her profound connection with God through Communion, asked rather lightly, “I guess you don’t want something about eating Jesus.”
The woman hadn’t been amused. “No!” she said. That just puts people off.”
“Okay,” Sara answered, “well, there’s plenty of stuff about feeding the poor and---”
The caller interrupted. “No,” she’d said again. Nothing like that. Nothing from the Bible. Just something inspirational.” [1]
Funny stuff. Of course, people have been inspired by the Bible to feed the hungry. The scripture is pretty pointed about what one ought to do in response to the hungry: feed them. Nothing too complicated about the instruction, really. It is, as the prophet Isaiah reveals, the demonstration of faithfulness that God most deeply desires, “To offer your food to the hungry.”
Seeing something in black and white on a page isn’t always enough to inspire, though. The woman looking for inspirational quotes was on to something there. Life experience, stories from real life may remind people that feeding people is not just something we do to comply with one of God’s rules, but something that brings life to both parties in the exchange of food.
Karla Kincannon tells such a story. Listen: “While in St. Louis at a National United Methodist Student Conference, I had the task of finding communion bread for 900 people. I set out on foot one cold morning in late December to find a nice, warm bakery where I could purchase seven loaves of bread. The wind bit into my cheeks as I pulled my scarf tighter around my head.
“On this frigid day, the streets were almost empty. Only a solitary shopper and an occasional street person were visible as I hurried to complete my task. I paid no more attention to the people I passed than I did to the mannequins in the store windows. I tried to ignore the homeless who had no place to warm themselves. I did not want to feel compassion for them; I was cold, and I just wanted to finish my errand.
“At last, I found the bakery. It felt good to warm my hands around a cup of hot coffee as I enjoyed the fragrance of baking bread. I paid the clerk and turned to face the cold. Arms laden with seven fragrant loaves of bread, still warm from the oven, I quickened my steps in the direction of the hotel.
“I was not outside more than three minutes when one of the street people, whom I had earlier tried to overlook, approached me and timidly mumbled something. In my not wanting to see him, I also could not hear him. ‘Excuse me?’ I said.
“He repeated his request: ‘Could you give me something to eat?’ Shaken to my senses by the sound of his voice, I said immediately, ‘How about a loaf of bread?’ He nodded, looked down at his feet, received the bread with hands outstretched, and quietly walked away.
“I stood there for a second, knowing this had been a holy moment, a moment of shalom. I was jarred out of my complacency and forced to look at one of the meek through eyes of compassion. The bread, intended for a later communion service, had become the body of Christ for both of us, right there on a street corner. This gentle homeless person received bread to fill his hunger, and I received nourishment for my soul.
“In this chance encounter, my frozen heart melted, and I realized I was no different from the one who had asked for bread. We were both equally in need of God’s peace. And in God’s peace, we all get what we need.” [2]
We all get what we need when the hungry are fed.
1. A Meditation on Being Hungry [John 6:35]
Theologian William Willemon reflects on the basic requirement to sit at Jesus’ table. Do you know what it is? Can you guess what qualifies a person to come to Jesus’ table for Communion? Willemon says it is this: you must be hungry.
That doesn’t mean you skip breakfast on Communion Sunday (although it couldn’t hurt!). It has to do with a kind of emptiness that goes beyond a grumbling tummy. Maybe you’ve heard this Zen Buddhist story told about Nan-in, a teacher who was active a hundred years ago in Japan. It seems that one day, Nan-in received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overflowing! No more will go in!" "Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
Do we ever show up to worship full? Full of Raisin Bran or pancakes, sure. But are we also full of our own opinions, our thoughts, our schedules, our possessions, our worries, our obsessions, our accomplishments? Full, in other words, of ourselves? At Jesus’ table we are offered the grace of getting in touch with our hunger. Remembering that we are hungry, so that we may seek out the gifts of God.
Physical hunger can serve as a sacrament in this sense. Sacraments are “visible signs of an invisible grace.” Hunger is sacramental when a growling stomach reminds us that we are creatures dependent on the gifts of a Creator and on the gifts of others. We may have, Willemon proposes, achieved much in life that is worthwhile and enduring, but we never overcome our basic human needs for food and for love. We are still needy, dependent, and vulnerable as far as our most basic needs are concerned. We are much in need of the grace of God. Being rich or being adult or being relatively self-sufficient does not change this basic human condition. [3]
Hunger of the physical and the spiritual kind jog our collective memory that we are still part of the human race. And it may bond us, at least momentarily, with all those other humans who share this terminal condition of being human--including the poor, for whom hunger is more than a temporary discomfort. Our need to be filled in more ways than one links us with the whole human family.
Willemon has said that one of the most radical things we can do is show up for Communion. We come up in front of God and everybody, hold out our hands, and get ready to receive a gift of bread. One may still have a hard time letting go of the master’s degree, the competence, the self-satisfaction that he or she brought with them to the sanctuary. Or one might come full to the brim of shame and disappointment, sadness or fear. Those, too, may be emptied at Jesus’ feet. At Communion time we can look at our empty hands and remember, we’re really empty. We’re hungry. We need a gift. [4] We reach out to our trustworthy God who never fails to satisfy the hungry heart. We receive the gift, the Bread of Life.
2. A Meditation on the Heavenly Banquet [Matthew 26:26-29]
When Jesus speaks of eating and drinking the bread and the wine with the disciples in the Father’s kingdom, he opens up a window to the future. Christians have come to think of Communion as not just a memorial meal that recalls the past but a meal that points to the future fulfillment of God’s kingdom. God’s kin-dom, as we often speak of it, the realm in which we shall all be gathered at God’s banqueting table. There will be more than enough food and drink to go around, and all nations will be seated together—no head tables, no waiters, no “adults only” or “whites only” or” cool kids only” tables. No onlys at all except the Only True God joyfully raising a toast to the beaming diners.
That’s the vision, and that’s what we try to create until the day God’s realm fully unfolds on earth. We don’t have to wait around until it’s completely complete; Jesus always said that God’s realm was breaking into our time and place all the time, and we’ll see it if we pay attention. I think there was a glimpse of it in a beautiful story from the food pantry Sara Miles describes in Take This Bread. On the one-year anniversary of opening the food pantry in her church, she asked the priest to come and celebrate the Eucharist with the workers and clients there, amidst the piles of food waiting to be given away. Sara was in a foul mood, but found it dissolving as the folks gathered. In her words:
“Donald (the priest) showed up, and I wanted to be annoyed with him, but he looked too good. He was wearing a white alb, the food pantry apron, a splendid onyx cross, and a black-and-gold “I [heart] Jesus” skullcap. Then Lawrence strolled in with a tray of cupcakes decorated with maraschino cherries, and it was pretty hard to be mad at him. I went to prepare the bread and wine. ‘Use one of the English muffins,’ Donald suggested, pointing to the bread table, where stacks of them were piled up.
Then Homer, who’d been in the hospital the week before, limped over and hugged me. Starlight came in from the baptismal font, where she’d been bagging rice. Martha appeared, radiant, and she was carrying flowers for us. Then came the Russian ladies with their carts, some Salvadoran families crossing themselves, two punked-out street kids, a confused-looking Chinese grandmother, and then somehow everyone was standing in a circle around the Table, singing the Eucharistic music with Steve leading the familiar, newly resonant prayer. There was a smell of incense and wet cardboard and slightly rotten bell peppers; and fifty voices, out of tune, filled the rotunda; and some little kid was lifted up on a volunteer’s shoulders to see Donald break the English muffin. I understood why Christians imagined the kingdom of heaven as a feast; a banquet where nobody was excluded, where the weakest and the most broken, the worst sinners and outcasts, were honored guests who welcomed one another in peace and shared their food.
“’Let this broken bread and wine be a foretaste of your kingdom,’ we sang, “and bring us finally to your heavenly Table, where no one is left behind, and we will join with saints and angels at the feast you have prepared from the beginning’.” [5]
So may it be.
[1] Miles, Sara Take This Bread New York: Ballentine, 2007, p. 190
[2] Kincannon, Karla M. “In Need of God’s Peace” Alive Now, May/June 1997, p. 55-57
[3] Willemon, William Sunday Dinner: The Lord’s Supper and the Christian Life Nashville: The Upper Room, 1981, p. 67
[4] Willemon, William “An Interview with William Willemon” Alive NowMay/June 1997, p. 16-17
[5] Miles, Sara Take This Bread, p. 157-58