The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
August 17, 2003

Taken, Blessed, Broken, and Given
John 6:53-59

Our Lectionary, or pattern of readings for Sunday worship, has really slowed down this month. We are on our third out of four weeks in a row on a single chapter of John’s Gospel. Two Sundays’ ago, Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Last week, Jesus went on to say, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” Now we hear Jesus say, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood, you have no life in you.”

Next week, we will continue with the same chapter from John and many of his disciples will say among themselves, “This teaching is difficult; who can except it?” The twelve will stick with Jesus, but many others will fall away. Knowing Jesus as a great teacher is one thing, but talking about your flesh as food and your blood is drink is crazy talk.

Of course Jesus’ words are less shocking for those who have grown up with the idea of communion. We know something about eating the bread and wine, which are spiritual food, the body and blood of Jesus. But what must these words have sounded like during Jesus’ own lifetime?

The thing that makes this whole discourse even more amazing is that the discussion does not follow the Last Supper. In fact, Jesus is a couple of years or more from that last meal with his disciples when he announces himself as the Bread of Life in John’s Gospel. This is, after all, John chapter six out of 21 chapters. There is much more time left in Jesus’ ministry before he gets to that last meal with his disciples.

John’s Gospel makes clear what the other three Gospels only hint at—the Eucharist is not about Jesus’ death alone. Jesus’ self-giving act in communion is not about the Last Supper, the cross and the empty tomb alone. Jesus’ whole life, rather than just one or two events, institutes the sacrament of communion.[1] Our faith is not in Jesus’ death and resurrection alone, but in Jesus’ whole life from Bethlehem to Golgotha and beyond to an empty tomb in a garden and Jesus’ appearances to his disciples.

Everything Jesus did—who Jesus was and how he acted—are part of God’s revelation to us. We cannot separate one part of his life out from the rest. We are to take Jesus whole story and make it part of our story. This is something that happens in communion. We don’t just listen to the words, “Take eat,” but we actually get up, come to the front of the church and take and eat. We enter the story and then we are called to make the whole story a part of our story.

It’s not just the bread that we take, bless, break and give. God took Jesus’ whole life, blessed, broke it and gave it to us. We are to let that story of God’s love for us take us, bless us, break us and give us back to the world.

I remember so clearly one day when I experienced this idea being lived out so seamlessly. I went to Folkston to visit Neil Maxwell’s Mom Rhoda. She was in rehabilitation for a broken hip. As we visited, Mrs. Maxwell told me about her life, about her family. But more than once she seamlessly switched from stories of how God had acted in her own life to Jesus’ story.

She could effortlessly go from a story about Neil growing up to say, “Do you remember that time when Jesus was cooking fish on the beach and his disciples did not recognize him at first, then Peter jumped in the water and swam for shore once he knew it was Jesus?” Her quick transitions caught me off guard at first. On subsequent visits with her I found that the story of God’s love shown through Jesus’ life was so integrated with her own story that those sudden switches in conversation came natural for her. When I grow up, I want to be like that. In fact, when we all grow up spiritually, we will be something like that. We will weave the story of God’s love through our lives so that our lives and God’s ongoing story of reconciliation found in scripture will form one tightly woven narrative.

One of the ways we do this is through studying scripture. The more we come to know the stories, the more we can make them our own. The other way we can do this is through corporate worship. We come together to tell the stories of scripture and then through communion to enter into that story and take the bread and cup of life into ourselves.

The communion that Jesus spoke of in John’s sixth chapter, describing himself as living bread is something that has woven itself deeply into the human story. I can think of all the times and places that I have gathered with fellow Christians for communion. From the churches I grew up in, to a cathedral in Bolivia, the ballroom of a fancy hotel in Nepal, out in the open air in a dusty town in Tanzania.

On and on, I could name the places I have taken communion, and the people with whom I have taken communion. People still living that I don’t see anymore, people now long dead and seen only by God. It shows just a tiny portion of those with whom God communes. I’ve tried to imagine all the places in which God has experienced communion and it is beyond my own ability to think.

I want to share with you a short video clip of an unusual act of worship. The scene comes from the HBO special From the Earth to the Moon and it begins with Apollo 13 touching down on the surface of the moon.

[insert four-minute video clip showing Dr. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin
administering himself communion on the moon as Neil Armstrong looks on.]

This first act of worship was under wraps for twenty years. After the trouble NASA got in following the Apollo 8 astronauts reading from Genesis, Buzz Aldrin was told that he could carry communion in his personal kit, but he could not overtly mention it on the radio. An Episcopal laymen at St. Thomas’ Church in Nassau Bay, Aldrin arranged to take reserved sacrament (already blessed bread and wine) with him to the moon. He had a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT, a man smart enough to think of no better way to offer thanks.

Dom Gregory Dix is a scholar of liturgy who book the Shape of the Liturgy, shows how we could almost have expected someone to take communion to the moon. For centuries, we Christians have found no better way to make the story of God’s reconciling love shown through Jesus a part of our story than through this simple act. For Jesus is the Bread of Life whose presence in communion sustains us. Jesus is the Bread that Came Down from Heaven whose presence sustains in every place and situation in which we find ourselves. It is no wonder that Jesus’ command to take, bless, break and give is so obeyed.

Dix wrote,

At the heart of it all is the Eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as they 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 [remembrance] 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 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. Men 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 a 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 settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren women; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while 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 hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of Saint Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men 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 the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancti Dei—the holy common people of God. 

Jesus is the true bread who came from heaven whose presence in communion and in all of your life can draw your story into God’s story if you are willing to let God take you, bless you, break you and give you back to the world. 

Amen.