The unity that lives behind our broken vision
Lent 4C  |  Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Jesus tells this incredible parable in response to the Pharisees who scoff at his choice of dining companions. Ritual purity prevents the devout from dining with tax collectors and sinners, yes, but so does custom and expectation. They seem to be saying that Jesus is hanging with the wrong kind of people. And to this, Jesus tells three parables of loss and finding: a sheep, a coin, and a son. I think most of us have little trouble recognizing these teachings suggesting that Jesus’s focus ought to be on the people in need of redeeming — because the redeemed are fine.

But it is in this third parable, that we feel the emotional energy of what that means. What it means to love those people others would exclude. To make that his mission over maintaining the comfort of the comfortable.

This parable plays with our understanding of inside and outside. Inside the family circle and outside it. In and out. A binary either/or. And both sons utilize this thinking. They mind who is in and who is out — including themselves. And notice the father never does. With him, there is only us.

The substance of the story is this: One son asks for his inheritance early — meaning, give me now what would come to me when you die. In a thematic way, the son has emotionally killed off his own father. He goes and uses the wealth until it’s gone. A famine, a natural disaster threatens his existence and he realizes there is only one person who would be kind and fair enough to help him. And he goes to his father, not for reunion as son, but as a hired hand — a servant.

The father doesn’t see a stranger coming up the walk, does he? He sees his son. How foolish he is to think he could be outside of his father’s love! He is the one who had mentally killed off his father and emancipated himself but here, the father calls this reuniting the son’s resurrection, for he was dead and is now alive.

The other son, meanwhile, gets all bitter and huffy at the word coming to him from the servants that his father is throwing a party (from his inheritance!) for his deadbeat brother who unsurprisingly came back after squandering the fortune. Some of us responsible types might be sympathetic, but his own thoughts betray him because he doesn’t see his neighbors as family (they’re the help) but he doesn’t see his own father as family either. He calls his father the master and himself a slave and the party he wanted Dad to offer him was one with his friends — not him. And not his brother. He is the one who stayed, thinking himself responsible, but in his own mind  he doesn’t even consider his own family to be family.

And the father’s appeal, once again, to a second prodigal and wayward son, is to say that they are together, have been together, day after day. The elder son is choosing his own exile, claiming his own victimhood, rejecting the community that is there — making himself an outsider — when the father sees only neighbors. And we party when the lost are found.

We too often frame our present experiences around divisions, binaries of broken relationships — insiders and outsiders — citizens and immigrants — good and bad — smart and stupid — rich and poor — deserving and undeserving — as if these divisions mean anything at all. As if this is how God wants the world to work. How God wants us to work — to see one another through a lens of in or out. And that is flat out wrong. We are neighbors. We take care of one another. And when one is lost we aren’t angry when the shepherd goes after the one who is lost because we are fine! We have each other! We are here, safe, together.

We celebrate findings, resurrections, because we are a neighborhood. We are a people of love, a family of commitment to hope and health, to Shalom. And God’s love is always present.

Communion as Presence

So far this Lenten season, we’ve explored the origin of Holy Eucharist, its dangers, and what are our common practices around it. This week, I thought we could dig into what we are doing, what we think is happening, and how we talk about it.

Holy Eucharist is a sacrament of the church, which is a word we only really associate with church, isn’t it? What are we saying to one another when we call something a sacrament? Or that something is sacramental? We’re ascribing value and spiritual heft, right? This is important to us spiritually. 

We also associate it with ritual. So it is something we practice and do in particular ways and for particular purposes. We might think of our own rituals in this light: like decorating the Christmas tree is a ritual. We bring it out at specific time of year, string the lights before hanging the ornaments, right? We have patterns because they make sense and because we need them. Because the time you put the ornaments on before the lights is the time you remember why you put the lights on first.

Sacraments are a Holy Both/And of the the spiritual and the physical. It is ritual and it is meaning.

According to the Catechism, page 857 of the Book of Common Prayer, it says: 

“The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”

Outward and inward, both. Given as a certain means of receiving. This is an elegant way of describing a mark of holiness, of our setting the moment aside, lifting it up, and naming what God is doing in it, within us here.

The fact that it is spiritual and physical is also to say that it is effectual in both ways, that it is for our whole selves and also for our real, embodied selves. 

Many of us often struggle with the metaphorical and the metaphysical — the spiritualizing of our tradition — which is to say that we like to think the effectual nature of faith is confined to the spirit realm and not, say, dealing with the material needs of our neighbors who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness.

And many of us make the physical, real, lived world the extent of our conviction. That we don’t play in the realm of soul and spirit, or reckon the work of God in Jesus having a relationship to both axes of spirit and body.

The Eucharist, as sacrament, as gathering tradition, uses the unifying character of body and spirit, to express what happens within and without, in us and with us. It is that we share in bread and then wine, as Jesus taught, but to do so with the vision that it isn’t magic. The priest’s hands aren’t magic. And we aren’t witnessing a trick of transformation. But we are participants in change, in something that involves us and also dwells within the realm of God’s power.

To honor and know something that has already happened, that God’s grace is bestowed upon us in Jesus. But this helps us see it. Know it. Be it.

So we gather each week in this participatory ritual. We pray the prayers and put our hands in the air and we talk of Jesus’s work and of God’s grace. We recall the memory of the last supper, which we call The Words of Institution, when we remember that Jesus taught us to remember by sharing in the bread and wine, like a holy string around a finger — remember!

And we invite the Holy Spirit to bless the food and drink in a moment we call the Epiclesis, which is Greek for “invocation” like a prayer before a meal, using words which, in Latin were mockingly heard as hocus pocus, attempting to turn this holistic moment of grace into a trick.

And yet we gather anyway, to receive from a table/altar this sacramental offering of joy and sustenance which reminds us of what God has done and continues to do with us and in us.

Because we are whole beings, full of grace and the joy of Christ. We exist in space with other beings, whole and full, too, and loving and giving and remembering, too. Imperfect and joyful, hopeful and curious, and we are where we are and God is with us and calling us and celebrating us and if we are open to it, we can join the party — we all were invited, it is happening right now, because resurrections are found everywhere and here you and I are and here is this moment and we can be of use and we can love and know and see and share in this unquenchable, eternal, hope-raining grace and, like this bread and wine, we all might become truly graceful.