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Third Sunday of Easter
Our Rogation Sunday
April 30, 2006
Delivered by Dora J. Odarenko
Micah 4.1-5
Acts 4.5-12
Luke 24.36b-48
Please pray with me:
Holy God, holy and merciful, holy and mighty,
you are the river of life,
you are the everlasting wellspring,
you are the fire of rebirth.
Glory to you for oceans and lakes,
for rivers and creeks.
Honor to you for cloud and rain,
for dew and snow.
Your waters are below us, around us,
above us:
our life is born in you.
You are the fountain of resurrection.[1]
AMEN
From today's Gospel: While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. (Luke 24.41-3)
A pilgrimage-long or short, across the sea or local-is a journey, a search for a sacred place. It is both holiday and holy discipline. It is also adventure. It can be risky. St Peter's is on pilgrimage in our town this morning. And not only St. Peter's. In the Cheshire Herald, we invited others to assemble with us. Not to walk as Episcopalians, but-in the words of Micah- "to walk in the name of the Lord our God."
That word "our" is not simple. We walk always, in some sense, as individuals. But we walk as a church, and so, as many, we are one. We walk as a town, and so, again, we many may be one. Even as a more-than-local group, we might be called an ekklesia. Ekklesia can be translated as an "assembly" as well as "church," individuals who are gathered together through a common heritage and a common yearning.
In the Gospel story this morning, the disciples have assembled not for a procession but for mutual comfort and support. They have heard rumors that Jesus has been seen and they are frightened and in shock. As we know, they have many individual personalities, but at this point, in their crisis, they are one. And then Jesus appears, explains the Scriptures to them, asks them to remember his words, and tells them that they must become a larger assembly. He is going to send them out on what will become a long journey for they will proclaim his message "to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem." We often call this larger assembly that they and others have gathered throughout the centuries by the name of "Church."
But who is it who is standing among them and teaching? Not a ghost, as they first think. He tells them, "It's I myself. Touch me and see." It's me, your friend-and I'm hungry. And so they feed him. They give him some fish and he eats it in the most human way. So too the 4,000 and the 5,000 eagerly ate fish and bread and Jairus' little daughter was able to eat after Jesus raised her from death.
The disciples are no longer alone or comfortless: They are starting to learn that to be an Easter People means that Jesus is still their friend; he has not deserted them or their world.2 In the future, for them and for us, he will again be present at meals, over and over again, when his community assembles for the breaking of bread and reading of Scripture.3
Are you struck, as I am, by Jesus' asking his disciples for something to eat? Are you struck by his perpetual reminding us of his presence through the breaking of bread? He knew-and knows-how needful bread is-and how painful is hunger. Some of us gathered here can take a simple meal for granted. Bread can be something to avoid because it's filled with carbs, or, conversely, it is something very special that we wonderfully make ourselves, either with or without a bread machine. Our children in the Sunday School loved making flat bread for Palm Sunday. In their excitement, one could feel the importance of their enterprise. Some of their bread was carried in our procession this morning.
Somewhere I have an old cookbook with delicious recipes for the home-baked bread or rolls that were carried in lunch baskets to the individual cottages at the MacDowell Colony or at Yaddo so that the artists could continue working throughout the day. When she was there, the writer Tillie Olsen told the baker that these breads were not the staff of life, but the wings of life; they gave wings to her thoughts.
For much of the world, however, bread is still first and foremost the staff of life, that which literally supports life. My professor of Liturgical Theology at Yale, Gordon Lathrop, explains that bread is usually "food for a group. It implies a community gathered around to eat together, to share in the breaking open of this compressed goodness."4 Bread links the bounty of the earth with the labor of cultivation and of food preparation. Where there is bread, there is a meal and thus, Lathrop argues, it becomes not only the symbol of the meal and of all food, but the symbol of human life when it is peaceful, fruitful, and in order.5 And, like most good symbols, it also remains richly, importantly, itself.
But, as our Gospel hymn 204 has just reminded us, "the green blade riseth from the buried grain," from grain that must die before it can rise again. And so Lathrop's startling conclusion is that even our "bread is never far from death." The loaf tells us that we are vulnerable, "dependent on that which is outside us."6 The whole loaf, the broken loaf, made from the grain that must die: No wonder our hymn tells us that Jesus is "laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen."7 And no wonder that Jesus tells us that the bread is his body which is given for us and that he asks us to break it in remembrance of him so that it may feed us and the world.
In the context of this Gospel story and others, it is clear that Jesus asks that we celebrate his life--as he asked his disciples-"in communal life in the midst of the world"8 and with ever-increasing awareness that the ground on which we stand is holy. Gordon Lathrop's book on this subject, Holy Ground, is worth reading. Surely a communal life on holy ground implies that we acknowledge physical as well as spiritual hunger and that no one's hunger is seen as irrelevant.9 It is in this world, filled with those we have never seen, that our incarnate Lord asks us, at least for now, to do his work.
We start with real people, in a real town, with many an "earthly connection."10 We know that, when we love, even little things delight us. We may have noticed this morning-perhaps in a slightly new way-the pattern of brick in our sidewalk (some of them broken), the young trees set out in the grassy space at the corner of Route 10 and Main, the children and young people asperging us and the earth with real water. Real bread in our basket in procession, real fire in our hibachi at the Great Vigil, real bread and real wine on our altar.11
Just as Jesus reassured his disciples with his physical presence and then sent them out into the world, all of these "concrete things"12 prepare us, nourish us so that we can stretch-in the way we are doing this morning--our notion of assembly. As we stop and pray on our holy walk, the stations become places of meeting between us and our Creator, between us and that larger assembly, gathering, fellowship, ekklesia to which He is drawing us.
We are on pilgrimage, experiencing familiar territory as something much larger than we had imagined. Claiming the physical world as sacred may allow us to take it and its care far more seriously. This world is nothing less than a gift, precious beyond our comprehension, from the One who alone is our "everlasting wellspring," and "the fountain of [our] resurrection." Caring for one another and for this earth may at times be the hard and risky13 part of pilgrimage, but reentering the open door of the church for the Eucharist, Sunday after Sunday, we can offer our journey and our assembled selves to the one who has already-- in faithfulness and compassion-- assembled the world, this world, and this world in its entirety.
AMEN
1 Prayer from Vigil of Easter, The Church's Year: Propers and Seasonal Rites, Renewing Worship B, ELCA Provisional Use (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004), 271.
2 Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness (Massachusetts: Cowley Publications, 1995), 68.
3 Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina (Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1991), 405.
4 Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 91.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Hymn 204 may be found in The Hymnal 1982 According to the Use of The Episcopal Church (New York: Church Publishing Inc., 1985).
8 Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 133.
9 Archbishop Williams, Ray of Darkness, 70.
10 Lathrop, Holy Ground, 135.
11 Ibid. This final book of Lathrop's trilogy (Holy Things, Holy People, Holy Ground) tackles head-on the necessary partnership between our liturgy and ecological ethics.
12 Ibid.
13 Archbishop Williams, Ray of Darkness, 70. In his reflections on Ascension Day, here referenced, that gave me some insights for this sermon, Williams, as always, alerts us to the risks involved in taking Christianity seriously.
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