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First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
Jeremiah 23:1–6 |
Psalm 23 |
Ephesians 2:11–22 |
Mark 6:30–34, 53–56
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Last February we did an instructed Eucharist at this service, and today we are doing a similar one at 10:30.
In the Gospel readings of the past weeks, Jesus and the disciples have been going from town to town, preaching, healing, and feeding hungry people with the nourishing diet of new hope and encouragement to engage in life with integrity. Jesus did not seek to gain dependent consumers of an attractive philosophy. Jesus wanted to recruit disciples, not simply fans or a political constituency beholden to his favors. Jesus recognized the danger in promoting a selfish dependency with the emphasis on personal gratification. That will become clear in next Sunday’s reading when some of the people, who had participated in the feeding of the five thousand, sought to make Jesus their leader by force and Jesus quickly withdrew from them entirely.
Jesus sought to teach his disciples that part of being a healed person, a whole person as it were, involves caring and giving outside one’s own circle of needs. That is why Jesus would often say to a person he laid his hands on, be healed, and now go show mercy in your new life. A forgiven person who, in turn, neglects to forgive or a person who has been shown love and who neglects, in turn, to share love usually becomes very troubled again, quite quickly.
As we gather around this table or altar, we receive the bread of life, food with genuine potential to endure and feed us through thick and thin. The paradox is, however, that the only way we keep continually receiving nourishment from this bread is for us in some way to share and give it to others. If we keep the Gospel just here on Sunday morning, if we forget the promise of God to be with us as soon as we walk outside these doors, the bread of life will disappear as surely as if we were to hold an ice cube in mid-July.
The special bread called manna that God gave to the ancient tribes of Israel in the wilderness only lasted one day. It would rot if it were saved or hoarded. Israel learned it needed to depend on God, and also learned that God had provided enough to share. So it is with the bread that Jesus gives us, the bread of new life. We are his body in that we share with one another. We live as members of that body in so far as we live as that body outside these walls.
As it will be noted, this distinctive service of Christians became known as a mass. The term mass comes from the Latin phrase of “Ita missa est.” That is to say, “Depart, it is the dismissal.” Giving and receiving, coming to the altar rail and being dismissed and going out into the world gives power to what happens here. You really can’t have one without the other. The bread of Christ lives in those who release it. Potential hoarders find Jesus simply withdraws.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
