Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 2, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Well, it’s Communion Sunday again. Today we participate once more in one of the most sacred and one of the most ancient rituals of the Christian faith. Christians have been coming to the table of the Lord to eat the bread and drink the cup for nearly two thousand years. The Christian tradition insists that the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the technical name for what we usually call Communion, has great spiritual power. Indeed, it must have great spiritual power, for any religious ritual that did not have great spiritual power would hardly have lasted for two millennia.

Yet I suspect that some of us sometimes take this blessed Sacrament for granted. I know I sometimes do. It becomes something we do by rote, out of habit, or because it’s just what you do in church. Some of you think we do it too often. Some of our members simply don’t come on Communion Sundays. Yet you have heard me say many times that the Eucharist is very important to me. Indeed, it is for me the central devotional act of my spiritual life. When I get over taking it for granted it moves me like nothing else in Christian worship does. I have, at least on occasion, powerfully experienced the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion—more about that phrase “real presence” in a minute. And I think maybe our passage from John this morning helps explain why that is so.

The story we heard from John is set shortly after Jesus has fed five thousand people from five loves of bread and two fish. He says to the people that they are looking for him not because they “saw signs” but because they ate their fill of the bread. He means, I think, that the people are seeking Jesus not because they know who he really is. Instead, they are seeking him because they got fed literal, physical bread. Then he tells them that that’s not what they should desire. Physical bread is not what will truly feed them. John’s Jesus says: “Do not work for the food that perishes, bur for the food that endures for eternal life.” A few lines later the people get it. They say to Jesus: “Sir, give us this bread always.” Of course, because they don’t yet truly understand who Jesus is, they don’t really know what they’re asking for. So he spells it out for them: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

So there you have it. The bread we should truly seek is not literal bread at all, it is a person. It is Jesus Christ. Of course Jesus knew that people needed physical food. He fed all those people literal bread, after all. Yet here he says that, as important as literally feeding people is, there is something that people need more than bread made from wheat. People need to be fed the symbolic bread that “endures for eternal life.” And recall, as I said last week, that in the Gospel of John “eternal life” means life with God here and now, in this life. We get that eternal life, that life with God here and now, when we come to Jesus Christ.

Which is precisely what we do when we come to the bread of the Eucharist. The Christian tradition has long insisted on the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist. Christians have understood “real presence” in different ways. The Roman Catholic church teaches a kind of physical transformation of the essence of the elements into the actual body of Christ. We Protestants don’t accept that understanding, which seems sort of primitively magical to us and which is grounded in a complex Aristotelian philosophy that doesn’t make much sense to us. Many of us understand “real presence” in a symbolic sense, with the understanding that symbolic presence is, if anything, more real than mere physical presence.

However you understand the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, I invite you this morning to understand as you come to the bread of the Eucharist that you are coming to the bread of life, that you are coming to Jesus Christ himself. Approach him in reverence. Approach him in awe. Approach him in silence. Approach him as your connection with God. As you come to the bread of life, open yourselves to the presence of God. Be filled with it. Rejoice in it. Let it lift your spirits and transform your life. It may look like an ordinary piece of bread. It isn’t. It is nothing less than the bread of life, even Jesus Christ himself present in our midst. And for that presence we can truly give God our heartfelt thanks and praise. Amen.