Here is Fr. Davids sermon for this weekend. Growing up in the Keill household, if you wanted to eat dinner, two things needed to happen. My mother (the hostess) would have to pick up her fork. But, before we got there, we had to say grace. That was either my job or my sister Katies job. We would always say the same thing: God is great. God is good. And we thank him for our food. Amen. It would take another three decades and my marriage to Cynthia to find out that there is another verse! By his hand we all are fed. Give us, Lord our daily bread. (This was before the internet,so if you didnt know the verse, you were out of luck). After I got ordained, I had to come up with a more professional sounding prayer. After all, with three years of seminary and a Masters Degree, God is great doesnt cut it! So I usually say what a lot of priest say, Bless this food to our use and us to your service, making mindful of the needs of others. However, my favorite grace of all time is the Superman Grace. I was taught this by my nieces, Carolyn and Stelli. It is sung to the opening credits of Superman, Thank you God for giving us food. Thank you God for giving us food. For the food we eat and the friends we meet. Thank you God for giving us food. Regardless of the specifics, when we pray before we eat, we acknowledge that everything that we have comes from God. Saying grace is a very familiar ritual in our culture, whether or not you are religious. A quick scan of Hollywood reminds us that the act of saying grace before eating is still widespread in America today. Whether it is Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents, Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights or Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act -- all pretty funny scenes -- we are familiar with the practice. Giving God thanks before eating is not a twenty-first century innovation by any stretch. In our gospel lesson the apostles come to Jesus with a problem. Its dinner time and there is not enough food to go around. Jesus responds to the apostles: You give them something to eat. That is a sermon in and of itself, but I will save that for another Sunday. It is clear that Jesus intends to feed the crowds. He asks for what food that people have, and he is told that there are five loaves of bread and two fish. However, before the crowds can eat, something needs to happen. God needs to be thanked for the food. Jesus takes that on and he does something that is very familiar to all of us. He says grace. Jesus does not, however, say, God is great, God is good and he certainly does not sing the Superman Grace! Instead, he follows a form that would have been familiar to the people of his own day. He says the berakah, which was the Jewish form of thanksgiving before eating. The berakah had four parts to it. The four parts are: taking, blessing, breaking and distributing. If you look carefully at our reading today from the Gospel of Matthew, you can easily see the four parts in the berekah that are described by Matthew. Jesus receives the bread and the fish, looks up into heaven, then blesses the bread. He then breaks the bread into pieces. After that, the food is given to the apostles to distribute to the crowd. We may not notice it right away, because Jesus is not using the form of saying grace that we are familiar with. The people are not seated around a table with their heads bowed. But the people of the time would have realized that Jesus was performing the four actions of the berakah prayer. Jesus was saying grace. However, Jesus was doing even more than that. He was, of course, performing a miracle. He was feeding thousands of people; five-thousand men, Matthew tells us, in addition to the women and the children who were present. But lets save that aspect for another sermon (that makes two other sermons I can preach on this passage!). Jesus was preparing his followers for the way in which he would continue to nourish us, even after he was gone. Later in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, where he would ultimately be crucified, Jesus wants to share one last meal with his disciples. This is the Last Supper. He arranges for a room, and as the apostles are gathered around the table, as the leader, Jesus says grace. What form does the grace take? If you said, berakah, you paid attention to the first half of the sermon! In Matthew 26, Jesus takes the bread, blesses the bread, breaks the bread and then gives it to his apostles. Jesus, this time, however was doing more than simply saying grace before a meal. Knowing that he would not be in the presence of the church, Jesus on that night instituted the sacrament that we in the Episcopal Church call the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Christians have disagreed over the centuries as to what exactly Jesus was telling us to do. Members of more Protestant churches, such as Baptist churches believe that Jesus was calling us to gather together to remember him and to remember his life and works. When I was a child in the Presbyterian church, the food element of communion consisted of a cube of bread that was passed around in trays and a small glass of grape juice. Not much to the food part of communion; the emphasis was on the instruction of Jesus: Do this for the remembrance of me. Do Episcopalians reject that element of remembrance? Absolutely not. As I say the Eucharistic prayer, listen for history and remembrance. You will find that there is a lot of it. In the Episcopal Church, we put a much greater emphasis on the bread and the wine, and what Jesus had to say about it. Jesus said, This is my body and This is my blood --- emphasis on the is part of those phrases. How are the bread and wine the body and blood of Jesus? Thats a whole other sermon for another Sunday (that makes three!). But, put concisely, in the Roman Catholic church people believe in a doctrine called transubstantiation. Without going into all of the Aristotelean philosophy that underlies the doctrine, you can put it this way: it may look like bread and wine, but what you are eating and drinking during the Eucharist is actually the body and blood of Jesus. Most people in the Episcopal church believe in the doctrine of real presence, which means simply that yes, you are consuming bread and wine, but Jesus is really there as well. In typical Episcopal church fashion, it is more of a both and than an either or. However, you can see the difference in our beliefs versus more protestant churches in that we either consume all of the remaining bread and wine or we carefully dispose of it, usually returning it to the earth in some way or other. When we gather together on Sunday, there is a lot going on, so you have to pay attention or you might miss some of it! Our gospel lesson today has a very basic lesson on the surface of it. All that we have, including the food that we eat, comes from God. Jesus came, in part, to encourage us to feed our brothers and sisters who do not have enough to eat. By the way, this is why I encourage people to bring their items for the Food Pantry during communion; as God feeds us, we feed others. However, Jesus took the basic Jewish blessing ceremony -- the berakah -- and transformed it on his last night on earth. We gather together each Sunday to remember Jesus as he instructed us. We remember his life, his teachings, his death and his resurrection. Not only, that, Jesus continues to feed us, not only with bread, fish and the other physical foods of our world. Jesus feeds us with spiritual food, being present to us to nourish us, guide and strengthen us for mission as we gather together each week to receive his body and blood. Isaiah 55:1-5 Psalm 145:8-9, 15-22 Romans 9:1-5 Matthew 14:13-21
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 16:14:41 +0000
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