Sermon, 8/3/21. Transubstantiation: What’s in Your Diet?

10 Pentecost

Psalm 5:1–13; II Samuel 11:26–12:13a; Ephesians 4:1–16; John 6:24 35

Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.’ John 6:35a.

I speak to you today about a topic that, so I am sure, occupies your nightly dreams.  That topic is transubstantiation.  Let us not forget that we clerics are expected to look to the readings of the day for the foundation of our homilies and sermons, and so I did and do.  Admittedly, transubstantiation is not a word in your or my daily-use vocabulary, but it lies quietly in the recesses of our brains.  It is a term most likely tossed about hourly by learned theologians.  And so, before I awaken that long word from its slumber, I take the privilege of office, in order to share with you several personal encounters with transubstantiation.  To do that, I repeat a key statement from today’s gospel: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.’ (John 6:35a)

In a previous life, I had a colleague/friend who was by profession an anthropologist and, as is so often the case when two people are becoming acquainted with each other, this colleague asked me how I amused myself when I was not relaxing with some obscure medieval German text, a specimen of my profession.  I told her, and apparently to her utter surprise, that I collected cookbooks.  I do so no longer, but at that time I had in my collection cookbooks from countries such as the Philippines, France, Germany, India, Scandinavia, Italy, and the U.S.A.’s southland, including “Soul Food.”  I confess that I may not have prepared a recipe from every book, but I had read [them], and with great interest.

My colleague was fascinated by my hobby; after all she, not I, was the trained anthropologist, the one who studied habits and habitats of humans.  What, she wanted to know, was the cause of my fascination?  Perhaps the colorful pictures?  Indeed, the pictures were colorful.  However, they were not the root of my curiosity.  Like her, I was curious about people and, so I explained to her, those books were a gateway to faraway lands and peoples.  They introduced me to the cultures far removed from my immediate environment.  Recipes tell me what is important to a living, vibrant culture, just as investigating pottery and other artifacts allowed her to understand a previous people.   

I could tell her, for example, that the cuisine of Southern Germany is vastly different from that of Northern Germany.  The south loves Schnitzel with Knödeln (or, buttered noodles) while the north, with its access to the North Atlantic and the Baltics, is in food-heaven when served herring and other fish dishes.  I could tell her that, in Italy, the consumption of alcohol—and that mostly wine—takes place primarily in the context of a meal shared with another, not in the ubiquitous Happy Hour of American culture.

Some of you may still remember the now vintage TV commercial, “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven.”  (Pillsbury Dough Boy, 1982)  I would suggest to you that it was not only catchy, it was and is also true.  A well-prepared meal is a way of saying, “I love you … I care.”  Likewise, I submit that night after night of take-out pizza also sends a message.  And where did people gather when, pre-pandemic, you would invite friends to dinner?  In the kitchen, perhaps even in your way, but in the kitchen where an essential ingredient gets added to the preparation of the meal, long before it makes its way to the dining table.  With those verbal exchanges, we feed each other’s unvoiced, often unacknowledged hunger.  In the crucible of those kitchen interactions, we validate each other’s humanity.

Food, tangible food, is a language, a way of expressing ourselves.  It is one of the first ways we have of communicating with our children, and not a single word needs to be spoken.  If the hungry child is fed promptly, it helps her learn that the world is a safe place.  Alternatively, if the child’s cries of hunger go unheeded, then he or she is likely to grow up wary, suspicious, and less likely to be generous of spirit and purse, more likely to hoard.

A major disappointment in life may call for a large helping of homemade chicken and dumplings, even if one cannot get home; and only the best restaurant in town will do when one graduates from college.  Prior to one of my many retirements, I observed couples, during premarital counseling, agonize more over the menu for the reception and where their reception was to be celebrated, than over the significance of the wedding ceremony and marriage itself.

Fact checking: Bread is important.  John’s gospel puts that on display.  However, none of us has ever eaten just a “mere meal.”  Jesus made that clear for his followers, and that rings true for us in 2021.  Every morsel of food we have ever eaten transmits more than just calories to our bodies.  Food conveys a multitude of associations.  Even the simplest of meals, a single meal represents the labor of hundreds of people: the agricultural workers who harvest, the workers on the conveyor belt who oversee the progress to deep freeze, the food inspector who certifies the cleanliness of the process, the driver who delivers them to the supermarket, the teenager who drives the pizza to your door, or the cook at home or in a restaurant who prepares it.  Yes, the end result may, to the naked eye, appear as “just another meal,” but is that truly so?

When Jesus said, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” (v. 51), or, as phrased in today’s gospel, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” The people wanted simplicity.  But that is not what they received.  John records that many were shocked.  As you will hear next week in the gospel appointed for the 11^th Sunday after Pentecost, although this week the crowd asks Jesus to give them that bread, they rightly ask the question: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (v. 52)  They were amazed by being part of the crowd of 5000 who were fed and they wished to be fed and never go hungry.  But clearly they were not prepared for the answer that they received.

Implied is the repulsion that we all feel toward cannibalism.  Of course, the crowd missed the point.  If I were to invite you to my house for dinner and prepare for you my world famous “pepper-crusted beef tenderloin with kumquat marmalade,” lifted directly from Cooking Light, you will be doing more than dining with me.  To the extent that I put myself into the preparation of the meal, you will be taking part of me into your life.  You would be partaking in a meal conceived by others beyond my kitchen.

Jesus places a challenge before us in this already stress-filled year.  Like those who were offended by Jesus’ claim that his “flesh” was “the bread that I will give for the life of the world,” many of us may have a difficult time with the idea because we want to label it, to fit his offer into a box that is easy for us to hold.  Theologians speak of transubstantiation.  But suppose that transubstantiation is just an elaborate explanation for the simplicity of “God with us?”

I share with you an anecdote, a true one, that a seminary classmate shared with me and fellow classmates during a reunion on our Brattle St. campus, which is no more.  He reported [that] a woman began attending his parish after she had lost her partner of twenty years.  After having not been in church for years, according to my classmate, she just started showing up every Sunday, but she would not come forward to receive communion.  Eventually, reported my classmate, the woman said: “I just don’t get it.”   “Get what?” he asked.  “The bread part,” she said.  “Why do you say, ‘The body of Christ’ when you place a wafer in a person’s hand?” 

My classmate had us on pins and needles.  Here is what he said that he told the woman.  Rather than launch into a lecture on transubstantiation, he said, he asked the woman, “What was Jane’s favorite food?”  Immediately the woman replied, “Spaghetti and meat balls.”  And, my classmate asked, “and do you still occasionally prepare spaghetti and meatballs for yourself and, when you do, is Jane there with you?”  My classmate reported that the woman’s eyes lit up.  She got it and never again sat in her pew, while everyone else came forward to receive the Body of Christ.

If we can transmit a little of ourselves to others by sharing a meal with them, how much more can Jesus transmit himself to us through the sacrament of bread and wine?  He made the ultimate sacrifice, to use a contemporary, over politicized phrase.  He poured himself out fully on the cross and, in a mysterious exchange, in an exchange “that passeth all human understanding,” he comes to us when we share bread and wine in his name. 

The sacrament of the Lord’s Table, however, works simultaneously in two directions.  It is an encounter with Christ who offers himself to us in the symbols of bread and wine.  However, it is also an occasion for us to offer ourselves to Christ.  English bishop and theologian William Temple observed that in placing bread and wine on the altar, “we have offered our ‘earthly’ goods to God.  God gives them back to us as heavenly goods, binding us into union with Christ…so that we give not only our goods but ourselves, and thus become strengthened as members of His Body to do His will…” (Geoffrey Rowell, et al. Love’s Redeeming Work, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001, p. 581)

At the Holy Table, at the altar, heaven and earth meet.  Christ comes to us in bread and wine, but the bread and wine are also our lives offered to him.  The mystery is not that bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ.  Rather, the far more mysterious transformation is that Christ takes and transforms us into his body, into a community—the hands and feet to do his will in the world that he loves.   The real miracle is not so much what we eat, but that we eat, because in sharing with each other what God has given us, each of us in our individual calling, we create community.  And from that which we have eaten, we receive strength to go back into the world, back into our varied communities, to live out the Good News of Christ Jesus.

The blessing intoned at the end of the Service of Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge puts it prosaically so beautifully: “May Christ, who by his incarnation gathered into one thing earthly and heavenly…”  I submit that that is exactly what occurs when we share bread and wine in Christ’s name—Christ gathers things earthly and heavenly into one.  Amen