andygoodliff

A Sermon on Eating

 

Have you ever realised that Jesus liked his food.

He enjoyed a good meal.

He liked a good meal so much that he was accused of being a glutton

and a drunkard.

In one of the gospels, Luke, we have eight dinner scenes.

The first is the banquet Jesus shares at Levi’s house.

The second is the dinner he has at Simon the Pharisee’s house,

                        during which a woman interrupts to wash is feet.

The third is a meal in the wilderness with over five thousand.

The fourth is another meal with a Pharisee

                        where Jesus doesn’t wash his hands.

And the fifth is yet another dinner with another Pharisee,

a prominent one we’re told

                        where Jesus heals a man with dropsy.

The sixth is when Jesus has tea with Zacchaeus. 

The seventh meal, the climatic meal, is the one Jesus shares with his disciples in

an upper room that we call the last supper.

And then there is one more sit down meal.

Its at Emmaus

when two disciples ask him, not knowing who he was, to stay for dinner.

So much of Jesus’ life, his ministry,

happens round a table, eating with people.

Each of these meals are lessons in about living in the kingdom.

And the stories he tells, also feature food

like when the prodigal son returns the father’s response is ‘let’s feast!’;

or when a man throws a great banquet he ends up inviting those in the street.

I want to ask then what difference does Jesus make to how we eat,

what are the connections between food and faith.

Eating is such an everyday thing,

we don’t think about it much.

We might think I wonder what to eat today,

but beyond that we probably don’t go much further.

We have lost the connection between eating and God.

If you go back to Genesis 1,

we get more detail about the vegetation – about food than almost

anything else.

            Genesis makes the link between God and food clear. [i]

            We are told that there is food enough for all.

Worship for Israel was connected to the harvest.

The deep connection between eating and agriculture and God

            was one that was everything

            in a way that it is not for us.

The mystery of food was about the providence of God

            and this led people to prayer and praise.

We’ve lost the mystery about the food we eat,

to the extent that often we have no idea what we’re eating.

The difference Jesus makes to eating

is to reconnect eating with worship and prayer.

In the gospel Jesus models that eating and discipleship go hand in hand.

Eating can be a spiritual exercise:

            As the Psalmist sings: ‘taste and see that the Lord is good.’

Eating matters.

Eating matters so much that the best thing that Jesus can give his disciples

            is a meal, a meal that is to be shared over and over again,

            so that it might shape every meal

            and that we might be surrounded by the mystery of

                        the One who gives – who gives in creation

                        and who gives himself for the new creation.

Jesus says

If you want to follow me,

If you want to understand who I am

and what my life means

come and sit round my table and eat.

We learn what discipleship means by eating round a table

where bread is broken and wine is poured.

Here at this table we learn how to eat

at every other table.

The Eucharist or Communion

is the Christian meal par excellence

Its an invitation to eat at God’s table

as God’s friends,

in anticipation of the great feast we will one day all share.

And if this eating causes us to look forward,

Its also leads us to see every meal as eucharistic.

Eucharist means thanksgiving.

Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, and broke it

And if every meal is a eucharistic

we are saying every meal is one in which are thankful.  

Every time we eat we are brought into a relationship

with farmers and cooks and the land and with God,

the Great Giver, the Lord of the Harvest. [ii]

Every time we eat there is an opportunity to celebrate and honour these

relationships.

The act of saying grace is a recognition that what we eat

comes from the one who creates and gives.

We live by the grace of God.

We beseech the blessing of God in his provision of daily bread.

The act of saying grace can also remind us of those who

have grown and prepared the food that finds its way to our kitchens

and onto our plates.

We beseech the blessing of God on the farmers and milkers, the grocers and

butchers, the bakers and chefs.

The acting of saying grace also acknowledges those we are eating with:

We eat as family, as friends, as church,

We eat amongst strangers and neighbours

and in Communion we eat as poor and rich,

old and young, black and white, Leavers and Remainers.

And in this meal, in the act of grace,

we say it is good you are here,

you are welcome as I am welcome.

If you’re not in the habit of saying grace, start today.

And so if the first way Christ makes a difference to our eating

is the act of saying of grace, of speaking a blessing

to renew our relationship to God, and land, and the production line from field to plate.

The second way Christ makes a difference to our eating

is in the act of sharing bread.

Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them

To share bread at this table

is to say everyone has a place at this table.

To share bread at this table

calls us to see the person next to you as wanted by God. [iii]

God wants their company as well as yours.

Eating at this table changes the way we see each other.

One challenge here then is to ensure that no one eats alone

all the time,

that we ensure we all share a table with others at some point during the week.

For eating with others is not often a silent affair,

it's the point where story telling happens,

at the Lord’s supper we tell the story of Christ,

and so we begin to see at other tables how our stories are woven into his.

Eating with others is where bonds are made,

within a family or a community, where new threads of fellowship are found.

I dream of a church that has learned the habit of invitation and hospitality,

where we regularly ensure there is enough food for one more person

to join the table,

not just on a Sunday morning.

I wonder what might grow in this church

if we each made the commitment to share one meal a week

with one person or more who don’t already live in our home.

That’s one way eating is an act of discipleship.

This kind of eating happens when we remember Jesus in communion,

when we open ourselves ‘to draw near enough to Christ that

our thinking and feelings are transformed.’ [iv]

To sit at the Lord’s Table is to allow the gospel to work in you,

to discover a new pattern to eating,

to encounter the good news of sharing food.

But sharing bread goes further than this,

because it reminds us that eating with Jesus is a justice issue.

That the bread we share at this table

calls us to share bread with those without enough.

When I was hungry you gave me something to eat

Eating as disciples is about not only the people who are present at your table,

but those hidden.

At every Communion there is bread left over,

just as at the feeding of the 5,000.

It is a reminder that gospel challenges the myth of scarcity

that there isn’t enough,

and say with Christ we are given everything we need and more.

God gifts are abundant,

God’s creation is blessed,

and so we are called to share that abundance with all.

So to eat at this table,

is to challenge how we eat at our table at home.

I wonder what would it mean for us to eat justly at home?

A first step might be to not be ignorant of what we eat,

but to pay attention to where our food comes from.

This might cause us to adapt where possible our choices in the food we buy.

Other steps might be to consider eating less meat, [v]

or giving to our Foodbank,

or growing our own food,

or learning how to cook new meals.

It might mean as a church we host a meal with an open table.

To eat justly is then an act of imagination,

to pray that God’s Spirit might lead us to new habits

of blessing and generosity

that reflect God’s kingdom.

In all of this we seek to see that every meal we eat is a potential holy meal,

a meal graced by God’s provision

and the presence of Jesus.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks,

broke it and began to give it to them.

Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

So go, go and eat,

eat with thankfulness,

eat with new people round your table,

eat with justice and mercy,

eat in anticipation of the great banquet

at which we will one day be God’s honoured guests and friends.

Amen.

 

[i] I owe this point to Ellen Davis, ‘Being a Creature Means You Eat’ in Preaching the Luminous Word (2016).

[ii] This section was helped by Norman Wirzba in Making Peace with the Land (2012).

[iii] This thought is from Rowan Williams, Being Christian (2014).

[iv] Norman Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land.

[v] On this see the articles by John Barclay, Tim Gorringe and David Grumett in the Expository Times (2010, 2011).

'This is my body; this is my blood': A Reflection for Maundy Thursday

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words he held out broken bread and the cup of wine.

With his words we would never experience Passover the same again.

With his words he was doing something new.

With his words this meal was of a different kind to all the meals we had shared.

With his words we remembered

                        We remembered

The bread blessed and shared at Levi’s house,

                                                and at Mary and Martha’s,

                                                and at home of Simon the Pharisee,

                                                on the hillside in the wilderness,   

                                                and all the other meals.       

We remembered his words then of kingdom and forgiveness

                                    of abundance and fulfilment;

his words of what really matters,

and they all led to

here and now

and the bread in his hands

blessed, broken and shared.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words our hearts burned within us.

With his words we were overwhelmed

            with a sense of foreboding and darkness.

With his words we were re-learning the meaning of

            love and life and death.

With his words he was saying ‘I am approaching the end.’

With his words we knew his way was set,

            his path was decided,

            his road marked out.

            It had been from the moment he turned his face towards Jerusalem.

            It had been from the moment of his baptism.

            It had been from the moment of his birth.

            It had been from before the creation of the world.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words we were coming face to face with

the God without measure,

            the God of surprises,

            The God of all goodness.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words he was giving us something,

something that we would carry with us from that day on

yes it was bread and wine, but it was more.

With his words we were encountering a mystery.

With his words he was saying this is I how I will be with you for ever.

With his words we were witnessing love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words we were confronted by grace,

            the grace of the one true life.

With his words we saw the future as God’s gift.

With his words he was declaring the undoing of death.

With his words he was teaching us how to live gently in a violent world,

showing us the cost of discipleship.

With his words he was saying these are the things that make for peace.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words he was re-describing reality,

the coming shaking of heaven and earth:

the promised deliverance of God.

With his words he was taking the story we knew so well,

            the story we had rehearsed every year from birth to adulthood

            and now he was re-writing it as a story that was re-playing again

            but now with himself at the centre

            he was to be the Lamb led to the slaughter (Is 53.7)

            and he was drawing us in – as if saying

my story will become your story.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words he was taking hold of ordinary things

            and making them a sacred promised sign of life.

With his words he was leading us to see how he was

            transforming fate into destiny,

                                    judgement into mercy,

                                    death into life.

With his words we would come to know nothing greater, nothing better.

This is my body

This is my blood

With his words we were silenced

With his words we acknowledged the fragility and frailty of our humanity

                        the capacity of our ability to do violence

With his words we saw the joining of brokenness and blessing

With his words he was drawing a line from past through present to future

                        from Exodus and Exile

                        to the Promised End

                                   where death would be swallowed up

                                    and tears wiped away from all faces

                                    and the LORD would remove all of our disgrace (Is 25.8)

                        and it would be through his body, his blood

                                    broken and poured out for many.

This is my body

This is my blood

 

(As will be obvious to some, many of the lines are borrowed from books that sit on the shelves of my study. It was an interesting exercise trying to weave them into this reflection)

40 Days of Eucharist: 1-40

1 English Baptist Records

2 Brian Brock and Stanley Hauerwas

3 Lauren Winner - Girl Meets God

4 Chris Ellis

5 Alan Greider - The Patient Ferment of the Church

6 William Cavanaugh - Torture and Eucharist

7 Michael Northcott - A Moral Climate

8 Barry Harvey

9 Daniel Izuzquiza

10 Kim Fabricius

11 Ruth Gouldbourne

12 David Ford - Self and Salvation

13 Robert Jenson - Conversations with Poppi about God

14 Steve Finamore

15 Miroslav Volf - Against the Tide

16 David Goodbourn

17 Keith Jones - A Shared Meal and a Common Table

18 Rowan Williams - Resurrection

19 Vincent Donovan - Christianity Rediscovered

20 William Cavanaugh - Being Christian

21 James K. A. Smith - Desiring the Kingdom

22 Charles Spurgeon

23 Scott Bader-Saye

24 Norman Wirzba - Making Peace with the Land

25 Eugene Peterson - Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

26 Isaac Villegas - Presence

27 Walter Brueggemann - Cadences of Home

28 Rowan Williams - Being Christian

29 John Webster - Confronted by Grace

30 Jeremy Begbie - Theology, Music and Time

31 Will Willimon - Sunday Dinner

32 Sam Wells - God's Companions

33 Anne Wilkinson-Hayes

34 Philip Doddridge

35 Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh - Beyond Homelessness

36 Graham Greene - Monsignor Quixote

37 Richard Lischer - Stations of the Heart

38 Stanley Hauetwas - - A Cross-Shattered Church

38.1 Richard Hays 

39 Patrick Miller - Stewards of the Mysteries of God

40 Alan Lewis - Between Cross and Resurrection

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 40

On this Holy Saturday, and final day of Lent, we listen to a theologian of Holy Saturday, Alan Lewis and an extract from his book Between Cross and Resurrection, completed just before his death from cancer in 1994.

Like baptism, the Eucharist is profoundly personal and individual, the promise to each recipient of bread and wine that this is Christ's body broken, his blood spilt, specifically "for you." And communion, like baptism, is by definition communal: we, being many, are one, just as the loaf of many particles is one; for Christ himself, who comprises many members, is one, and we participate in him (1 Cor. 12.16-17). But above all, like baptism, the Lord's Supper is cosmic in its scope. As is understood increasingly today, through an ecumenical deprivatizing of the sacrament, this is a meal for all humanity, a messianic, doxological banquet proleptic of eschatological festivities, when humanity shall comes from east and west, north and south, to eat together at one table in God's kingdom (Lk. 13.39; cf. 1 Cor. 11.26; Lk. 22.15-18), and when every creature shall be reconciled and gathered up in hymns of praise and glory to the Maker of heaven and earth (Col 1.20; Rev 5.11-14).

If, however, as a sign of creaturely and human unity, the Lord's table is always approached with joy, in hope and expectation for the world's reconciliation, we can scarcely partake there without many pangs of sorrow, indignation, and remorse. As with baptism, so with Eucharist, every enactment of the sacrament constitutes a protest at the world's disunity, let alone the church's: the incongruity between heavenly vision and earthly, and ecclesiastical, reality. There must be grief here at the world's refusal to accept God's invitation to the banquet of redemption (Lk. 14:12-24). This is a meal for the poor and maimed, the lame and blind; yet the world, recalcitrant and stubborn, remains outside, broken, crippled, crooked, refusing to accept the truth of its own healing already realised in Christ's rising from the grave of the ugly, the stricken, and the despised (Is. 53.1-9). And there must be repentance at our meal: shame that the church fails so continuously and comprehensively to provide an empirical foretaste of human wholeness and togetherness; and that while we eat the bread and drink the cup in fellowship and feasting, sisters and brothers go hungry and thirsty, their flesh still torn and blood still split by poverty, disease, violence, and ear, by manifold evils, human and demonic. And there must be commitment: to live out the costly demands of the Easter Saturday identity, confirmed in very Eucharist, that as participants in Christ's own death and burial we shall struggle, suffer, and makes sacrifices, perhaps of life itself, in solidarity with those around us and for their healing and their freedom. The Supper of our Lord, no private retreat of religiosity and piety, drives us to preach and practice Christ's lordship in the public square, in the courthouses and prison cells, the refuges and ghettos, in the corridors of power and towers of opulence - where injustices are perpetrated, greed idolised, power centralised, while "the least," who are Christ's sisters and brothers, remained naked, hungry, and forlorn. 

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans, 2001), pp.455-456.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 39

Today is Good Friday. The Old Testament scholar Patrick Miller is our thirty-ninth person in these forty days of Eucharist.

... taste and see the bread and wine that mark the goodness of God, a goodness that stands over against all suffering and tragedy and evil and wickedness that mark and mar human existence. For that too is the meaning of the death of Jesus we remember on this occasion as we eat bread and drink the wine. That strange willingness on the part of one who is the transcendent ground of all that is to take into God's own self the pain and suffering of the human lot. That is indeed scandal and foolishness - except for those who have also experienced the pain and suffering. For Jesus represents and stands with all of them in his death even as he represents and stands with God in saying No to all that. 'This is my body which is broken for you' - and for all broken bodies and minds. 'Taste and see.'

Patrick Miller, Stewards of the Mysteries of God: Preaching the Old Testament - and the New (Cascade, 2013), p.130.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 38

Today is Maundy Thursday and we listen to the preaching of Stanley Hauerwas. Often his sermons will end with a connection to the Eucharist. Here are some of them.

Wheat becomes bread, and through the Spirit, bread becomes the body and blood of Christ. God is present here in this meal in a way God is present nowhere else. We are that wheat; we are that bread, which the families of the world need if they are to know God. We are the people on which the peace of God depends. We are God's eucharist; we are those children for which creation had been longing. In the celebration of this meal, God lifts up as he lifted Christ at the cross, so that the world might see the beauty of God's creation made real in a people at peace with their world. How can we not hunger to share this meal and share if often? May God continue to make us hungry for it.

 

So now let us come to the table, the table to which we have been led by this cross, the table where God welcomes us as friends, to handle his Christ. Here God invites us to share with him and one another the body and blood of Christ so that the world may know that we have been befriended. Come and see, come and taste, how right, how fitting, it is that in this meal God invites us to participate in, to be part of, the love, the beauty, that is the cross.

 

The one sacrifice that is not forbidden, the one sacrifice that is required, is that sacrifice called Eucharist. The Father desires, as the book of Hebrews says, to have us 'enter the sanctuary' made possible by the sacrificial flesh and blood of Jesus. Indeed we are made, through Christ's body and blood, God's sanctuary, God's holy temple, for the world. Just as this bread and wine is transformed by the Holy Spirit to be for us the body and blood of Christ, our lives, our everyday sacrifices, are taken up in this oblation. Through that transformation the sacrifices, so often forced upon us, can become life-giving because they have an end.

 

For we believe that God has in fact prepared for his people a feast of rich food and wine. That feast we call Eucharist, for in eating it we are made 'living members of your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ.' We believe, moreover, that when we celebrate this holy meal we do so with the saints who have gone before and who know share in God's eternal life. The devil would have us remain fixated on death, but in sharing this meal we learn to gaze upon Christ, who makes it possible to view our lives and deaths through the power of the resurrection. Death has been undone.

 

Jesus's love for us is evident because he refuses to let our fears, our unbelief, prevent him from the deed of power his resurrection makes possible. We call that deed Eucharist. In the Eucharist our fears are overwhelmed by the power of God's love in Jesus, making it possible for us to be a spirit-filled people who can be an alternative to a world driven by fear.

 

Foe what we do know is that if Jesus is not fully God and fully human, then we can make no sense of the Eucharist. This wine and this bread is the food we need to sustain human life. Just as God joined God's life with the life of Jesus without ceasing to be God, so we receive now the very body and blood of Christ without this bread and wine ceasing to be bread and wine ... Because Jesus is very God and very man, at the Eucharist we are consumed by what we consume. God became human, assumed our nature, so the we might share in God's very life.

 

They are taken from sermons in Stanley Hauerwas, Disrupting Time (Cascade, 2004); A Cross-Shattered Church (Brazos, 2009) and Without Apology (Seabury, 2013)

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 37

Today's extract comes from Richard Lischer moving memoir Stations of the Heart, which tells the story of the final months of his son Adam's life has he battles with cancer.

Late one morning, when Adam and I were sitting in the lower level of his house with nothing to do, he started talking about the Eucharist again. It was another of his monologues that began from a standing start, with no introduction. 'If you have cancer and you want to give to God a taste of the hell you are going through, you get down on your knees in front of a cross and tell him about it. Then you come to the altar and give God everything you have, and God gives you everything He has. That's how Father Steve puts it.' We were no longer discussing the composition of the communion elements like a couple of scholastics; he was gathering steam like a street preacher, and he was good at it: 'You say, "This is my body," and you bring it to the altar like a piece of bad meat, and God says, "No, this is my body." You come naked, and God dresses you. You come hungry, and God feeds you.' His voice was full of rage and dare. He was preaching to himself, a hungering congregation of one, and to me as an afterthought. He was throwing himself into the face of God.

You bring your dirt to the table (he said 'shit'), and God accepts it as something beautiful - the flesh of His Son. It wasn't a pious communion Adam was preaching about, but a primitive trade, as if at a scrap exchange, where you leave something old or broken and walk away with something better. You return again and again to that place until, finally, there's nothing left of the original you, and all that remains is the new thing that has been forming in you. Protestants call this transaction Communion or the Lord's Supper, Catholics and Lutherans call it Eucharist. A dying boy call it "the best part of the day."

Richard Lischer, Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), pp.105-106.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 36

This strange Communion scene comes from near the end of Graham Greene's novel Monsignor Quixote (thanks to Kim Fabricius for suggesting it). 

Father Quixote led them down into the shadows of the great church lit only by the half moon which shone through the east window. He walked firmly to the altar and began to say the words of the old Latin Mass, but it was in an oddly truncated form. He began with the response 'Et introibo ad altare Dei, qui laetificat juventutem meam.'

'Is he conscious of what's he doing?' Professor Pilbeam whispered.

'God knows,' Father Leopoldo answered.

The mass went rapidly on - no epistle, no gospel: it was as though Father Quixote were racing towards the consecration. Because he feared interruption from the bishop? the Mayor wondered. From the Guardia? Even the long list of saints from Peter to Damien was omitted.

'When he finds no paten and no chalice, surely he will wake,' Father Leopoldo said. The Mayor moved a few steps nearer to the altar. He was afraid that, when the moment of waking came, Father Quixote might fall, and he wanted to be near enough to catch him in his arms.

'Who the day before He suffered took bread ...'

Father Quixote seemed totally unaware that there was no Host, no paten waiting on the altar. He raised empty hands, 'Hoc est enim corpus meum,' and afterwards he went steadily on without hesitation to the consecration of the non-existent wine in the non-existent chalice.

Father Leopoldo and the professor had knelt from custom at the words of consecration: the Mayor remained standing. He wanted to be prepared if Father Quixote faltered. 

'Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei.' The empty hands seems to be fashioning a chalice out of the air.

'Sleep? Delirium? Madness?" Professor Pilbeam whispered the question. The Mayor edged his way a few more steps towards the altar. He was afraid to distract Father Quixote. As long as he was speaking the Latin words he was at least happy in his dream. 

In the years which has passed since his youth at Salamanca the Mayor had forgotten most of the Mass. What remained in his head were certain key passages which had appealed to him emotionally at that distant time. Father Quixote seemed to be suffering from the same lapse of memory - perhaps in all the years of saying the Mass, almost mechanically, by heart, it was only those sentences which, like the night-lights of childhood, had lit the dark room of habit, that he was recalling now.

So it was he remembered the Our Father, and from there his memory leapt to the Agnus Dei. 'Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi.' He paused and shook his head. For a moment the Mayor thought he was waking from his dream. He whispered so softly that only the Mayor caught his words, 'Lamb of God, but the goats, the goats,' then he went directly on to the prayer of the Roman centurion: 'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof; say but the word and my soul shall be healed.'

His Communion was approaching. The professor said, 'Surely when he finds nothing there to take, he will wake up.'

'I wonder,' said Father Leopoldo replied. He added, 'I wonder if he will ever wake again.'

For a few seconds Father Quixote remained silent. He swayed a little back and forth before the altar. The Mayor took another step forward, ready to catch him, but then he spoke again: 'Corpus Domini nostri,' and with no hesitation at all he took from the invisible paten the invisible Host and his fingers laid the nothing on his tongue. Then he raised the invisible chalice and seemed to drink from it. The Mayor could see the movement of his throat as he swallowed.

For the first time he appeared to become conscious that he was not alone in the church. He looked around him with a puzzled air. Perhaps he was seeking the communicants. He remarked the Mayor standing a few feet from him and took the non-existent Host between his fingers; he frowned as though something mystified him and then he smiled. 'Companero,' he said, 'you must kneel, companero.' He came forward three steps with two fingers extended, and the Mayor knelt. Anything which will give him peace he thought, anything at all. The fingers came closer. The Mayor opened his mouth and felt the fingers, like a Host, on his tongue. 'By this hopping,' Father Quixote said, 'by this hopping,' and then his legs gave way. The Mayor had only just time to catch him and ease him to the ground. 'Companero,' the Mayor repeated the word in his turn,'this is Sancho,' and he felt over and over again without success for the beat of Father Quixote's heart.

Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote (Vintage, 2006 [1982]), pp.240-243. 

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 35

Today Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh describe a scene of folk receiving communion.

This Sunday is Communion Sunday for Edna and her children in the wooden pew at the little pink church in Waxahachie. As the minister speaks the words of the institution ('This is my body ... this is my blood'), the choir begins to sing the familiar evangelical hymn 'I Come to the Garden Alone.' The chorus ('And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells I am his own') provides the backdrop was a silver tray containing plastic cups of grape juice is passed from person to person down the pews. Upon drinking the symbolic blood of Jesus, each person says to his or her neighbour, 'The peace of God.' In the company of those partaking of communion and passing the peace, you notice an elderly woman. This woman had been homeless, living in her car, when she was killed by the tornado that raged through town. But now she is among those celebrating the Lord's Supper. Behind the nameless woman, seated on the aisle near the back, you see Moze, an unexpected presence in this segregated white church. Furthermore, the Klan had run him out of town after viciously beating him. He had become yet another victim of racist violence, apparently destined for a vagabond life. But here he is, quietly taking communion in the little pink church.

More takes a cup of juice, drink it, and serves Mr. Will, who is seated next to him. Mr. Will takes a cup, drinks, and serves Possum next to him, who takes a cup, drinks, and passes the tray to her big brother, Frank. As he drinks from the cup, Frank says to himself, 'The peace of God.' It is now his mother's turn. Edna drinks and also repeats the words 'The peace of God.' When finished, Edna turns to her right and passes the cups of juice to her formerly dead husband, Royce, who, in turn, passes it to Wiley, his killer. Looking Wiley directly in the eye, Royce says, 'The peace of God.' With a subtle look that says all is finally well, Wiley drinks and wishes Royce, 'the peace of God.' In the background you hear the words of the hymn, blanketing this scene of serene bliss: 'The joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.' Ears and eyes reveal a time and place in which the peace of God is completely realised and joy is shared by all - life as we know in our gut it should be. Peace and harmony and joy: God's future of shalom.

This description is of the closing scene from the award-winning movie Places in the Heart. Its final surrealistic images of life as it should be. Everyone, even the dead, is present in the little church, giving and receiving from each other the holy sacrament and offering the peace of God. Young widows and fatherless children, homeless women and Klansmen, black folks and white folks. This seemingly mundane ritual has been transfigured by director Robert Benton to portray heaven: life as God intended it to be, when all is set right.

Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in Culture of Displacement (Eerdmans, 2008), pp.197-198.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 34

As holy week is about to begin tomorrow, one final hymn, from nonconformist Philip Doddridge (1702-1751).

My God, now is your table spread,
your cup with love still overflows:
so may your children here be fed
as Christ to us his goodness shows.

This holy feast, which Jesus makes
a banquet of his flesh and blood
how glad each one who comes and takes
this sacred drink, this royal food!

His gifts that richly satisfy
are yet to some in vain displayed:
did not for them the saviour die
may they not share the children's bread?

My God, here let your table be
a place of joy for all your guests,
and may each one salvation see
who now its sacred pledges tastes.