1 Corinthians 11:17-26
I sometimes wonder about the slow process of humans figuring out food. I mean, who looked at a tree on the Indian subcontinent and thought “You know, the inner bark might be tasty,” giving us cinnamon, one of my favorite flavors.
Sushi made from fugu, a pufferfish, is a delicacy in Japan. It is a little tingly since the fish contains a deadly neurotoxin. In fact, chefs need years of training to be licensed to serve it. So how did they figure all of that out? By feeding portions to Granny until she fell over?
“Oh yeah. Let’s not eat that bit!”
Cooking made these huge brains possible, but who looked at maize and thought “That will be safer, tastier, and more nutritious if we soak it and cook it in limewater before we grind it”? And yet, that is the ancient process civilizations here in the Americas developed, leading to the tortilla and “Taco Tuesday.”
Sometimes, I suspect it was all just one happy accident after another. Even today, some traditional sour beers depend on airborne wild yeast and bacteria to fall into shallow vats to begin fermentation.
Yeast, so incredibly tiny, was passed on and preserved as starters, much like that sourdough starter so many created during Covid-19 lockdowns, long before we could buy little packets of Fleischmann’s at the grocery store. Well, for that matter, before grocery stores.
A little crush, a little mash, something sweet, something salty, yeast wild or domesticated, heat before or after, and badda-bing, as they say, a hot loaf of bread, a cold mug of beer or a glass of wine.
I mean, you can eat grapes right off of the vine, but to get the full nutritional value out of most grains, you need pressure and heat. Transformation is necessary but not necessarily easy.
If beer or wine or even bread are not your thing, chocolate is the end result of a fermentation process too. And if you don’t do beer, wine, bread, or chocolate, why are you even alive?
Ingredients are brought together under the right conditions, magic happens, and they become something else.
And since we are a refugee church, picking up spiritual hitchhikers from the highways and byways of faith, since today is World Communion Sunday, it might be good to talk about another bit of magic, what we think does and does not happen when we come together at Christ’s table.
Early Christians gathered for a communal meal. During that meal, they told the story of the Last Supper in remembrance of Jesus, blessing and sharing a loaf and a cup as he instructed according to scripture.
Over the course of several centuries, this act became more and more ritualized, and less and less a meal, until we end up with something akin to today’s communion.
The life and ministry of Jesus took place during a time when the High Priesthood and the Temple stood between the people and God. Everything was about prestige and power, was transactional.
Jesus challenged all of that. You didn’t have to be born into a Levite family. You could switch from fishing for fish to fishing for people, could go from treasonous tax collector to evangelist. The center of religious life was no longer a journey to Jerusalem and an appeal to self-serving priests. Jesus predicted the Temple itself would fall, as it did in the lifetime of some of his followers.
For the followers of Jesus, religious life was centered on any time the faithful gathered for a meal. Changing the Lord’s Supper to a ritual undid all of that. Once again, priests stood between God and the people. Once again, grace was not free, but was instead a transaction.
Around a thousand years after Jesus, the church centered in Rome took this a step further and began to interpret the words recorded in Paul’s account of the Last Supper literally, asserting that the bread and wine actually became the flesh and blood of Jesus.
In 1079, the French intellectual Berengarius, head of the cathedral school at Chartres, was forced to renounce his view that the bread remained bread and the wine remained wine, forced to affirm transubstantiation, the claim that the substance of the bread and wine are transformed into actual flesh and blood.
This became official doctrine of the Western church with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Not only was the priest now between the people and God, he (the priest, always male) served as a sort of alchemical magician, changing the ordinary into the extraordinary, or at the very least served as a human conduit for the divine when magic happened.
Instead of a table, where we gather to eat meals, communion was celebrated at a distant altar, where you make a sacrifice.
When Reformation spread like a wildfire through Europe in the early 16th century, the two leading figures of the growing Protestant movement were initially in agreement about the bread and wine. Neither Luther nor Zwingli was willing to give up the prestige of the priestly class, but both initially rejected transubstantiation. The bread remained bread, the wine remained wine, and the priest was a priest, not a magician.
But Luther was a backslider, and soon he had fallen back into claims of transubstantiation. In fact, this was the primary issue that divided the two largest Protestant movements that emerged from the Reformation, known to us in the United States as Lutheran and Reform.
Congregationalism is part of the Reform tradition. The United Church of Christ absorbed some Lutheran elements, but when we do theology, we do it in the Reform tradition. If we had an official position, it would be that even after the Words of Institution and the Prayer of Consecration are said, the bread remains bread, the wine (or Welch’s Grape Juice) remains what it was, and the officiant is neither conduit nor sales agent dispensing holy goods. The pastor is just one more person, a sinner saved by grace. Hopefully. The priesthood is not composed of some elite, but is composed of all believers.
Let me say that again. When you become a member of a United Church of Christ congregation, you join the priesthood of all believers.
Don’t let this plain theology fool you. Magic still happens, but it is horizontal, not vertical. God is not using me to turn bread and wine into something else. The thing that is being transformed is us.
Just like everything else in this amazing creation, when we come together, we are more than the sum of our parts. Transformation happens as we hear the good news, that the Holy Mystery we name as God is a source of serendipitous creativity and life itself, that the nature of creation is adaptation and growth and resilience, that justice is not retribution or punishment, but is justice making, is opening the door and inviting all who are hungry to the table, symbolic and literal.
The story we tell is that Jesus sat at table with his followers, shared a meal with them, and told them how to go on, how to continue his ministry of healing, of changing lives, of opening hearts and minds to the goodness of God, even after he was gone. For the story is that he knew the worst was possible, for he had challenged the rich and powerful, called out those who exploited and brutalized others.
When we come to the table, we are nourished and transformed in our collective remembrance, in proclaiming once again that love wins, claiming that we are more than bipedal primates, but are always evolving, physically as a species, collectively as communities, spiritually as artists and chefs and home brewers and bakers, even as legislators and voters, evolving in every act of imagination as co-creators with the holy.
This table is a feast that never ends. Please RSVP. But don’t worry. There will always be room for one more. Amen.