Why Do We Have Eucharist?

Today is the second part of our instructed Eucharist series. Last week I talked us through the movements of the first part of the service, everything that leads up to the Peace – that’s known as the Liturgy of the Word. Today we’re talking about the Eucharist itself, the Liturgy of the Table. Holy Eucharist is something we celebrate every Sunday we come together. I said last week that part of why we share communion together every Sunday is because Jesus told us to in the Last Supper: do this in remembrance of me. That was the practice of the early church and it is still the practice of most liturgical churches today. Some of you might remember a time in the Episcopal Church when it wasn’t the custom to do communion every week, when we were more like our more Protestant siblings in only having it once a month or so. It was seen as too special, too complicated, too time-consuming – for a wide range of reasons many Episcopal churches did a choral Morning Prayer on Sundays most weeks, and saved the Eucharist for special times. But the liturgical renewal of the 1960s and 1970s, the era that gave us our current BCP, brought back the Eucharist as the most important thing, the main thing, the main reason we gather. So I guess we’d better talk about why it’s so important.

Eucharist is important partly because the early church did it, and it connects us with a long line of tradition. Also it’s a powerful experience of taking God into our very beings. And it puts us in mind again and again of Jesus’ love and sacrifice for us. And not least of all, sharing a meal seemed to be absolutely central to what Jesus did with his followers. Today’s gospel leads into the two familiar parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin with a line of ‘grumbling’ by the Pharisees and scribes: ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ There’s a church called St Gregory of Nyssa up in San Franciso that carved those words into their altar. As one of their founding priests, Rick Fabian, likes to say, this was the core of what Jesus’ opponents hated about him: he ate with all the wrong people. Rick also likes to point out the word translated ‘sinners’ is really much cruder – in other words, this was a major slur against Jesus and his disciples. Yet Jesus seemed to keep doing it anyway, over and over, eating with anyone and everyone right out in public. This is no small thing, even for us today. The events of this week in our nation have many fearing that we’ve come to a time when Americans kill each other for different political beliefs. So this is a profound message for the church to claim: that here all of us, all of us sinners, whatever we think, whatever we’ve done, whoever we are, come together around the table, welcome to be with Jesus. I believe we must keep claiming this. We need this desperately. 

And that reality is what should anchor us in this ritual. Because what happens in the Eucharist is like what happened in those meals with Jesus – in the Last Supper with his disciples, and earlier in the feeding of the 5000. There are four main actions Jesus does: he takes the bread (and sometimes the fish), he gives thanks and blesses it, he breaks it, and he shares it. It’s the same sequence in the Eucharist: the priest takes the bread and the wine, brought forward from the congregation as an offering. Then the priest offers the Eucharistic prayer, which is a prayer of thanksgiving, called the Great Thanksgiving (the word Eucharist simply means thanksgiving). In the prayer we thank God for all God does for us and we ask God’s blessing on the bread and wine and on us. Then the priest breaks the bread, remembering Christ’s body broken on the cross. And then we all share the food. 

And, of course, it’s not just bread and wine. So here I need to talk a little bit about sacraments. The official church definition of sacrament is “an outward and physical sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” So the physical experience points to the spiritual experience. The physical water of baptism, for instance, represents spiritual cleansing and new life happening inside of us. We are incarnate people, here in our physical bodies. What we do physically connects to what we experience spiritually. 

It's also true that for many reasons, much of what we do physically has been scaled down a lot in church practice: most churches don’t baptize with full immersion into water, but with a little sprinkle of water on the head – even though it began with stepping into the River Jordan, it’s become just a few drops of water. For logistical and practical reasons, things have changed from the way the early church did them. And some of the ways we have lessened the physical experience can also lessen the spiritual experience. Eucharist is one of those places where sometimes the ritual part gets in the way. It’s always been a ritual meal – but sometimes it can get so ritual that we fail to make any connection between it and an actual meal. Wafers don’t seem much like bread, and a tiny taste of wine from a dipped wafer isn’t much like enjoying a glass. And yet sometimes even that little bit does have power – sometimes despite how small our physical experience is, we can have an overwhelming spiritual experience. But sometimes it might take us a little extra effort to get there.

In my last congregation we experimented with some services where we actually ate a meal as part of the worship, what some scholars think the early church services were really like. We did something like that here in our Maundy Thursday service. In the church we like to eat together, all the dinners and coffee hours – so it can be powerful to eat together and worship all at the same time, and make that connection of what we’re doing clearer. But there are simpler ways to emphasize the physical experience: some churches might use real bread rather than wafers for communion, members of the congregation taking turns baking it. Some of you who spent time in churches that only used grape juice have commented on how real wine makes a difference for you. Kneeling alongside your fellow congregants might make it extra meaningful – and for others, standing to receive feels right. For me, drinking from the cup rather than intincting feels more meaningful; others feel differently. All of it is a personal choice. There’s no one right way to do it.

Ultimately why I think we return again and again to the Eucharist, in whatever form and with whatever words, is that its meaning is so central to our faith. God feeds us. God gives God’s very self to nourish us. God showed us how to live in Jesus, who broke bread with his friends just as we do with one another. Take, bless, break, give. It’s what we do when we share a meal. It’s what God did in Jesus. And it’s also what is meant to be done with our lives: we offer them to God, who takes them, blesses them, breaks them apart (maybe in ways that we don’t like), and shares them with others, all to nourish us and others. In other words, what we do in worship every week is a mirror, or is meant to be a mirror, of what we do in our lives. It is itself sacramental, all of it – physical actions and words spoken that express and nourish our experience of God. So as we experience it today, let it sink into you a bit more – hear the words, taste the wafer and the wine, eat with the wrong people. Open yourself again to God’s love for you and for the world. Because we all need it, all of us, over and over again.