Eating Together

For twenty years, I've led Maundy Thursday services, ever since I started down the pastoring path.

It was never a thing for me growing up in church, as my home church was a big downtown congregation at the heart of the nation's capital.  Even if there'd been a service there, it'd have been such a pain navigating traffic that my parents wouldn't have tolerated it.

As I've spent my ministry career in small congregations, I've always run the service in the simplest of ways.  No complex liturgies or innovations, just a good ol' potluck, framed by the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup.  It's as simple a way as possible to mark the Last Supper, and the command to celebrate communion with one another.

As a creature that takes deep comfort in habit and ritual, I've always brought both bread (challah, typically, because it's way tastier than matzoh, and the Lord's Supper ain't a Seder) and soup.  The soup is always the same soup, several boxes worth of Trader Joe's Tomato and Red Pepper.  It's pretty tasty.

This year, I started out to do the same thing.  But three things changed the arc of the evening.  

First, there was already going to be plenty of soup for everyone, a tasty homemade vegetable stew.  My contribution wouldn't be necessary, and if prior years were any guide, I'd end up taking it home.  Despite my best efforts to consume it, most of it would go bad, and then get dumped into my compost.  Composting meant that at least it returns to the earth, but it still felt like a waste.

Second, earlier in the day I'd chatted with church volunteers about the ever expanding demand for food in the town.  Our tiny Little Free Pantry pushed through twenty five tons of food last year, and with more and more economic pressure on the DC area, that seems to be increasing.  The stream of souls coming to our door in search of sustenance is swelling.  Across the way at the town's food bank, the shelves are increasingly bare.  Wasting food in that context seems even less tolerable.

And third, well, there were the words of the Apostle Paul from his letter to the endlessly frustrating Corinthians.  In preparation for the service, I'd re-read the section where he challenges them over the mess they'd made of the Lord's Supper.  They'd modeled their communion after the cultural expectations of the Greco-Roman feast.  There, the important and influential guests ate first and abundantly, and the poor and unknown were served last, getting scraps or nothing.

This annoyed the bejabbers out of Paul.  As The Message puts it:

I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.

With Paul's words echoing in my soul, I set those boxes of soup into the donation crate.  Afterwards, church folk ate and drank together, partaking of bread and cup and remembering Christ's call to love and serve.  It was a gracious time of fellowship, and there was more than enough for all.

And for those who come to us in need today, that soup will be there waiting for them.  

It's pretty tasty.

 

Christians and Seders

The other day, I read a blog post being circulated by Bruce Reyes-Chow.  It was written by J. Mary Luti, a UCC pastor.  In it, she begged Christians to please, please stop having Christian seders.

I'm a Presbyterian pastor who is married to a Jewish woman.  I've raised two Jewish boys.  I've married into the family of Moses, rather literally, given that my wife's last name is Mosher.  And from that perspective, I had two reactions to the post.

First, I think Luti is dead on.  Many Christian communities that are interested in having seders do so as a way of celebrating Maundy Thursday.  The "meal" we celebrate on that day is the remembering of the institution of the communion meal, which may or may not have occurred on Passover.

As well meaning as the Christian seder is, Passover is a different event.  There's a specific context being remembered, and a specific reason for the ritual.

I attend a seder every single year, usually at the home of my in-laws.  There, we read through the haggadah, and drink the four cups, and taste the herbs and the salt water, and retell a very specific tale for a very specific purpose.  It's the Exodus story, the story of deliverance from slavery and oppression.  It is told for a particular reason, to remember a particular and archetypal event in the history of the Jewish people.

When Christian communities fuse that telling with our own narrative about Jesus and the Lord's Supper, we muddle the story, decoupling it from its original purpose.

And sure, yeah, Jesus delivers us.  There are powerful resonances between the story of Moses and the Christian story of spiritual and existential transformation and liberation.  I get that.

But the story of Moses and the escape from Egypt has integrity on its own as a faith narrative.  The story of the Passover needs to be given voice to speak on its own.

In my own congregation, we do an agape meal, a recounting of the Last Supper that does not confuse the stories.  It feels clearer.  Less muddled.

When I think to the integrity of the story of the Passover, though, I find myself in a place of difference from Luti.  She suggests that the story of the liberation from Egypt is a uniquely Jewish story, that can only be understood from the context of Jewish identity.

This feels off.  

It's well intentioned, in an NPR sort of way, but off nonetheless.

The story of liberation from Egypt is unquestionably the story of the Hebrew people, but it is also a narrative that speaks powerfully to the human condition.  When Jews tell this story, it speaks into the hearts of any who hear it, to the promise of liberation.  Wherever human beings are suffering or oppressed, that story speaks to the yearning for freedom.

Around the seder table on Monday, I was reminded of this.  We read and recited, and we sang in Hebrew, tunes and words that I have learned over the years.  But at one point in the haggadah, we also sang a song in English.  My voice mingled with the voice of my Jewish son, as Christians and Jews around the table sang that old spiritual together.

Go down Moses, we sang, way down in Egypt's land.  Tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go.  It was the song of a people oppressed. They were not Jews, but heard the Passover tale as their own hope.

If you are oppressed, this story speaks the truth you know.

This truth is fundamentally integrated into the Jewish telling of the story.  In every recounting of the liberation from Egypt comes a reminder: there are those who still yearn for deliverance, and all who retell this story are called to remember what it means to suffer. It is a story that builds bridges of understanding.  Wherever human beings experience political, racial, or economic oppression, this story has a voice.

And for those of us blessed with liberty, it says: Remember that you were once strangers in the land of Egypt, it says.  Make sure you're not being Pharaoh, it says.

Which is why the story is worth retelling, and honoring, no matter what your tradition.

Transubstantiate Everything

On my early morning constitutional walk with my dog, the air was still sharp and brisk, a reminder of how slow Spring has been in coming this year.  But the skies were beautiful, dappled with the colors of the rising sun.  The robins were hopping about worm-hunting, and the trees were pushing their buds outwards towards the hope of summer sun.

As I turned a bend, the light from the morning was just beginning to touch the tops of the trees on a nearby hillside.  The world felt bright and new and alive.

This mingled with the theology bouncing around in my brain.  Tonight at my little church, we're planning to have a simple meal together.  It's an Agape Meal, which sounds considerably less R-rated than a Love Feast.   Why are we having this meal?  Because it's Maundy Thursday, that day we remember that meal Jesus asked us to share with one another.

Being a Teaching Elder and all, I use the start of the meal to talk through some of the ways we disciples of Jesus have tried to understand what he meant by what he was saying.   I play my way through Lutheran sacramental union, Zwinglian humanist mnemonics and Calvin's pneumatological eucharistics, mostly because when I use those words they tend to take a loud room and stun it into...um..."reverent and prayerful silence."

But as I've studied the ways Christian homo sapiens sapiens have tried to articulate the importance of this event, I find that all of our disparate approaches kinda sorta work.   Even transubstantiation has a voice.  Yeah, it's an old Aristotelean way of looking at things.  But the intent isn't bad.  It's a valiant philosophical effort.  It says, somehow, something important is happening here.   Somehow, in these humble things, there lies the ineffable possibility of the fullness of what Jesus taught.

Oh, you could pick it apart forever and never find that hidden reality.  Every observable state of that hunk of challah or that cup of Welches Concord Grape Juice would not get you to it.

But that reality is there nonetheless.

Walking through the waking creation this morning, I found myself musing that Eucharist...that "good gift"...is meant to be how we see the entirety of our world.  The words "Transubstantiate Everything" rose up unbidden out of my subconscious, and it struck me a lovely way to conceptualize the Kingdom.

If we understood it, if we got it, if we registered it, we would encounter everything as suffused with the essential nature of our Creator.