“Holy Mash-up”
Exodus 16:11-15,31-32; 17:1-6
John 15:4-5, 7-12
Luke 22:14, 19-20
Meat. Manna. Rock. Water. Branch. Fruit. Vine. Bread. Cup. Table. Hunger. Thirst. Incarnation. Body. Blood.
So many of us live in the world of ideas and education, content and production, issues and causes. So few of us have a regular, dependent, all-consuming connection to seeds and soil, vines and fruit, the hunt for food and water.
And so it is easy to forget how many of the stories, traditions, and metaphors of our faith are drawn from and based on the central elements of creation, the fundamental realities of existence, the most basic of human needs.
Food. Water. Physical and spiritual sustenance.
Give us this day our daily bread.
For our ancient ancestors in faith, existence itself was precarious and the ways of nature and the human body were mysterious and little understood. People lived on the land, and were absolutely dependent on the land, its resources, their stewardship of those resources, and the spiritual forces that they believed controlled things like weather and health and wealth.
And so they understood God and God’s love and care, worship, and the community of faith through the lens of creation and survival. To acknowledge one’s dependence upon what the land produced was to honor and worship the Creator. One could not worship the Creator without also enjoying and praising the wonders of creation. It was all of a piece. It was the practical, necessary stuff of life, the mystery of how it all came to be, the wonder of how it worked, and the shared sense that a higher consciousness was involved.
And so the rituals and stories and sacraments of faith were all tied to the land, to the body, to the material—to mutuality and reciprocity, give and take, planting and harvest, garden and wilderness, trees and fields, sheep and shepherds, branches and vines, bread and wine, families and generations, tribes and communities. The land and the fruits of the land and the creator of it all connected everyone to everything.
To get the food, water, and other necessities they needed to live, people worked, of course, but they also prayed and offered sacrifices to God. To seek healing and wholeness, they used whatever medicinal resources were available, but they also called upon God. They thanked God for the harvest and created major festivals to celebrate and bless what God had given them from the earth. They marveled at the diversity of creation and wrote songs and sacred texts to praise God for it.
When times were tough, when the overwhelm and fear and anxiety took over, they sometimes forgot God’s promises. They relied on their own cunning, their horses and their chariots. Sometimes they turned on one another. They blamed their leaders, abused creation, and cursed God.
But God never stopped listening or loving. According to tradition, God never stopped providing. Manna in the morning. Quail at night. Water from a rock. And then God gave them the law, which told them how to care for the land and their animals, how to provide for the weakest among them, home to make sure everyone had enough, and how to let God care for them.
To be the people of God meant observing the sabbath—that is, resting; practicing jubilee, in which debts were canceled and land was returned; gleaning, by which the poor could get what they needed from produce intentionally left in the fields; welcome for the stranger; and care for orphans and widows.
The story of God’s people—which is to say, our story—is the story of Creator and creation, God’s care and feeding of our souls as well as our bodies, God’s steadfast love, and God’s never-ending efforts to reconcile us to our maker, our true nature, and one another through mercy and kindness, justice and peace, community and creation, and so much grace.
So it’s only natural that Jesus connected with people over food. That so many of his parables revolved around the stuff of life: vineyards and labor, shepherds and sheep, vines and branches. That the signs he used to demonstrate God’s love and care involved elements of nature, celebration, and demonstrations of abundance: turning water into wine, feeding the five thousand with next to nothing and then collecting leftovers, so many healings, so many meals.
And so it is, of course, with the sacrament we celebrate today. Holy Communion, the feast that Christians the world over are sharing today with the produce of their own lands and cultures, is rooted in the glory of God’s creation: bread and wine, body and blood, blessing and thanksgiving, giving and receiving, God’s love in and through it all.
To observe World Communion Sunday and Creation Sunday on the same Sunday may feel absurdly over the top, but that is precisely the point: Life itself is a holy mash-up of creation and communion—intimacy with God and one another through the wonders and fruits of creation; experiencing God and God’s glory in the wonders and fruits of creation; loving and serving God and our neighbor by loving, protecting, tending, and restoring creation; connecting to our creator by honoring and engaging creation.
In this time of climate crisis, climate disaster, climate grief, and climate anxiety, we face monumental existential risks. To fail to address those risks with all the love, hope, and passion we have is not only dangerous and destructive, but also ungodly and unwise.
But we also face serious spiritual risks: the risk of reducing creation to an “it,” an object, a cause, something separate and disconnected from us, something that is nothing more than a means to an end, a resource for us to use. And this is where the communion can, if we let it, heal us by becoming a holy bridge between creation and creatures, a sacred reminder of the bond between creatures and the abiding presence of their Creator.
October 4 is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, who continues to bless us all through his beautiful acknowledgment of the kinship between human creatures and animal creatures, between creatures and creation itself, between creation, creatures and Creator.
In the “Canticle of the Sun, ” St. Francis gave us Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Wind and Sister Water, Brother Fire and Sister Mother Earth.
I’ll leave you this morning with two writings attributed to St. Francis and modernized by Daniel Ladinsky. The first, called “The Sacraments,” goes like this:
I once spoke to my friend, an old squirrel, about the Sacraments—he got so excited and ran into a hollow in his tree and came back holding some acorns, an owl feather, and a ribbon he had found. And I just smiled and said,” Yes dear, you understand: everything imparts God’s grace.”
The second, called “God Would Kneel Down,” goes like this:
I think God might be a little prejudiced. For once God asked me to join Him on a walk through this world, and we gazed into every heart on this earth. I noticed that God lingered a bit longer before any face that was weeping, and before any eyes that were laughing. And sometimes when we passed a soul in worship, God too would kneel down. I have come to learn: God adores God’s creatures.
So may we adore all God’s creatures and their Creator. So may we understand that everything imparts God’s love and care.
Thanks be to God—for creation and communion.
