Sermon — March 26, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s a phrase in our liturgy that has a special place in my heart, and appropriately enough, it’s the one I say the most often during our service on any given Sunday morning. Think about the words that come out of my mouth during this hour of my week. What do you think I say the most? Is it “Amen”? “The Lord be with you”? Maybe “Let us pray”? No, it’s something else, and interestingly enough it’s the only thing I say to each one of you, as individuals, not to you as a collective and not to God. Can anyone guess what it is?
“The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”
Now, much ink and much blood have been spilled over the phrase “the Body of Christ” in the history of the Church, with philosophers and theologians debating and sometimes armies even fighting over what exactly Jesus meant when he said those words. But it’s actually that second half that means the most to me, week after week. This is the Body of Christ, yes—and it is “the bread of heaven.”
To me, this is more than just a poetic phrase or a symbolic idea. It’s a way of expressing the alternate reality we enter in this room. It means the same thing that it means when I say, week after week, that “joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, we forever sing this hymn.” These are not just pretty words. They are a statement of faith that in this Eucharistic meal, in this Holy Communion, we are united with the whole communion of saints. We gather around the altar with the whole choir of heaven. When I say “the bread of heaven,” it means that this is the bread they are eating in heaven; that there is just one eternal banquet happening with God across all of time and space, and we dip into it for a while, week after week, and we take another bite of heavenly food. And when we eat that bread, we are sharing in a holy meal with people from generations before us and generations yet to come, and even though we can’t see them or hear them, they are somehow, mysteriously, present with us here.
This is what makes these words mean so much to me. There are some people I think about every week as I give you this bread, people some of you have loved and lost, people with whom you wish you could share another meal, and as I say the words “the bread of heaven” I pray that you may feel them present with you here, sharing this bread with you across eternity. There are many more of you whose grief I do not know. But all of us, above a certain age, come to this altar bearing pain and loss, bearing the memories of people who have died or who won’t talk to us any more or who talk to us all the time, but can’t remember our names any more. And so I pray for every one of you, every week: may this bread unite you with them again, wherever they are, as we will all be reunited again in heaven.
In Christian life, we hold two things in constant tension: we proclaim our faith in a God who is good and who loves us and cares for each one of us, and we live in a world in which tragic things happen. Philosophers can debate the question of why; John the evangelist just tells a story. And it’s a story that has a few things to say about how God responds and how we can respond to all this grief and pain.
First: Mary and Martha’s story tells us that sometimes God doesn’t do the things we wish that God would do, and when that happens, it’s okay to point it out, to blame God for God’s visible absence from our world, for God’s failures to heal and cure and save us from harm. When he’s told that Lazarus is ill, Jesus inexplicably, unbelievably, delays for two days. He waits until Lazarus has died, and then he goes. And Martha and Mary blame him, as they should: “Lord, if you had been here,” Martha says, “my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21) And she piously adds something to soften the blow: “But even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” (11:22) But when Mary comes, she doesn’t add all that. “Lord, if you had been here,” she says, “my brother would not have died.” (11:32) And Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for her lack of faith.
He does something else. He weeps. And this is the second thing the story tells us: God is a God of compassion, empathy, and love. When all our questions fail to produce any answers, when all our prayers fail to produce a result, God is not far off, distracted or unmoved. God comes to us, and loves us, and God’s heart breaks for us. Jesus loves us like he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and he sees our pain, and he is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (11:33) And perhaps this is a part of God’s answer to our pain. Where is God in our grief and pain and loss, where is God in the midst of all our tears? God is right there, weeping with us; and in fact, God is right there, dying with us. Thomas reminds the other disciples that the powers that be have it out for Jesus, and they do. This journey to Jerusalem, in fact, is the beginning of the end: Thomas is right. Jesus is traveling toward his death. The only person who’s dead at the end of this story is God. Lazarus’s tomb is empty, and Jesus’ tomb is full.
But that’s not all that God does. Jesus does not absorb our anger as we vent it, like an infuriatingly-calm therapist. Jesus doesn’t just weep with us or comfort us, like a loving, compassionate friend. Jesus doesn’t just die with us and for us. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And he doesn’t just do it at the end of time, in the general resurrection on the last day, as Martha says. (11:24) No, Jesus says, it’s better than that. “I am the resurrection and the life.” (11:25) And he actually raises Lazarus from the dead. (11:43) And a couple chapters later, on the night before Palm Sunday, on the night before Holy Week begins, Jesus visits his friends in Bethany, and they share a meal—Jesus and Martha, Mary and Lazarus—and it’s as if Lazarus and Jesus have traded places, Lazarus coming forth from his tomb, and Jesus turns toward his own. In Jesus, the two sisters and their brother who has died break bread together again, and that’s the good news: that the power of death that separates us from the people whom we love will never win in the end; that though we die, we live, and we will rise again.
We don’t get the same certainty that Mary and Martha had. We aren’t given the miracle meal. “We walk by faith,” as the old hymn goes, “and not by sight.” “Those who believe in me,” Jesus says to Martha, “even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (11:25-26) And then the question he asks her becomes the question he asks each one of us: “Do you believe this?” (11:26)
We live in the world as it is. Most of us carry with us, through our lives, a hundred small losses and a couple big ones. And there’s nothing I can say or do to soften the blow. There’s no prayer I can teach you to pray that will bring about a miraculous change. But God has promised that the story doesn’t end here. And there’s an invitation, amid it all: When your “bones are dried up,” when “hope is lost,” when you are “cut off completely” from the joy of the Lord, you are invited to share a meal, by the one who tells you he is the resurrection and the life, by the one who offers you the bread of heaven, who invites you to come and eat, and be in the presence of those who are long gone. To know that, as my favorite prayer from our funeral service goes, “to [God’s] faithful people… life is changed, not ended”; that although we cannot see them, they live, and they are here, and we will one day see them again.