A Eucharistic life
My standard answer, when my daughters ask me to make them something to eat, is to say, “again?” They’re tired of my act. But hunger is a useful picture of not only physical but spiritual truths.
“Some wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to a city to dwell in; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted within them. Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He led them by a straight way till they reached a city to dwell in. Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.” (Psalm 107:4–9 ESV)
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied” (Luke 6:21 ESV)
The way you know what’s food and what isn’t is by physical hunger. The way you know what is good spiritually, or - you know - what connects you to God or what makes you tolerable to the people in your home - is by your hunger of another kind. Hunger, maybe more than anything else, drives our commerce, paints our paintings, edges our front yards, keeps us tied to our phones, responding, pavlovian, to every possible flicker, notification, pang. Could it be, our phone clicks and bells suppose, that there is something to know, someone to fill our gut if not our stomachs with life?
But the real story isn’t that we’re subject to our hunger, but that we love it. Sacred to the human heart is the right to live a life of unregulated desire. Follow your dream or follow your heart. But the more I pastor people, and the more I pastor myself, I realize that the fact that the heart is “deceitful above all else, and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17.9) is more than an unfriendly assessment of the human heart, it is a means of rescue. I have two assessments of where we are, as a species, all of the time - but especially in quarantine week ten:
We are starving. Hungry for emotional and physical contact, order, vocation, clarity.
We are starving mad. Hunger is turned inward and becomes hyper sexuality, online and in-person conflict and tribal hatreds, serial job dissatisfaction, debt.
And when you’re hungry, hungry enough to betray your ethics, hungry enough to despise your neighbor, drink yourself senseless, what is it exactly that God has to say to that kind of human experience? In our suburban spaces we have given you a way to increase your credit limit, clear your browser history, deliver to your door, quit the high-maintenance relationships, gently relate to one another with a list of conversation topics that barely register as they flicker past us. Small stories, little truths, miniature dramas when we need something far more robust. Shakespeare hearts delivering lines from the back of cereal boxes. We memorize our jingles and keep the lawn green, baby.
I do love that God speaks to us of a kind of hunger that is both physical and spiritual in Psalm 103. If we are to worship while hungry, we will need to know that God does not discourage the empty gut, he directs it toward himself. They were hungry and thirsty in the Psalm, and God delivered them and filled their souls, too. God can fill our stomachs all day long, but I think the harder thing is to fill the gut, the pit of the stomach, where all of the big decisions, and sometimes the big mistakes, are made. How we are hungry, you might say. Our world is starving, hungry enough to devour one another, hemmed in and mad as hatters. As we said yesterday, that hunger needs to be Eucharist-ed.
If the Eucharist (“act of thanksgiving”) - the Lord’s Supper - becomes the center and, as the Catholics say, the “summit” of Christian life, it not only nourishes your soul, but becomes the means of the satisfaction Jesus talks about in that beatitude. Blessed are you at the Lord’s Table, the hungry, because the pathways of hunger, flowing from the gut, the heart, are rewired, re-routed by the act of receiving from God and giving thanks. We are spiritually nourished and trained to understand the world not as consumable but sacramental - the union of the physical and the spiritual, braided together by the work of God’s loving-kindness. Pathways of conflict and madness become pathways of generosity and craft, invitation and feasting instead of competition and austerity.
A Eucharistic church is hungry for the Kingdom of God. But first you will have to be curious about the Kingdom of God. Where is God at work, where do you long for God to be at work? Pray, instead, for the Kingdom of God to come. Let the suffering of people and places drive your hunger pains.
A Eucharistic church is a public announcement of the Good News. It will celebrate a Neon Eucharist - a Eucharist that is visible for all. The Eucharist was intended to be a sign of the coming Kingdom of God not only to us, but to the world around us. The Eucharist is how Jesus’ blessed are the Hungry is fulfilled today. We eat together at the Lord’s Table with the expectation that it not only binds us to Jesus but to His mission. So take the Lord’s Supper, when you do, as a commitment to act. We should hope that the Eucharist is a bit like the leash hanging from the hook near my front door. The moment I touch it, the sound sends our dog into frenzy. You don’t move the leash, you don’t even touch it, unless you expect something very particular to happen. We eat, in part, so no one else goes hungry. Otherwise we’re not much more than a really peculiar kind of book club.
A Eucharistic church models the home table after the Lord’s Table. Just because we are not celebrating the Lord’s Table together now doesn’t mean we cannot long for it in miniature. The appetizer for the Sunday feast is the weekday meal. As you wait to feast together at the Lord’s Table give thanks in your kitchens and dining rooms. When you eat, maybe once a week or more, read a psalm of thanksgiving together. Eat together, too. Keep your devices away so that you can see each other and hear each other. A good practice for children is, when giving thanks to ask, “How are we thankful to God today?” Train your children to live eucharistically. Train yourself to do the same. If you’re going to eat in front of the TV, by yourself or with a friend, take a moment to give thanks. Try not to eat mindlessly if you can help it. And for those of you who are fighting for survival at the family dinner, man you’re just trying to get through it, don’t try to be the perfect family - it’s okay that this is a season of chaos. But pray it out anyway - give thanks out loud even if your youngest is screaming, or if you just got into a fight with your husband. That’s how the church lives.