On the wall behind my desk - the place where I spend the most time each day - are three obvious interpretations of Jesus celebrating what I know as the Eucharist - and a few that are more abstract. Each hails from a different time in my life and a different culture, yet all evoke a common truth: being together at a meal, whatever meal that might be, is holy ground. Eucharist has always been for me both a time of inner renewal and a rehearsal for how I ache to live my ordinary, walking around life.St. Paul taught his early communities that they were to live in the world as a living sacrifice:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12: 1-2, The Message)
I hear those words as an invitation to live as those who follow Jesus. Christ knew how to let the Holy Spirit be his guide in the most mundane experiences. And because most of life is spent in the valley rather than the mountain top, the Words of faith become Flesh when we do likewise. Trusting God's grace in the small moments of life rather than the demands of culture, habit, fear, pride, addiction, desire, or wounds. No wonder the early Church reinvented the Greek word liturgy to define our order of worship. Liturgy means doing and practicing "the work of the people." Worship, therefore, is simultaneously a humble opening of our hearts to the Lord of heaven and earth, and, a rehearsal for how we will trust grace in all things. What we give to God in worship, we give to one another afterwards. And what we study on the Sabbath is how we share the love of the Spirit once the celebration has ended.
My oldest Eucharistic art work comes from El Salvador in the late 1970s. Informed by the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero's conversion from a privatized faith to one of radical social justice and compassion, it uses the folk idiom of peasants to honor the Lord's presence within and among us. The artists eventually formed a small collective to let their faith and art advance the cause of economic justice for those at the bottom of society. This painting is visually vibrant and alive - a witness to hope and trust - despite the suffering shared every day. It is not accidental that the beauty is carved and painted upon ordinary scrap wood as a way to embody the transformational nature of grace. In so many ways, this small icon gives shape and form to the foolishness of living in the world as Christ's disciples. St. Paul put it like this: The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe... we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block for some and foolishness to others, but to those who are called, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (I Corinthians 1)
The second painting comes from the North American artist/author Tommie Depaola. It, too, takes a Latin American liberation theology motif to tell us that
equality before the Lord can shape our work for social and economic equality in the world. Women, men and children gather with their priest as equal servants of Jesus around the table of blessing. And what happens around the table becomes the community's vision for social transformation. We act as one body at the Lord's Supper. We have different gifts and different work; different joys and different sorrows; different hopes, dreams and opportunities. But as one body we share one faith, one baptism, and one hope born of our love for the one God made flesh in Jesus Christ. This is the table of abundance . It is a foretaste of a world living within the balance of the holy. A line from the United Church of Christ Eucharistic Prayer of Thanksgiving puts it like this: We give thanks to you, O God of majesty and mercy, for calling forth the creation and raising us from dust by the breath of your being. We bless you for the beauty and bounty of the earth and for the vision of the day when sharing by all will mean scarcity for none.
The third visual call to Eucharist comes from the Abbey in Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Quebec. Another visual style speaks to me of the heart of St. John's gospel: love one another as I the Lord have loved you. We are to be servants. Friends. Those who are willing to be tender and trusting. Yes, the style is more somber than the others. There is a plaintiveness to the faces that recognize life's anguish. At the same time, the inner quietness of this painting captures Christ's presence in both our trial and rejoicing. Ironically, it makes me think of the United Church of Christ's early statement of faith which read in part: In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, he has come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to himself. He bestows upon us his Holy Spirit, creating and renewing the church of Jesus Christ, binding in covenant faithful people of all ages, tongues, and races. He calls us into his church to accept the cost and joy of discipleship, to be his servants in the service of all, to proclaim the gospel to all the world and resist the powers of evil, to share in Christ's baptism and eat at his table, to join him in his passion and victory.
The Reformed tradition of my childhood and youth did not value visual prayers. For hundreds of years, sacred art was discouraged. It was forbidden as idolatry. In time, the rules softened and some sacramental art found its way into our sanctuaries. My heart always felt parched in the austere simplicity of the churches of my childhood. I was drawn to the mystical splendor of the Anglicans smells and bells, the iconostasis of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the stone chapels of Irish and French Roman Catholicism. My spirituality is sacramental and knows that "in the beginning God created the world and called it good." The late Henri Nouwen, who lived his final decade as part of the L'Arche Toronto Daybreak community, put it like this in his small but potent book on icons:
...icons speak of a God not hidden in the dazzling splendor of the divine light but reaching out to a world yearning for freedom... (in these works of spiritual art) we have become the privileged recipients of the mystery that had remained hidden in God for ages. We have become as intimately connected to God as Jesus is. We have truly been made children of God. (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, pp. 76-77)
This morning we listened in joy to the liturgical chant of Anglican choir music. We prayed the words of the old liturgy and sang the Creed set to the early American tune "Holy Manna." Later I baked bread and we set out our week to be one of balance and beauty. Psalm 27 gets it right: One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple.
My oldest Eucharistic art work comes from El Salvador in the late 1970s. Informed by the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero's conversion from a privatized faith to one of radical social justice and compassion, it uses the folk idiom of peasants to honor the Lord's presence within and among us. The artists eventually formed a small collective to let their faith and art advance the cause of economic justice for those at the bottom of society. This painting is visually vibrant and alive - a witness to hope and trust - despite the suffering shared every day. It is not accidental that the beauty is carved and painted upon ordinary scrap wood as a way to embody the transformational nature of grace. In so many ways, this small icon gives shape and form to the foolishness of living in the world as Christ's disciples. St. Paul put it like this: The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe... we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block for some and foolishness to others, but to those who are called, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (I Corinthians 1)
The second painting comes from the North American artist/author Tommie Depaola. It, too, takes a Latin American liberation theology motif to tell us thatequality before the Lord can shape our work for social and economic equality in the world. Women, men and children gather with their priest as equal servants of Jesus around the table of blessing. And what happens around the table becomes the community's vision for social transformation. We act as one body at the Lord's Supper. We have different gifts and different work; different joys and different sorrows; different hopes, dreams and opportunities. But as one body we share one faith, one baptism, and one hope born of our love for the one God made flesh in Jesus Christ. This is the table of abundance . It is a foretaste of a world living within the balance of the holy. A line from the United Church of Christ Eucharistic Prayer of Thanksgiving puts it like this: We give thanks to you, O God of majesty and mercy, for calling forth the creation and raising us from dust by the breath of your being. We bless you for the beauty and bounty of the earth and for the vision of the day when sharing by all will mean scarcity for none.
The third visual call to Eucharist comes from the Abbey in Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Quebec. Another visual style speaks to me of the heart of St. John's gospel: love one another as I the Lord have loved you. We are to be servants. Friends. Those who are willing to be tender and trusting. Yes, the style is more somber than the others. There is a plaintiveness to the faces that recognize life's anguish. At the same time, the inner quietness of this painting captures Christ's presence in both our trial and rejoicing. Ironically, it makes me think of the United Church of Christ's early statement of faith which read in part: In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, he has come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to himself. He bestows upon us his Holy Spirit, creating and renewing the church of Jesus Christ, binding in covenant faithful people of all ages, tongues, and races. He calls us into his church to accept the cost and joy of discipleship, to be his servants in the service of all, to proclaim the gospel to all the world and resist the powers of evil, to share in Christ's baptism and eat at his table, to join him in his passion and victory.The Reformed tradition of my childhood and youth did not value visual prayers. For hundreds of years, sacred art was discouraged. It was forbidden as idolatry. In time, the rules softened and some sacramental art found its way into our sanctuaries. My heart always felt parched in the austere simplicity of the churches of my childhood. I was drawn to the mystical splendor of the Anglicans smells and bells, the iconostasis of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the stone chapels of Irish and French Roman Catholicism. My spirituality is sacramental and knows that "in the beginning God created the world and called it good." The late Henri Nouwen, who lived his final decade as part of the L'Arche Toronto Daybreak community, put it like this in his small but potent book on icons:
...icons speak of a God not hidden in the dazzling splendor of the divine light but reaching out to a world yearning for freedom... (in these works of spiritual art) we have become the privileged recipients of the mystery that had remained hidden in God for ages. We have become as intimately connected to God as Jesus is. We have truly been made children of God. (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons, pp. 76-77)
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