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I am married to a cook.
This is such a familiar, such a basic fact of my existence, I sometimes fail to focus on it. Andrew has been feeding me for nearly twenty-five years. Since the year 2000, for thousands of evenings, Andrew has prepared food for me to eat. On many Saturday mornings, he bakes biscuits.
I wash and fold all of our laundry; Andrew prepares all of our meals. This has been a clear, firm division of labor for us.
In my last call as a priest, I spent two evenings a week overnight on Bainbridge Island. A Grace Church family generously gave me their little above-the-garage apartment to use. It did not have a stove. All it offered was a toaster oven and a microwave. I would cook an Amy’s pizza, or reheat an entree from the grocery store. I fed myself in college-dorm fashion. My food had calories and nutrients, and often enough it tasted okay. But it was not two important things, two things Andrew’s cooking has become in our household.
My humble solitary meals in that apartment — in contrast to Andrew’s cooking — were not eucharistia, and they were not koinonia.
Yes, I just dropped two fancy Greek words. But bear with me, and don’t worry: you probably already know one of them quite well. Eucharistia: that’s the Greek word for ‘thanksgiving,’ and it has arrived in English basically unchanged as the word Eucharist. Every week, you and I, all of us, longtimers and newcomers, elders and children and adults in midlife — all of us make Eucharist together. We gather at this Table, and give thanks to God. We celebrate eucharistia.
But eucharistia is not just a prayer of thanksgiving. It is that: after all, we say right up front, “It is right to give our thanks and praise.” But eucharistia is far more than a perfunctory “thank you.” It’s not, “Cool, yeah thanks bro.” Eucharistia is a full reorientation of our whole lives, even our whole identities, as Eucharistic people. We become God’s People of Thanksgiving. Gratitude shapes not just our attitudes and choices and behaviors: gratitude shapes us. When we receive and consume the Eucharistic bread every week, we become what we receive.
The transformation may be subtle today, but noticeable when we look back over our lives and see how we have changed. I have been receiving Communion since 1984, when I was in ninth grade and my Lutheran parish led me through Confirmation and first Communion (quite late in life, by our standards here at St. Paul’s!). I’ve been a fairly faithful churchgoer for the last forty years, so maybe it’s fair to say that I have slowly been transformed into a Eucharistic person. I have my bad days; I don’t behave well in a sugar crash; I have a rap sheet of bad behaviors. But: maybe I’m changing. Maybe I’m becoming “Eucharistic.” I hope so.
How long have you been receiving Communion? Some of you may have been receiving it far longer than me. Others may be able to count your trips to this Table on one hand. However long each of us has received and consumed this bread and wine, this Body and Blood, our faith invites us to reflect on our identities, and how Eucharistia changes us.
Has the Eucharist gone to work on you? Remember, it’s often subtle. It can take a whole lifetime, and even as we prepare for death, we may sigh and wonder whether we really have lived lives of thanksgiving, lives marked by a sacrifice of praise.
One way to notice Eucharistia is to see the Eucharistic effect on other people. Today is the second Sunday of the month, so I’m scheduled to walk with the St. Paul’s in the Neighborhood ministers — the SPiN walk. Often, when I go on this walk, I see Eucharistic people in action. I see BJ, our Neighborhood Action team leader, embracing neighbors with whom she enjoys powerful friendships. She chats them up, picking up threads of conversation that they have been sustaining for weeks, months, maybe years. She knows many of our neighbors, and not just by name: she knows their circumstances, their dilemmas, their regrets and griefs, their hopes and fears.
That’s a Eucharistic person.
But this example also illustrates the second fancy Greek word I mentioned a bit ago: koinonia. We can translate koinonia as “life in community.” We come here weekly to receive the Eucharist, allowing God to form us into Eucharistic people, and that inevitably, viscerally, essentially forms us into a community. As a priest, I am authorized by you, the Christian assembly, to preside at this Table. But I am not permitted to preside there if I am the only person in the room. That is not a valid Mass. If I came in here all by myself and spoke all the prayers, chanted all the refrains, held my hands in the orans position, said and sang and did all the correct things, nothing would happen. It would not be Eucharist.
Eucharist only happens in community. Without koinonia, eucharistia does not exist.
And happily, I can gladly reassure you that koinonia is far easier to recognize than eucharistia. Life in community — which is formed around this Table — is here or not here; we can often tell. I’ve been to churches where koinonia seems absent, and those are hard, sad places. Pray for people who attend those churches. (Seriously: I bid you to pray for them.) Those churches are not just riven with conflict, not just depressed, not just angry or anxious. There is an aching absence there: the whole thing feels like a flat, false show.
Churches suffering from that lack of koinonia came to my mind this week when I listened to a sermon preached by a Jewish faith leader, Rabbi Sharon Brous, the spiritual leader and teacher of Ikar, a Jewish faith community in Los Angeles that seeks to embody the best of Jewish identity and mission. Rabbi Brous was reflecting on stories of zealots two thousand years ago whose extremism led to famine and mass death. Standing inside the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Brous noted an ancient Jewish description of an extremist, one that she said describes the top Israeli government officials responsible for the devastation in Gaza. Jewish tradition describes violent zealots as “empty people who are eager only for war.” Empty people, eager only for war. That is who we risk becoming if we do not cultivate koinonia in this place.
And so I am here to encourage you by pointing directly to this loving, active, living parish: koinonia flourishes here. Koinonia infuses our gatherings. Sometimes it brings a lump to my throat, and I can hardly choke out my song of alleluia. Now, I am not naïve. St. Paul’s has a few problems. We don’t always, unfailingly treat each other with respect and care. We strain and even fracture the bonds of koinonia that God has woven here. We’re a human organization.
But we flourish nonetheless as the Body of Christ in this place. If my reception of the Eucharistic bread over forty long years hasn’t done enough to transform me, you all help by embracing me as your sibling. Whether you’ve received Communion for five decades or for the first time today, the power of your Eucharistic identity is contagious; it flows from you; it transforms those around you. Eucharistia and koinonia work together, they reinforce each other, they swirl together and lift us and change us and send us forth from here as Christ’s loving hands and feet.
And so we finally can begin to make sense of that strange, even bizarre thing that Jesus says about himself in the Good News according to John. Jesus says, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.
What an odd, startling, maybe even revolting thing to say! The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. We feed on Jesus, the Bread of Life. We eat our Savior. We take him into our very bodies — that’s how intimate we are when we keep koinonia with Jesus, and with one another.
And this brings me back to my husband, the cook, who I suspect was a little mortified to know that I ate like a college kid whenever I was away for those solitary overnights on the island. Andrew is not, of course, Jesus. (Believe me; of this I am sure.) But his witness to us as a cook may help open up the image and meaning of Jesus giving us his own flesh to eat.
Cooks — the good cooks, that is — give of themselves, with startling generosity, to nourish their companions. (Companion: a word that means “with bread,” or “breaking bread together.”) Andrew’s cooking has formed and shaped our marriage, every bit as powerfully as the thousands of times I have tri-folded our t-shirts and towels. These are costly labors of self-giving love. We have friends who cook and care for their companions with the same spirit. Our parish has bread-bakers, coffee-hour hosts, formation leaders, faithful staff professionals, vestry members, devout parishioners who evangelize simply by praying in the pews — all of these saints are “cooks” whose costly, self-giving love forms and shapes the koinonia that thrives here.
Christianity is not a fascinating little intellectual exercise. Christianity is not an entertaining little social club, or a sweet nonprofit charity, or a nostalgic family reunion. Christianity is not frozen in place: if this is a place where excellent cooks are at work, then the menu will change often. Christianity is not going to leave us unchanged, unchallenged, or untransformed. Christianity will not even leave us undamaged! The intimacy we share when we eat our Savior — the intimacy we share when we “cook” for one another — it can be dreadful, daunting, even devastating.
God gracefully breaks us to creatively transform us.
Eucharistia and koinonia. That’s what’s happening to us, week by week. That’s who we’re becoming, week by week. And this is how God heals and restores this whole wondrous world.
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Preached on the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14B), August 11, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35:41-51