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A Reflection for the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost

When Bill and I lived with the Episcopal sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit at their convent at Bluestone Farm, sometimes they joked that their life is really "all about food." But what they meant is that they strove for an intentional, Eucharistic understanding of food. The sisters payed attention to the cycles of life and death, valued human fellowship, observed with awe nature's continual self-sacrifice, and contemplated the mystery and becoming that is part of daily life.


They wrote:

The heart of our participation in the furtherance of the adventure of Life is food. We understand that we arise from and are held within the arms of a Eucharistic Universe; all energy exchange is costly - individual life is given, in part or in whole, in order for other individuals to sustain life for a time. This is a holy, sacrificial and sacramental exchange that we honor and celebrate, and which is clearly reflected in our Christian heritage.


At the same time eating is a joyful experience, suffused with thanksgiving and celebration. As we partake of the great banquet of food offered by Earth, we enjoy the delights of this bounty. - from the Melrose Customary

Jesus offers himself as food. The authors quoted in this week’s quotes each consider this mystery, inviting us to be changed not only in consciousness but in mission.


-Suzanne Guthrie


(* The Community of the Holy Spirit is an Episcopal women's monastic order. Bluestone Farm in Brewster, New York was one of their ministries. Bill and I had the privilege of living at the farm/ convent for six years.)


Meditation One - Our Manna Is Christ


What is manna? Is it a Hebrew pun on mah hu, or as Everett Fox suggests, “Whaddayacallit”: What is this stuff? Is manna mountains of sweet insect excrement, as proposed by some scholars, or the stuff of legend, of a tale told over the generations about how, in some mysterious way, God gives us life? The New Testament’s version of this question is “Who is he?” – and Christians have told one another, over the generations, that in some mysterious way he is the life that God gives. Our manna is Christ.

–Gail Ramshaw

Christian Century, July 28, 2009


Meditation Two (Insight) - Into Your Very Bodies

The incarnate Word of God is bread. The Word is already food and drink in the Old Testament, but there the threshold of understanding is lower: the images may be taken as metaphor. Here the metaphor, the symbol, has become a physical reality and even a person. It refuses to be spiritualized or allegorized: I am your food. I have come to be consumed and assimilated: first into your hearts and minds through listening and faith; then into your very bodies which I will transform into my own. …

Jesus is the divine light and life made visible, audible, touchable … and finally ingestible. To “see” him, to listen to his words and believe in him, and thus to feed upon him, is to begin to surrender the boundaries of one’s own consciousness and one’s own being.

-Bruno Barnhart

The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center


Meditation Three (Integration) - Actual Food

One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. … This was my first communion. It changed everything.

Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer at all but actual food – indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.

-Sara Miles “Take This Bread”


The Last Word - At the table

Blessed are you Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.

- from the Roman Eucharistic Liturgy


By Suzanne Guthrie – “Bread of Life” - At the Edge of the Enclosure

**********************************************

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful

and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created,

and you shall renew the face of the earth.

MAY GOD’S BLESSING ABOUND ALL THE MORE – IN 2024!

May God Bless you and yours as we journey in this Pentecost Season…

May God’s Spirit empower us to

“expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God”… and

May God Continue to Bless Union Church!


-Pastor Mark

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