All posts tagged Eucharist

  • February 8, 2016

    Grain and Grape

    van-gogh-wheat-field

    Grain and Grape
    Brian Zahnd

    In the mystery of the Eucharist God in Christ chooses to make himself present to humanity by ordinary elements. Through grain and grape we find Christ present in the world. But it’s not unprocessed grain and grape that we find on the Communion table, it’s bread and wine. Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine. And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry.

    The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred. For there to be the holy sacrament of Communion there must be grain and grape, wheat fields and vineyards, bakers and winemakers. Human labor becomes a sacrament. A farmer planting wheat. A vintner tending vines. A miller grinding wheat. A winemaker crushing grapes. A woman baking bread. A man making wine. A trucker hauling bread. A grocer selling wine. Who knows what bread or what wine might end up on the Communion table as the body and blood of Christ.

    This is where we discover the holy mystery that all labor necessary for human flourishing is sacred. A farmer plowing his field, a worker in a bakery, a trucker hauling goods, a grocer selling wares, all are engaged in work that is just as sacred as the priest or pastor serving Communion on Sunday. The Eucharist pulls back the curtain to reveal a sacramental world.
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    19 Comments / Communion, Sacrament /

  • November 27, 2014

    Black Friday and the American Malady

    0602_wallstreet_bull

    Black Friday and The American Malady
    Brian Zahnd

    I’m not sure when Black Friday became a “thing.” It hasn’t always been with us. But I am sure that Black Friday as a celebration of consumerism coming the day after Thanksgiving is symptomatic of the American Malady. Miroslav Volf put it this way…

    “There’s something profoundly incongruous between the gratitude of the Thanksgiving Thursday and the Black Friday’s mad rush to acquire. Black Friday seems to have been designed to ensure our sense of gratitude doesn’t spill over from Thanksgiving into our ordinary daily life.”

    On Thursday we gather around a table to give thanks and feast with family and friends.

    On Friday we stampede madly into the temples of American consumerism.

    On Thursday we give thanks to God for the cornucopia of plenty.

    On Friday we trample our neighbors for a flat-screen TV.

    It seems to have echoes of Israel eating the Paschal lamb only to worship the golden calf. Read more

    7 Comments / America, Sacrament /

  • October 30, 2014

    Halloween: A Search For The Sacred

    the-bored-gargoyle-of-notre-dame-2

    Halloween: A Search For The Sacred
    Brian Zahnd

    It’s Halloween. The season of ghosts and goblins, haunted houses and horror movies. The modern observance of Halloween seems, for the most part, to be an innocent celebration of the strange joy of being scared. There’s no doubt that a significant number of us do enjoy being scared as a form of entertainment. After all, Stephen King has sold 350 million books! But why? Why do we like to be scared? I think it has to do with a search for what is most missing in the modern world: the sacred. We like being scared because we are so very secular.

    When modernity came of age it banished the sense of the sacred. Empiricism, materialism, positivism had won the day. Science was now the high priest that would answer all questions and religion was merely the superstition of the hopelessly naïve. We found ourselves in a world without God or gods, a world beyond good and evil (as Nietzsche said), a world without angels and demons. Religion was but hucksterism and nothing was truly sacred anymore. Bob Dylan captured it well when he said,
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    9 Comments / Christianity, Eucharist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Modernity, Sacrament, Sacramental Ontology, Secularism, Theology /

  • July 17, 2014

    The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Eucharist

    Apocalypse_vasnetsov

    The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Eucharist
    Brian Zahnd

    Like the other Gospel writers John recounts the story of Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes to feed five thousand. But John adds this unique postscript:

    “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” (John 6:15)

    The crowd’s response to this “table in the wilderness” was an impulse to make Jesus king…but Jesus declined. Why? Jesus is king, he came to be king, king is what Messiah means. So why does Jesus slip away from the crowd when they want to make him king? The issue is force.

    The crowd wanted to “take him by force and make him king.” At the center of the crowd’s concept of kingship was violent force. They wanted to force Jesus to be their forceful king so he could lead their forces in an uprising of violent force against the Romans. This was antithetical to the kind of king Jesus came to be. Caesar is a crucifying king who reigns by force. Christ is the crucified king who reigns without force. Christ’s kingdom is built upon co-suffering love, not violent force.

    The crowd that wanted to force Jesus to be king was operating from the dominant paradigm of scarcity. This is the paradigm that possessed Cain to kill Abel, and it lies at the dark heart of human civilization. We are scripted to believe that reality is zero-based and that we live in a closed system.

    This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won’t be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee “us” “ours.” We call it security. We call it defense. We call it freedom. What we don’t call it is what it is…fear. Driven by our fear of scarcity we create an organized, large-scale, slow-motion version of anarchy. A mob on a looting rampage is called anarchy. One nation looting another is called glorious conquest — but it’s just looting on a grand scale. Kings are tasked with looting our enemies on our behalf.
    Read more

    18 Comments / Eucharist, Jesus, Violence, War /

  • July 10, 2014

    Grain and Grape

    Red_vineyards

    Grain and Grape
    Brian Zahnd

    In the mystery of the Eucharist God in Christ chooses to make himself present to humanity by ordinary elements. Through grain and grape we find Christ present in the world. But it’s not unprocessed grain and grape that we find on the Communion table, it’s bread and wine. Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine.

    And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry. The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred. For there to be the holy sacrament of Communion there must be grain and grape, wheat fields and vineyards, bakers and winemakers. Human labor becomes a sacrament.

    A farmer planting wheat.
    A vintner tending vines.
    A miller grinding wheat.
    A winemaker crushing grapes.
    A woman baking bread.
    A man making wine.
    A trucker hauling bread.
    A grocer selling wine.
    Read more

    8 Comments / Eucharist, Theology, Vincent Van Gogh /

  • June 12, 2014

    Bread on the Table

    167_1

    Bread on the Table
    Brian Zahnd

    The church in Western Europe and North America is struggling with deep disappointment. We are disappointed with the failure of the Christendom project. The grand attempt to produce a continent of Christian civilization through the apparatus of the state is either dead or dying. It appears that secularism has already won in Europe and will win in North America. So we either deny it (more easily done in America), or we angrily blame scapegoats (those we claim have “compromised the gospel”), or we simply trudge along, a bit sad about it all.

    The church in the post-Christendom world is walking the Emmaus Road. Confused and disappointed. Just like those two disciples on the first Easter. (see Luke 24:13-35) The original Emmaus Road disciples had misread everything. Their disappointment was a result of their wrong expectations. They expected a conventional king after the model of the Pharaohs and Caesars. They expected Jesus to be a war-waging Messiah like King David or Judah Maccabeus. What they ended up with was a “failed” Messiah — a Messiah executed by the Romans. The movement in which they had invested all their hope had failed. So they walked the Emmaus Road with soul-crushing disappointment. This is when Jesus came and walked with them “in another form.” (Mark 16:12)

    When Jesus in the guise of a wayfaring stranger remarked upon their evident sadness, the disciples told how they had hoped that Jesus of Nazareth was the long-awaited Messiah, the one who would redeem Israel. But that was all over. Their hopes had been dashed when their would-be Messiah was condemned by the priests and crucified by the Romans. Their movement had failed and disappointment had settled in.
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    2 Comments / Christianity, Communion, Culture, Kingdom /

  • October 19, 2013

    Mass Suicide

    communion-of-saints-elise-ritter

    Mass Suicide

    “The Eucharist becomes the meal of unity binding Christians through time and space to be one body, one Christ, for the world. That we have been made one makes it impossible, therefore, for Christians to contemplate killing other Christians with whom we share this meal. Such killing is not murder, it is suicide.”

    —Stanley Hauerwas, Commentary on Matthew, pg. 219

    This may explain the death of Christianity in Western Europe following the two world wars.
    It was mass suicide.
    Or Mass suicide.
    Selah.
    Read more

    1 Comment / Christianity, Communion, Theology, Violence /