Eucharist and Grace

This week Christ Church joins with our nation in celebrating Thanksgiving. As much as it is a civic holiday and a paid day off for most Americans and a commercial holiday which kicks off in earnest the shopping season, it is in origin a religious observance for giving thanks to God for his providence.

We all know by heart the story of the Pilgrims and the Indians sharing a feast at Plymouth in the 1600s in thanksgiving to God for survival of that first harsh winter. That story is deeply ingrained in Americans from preschool on: think back to construction paper bonnets and feather headdresses and turkeys made from cut outs of little hanks. (Texans claim an alternate first Thanksgiving in El Paso, but let's not mess with Texas.)

This Thursday, nearly all of us (Americans) will play out that story on the table with a centerpiece turkey and local additions to the feast which are nearly as sacrosanct: greenbean casserole containing cream of mushroom soup and canned fried onions back in Kansas, hushweh a Lebanese dish of rice and ground lamb at the Ledbetter-Jacobs celebration and kimchi and bulghooghi at my old parish dinner. I bet that each of us has our own family tradition of the feast.

While Thanksgiving is a family-centered holiday in America, it is also a feast which is ideally open to outsiders. Wherever I have lived around the country and around the world we Americans tend to invite others to join us in Thanksgiving. As a sailor stationed in Italy for years I invited other servicemen and women to join me and my roommates for dinner and we instinctively invited locals to join us as well. You know, that old Pilgrim and Indian thing of sharing with others. San Pelligrino - coincidentally meaning holy pilgrim - joined Coca Cola on the table and panetone joined pumpkin pie for dessert.

Other times, I have been alone in a new place and was invited in to share the day and meal with a family or group of friends. Are you gathering this week with others to share a meal and give thanks?

At the heart of our faith is thanksgiving to God for his grace shared so abundantly with us. Each week we join together around a table to tell the story that unites us and share in a meal of bread and wine. That celebration is the Eucharist which means thanksgiving. Like at our family gatherings this Thursday this is a gathering where there is hopefully always someone new who is joining the tribe and who is welcome just because they are loved.

In my family many things are predictable. During the year there will have been spats between siblings and there are spats dating from years ago which no one can quite remember how or when they got started: they just are. Yet at Thanksgiving there is a sense of calm that descends over the gathering, a sense that this is the time for forgiveness and the time to reach out and be generous and loving. Thanksgiving is a time of grace in my family when there is a chance to put old things away and start anew.

On Sundays at the Eucharist we receive communion, that is we receive the body and blood of Christ and we receive the grace of knowing that God is Father of us all and that all of us gathered together are truly brothers and sisters. It is a wonderful blessing to know that we are not alone and that we are part of something much greater than ourselves. We are each and everyone part of the body of Christ.

As a student of Romance languages, I remember making the connection that to express thanks one says gracias or grazie: Grace. Grace, the unearned favor and love of God, is what we receive in our Eucharist/thanksgiving and grace is what we can take away from the table and pass on to the world. Let this Thursday and this Sunday, too, be a time of thanksgiving, fellowship, grace received and grace shared. Enjoy your turkey with green bean casserole and hushweh and kim chi and greens and Pelligrino - and tamales if you are truly blessed. Remember, too, to say grace, to receive grace, say Hallelujah and pass the mashed potatoes - and the grace - along.

ACE Quiz

Thanksgiving is a translation of

A) Baptism
B) Confirmation
C) Eucharist
D) Extreme Unction

Grace is

A) an Extension of a Deadline
B) Forgiveness of a Debt
C) Unmerited Favor
D) a Tax Credit

The answers are the initials of Christ Church

This week's gospel reading from Mark contains the following passage: "For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs." This passage refers to:

A) The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
B) The burning of Nero's Rome
C) Mutually assured destruction
D) The Second Coming of Christ

I think that this bit of the story and others refer directly to the coming fall of Jerusalem and the final destruction of the Temple by the Romans. The levelling of the Temple to the point of only a retaining wall left standing, the mass starvation of the besieged and the crucifixion of thousands of survivors were horrors the people of Judea would suffer in the lifetime of those listening. Too, the burning of Rome and the resultant scapegoat killing of Christians.

As the first generations of Christians died before the return of Christ to establish God's kingdom of love instead of the Roman rule of oppression, they came to understand that suffering would always be with them until Christ returned and one could not predict when that time would be. Millenialist movements have arisen regularly through the ages as Christians have sought to see in the travails and anxiety of their times signs of Christ's return. In our own lifetimes we have seen much made of the signs of war and earthquake and famine. Fortunes have been made on books, magazines and movies that proclaim specific signs of Christ's immanent return ranging from the establishment of the common market/European Community/European Union to comets to Saddam Hussein.

So, before the parousia (arrival) or Christ's coming in glory we will always be in the midst of turmoil. Christ doesn't ask us to predict his return, but simply asks us to be faithful doing his work until that day. Like a bumper sticker proclaims: Jesus is Coming, Look Busy.

The answer? A - definitely, B - fits the description,
C - seems like rumour of war, no? D - will come when A,B, and C and E,F through Z have run their course. Be ready, it's any day now.

Most Catholic and Episcopal churches have a patronal feast day and Christ Church is no exception. Our feast day is relatively new to the liturgical calendar: it was only added in 1926 and the present date was determined in 1969. This year ours falls on November 26, the last Sunday before Advent.

Two questions:

What is the name of our feast day?

A) Christ the Savior
B) Christ the Incarnation
C) Christ the Lord
D) Christ the King

The date was chosen by:

A) General Convention
B) Lambeth Conference
C) Vatican II
D) The Vestry

The answers are D and C (sort of).

Christ the King as a solemnity or holy day was instituted by Pius XI on December 11,1925 in the encyclical Quas primas in celebration of the all-embracing authority of Christ which shall lead mankind to seek the 'peace of Christ'. In the reform of the liturgical calendar following the Second Vatican Council the observance was moved to the last Sunday before Advent.

So, how did it come to be celebrated (unofficially) in the Protestant Episcopal Church? Despite some hours of internet research and digging through books in my own library, I honestly can't tell you. Christ is called king in the collect for that day, but there is no mention in either the prayer book calendar or the Lesser Feasts and Fasts our church's official recorders of holy days and observances.

I suspect that it is one more example of the Anglican reappropriation of its Catholic heritage. This reappropriation could be said to have begun with the Tractarians who reintroduced much ceremony and practice from contemporary Roman Catholicism into their 19th century church while obstensibly aiming to recover pre-Reformation elements of the English Church. In our lifetimes we have borrowed and adapted much more from post-Vatican II Catholicism, including much of the form and language of our worship and many of the more contemporary hymns.

It is nothing to be ashamed of to borrow and adapt the best of what other churches have to offer. Indeed, one is just as likely to hear a Lutheran hymn (even a Martin Luther hymn!) a Methodist hymn or Anglican hymn in a Catholic church as one is to observe a Roman Catholic practice in our own church. The similiarities among our worship services are now so great that maybe there is greater diversity within a church or denomination than there is between them.

So, let us rejoice that we are different parts of one body with one Lord and one King. And to borrow an old slogan from the Puritans: No King but Jesus!

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. –Hebrews 12:1

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God . . “ Ephesians 2:19

“ . . equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ . .”
Ephesians 4:12


Another All Saints Day is upon us, one of the major feasts of the Christian year. Yet, one can be easily excused in this Christian nation of ours for not knowing the significance of the day or even that November 1 has any significance at all beyond the chore of taking down decorations and the chance to get half price off candy corn and miniature Hershey bars. Halloween is of course the eve that ate the holy day and this time of year we are much more prone to think of skeletons, witches and children dressed as movie mass murderers than saints.

Perhaps Halloween is right to get precedence since All Saints is one of the feast days which was deliberately placed on the calendar to supplant a pre-Christian pagan festival. It is a time of year when the early Celts believed the spirits of the dead revisited the earth and bonfires were lit to ward them off. In contrast, the Christian observance of All Saints was a day when the departed saints were commemorated and the communion of living and dead in Christ was welcomed and celebrated.

So, who are the saints? In the Old Testament hesed refers to faithfulness to the covenant with God and those who are faithful are refered to in our English Bibles as “saints.” In the New Testament hagios signifies “dedicated to God” and from this develops the sense “holy” and “saint.” The saints are those living members of the body of Christ in Ephesians and also those in the presence of God - or in heaven – in Hebrews and Revelation.

All of these saints: the Old Testament prophets, the apostles, evangelists and martyrs of scripture and the martyrs and confessors of the early church were seen to be both godly examples of Christian living and intercessors for us before God. Their tombs became sites for worship and pilgrimage and the famous catacombs of Rome were centers of the church not so much for safety from persecution, but for proximity to the relics of the Christian saints buried there. The remains of the saints were venerated for having been instruments of the Holy Spirit during their lives and as reminders of the dedication of the saints’ lives to Christ.

Who are the saints among us today? In one of my favorite devotional books, All Saints, the author Robert Ellsberg says that they are the men and women whose lives and message speak to the spiritual needs of our day. They exhibit heroic sanctity or godliness in their lives that is a light for our own pilgrimage through life. These saints include the ones we read about in scripture and see in the stained glass in church, but they are also those who we read about in the paper or see in the news who preach the gospel by their words and deeds.

Saints were not originally canonized centrally in Rome, but were acclaimed saints by their communities when the people recognized heroic faith. In our lives it is best that we, too, seek to recognize saintliness around us and let those whose lives are closer to us in time and space find a place in the cloud of witnesses who build us up as part of the body of Christ. Is there a teacher, a pastor or friend who has guided you on the Way? She, too, is a saint of God who you can ask for prayers before our Father. Is there a hero or prophet of our day who has inspired you to holiness? Let his life be for you an icon, a window into the Kingdom of God.

Think, too, how you are called to be a holy companion on the way for others. As the hymn I Sing a Song of the Saints of God goes in its own saccharine way, anyone can be a saint (even a priest!). May we all aim to be one, too.

ACE Quiz
Name the author of the following quotes or fragments.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God .”

A) St. John
B) St. Paul
C) St. Francis
D) Bob Cornner

“ .. simultaneously saint and sinner”

A) The Rev. Al Green
B) St. Paul
C) Martin Luther
D) St. Augustine of Hippo

“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

A) Martin Luther King, Jr., Baptist minister and Civil Rights leader
B) Jon Bruno, Bishop of Los Angeles
C) Mahatma Gandhi, Indian teacher of non-violence activism
D) Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker founder

Answers: b,c,d