Extra Ordinary

April 24, 2022
Imago Dei MCC

Francisco X. Alarcón wrote of un dios más dios, a more godlike god:

I want a god as my accomplice who spends nights in houses of ill repute and gets up late on Saturdays. a god who whistles through the streets and trembles before the lips of his lover. a god who waits in line at the entrance of movie houses and likes to drink café au lait. a god who spits blood from tuberculosis and doesn’t even have enough for bus fare. a god knocked unconscious by the billy club of a policeman at a demonstration. un dios que se orine de miedo ante el resplandor de los electrodos de tortura. a god who hurts to the last bone and bites the air in pain. A jobless god a striking god a hungry god a fugitive god an exiled god an enraged god a god who longs from jail for a change in the order of things. I want a more godlike god

A more godlike god. I think Alarcón is writing about an extra, ordinary god, a god who is More, ordinary. One perhaps who blurs – or erases – the hierarchies between secular and sacred, between holy and habitual. I think today’s gospel passage illustrates this beautifully.

It is a remarkable and an ordinary story. Hours of fishing with no catch and then a surprising haul. A charcoal fire at daybreak beside a lake. A miraculous meal and a common meal, like so many others Jesus shared in homes and on hillsides. Friends, family have gathered. They are reunited, Jesus is alive! Bread and fish is on the fire, typical food, already there is enough for the day, already a blessing; and Jesus says, bring the fresh catch – and there is something new, abundance! un dios más dios. Ordinary miracles in you and with you and through you.

It’s a communion story and so it tells us something of that meal. Bread and cup are ordinary things; routine, useful things, necessary stuff but wholly commonplace. Like the stuff of Jesus’s miracles: he uses words, water, bread and fish, spit. And like the stuff of his lessons: seed, a woman with a broom, a man with debt, wheat, weeds, leaven, flowers and birds, all things that surround us in our homes and our work and play. Bread and cup; bread and fish. This routine, this daily meal, and Jesus said, this is my life, this my body, my promise. This ordinary repeated thing, this everyday practice, becomes the magical rite of community and salvation, solemn representations of a divine, loving reign.

It feels really important to peel away some of the spiritualization and religion of this passage (not to discard it, if you want to keep it please do, but peel those layers back for a minute) and better understand that communion is also, perhaps first, a meal. Just a meal. A more godlike meal, an extra, ordinary meal. The bible (in Greek and in Hebrew) is filled with meals that are ordinary, that are special, some that are startlingly special.

Just in the gospels alone, how many instances can you remember of meals, parables of meals, sayings of meals? There is the surprising feedings of five thousand households in all four gospels. (John agreeing with the other three gospels is in itself is something of a surprise.) Then we have the surprising feeding of four thousand households which is told in Matthew and Mark. Again, all four gospels tell a story of the woman who anoints Jesus as he sits at table, John’s gospel calls her Mary. In Luke there is a post-resurrection meal after the walk to Emmaus, Jesus invites himself to the home of Zaccheus to eat, and Mark insists that the laborer deserves her food.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree that Jesus’ disciples eat and drink, as opposed to John the Baptizer’s disciples, who fast. The Syro-Phonecian woman in Mark, whom Matthew made into a Canaanite woman, argues that even the dogs get to eat the scraps under the table. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell of a last supper and provide a similar ritual story. John tells of a last meal, too, with a much, much, much longer story and many more words. In two gospels there is a parable of the wedding meal (where people are brought in from off the streets, from the highways and hedges, when the invited guests refuse to come; hold that thought). Luke prefaces its version of that parable with a saying that folks should take the lower seats at meals. And John tells of a wedding meal at Cana.

And these are just the ones I can think of right off the top of my head. What could we come up with if we put our heads together? Or if we sat down with a concordance or something? The meal is important to Jesus and to his first followers, and I want to argue that the significance of the communion meal is drawn from the significance of the ordinary table. My boyfriend John Dominic Crossan notes the importance of the meal throughout the gospels and says that the meal is actually the heart of the original Jesus movement.

Think about that. The heart of the movement.

Part of this is clear when you know that, culturally, there was a strict hierarchy that divided people into separate and separated classes. This system of hierarchy was based on whether people were able to make an equal exchange of some social, economic, or political capital, and the hierarchy was so unquestioned that it was considered to be the bedrock of public life.

People did not break bread with those across the vast gulf that separated the upper and lower classes. People did not invite those from the other side of the gulf to dinner. Weddings and banquets and dinners were held between people from the same side of the social chasm.

Because the only people who mattered were the people who could trade favors with you, people who could benefit you.

Because the meal itself was as socially symbolic as it was actual.

Because, then as now, the concentration of wealth with a few demanded the exploitation of most others and their labor – exploiting people deprives them of “proper family life, material sufficiency, basic human dignity and life space in order to generate a surplus” (Crossan, The Historical Jesus).

This social fabric, then, is the backdrop of Jesus’ life and ministry. And from this place of vast inequality, Jesus introduces the ministry of meal.

Jesus is introducing a new commensality (that means eating together). His meal is egalitarian, mutual, reciprocal, just, balanced, interdependent, partnering. It assumes that everyone has something to bring to the table. It assumes that no one *needs to bring something to the table. Jesus rearranged the rules about who is good enough, who is enough, to eat with. He called for a new way of understanding interdependence or, as Thich Nhat Hahn calls it, inter-being. (There is no place where I stop and you begin; we inter-are.) Given how central it was to their social construct, it was meal as protest, meal as theater, every bit as much as the satirical march on Jerusalem or the civil disobedience with the temple money changers. In that culture, the meal itself, the very act of breaking bread with, of sitting down to table with another person in itself meant that you were equals. And Jesus was creating an actual and symbolic world in which reciprocity was based not on social, economic, or political grounds but on something higher.

Instead of telling you what that means for you, I’d just like you to think about this for yourself. Whether there are people who you think are beneath you. Or maybe you think that you are the person who isn’t good enough to be invited to the banquet. And importantly, please think carefully about this as something that the communion table only elevates, that the eucharist ritualizes and sacralizes: remember that the ordinary meal and our ordinary daily practice of eating together and being together is what we are being asked – even required – to reformulate. Not just on Sundays. Not just during the eucharist. Not just when someone is looking.

This passage goes on to include an exchange with Peter that reverses his denial of Jesus. Peter denied Jesus three times, and three times today, Peter takes it back and gets a do-over. It’s tempting to talk about this as forgiveness, and to preach about forgiveness, but I usually don’t. I don’t know what forgiveness is, other than who is expected to do it with or without an apology, and how it’s used an end in itself rather than as a tool for repentance and repair. But I will point out that Peter is at the table. Peter wasn’t left out of the meal here, wasn’t shamed or punished, but was brought in and fed and given three opportunities to make peace with Jesus and himself, to find amnesty from Jesus and from himself. It feels so important to notice that and be challenged and moved by that, and maybe convicted, I don’t know. I’m thinking on it, too, and what that means for the people in my life who have really done a number on me, have never apologized or even acknowledged that harm, and who I am repeatedly told to forgive. I’m struggling with this, too, because it looks like those people are at this lakeside coal fire breakfast reunion along with everyone else. It breaks my heart open. It breaks my heart. It opens my heart. I’m thinking on it, too.

It’s just a meal. And a more godlike meal, an extra, ordinary meal. Just that. But not merely, or unimportantly. A more godlike extra, ordinary meal that is a daily, a three-times daily event, woven into the fabric of our existence, for our survival, embedded in our culture. Like Pride. Like breathing.

I know this parable is true and important and points us toward the thing we call heaven. A meal where people bring whatever they have, whether that’s material stuff, emotional stuff, identity stuff: the little boy had five loaves and two fish; the woman has her tears, her long hair, her expensive ointment; the Syro-Phoenician woman has her certainty that she, too, is a child of God; Jesus had a charcoal fire, fish on the fire, bread; and the disciples have a fresh catch. People have brought what they have, and sometimes that is only their hunger, sometimes only their brokenness: together it becomes a meal. Together we create a meal.

I believe this points us toward “heaven.” Not something apocalyptic or apocryphal in the future, but a way of living together right now, today. Maybe this is exactly heaven: An open table.

Metropolitan Community Churches everywhere celebrate an open communion. Everyone is welcome at its table, whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, whatever you call yourself, whatever name you call your God. Without exception, without exclusion, everyone is invited here because we believe that these gifts, these ordinary miracles of food, friendship, abundance, are for all of us. un dios más dios. The table is set, please come and be fed.

Peace.