This is Eucharist ready during the “Nourish Your Spirit” Bible study and Eucharist at the end of common art. Yes, the white cloth under the elements is paper towel. Yes, that’s grape juice and a multi-grain roll. We’re reading through the Gospel of John (the hardest one, as one of the staff noted), but it doesn’t seem hard to this group. More on how they hear Gospel later–today, I’m preaching on Boston Common about the lilies of the field.
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Well, I never really thought that Jesus was too picky about the whole bread and wine business. One assumes that bread and wine were fairly ordinary things that one had at dinner, even at the Last Supper. The point, as I see it, is to remember Christ in your daily activities, not just to put on a show.
Bean is crawling on my lap as I type this. Perhaps he wants to say hello.
Cardinal Ratzinger makes a good argument in “The Spirit of the Liturgy” about the water of Baptism being universal and the bread and wine of the Eucharist being specific. They are the common food and drink of the particular culture where God became a particular human being in space and time. As such, they remind us of the specificity of the Incarnation. God is not some nebulous ground of being “up there” somewhere; he is Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam.
Ratzinger argues that this means that bread and wine is what should be used in whatever culture the Eucharist is celebrated. Although I think he has an excellent point about Baptism and Eucharist that would never have occurred to me, I turn the argument slightly on its head and would say that the multigrain roll and Welch’s – or any “bread and wine”, whatever their form — connect the Incarnation (“this is my Body”) with the very particular place and people wherein the Eucharist is being offered, and, as Ratzinger would perhaps agree, serves as the counterpoint to baptism into one universal Body. Both aspects are important, and true.
For the people sleeping rough, as the English call it, or in shelters, alcoholism is so large a problem that we cannot use wine.
Thank you for giving me the Ratzinger; I agree, the point is very helpful. And thank you more for seeing that it’s the materiality of the bread and drink, the species, not the genus, that matters. We dare not limit God–doesn’t the anthem text say something like that? And we could not if we tried.
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