ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at the Parish Mass on the Tenth Sunday of Trinity, 16th August 2009
Readings: Proverbs 9. 1-6; Ephesians 5. 15-20; John 6. 51-58
If you are a child of the 60s then you may remember 'following your bliss'. Of course, some say that if you can remember the 60s then you weren't really there but if you were young in the 60s and 'following your bliss' then you were knowingly or unknowingly a disciple of Joseph Campbell . It was Joseph Campbell who coined the phrase. In the 1960s and 70s he was influential both as an academic and as a mover and shaker in popular culture. He explored the myths and rituals of the world's religions especially those of indigenous peoples. Campbell took over from where James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) left off.
Today Campbell is falling out of fashion. His idea that all religions have basically the same myths and rituals, no longer stands up. For Campbell the key idea was that religion gravitates around the notion of dying and rising. Dying and rising is a basic fact of nature. Rivers run dry. Plant life dies back. Then comes the flood and the world is renewed. Dying and rising. Religion hooks into this cycle and sees itself not just as celebrating it but as enabling it. Without religion, without sacrifices to the gods, the cycle would stop and people would perish.
In an interview towards the end of his life Campbell spoke about a myth and ritual from Papua New Guinea that fascinated him. As it's not long since breakfast I won't go into details but suffice to say, a tribe acts out the natural cycle culminating in the sacrificial deaths of two young people, a woman and a man who are then eaten. Campbell was asked: 'What is the truth to which the rituals point?' Campbell replied drawing a distinction between 'hunting cultures' (i.e. where people hunt animals for food) and 'planting cultures' (i.e. where people practise agriculture). He then goes on to apply this idea to Christianity. Campbell says
The nature of life itself has to be realized in the acts of life. In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or a bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food.
Then he says
Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes.
What's absent from Campbell's work is any sense of moral repulsion that people are killed and eaten. To put cannibalism on a par with the Eucharist is perverse. Indeed, it was an accusation levelled at the early church. In the second century a group of Christian writers known as Apologists spilt a lot of ink refuting it. But Campbell's error isn't just mischievous it's much more subtle than that. The problem is that Campbell sees myths as prime examples of human creativity but he sees ritual as both secondary and second-rate. Catholic Christianity on the other hand has always valued ritual: not for itself, but because it is a vehicle for a message and not simply the enactment of a myth.
Over the past few weeks and on to next Sunday the gospel comes from John Ch 6. If you've been at church every Sunday recently you may have thought that the needle has got stuck. We kicked off with the Feeding of the Five Thousand at the end of July and since then 'bread of life' imagery has been the order of the day.
John is meditating on the relationship between the physical Jesus, the bread and wine of the Eucharist and Christ as the incarnation of God. It's a tall order John was writing at a time of persecution. Dying and rising was not about nature for John the Evangelist. Christians celebrating the Eucharist, often meeting in secret was about keeping the blessing of hope alive. Christ had died and was risen. Christians facing death believed that they, too would rise again
In today's verses Jesus is locked in controversy with the Jews. Jesus says I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Jesus replies by pointing to what eating and drinking in his name means. Eating and drinking in his name means to abide in him, to die and rise with him, to share eternal life with him and the Father.
The early Christians, modelling themselves on Christ did not fight back when it came to persecution. They didn't kill in return for being killed. They were abiding in Christ, nourished by his final sign. They were seeking to break the cycles of violence that Jesus himself had stood against by being crucified. Jesus brought the shedding of blood to an end. There was to be no more temple sacrifice and there was to be no more shedding of innocent blood in human society either. His message of forgiveness was to assuage the human desire for revenge. His gift of love was to overcome the avarice that makes us kill for what other people have.
The first readers of John's Gospel saw themselves as the Body of Christ, as Jesus Redivivus and engaged in the same work that their Master had begun. Far from Campbell's claim that the Eucharist is just another dying and rising ritual, something bound to the cycle of nature the Eucharist itself is a critique of all violence both secular and sacred. That's why we do it over and over again. We say 'No, no, no' to the ways in which people are killed all the day long.
To give the image of bread a bit of a rest this week, I'd like us to turn to wine. Christ gives us his blood, his wine to drink. His blood, he tells us is drink indeed. St Paul, writing to the Ephesians this morning says succinctly (using the Authorised Version) Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess. Far be it for me to turn this into a temperance sermon. Even I wouldn't be that stupid preaching in a church that has a bar in the crypt but we live in a culture that is being killed by addiction. Addiction to alcohol is one example. Addiction to drugs is another. But the problem is much more fundamental than narcotics. We're also aware that things like salt and sugar can be harmful, too. George W Bush famously remarked that 'America is addicted to oil'.
Beneath our addictions is a profound human loneliness. We easily 'fill up' our empty lives with consumption. Alcohol, drugs, salt and sugar go down our throats as easily as petrol goes into the tank of a car. But they aren't our saviours. We're killing ourselves and we're helped in self-assassination by the myths of contemporary society.
We imbibe myths every time we open a glossy magazine. Here in the adverts the Beautiful People stare out at us seductively. The Beautiful People wear the best clothes. They stay in the most luxurious places. They drive the smartest cars and knock back the most expensive drinks. We chase the ace. We spend our hard-earned cash to look like them, to be like them, to inhabit their world, to abide with them. But we fail. Our resources are exhausted long before we can even touch the hem of their garment and we find ourselves hollow and depleted.
In the 60s and 70s we followed our bliss and found it wanting. In the 80s and 90s we followed the consumer dream and found that pretty empty, too. Perhaps now is the time to return to something ancient, something 2000 years old: a morsel of bread and a sip of wine. This great sacrament doesn't perpetuate the cycles of nature but breaks the vicious circles of nurture. It reassures us that in the depths of our souls we aren't alone and that our creation and re-creation, our dying and rising are in the hands of God. In Him is bliss. In him we are blessed with a gift, Christ himself, something that money can't buy and nature cannot destroy.