We continue our four-week worship series called Earth-Honoring Faith. The outline for this worship series began to develop earlier this summer when we attended a conference called Seizing An Alternative. We hope this worship series will encourage us to consider how our faith tradition calls us to honor the earth. The earth is in a time of peril and we believe our Christian tradition can both teach and encourage us to respond more faithfully in our daily lives.
Outline for Earth-Honoring Faith
▪August 16: Caring (Psalm 139)
▪August 23: Communion (John 6.56-69)
▪August 30: Consumption (James 1.17-27)
▪September 6: Climate (Romans 8:19-23)
We will turn this week from Caring to Communion and reflect upon how our faith might shape what and how we eat. Communion is literally common-union. We break bread at The Table with bread and juice each Sunday as a reminder of the ways in which God shapes us into one people through the practice of this ritual. We have opportunities to embody this ritual each time we break bread in the world throughout the week.
Larry Rasmussen writes, “The moral ethos of leaning into the world in this way is signaled in the word ‘Eucharist.’ Eucharistia is Greek for “thanksgiving” and is a word implying liturgy and ritual as the form of people’s grateful response and as a guide for their living. If the bread of heaven is shared freely and equally with all as God’s own provisioning way, and if all are welcome to this welcome table for a sacramental meal together, why do we not do likewise for the other tables of the world? (Earth-Honoring Faith, 263)
Read John 6.56-69.
Nanette Sawyer, in writing on this passage, reminds us: “Fleshiness is important to Christian theology. Incarnation is central to how we think about, encounter, and (try to) understand God. The incarnation is about living in flesh, and Jesus says that those who eat his incarnate holiness actually take him inside themselves. He lived in flesh when he spoke these words, but now he lives in the flesh, the bodies, of his followers. Imbibing the embodied Christ, taking him into our core experience—this is how we step into the life Jesus lived, trying to follow God in the Way Jesus did.” (http://thq.wearesparkhouse.org/featured/ordinary21bgospel/)
Reflect on the meals you have eaten over the last few days. How have you been caring for the earth in your eating choices? How have you been caring for your own body in your eating choices? What are you most grateful for in terms of how your eating reflects a deeper sense of communion with the earth and yourself and God and your neighbors? In what way might your eating draw you deeper into communion in the coming days?