THE EUCHARIST CAN SAVE THE WORLD: PART I

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This is not a click-bait title, but a deep conviction born out of my experience with both the endless challenge and the enduring sustenance found in Christ’s body and blood. I don’t think that I am alone when I say that the Eucharist, much like the figure of Jesus in the Gospels, has a strangely compelling power that draws people toward it. I marvel at how each week we come back to the table to be fed, and how God is always there. I marvel how, over a lifetime, the mystery of what is sought and what is given there remains inexhaustible. The only thing bigger than our insatiable hunger, it seems, is God’s undying mission to satisfy it. 

It was the Eucharist’s reliable pattern and enduring promise that drew me into the worship of the Episcopal Church many years ago and also back into my relationship with God after much wrestling and wandering in the wilderness. But ironically, essentially, it is the honesty of the Eucharist—a space where I continue to wrestle and where I continue to encounter God in the untameable wilderness places of my soul—that has kept me coming back. Because, as in any honest relationship, there is no stasis, no complacency when it comes to knowing and being known by God. I come to the Eucharist to lay down both my reverence and my restlessness, trusting that that this encounter will sustain me through the meager seasons of the spirit. I come with my questions, and God comes with their own questions, too.

I ask, why do we suffer, Lord? Why do we hunger? And how can it be that you would give us yourself as the answer? 

And God asks, why do you suffer? Why do you hunger? And would you give me yourself to find the answer?

And thus we arrive, God and I, at the edge of what we know about one another, trusting that the questions themselves are part of the answer. And thus, at last, we are honest with each other about the stakes of this love where our bodies, God’s and mine, are both on the line for each other. Every time the bread and the cup are offered, I reach out to receive the sweet-bitter tase of grace enfleshed. Sweet because God offered their body first; Jesus laid down his life for the love of the world. Bitter because I am asked to do the same in memory of what was given—this is my body, this is my blood—and the prospect of doing so frightens me. I know that this feast will always be both never and always enough until everything is given, until everything is received, including myself. 

To love and to feed upon God is a complex form of praise—a thin line between communion and consumption that denies simplistic understandings of what is given and what is offered up. And yet in its ambiguity there is spaciousness, and a freedom for both myself and my Lord to be who and what we are. There is space enough for my love and my fury, and for His. And so I believe that the Eucharist can save me, and everything, because it holds everything—it cradles everything—in a love free from illusions. The Eucharist can save the world, not because it is mighty, but because it is honest. It is true. 

Before we go further, though, we must attend to our language. What do we mean when we say that the Eucharist can ‘save’ the world? For many of us, ‘salvation’ is a fraught word that brings up ideas of judgment and hell and eternal condemnation. And while these are undeniably aspects of how Christians have understood the stakes of salvation over time, they are not the entire story. 

In the Hebrew Scriptures, salvation refers to rescue, whether from distress, death, disease, or misfortune. Israel turned to God in moments of crisis and asked for physical health and life and safety. In exile, they did not cry out for a heavenly home but for their actual homeland.  When the Psalmist lifted their voice to God for salvation, it was not ethereal joy they desired but survival. So salvation, in its original and purest sense, is very much about life on earth and the way that God acts to preserve, sustain, and restore that life. 

And while it is true that in Christ the whole scope of God’s salvation took on cosmic dimensions—dimensions that are eternal and boundless—it is still not divorced from material reality. Incarnational theology, for which the Eucharist is a primary liturgical lens, reminds us that salvation is not just about “going to heaven” and escaping the world, but about the world being made whole by God. We aren’t going anywhere, ultimately. Instead, God is coming to us in order to fulfill the long-promised redemption of the earth. Our salvation, whatever it looks like, will be fully revealed here in the world at the end of time.

So when we talk about the Eucharist saving the world, we should not translate this to mean that the Eucharist saves us from a broken creation and gets us out of here into heaven” Instead, the Eucharist suggests that salvation is God’s plan to rescue creation and to make us active participants in the process. And it is in the ongoing encounter with Christ’s broken and risen body that we are both challenged and sustained to do so, in ways both practical and mystical. 

First, let us consider the practical. 

The Eucharist, as a liturgical pattern and practice, is not just a worship service we attend on Sundays. It is an immersive, firsthand, grace-infused experience of the already-not-yet fully redeemed creation. Each person who participates in the Eucharist is choosing, as the theologian Aidan Kavanagh said, to “do the world as the world was meant to be done,” as participants in a creation immersed in its Creator’s self-giving love. 

In other words, through its shape and its substance, the Eucharist forms us into who we are supposed to be as human beings—it offers us a pattern for living our lives well as disciples of Christ, because it connects us with our basic God given nature. And so at any particular section within the Eucharistic liturgy, we would do well to ask ourselves: where can I practice this the rest of the week?

There are many ways to name and consider what these practices are, but as a jumping off point, I have divided the sections of the standard Eucharistic service in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer into the following outline. I encourage you to bring this with you the next time you worship. Notice how these practices arise and give way to the ones that follow. Consider which of them are most needed in the current circumstances of your life. 

Practice: Greeting, Seeing & Honoring

Opening Acclamation

The Collect for Purity

Song of Praise

The Collect of the Day

Questions: What (or whom) do I need to acknowledge in my life? Where might I be ignoring something that requires my attention? How can I honor what is happening right now, even if it is challenging?

Practice: Learning to Listen & Respond

The Lessons & Psalm

The Gospel

The Sermon

The Creed

Questions: What is God trying to tell me, whether in the Word or in the words of my neighbor? Am I willing to listen? Am I willing to be changed and to be moved to action by what I hear?

Practice: Caring for the Needs of the World

The Prayers of the People

Questions: Am I aware of the needs of those around me? Have I numbed myself to the pain of the world? Or have I taken on too much of it as my own? How can I be an answer to prayer even as I pray?

Practice: Repentance & Reconciliation

The Confession of Sin

The Peace

Questions: What is missing? What is broken? What is possible? What is enduringly true? Can I be honest with God and with myself?

Practice: Generosity and Gratitude

The Offertory

Question: What do I have to give? What have I been given? 

Practice: Remembrance, Hope & Presence

The Great Thanksgiving

The Sanctus, Benedictus & Memorial Acclamation

Communion

Questions: Who or what has sustained me thus far? Where do I hope to go from here? What is my share of God’s dream for the world? How can I partake in it?

Practice: Leaving, Letting Go, Beginning Again

Post Communion Prayer

Blessing & Dismissal 

Questions: What is ending in my life? To whom or what must I say goodbye? What must I release in order to begin again? 

Other questions might arise, too. Whatever they are, I encourage you to explore them, for whatever we encounter in the Eucharist is an invitation into the fullness of our humanity. And in pursuing the answers, over the course of a lifetime, we are being formed by the One who is the Answer.