"Spiritual but not religious?" Let's be the kind of "religious" Jesus was

Sermon delivered Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016 (4th Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C), at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Fremont, CA (where I was filling in as a supply priest). Audio (but no video) posted below on Vimeo.

(1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30)

Our Gospel passage from Luke today describes Jesus’s return to his hometown of Nazareth after beginning his ministry in other parts of Galilee. The homecoming does not end well: while the people are initially impressed with his preaching, the story ends with them running him out of town and trying to throw him off a cliff! Jesus observes, in a now oft-quoted statement: “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

But it’s not just in his hometown that Jesus is rejected; he offends lots of people and almost gets attacked in several different stories throughout the Gospels, and of course, ultimately ends up crucified. It was not just his childhood friends and neighbors who found Jesus’s teachings hard to accept or threatening, it was many, many people – and most of them highly religious people.

In reading commentaries on today’s Gospel text, I came across an article titled, “Why Religious People Reject Christ.” Why Religious People Reject Christ. The author points to the fact that today, as in the time of Jesus, “most opposition [to the work of God] comes from the religious crowd, not from those outside.”[1] It’s always the people who are the most passionate about and devoted to their faith who are the most threatened by any criticism of it, even when that criticism is well-deserved.

“Religious people” don’t fare too well in the Gospel texts. It’s the religious leaders and the highly devout who reject Jesus, and ultimately come to call for his execution. Most of the prophets throughout the Hebrew Bible are rejected and scorned by “religious people” as well. Prophets come to remind the faithful of what it truly means to follow God, but they are met with resistance from those who think they already have it all figured out. In today’s particular example, the people of Nazareth are so offended by Jesus reminding them – with stories from their own scriptures, by the way – that God can and does work outside of the people of Israel that they almost kill him. They are so sure that they alone are deserving of God’s favor that the very idea that God would neglect lepers and widows in need in Israel while blessing and healing people who would normally be considered enemies of Israel – a leper who is a commander of the Syrian army and a widow who is a Canaanite, one of the people the Israelites had been commanded to drive out of the land so they could possess it – sends them into a rage. How dare God show mercy on anyone other than us? And how dare you suggest that somehow that has something to do with the fulfillment of God’s purpose?

This kind of thinking is alive and well today, as we all know. There’s a modern “parable” that says that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. So he takes his case to God in protest: ‘They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner,’ he says. ‘What are you complaining about?’ God responds. ‘They won’t let me in either.’[2]

It’s likely because of those kinds of “religious people” that an increasing number of Americans are rejecting organized religion – the latest surveys show that up to 20% of the population now does not claim any particular religious affiliation. [3] When asked, many of them will tell you they are “spiritual but not religious.” Perhaps you’ve heard that line before; perhaps you’ve even said it yourself at some point. Because being “religious” has gotten a bad rep because the “religious” people are the ones who are so often uptight about things, the ones who draw lines around who’s in and who’s out, the ones who manage to take the fun out of everything.

People who say they are “spiritual but not religious” often point out the hypocrisy within organized religion and the ways in which it is used to control or exploit people. They take issue with any group of people thinking that God chooses or prefers them over others, and point out that when people think they have all the answers, not only do they shut out God, but they shut out other people, in the most extreme cases leading to dehumanization and violence.

This critique of religion is really nothing new – in an interesting twist, these modern religiously unaffiliated people are echoing the words of the biblical prophets!

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Jesus says to the “religious people” of his day. “For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (Matthew 23:13-15)

Before Jesus, John the Baptist called out any within the Jewish faith who might have felt that their lineage as “sons and daughters of Abraham” entitled them to a kind of “free pass” at the last judgment, who might have thought that they were worthy just by virtue of the fact that they were part of God’s “chosen people.” He says to them (you might remember this from a few Sundays ago during Advent):

“Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” (Luke 3:8-9)

John calls them to “bear fruits worthy of repentance,” to live an authentic life of faith that bears visible fruit in their actions. Being a son or daughter of Abraham means nothing, John says, if your life does not bear witness to God’s justice and love.

Reaching back into the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Amos brought this word of God to the people: “Because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain… you… afflict the righteous, … take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate… I hate… I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them” (Amos 5:11a, 12b, 21-22a).

Prophets always remind religious people that the correct observance of rituals means nothing if their hearts are not in the right place. You can say all your prayers and go to services every week, but if you do that while people are suffering from injustice and hunger all around you and do nothing to help, you’ve entirely missed the point. And that’s pretty much what the “spiritual but not religious” people are saying as well.

What’s frustrating to me is when people reject religion entirely when they encounter religious hypocrisy and abuses of power, when they see all the things that are wrong with “religious people.” Because what they’re rejecting isn’t actually an authentic representation of religion. It’s a twisted version, filtered through the lens of sinful humanity. The prophets rejected that kind of religion, too, and yet they were all deeply “religious!”

There’s a common misperception among many people, Christian and non-Christian alike, that Jesus’s message carried with it a rejection of “religion.” They see in Jesus’s critiques of Jewish ritual practice and his scathing rebukes of the religious leaders of his day a rejection of religion altogether. I've heard folks say, "Christianity isn't a religion -- it's a relationship." But Jesus didn’t reject religion; Jesus was a devout Jew. He followed all the rituals and traditions of his faith. As we read in last week’s Gospel, “he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom” (Luke 4:16). He knew the scriptures of his tradition well enough to quote them from memory on a regular basis. He observed the Passover. He did all the things that a “good Jewish boy” of his day would have done. He just didn’t let the observance of those rituals blind him to the meaning behind why they were set up in the first place.

Jesus didn’t reject religion, he rejected a certain kind of religiosity, one that puts ritual observance above love of neighbor, one that puts the letter of the law above the spirit of the law. He rejected the kind of religiosity that would allow someone to die on the Sabbath because it is forbidden to do “work” on the Sabbath and healing them would be considered “work.” He rejected the kind of religiosity that makes people think God owes them something, instead of acknowledging that everything is a gift from God, the kind of religiosity that talks about “birthrights” instead of gifts, about righteousness instead of grace. He rejected the same kind of religiosity that “spiritual but not religious” people reject today.

What Jesus and the prophets came to remind us is that that kind of religiosity is not really being “religious,” it’s being self-righteous. It’s not worshipping God, it’s worshipping self. And it’s condemned in all the major world religions.

“This is the fast that I choose,” God says to the people through the prophet Isaiah; this is what he tells them it means to be “religious”:

“to loose the bonds of injustice…

to let the oppressed go free…

to share your bread with the hungry,

and bring the homeless poor into your house” (Isaiah 58:6-7).

I get the critique of the “spiritual but not religious” folks. I do. It’s easy to want to walk away when you encounter hypocrisy and corruption in any institution. But let’s not let that define what it means to be “religious.” Instead of rejecting religion, let’s be the kind of religious Jesus was. The kind of religious that comes to “bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” – that passage from Isaiah that Jesus quoted in the synagogue in his hometown and said he came to fulfill (Isaiah 61:1-2, quoted in Luke 4). Let's be the kind of religious that reminds us that God can and does work through Canaanites and Syrians as well as Israelites. The kind of religious that acknowledges that “we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9), that only God knows the full truth. The kind of religious that cultivates humility, not pride, and remembers Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians, that “if I do not love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Perhaps if we were all that kind of “religious,” people would be drawn to religion instead of repelled by it. Religion could be a part of the solution instead of part of the problem. In our collect for today, we pray for God to “hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace” – but we have to play a part in making peace as well. Perhaps God might respond to our prayer with a prayer of his own, that might go something like this:

“O finite and limited human beings, you are indebted to me for all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of my prophets, so that in your time I may use you to bring peace.” Amen.

---

[1] Steven J. Cole, “Why Religious People Reject Christ.” From the series “Luke,” on Bible.org. Published 6 June 2013 https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-16-why-religious-people-reject-christ-luke-414-30 Accessed Jan 28 2016.

[2] Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel.

[3] As cited by the 2014 Pew Research Forum survey of religion in American life. Article on the results of that story here: "America's Changing Religious Landscape," published May 12, 2015. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ Accessed Jan 28 2016.

Easter Message: God goes beyond what would have been "enough" to lavish abundant blessings on us

Sermon delivered Saturday, April 19, 2014 (The Great Vigil of Easter, Year A) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN.

Tonight we gather for one of the most ancient liturgies in the church. Although celebrating Easter on Sunday morning became the main Easter observance in Western churches after the Reformation, the custom of celebrating Easter with a vigil on Saturday night is much earlier, dating back to at least the 3rd century. When we gather for the Easter Vigil, we are celebrating Christ’s resurrection as some of our most ancient forefathers and foremothers did. As we say their prayers and sing their songs, they become our songs as well, no matter how long ago the texts were written. In the liturgy, time collapses, and no matter how many centuries have passed between the events we remember and our present time, we experience them as if they are happening now. Today, tonight, “this is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave.”

This custom of retelling the sacred stories of our history as if they were happening now, as if we were participants in the story, is even more ancient than the Easter Vigil service itself. In fact, it’s something we inherited from our Jewish brothers and sisters. Every year on Passover, the Jewish community gathers to remember the story of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, one of the foundational stories of the Jewish tradition. As they gather around the table for the seder dinner, the traditional liturgy of Passover, the youngest child present has the honor of asking the loaded question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” This question comes in the middle of the re-telling of the Passover story, which is told as if it happened to the people present. The leader of the seder says, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God took us out from there with a strong hand and with an outstretched arm.” [1] Passover is not just about remembering an event that happened to some other people a long, long time ago. It is about reliving that event, experiencing it as if it happened to them, as if it happened this night, so that the ancient story of their ancestors becomes their story, so that they become one with their forefathers and foremothers.

And tonight, in the Easter Vigil, we celebrate our own version of Passover. Jesus died during the time of the Passover in Jerusalem, and his death took on added religious significance to his Jewish followers because it occurred during that most sacred holiday. Although our English word “Easter” bears no resemblance to “Passover,” in most languages the word for “Passover” and the word for “Easter” are linguistically related, if not identical. The Latin word for the holiday we celebrate this weekend is Pascha, and Eastern Orthodox Christians still talk about celebrating “Pascha” rather than “Easter.”

The Passover imagery is vivid and plentiful in our liturgy tonight – we open by declaring that this is “the Passover of the Lord,” in which “our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life” (BCP 285), and the exsultet, that wonderful ancient hymn at the beginning of this service, declares this is both the night that God brought the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt and the night that Christ rose from the dead (BCP 287). Of the nine readings we hear from the Hebrew Bible during the Liturgy of the Word, the only reading that is not optional, that must be included if you are going to do an Easter Vigil service, is the story of the Exodus, of Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea – the story of Passover (BCP 288). A clergy colleague of mine who was raised Jewish says that, in essence, the Easter Vigil is our Passover seder! [2]

In this liturgy, we too declare that this night is different from all other nights. We too remember the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But we add another way this night is different from all other nights: “This is the night that Christ broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave” (BCP 287).

In Jesus’s Resurrection, in his defeat of the powers of our greatest enemy, death, his earliest Jewish followers saw an echo of that ancient Passover story – the deliverance from their enemies at the Red Sea. The early church declared the Easter Vigil to be the most appropriate time for baptisms not only because at Easter we recall the Resurrection and we are joined to Christ’s resurrected life through our baptism, but because baptism symbolizes a movement from slavery to freedom through water – an echo of that ancient Passover story. Just as the Israelites came out of slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Promised Land by passing through the waters of the Red Sea, so the newly baptized move from slavery to sin into freedom in the new life of Christ through the waters of baptism. In baptizing Megan and Anders tonight, we join them to the stream of God’s redemptive work that flows from the Exodus to the Resurrection and on to this day. The layers of meaning enfold over one another as we pour symbols upon symbols in this liturgy, in an attempt to give words to what is ultimately beyond the bounds of human language – the abundant mercy and love of God.

In the Passover seder, there is a famous liturgical poem, a hymn, that is sung after the re-telling of the story of the exodus. It is called, in Hebrew, dayenu, a word that is translated as “it would have been sufficient for us” or “it would have been enough.” One by one, the people recall the various stages of the exodus story, after each one saying that “it would have been enough” if God had stopped there – if God had only brought us out of Egypt, that would had been enough. If God had only split the Red Sea, that would have been enough. If God had only sustained us in the wilderness with manna, that would have been enough. If God had only given us the Torah, the Jewish law, that would have been enough. If God had only led us into the Promised Land, that would have been enough. This hymn emphasizes how abundant God’s mercies are – because even though any one of these great acts of deliverance would have been “enough,” God continually goes beyond what is merely “sufficient” to lavish his love and mercy on us. God wants us not to just survive, but to thrive, to use an old cliché. Or as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, he came that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

The clergy colleague I spoke of earlier who was raised Jewish has written a Christian version of the Dayenu, which seems appropriate to share with you at this Easter Vigil, which is in so many ways the liturgical descendant of the Passover seder:

“If only God had come to be with us, it would have been enough.

If only God became human, the Word made flesh. If only through Jesus God entered creation so that by his presence he might bless it, it would have been enough.

If only Jesus taught us and healed us and fulfilled the Law in Love, it would have been enough.

If only he’d died, if only he stretched out his arms of love on the cross, if only Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, it would have been enough.

If only he rose again, if only he left a pile of linens in an empty tomb. If only he denied death the final word and changed forever the life we live here and now, it would have been enough.

If only he sent us the Spirit to be a comforter and advocate and to lead us into all truth, it would have been enough.

If only he ascended, drawing our humanness back to God, leading the way for us, it would have been enough.

If only he made a way for us all to be adopted as daughters and sons, if only he led us all through the waters to be joined to him, our hope and our calling, and to be joined to one another, it would have been enough. Dayenu. It would have been enough.” [3]

For each one of those statements, of course, there is a still more wonderful action of God for us to celebrate, a way in which God went the extra mile, so to speak, to come even closer to us and draw us closer to one another, bringing even more blessings and joy into our lives. And although the litany must stop somewhere, in fact it never really stops. There are always more ways to say “dayenu” – it would have been enough – and to experience gratitude for the abundance in our lives.

So what is your “dayenu” this Easter season? If only God had _______, it would have been enough? In what ways has God gone beyond what would have been “enough” in your life to lavish you with abundant blessings?

In the church, we are pretty good about observing the season of Lent, but we often forget that Easter is not just a day, but an entire season. While we have 40 days of Lent to reflect on our mortality and repent of our sins, we have 50 days of Easter to celebrate the joy of the Resurrection! We’re all familiar with the tradition of taking on a Lenten discipline, but what if we started a new tradition and during the Great 50 Days of Easter, we took on an “Easter joy”? What if we committed to spend the next 50 days – from now until Pentecost, which is on June 8 this year – doing things that that bring us joy, and intentionally bringing to mind all the ways in which we are abundantly blessed, all the ways in which God has gone beyond what would have been enough in our lives?

We just might begin to re-tell the story of Easter as if it had happened to us personally. We might experience the resurrection as if it were happening now. We might live into the story so completely that it would become our story. We might become aware in new ways of our mystical union with Christ’s death and resurrection in our baptism. And in the liturgy each week, we might say with ever-deepening appreciation:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
(The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!)

---
[1] English Haggadah Text With Instructional Guide, http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/661624/jewish/English-Haggadah.htm Accessed 14 April 2014.
[2] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, associate rector at Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, GA.
[3] The Rev. Jenna Faith Strizak, “a sermon for the feast of all saints (year c), with baptisms,” November 3, 2013, Holy Trinity [Episcopal] Parish, Decatur, Ga. http://graceandgrits.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/a-sermon-for-the-feast-of-all-saints-year-c-with-baptisms/ Accessed online 8 April 2014.

An exegesis of John 6:35, 41-51 - Jesus as the bread of life and the new Passover lamb

Sermon delivered Sunday, Aug. 12, 2012 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.

Two weeks ago, we began reading through chapter 6 of the Gospel of John in our lectionary, with the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Last week, some of the people who were fed followed Jesus to Capernaum and started asking him questions about who he was and what they must do to follow God. Jesus says that they must believe in him as the one whom God has sent, and tells them that he is the bread of life.

This week, we pick up the story with the people’s reactions to Jesus’s comments. “What on earth is this guy talking about?” they ask each other. “What does he mean, he’s the ‘bread of life’? And how can he have ‘come down from heaven’ when we know who his parents are?” It doesn’t make much sense to them – and it doesn’t make much sense to some of the disciples, either. Later in chapter six, after Jesus finishes talking about how he’s going to give his flesh as bread for the world and people must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, the author of John’s Gospel tells us that “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)

These teachings from Jesus about eating his flesh and drinking his blood lose some of their “shock value” on us because we are used to hearing similar language each week in the Eucharist. The bread is the “body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and the wine is “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” These words are probably familiar and non-threatening, maybe even comforting, for most of us, and since we hear this passage from John’s Gospel with a knowledge and understanding of the Eucharist, these words about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood may seem metaphorical and benign.

But even within the context of the Eucharist, language about eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood has been controversial in the history of the church. One of the earliest accusations against the followers of Jesus after his death was that they were cannibals – because they spoke of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood. There were even rumors that Christians sacrificed babies to provide the flesh and blood for their cannibalistic rituals. The mistaken belief that Christians were taking part in such inhumane and abhorrent practices was used to justify persecution of Christians in the first few centuries after Jesus’s death. Although that particular controversy is likely over – I highly doubt that any non-Christians today perceive us as cannibals – the language of eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood still sparks debate among Christians – between those who believe that the consecrated elements of bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus and those who believe that the bread and wine are just symbols for Jesus’s body and blood.

But why is the central ritual of Christianity one that has to do with eating Jesus’s flesh and drinking his blood? The short answer is because Christians believe this is what Jesus commanded his followers to do – to remember the last meal that he shared with his disciples, when he told them that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood.

But why did Jesus do such a thing? And why was he already talking about himself as the bread of life and his flesh as bread for the world in the middle of his ministry in Galilee? The key is found in the Jewish festival of Passover.

Those of you who were here two weeks ago may remember that Passover is very important to the theological claim the author of John’s Gospel is making about Jesus: that Jesus is the Messiah and the new Passover lamb. We looked at the ways in which John’s version of the story of the feeding of the five thousand portrayed Jesus as the Messiah, and I told you that I’d be talking more about Jesus as the Passover lamb in a few weeks. Jesus’s words in today’s passage from John’s Gospel about giving his flesh as bread for the world make more sense in connection with the Passover imagery that is so strong in the Gospel of John.

Passover is the Jewish religious festival that celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. You may remember the stories from the Hebrew Bible: while Moses was trying to convince the Pharaoh to free the Israelites, God brings a series of plagues on the land of Egypt as a way of showing the Pharaoh that Moses was serious and was indeed speaking the Word of God. The final plague was a slaughter of all the firstborn of Egypt – people and livestock alike. Before this horrific event happened, God instructed the Israelites to sacrifice lambs and to spread their blood on the doorframes of their households. The name “Passover” comes from the fact that this blood served a sign to God so that he would “pass over” those households with the blood on the doors and not kill anyone inside; the blood of the lamb was a protection against the power of death that overshadowed the land of Egypt. After all the firstborn of Egypt are struck dead, the Pharaoh finally agrees to free the Israelites. When he changes his mind and pursues them into the desert, he and his entire army are killed in the Red Sea while the Israelites pass through on dry land. Chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus details God’s command to the people of Israel to commemorate that day as a perpetual ordinance, with specific instructions about how to celebrate the Passover – to kill a lamb and eat it with bitter herbs and unleavened bread.

All four Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus died in Jerusalem, sometime during the weeklong observances surrounding Passover. But while Matthew, Mark, and Luke all indicate that Jesus ate the Passover meal with his disciples the night before his death, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s last supper with his disciples is not a Passover meal, but takes place the day before the Passover. In John’s version, on Passover, Jesus is not sharing a meal with his friends, but dying on the cross, crucified at exactly the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in preparation for the Passover meal. Thus John’s Gospel makes a powerful theological point: Jesus is the new Passover lamb whose sacrifice saves us from death. Just as the blood of the lambs saved the Israelites from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt, the blood of Christ shed at his death saves us from death once and for all.

This theology is reflected in our Eucharistic liturgy. When we say, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast,” we are affirming that Jesus is the Passover lamb whose flesh and blood we are about to eat. This is where Christian imagery about Jesus as the “lamb of God” comes from – it all points back to Passover.

Now, at this point, you might be asking, “So what? Why is this connection with Passover important to us as twenty-first century Christians?”

Most Christians in the world today trace their heritage to the Gentile group in the early church who were not part of the “in crowd” of Jesus’s first, Jewish followers. From that perspective, the fact the central ritual of our faith, the Eucharist, has its roots in the Jewish festival of Passover might not look so wonderful at first. After all, the whole story of Passover is about God choosing the Israelites and rejecting the Egyptians – about Jews being “in” and Gentiles being “out.” This sharp delineation between “us” and “them” was so strong in first-century Judaism that many Jews who had chosen to follow Jesus as the Messiah had a very hard time accepting the message of people like Paul, who believed that God’s will was for the community of Christ-followers to include all people, Jews and non-Jews alike.

There is certainly potential for Passover to be a triumphalist celebration of God being on “our side” and a rejoicing in the destruction of another people, and those of us of Gentile heritage who were once on the “other side” of that story should be particularly sensitive to the potential for our Eucharist to convey a similarly exclusive message, affirming that we and not others are God’s chosen people. But there are strong correctives to this perspective in both Jewish and Christian tradition.

Some aspects of Jewish tradition have broadened the theme of Passover celebrations to be not just about the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, but a celebration of and praying for the freedom and liberation of all people. There is an entire movement among modern-day Jews of hosting “freedom seders” or “liberation seders,” which are interfaith or multicultural Passover meals designed to celebrate all those who fight against oppression and injustice.

In the Christian tradition, there is a strong precedent to viewing the Eucharist as a meal in which we commemorate not only our own deliverance from death through Christ, but the redemption of the whole world. This theology is expressed beautifully in our Eucharistic Prayer D, the most ancient Eucharistic prayer in our prayer book and one that is also used, with slight variations, in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. It affirms that “rising from the grave, [Jesus] destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.” Not “made us new” or “saved those who believe in him,” but “made the whole creation new.”

Jesus says in John’s Gospel that he will give his flesh as bread for the world, not just for the community of Israel or for a chosen group of his followers. The “Passover” we celebrate in the Eucharist is like those modern Jewish “freedom seders” – a celebration of our redemption from death and an expression of faith in the power of God to liberate all people from all forms of oppression and violence.