THE MESSENGER, THE END OF VIOLENCE

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and steadfast spirit withing me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a generous spirit...

O Lord, open m lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you have no delight in sacrifice;
If I were to give a burnt offering,
you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart,
O God, you will not despise.
Psalm 51: 10-17

We give you thanks, gracious God. In the beginning from the dark and void, you flung lights into the sky, spun a planet of land and water, and filled the earth with living beings.

You call us by name and invite us to journey in harmony with you and all creation. Even when we wander from the path and forget our Divine image, you call us home again and again to walk with you.

Holy and caring God, you give us Jesus who dares to touch the outcast, heals the sick, and calls the dead to life; breaking down the walls of division and announcing the new reign of love.

In his compassionate life, his willing suffering, his resurrection, you show all the world that love is stronger than death, that hope overcomes despair, and joy follows grief.

You call us to be the church – a compassionate witness, a caring fellowship, a prophetic voice.

At the last supper with his disciples, Jesus took bread, gave thanks to you, broke the bread and gave it to his friends, saying, “Take, eat, this is my body given for you. Remember me.”

Then he took the cup, gave you thanks and shared it, saying “ Drink from this, all of you. This is my life poured out for you and for many. Remember me.”

Loving God, pour out your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts, that they may become the presence of Christ in and for us, strength for our journey and joy for our souls.

We give you thanks for your gracious presence with us. Make us one with Christ, one in communion with each other, one in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed and one in harmony with the world and all creation.

I have shared with some of you visiting St Peter's in the Vatican, the largest church in the world. The high altar is stunning – a bright gold monstrance by Bernini dominates it, containing the reserved sacrament. Flanked below it are two doctors of the western church – Augustine and Jerome, and two doctors of the eastern church – Chrysostom and Basil.

We had taken the elevator to the base of the dome of the church, something around two hundred feet above the altar, and were looking down at it when a cardinal and his retinue began processing up to celebrate mass. I thought what a wonderful thing it would be to attend the celebration from this great height when a guard appeared and made us leave. I quickly took the elevator back down and found a place on the benches before the altar for almost all of the celebration.

Now, I could critique the fact that the wine was withheld from us, and that the mass was not in the language of the people, although Italian is not that different from Latin. But that was nothing compared with the privilege of participating in this great and timeless ritual. Its origins and profound meanings over thousands of years of the history and prehistory of the human race moved me and touched depths of the human psyche in ways that I imagine neither the cardinal who celebrated it, nor the priest who offered me the host, nor I who accepted it could fully grasp.

What we do here touches the depths of who we are – our personal history, the collective unconscious or objective psyche we all share, as Carl Jung called it, and the far reaches of the human experience beyond anything we ever learned in school.

In the Eucharist or communion that we celebrate today we touch the primal facts of our humanity, even when we have no conscious awareness of it. So perhaps once in a great while it is well to remember some of those great meanings.

The cells in our bodies are eukaryotes, like all almost all multi-cellular organisms. They have all the other amazingly complex structures biologists have discovered in recent decades. Eukaryotic cells came into being 1.6 to 2 billion years ago and the evolution of life beyond the simpler prokaryotic celled creatures depended on this great stride forward.

Eukaryote cells developed by eating or merging in a symbiosis with other cells, often simpler prokaryotic cells. Universe story 101-105. This invention of these predator prey relationships made possible the evolution of life into more complex forms by this combing of life energy.

What happens with cells happens with us human beings also. A fundamental fact of being human is that we are predators who survive by killing and eating other life forms. You don't get a free pass by being a vegetarian, every meal depends on killing and eating living beings - plants or animals.

Now we live in such an artificial environment that we seldom are even aware of this basic fact of our existence. I happen to have grown up on a farm, so the reality of raising, killing and eating plants and animals was perhaps more of a direct experience for me.

But it was a universal experience for our ancestors. Maybe they didn't have cell phones and computers, but they had something much more important that we pretty much lack – a direct unmediated immersion in nature, direct connections with animals and plants and life forms, and a profound sense of connectedness, communion, and oneness with life and all that is.

And because of all that, they got what we grasp only with difficulty – that we don't get a free pass for our violence against other life forms, we need to take responsibility for it. Specifically, we need to take action, usually a ritual action, to restore the harmony we have broken.

Joseph Campbell believed that was the origin of all religion –the need for ritual to restore the broken harmony. What we do know is that animal sacrifice is universal in traditional religions.

Hunting gathering people lived in communion with the wild animals on which their lives depended. Shamans in trance would seek the advice of animal spirits to tell them where the best hunting grounds were with animals willing to give their lives to sustain the tribe. Rituals of animal sacrifice recognized, honored and gave thanks to the animals that were hunted, and on which their lives depended. Shedding their blood renewed the energy that kept the world in being.

Some vestiges of those rituals continue even into the present day. I once knew an army sargeant who was discharged in Germany after the second World War. He became friends with some Germans, and went hunting with them in one of the forest preserves. When they killed their deer, they put a sprig of Juniper in its mouth and sat down around it silently for a few minutes to express their gratitude for its willingness to give its life for them.

In agricultural economies, rituals were needed to renew the fertility of the land each year, so that crops could grow. People noticed that the menstrual blood flow of a mature woman continued, except when she was pregnant. It must be then that the Great Mother of goddess religions needs blood to bring forth new life, to cause the crops to grow again. In the early sacrificial rites the animal or human symbolic consort of the Great Mother is sacrificed. Then the Great Mother follows the dead god-consort into the underworld, and effects his resurrection so that a new cycle of new life and new fertility and new moon can begin. Up From Eden p 126

The later strands of Hebrew religion refined animal sacrifice. It was not considered a killing of the animal, but a transformation into a spiritual substance. Only domestic animals raised for food could be sacrificed and eaten - they were 'clean'. 'Unclean' or wild animals were not to be killed and eaten at all, so they were not sacrificed. Great Transformation 213. The sacrificed animal was burnt, part was eaten by the priests, and the rest shared with the people.

In New Testament times in the cities Paul visited and evangelized, pagan temples were sort of restaurants in which people could come and eat sacrificed animals. Paul needs to tell his fellow Christians that it is alright to eat that food. But, because some new Christians might be insecure in their faith and confuse eating the meat with worshiping the idols, He would not do so himself.

All across the ancient world during the centuries before Christ people began to internalize these ancient rituals. They began to understand them as symbolic invitations to discover the inner worlds of Spirit and their own depth experience. In India the fire ritual became an invitation to discover one's own inner fire, in the Atman – the essential and eternal core of the person. Great Transformation 98

For the new sect of Christians, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ realized this transformation. Christ was the eternal definitive symbol of God's self giving love for humans. Animal sacrifice was no longer needed or relevant. The beautiful passage from Hebrews we read a couple of weeks ago is one of the great statements of that in the New Testament.

Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for the one who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as in the habit with some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
-Hebrews 10:19-25

Paul echoes that in Romans 12:1-2: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

What does all of that mean for us each first Sunday of the month when we celebrate the Eucharist. The word Eucharist, by the way, is simply the Greek word for thanksgiving. The prayer we say during the service, and which we just read, tries to summarize some of those profound meanings from the whole history of the human race and for us today:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and steadfast spirit withing me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a generous spirit...

O Lord, open m lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you have no delight in sacrifice;
If I were to give a burnt offering,
you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart,
O God, you will not despise.
Psalm 51: 10-17

We give you thanks, gracious God. In the beginning from the dark and void, you flung lights into the sky, spun a planet of land and water, and filled the earth with living beings.

You call us by name and invite us to journey in harmony with you and all creation. Even when we wander from the path and forget our Divine image, you call us home again and again to walk with you.

Holy and caring God, you give us Jesus who dares to touch the outcast, heals the sick, and calls the dead to life; breaking down the walls of division and announcing the new reign of love.

In his compassionate life, his willing suffering, his resurrection, you show all the world that love is stronger than death, that hope overcomes despair, and joy follows grief.

You call us to be the church – a compassionate witness, a caring fellowship, a prophetic voice.

At the last supper with his disciples, Jesus took bread, gave thanks to you, broke the bread and gave it to his friends, saying, “Take, eat, this is my body give for you. Remember me.”

Then he took the cup, gave you thanks and shared it, saying “ Drink from this, all of you. This is my life poured out for you and for many. Remember me.”

Loving God, pour out your Holy Spirit upon us and upon these gifts, that they may become the presence of Christ in and or us, strength for our journey and joy for our souls.

We give you thanks for your gracious presence with us. Make us one with Christ, one in communion with each other, one in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed and one in harmony with the world and all creation.