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As some of you may know, Zonnie and I have very close ties to the City of New Orleans. In fact, she was born there, and her family has lived in and around New Orleans and South Louisiana since about the middle of the 18th century. And New Orleans is where we met as first year law students, got married, began our careers, and gave birth to three beautiful children. It was our home parish, Trinity Church, that sent us to seminary in Austin and into this great ministry adventure that we have been so blessed to share for going on 30 years now. Our oldest son, Alex, and his wife and children live in New Orleans these days, along with several of Zonnie’s siblings, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews and cousins too numerous to count. In fact, we’ve just bought a little cottage right around the corner from those kids and while our permanent home will remain here in Seattle, we are going to be visiting New Orleans quite a bit during the gloomy time in Seattle. You know that time I’m talking about, right? In any event, you can see why The Big Easy holds a lot of pull for us.
So New Orleans has been much on my mind lately, particularly as we approach the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the great natural disasters in our nation’s history. It was on August 29 nineteen years ago that Zonnie and I watched in sickness and disbelief as the much-loved place where we had lived together for 20 years, the place where all our children had been born and our own adult lives had been launched, slowly began to drown. We were living in Austin by that time, but our oldest son, Alex, and his then very new bride, Kirsten, were in New Orleans where he was in law school. Zonnie also had all those brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins who were being devasted by what came to be known as “The Storm.” Our kids finally got safely out of town and made their way to our home in Austin, as did some other New Orleans friends who would live with us for the next few months. Over the days following The Storm, we all watched images, which some of you may remember too, images of suffering people trapped in the Superdome, people being rescued from their rooftops in pirogues and in helicopters, people standing on the sidewalks in front of their ruined homes, tears streaming down their faces.
As the waters receded, the destruction that was revealed was difficult to comprehend: homes ripped from their foundations and resting on top of other houses; a 55-foot-long grain barge flung out of the Industrial Canal and sitting on a now deserted street. But above all, the human suffering. The fear, the tears, the desperate search for missing loved ones, the stunned disbelief that life as it had previously been known, had been washed away forever. And the question that was on so many hearts was, “Where was God in the midst of all this suffering? Where was God?” In the midst of so much death and destruction and devastation, “Where was God?”
Haven’t we all asked that question in one form or another at some point in our lives? Not just in the midst of catastrophes like Katrina, but in the midst of illness or death or family conflict or trouble at work? We go looking for God, or at least for a sense that there is a God who is going to make it all come out the way we want it to, and then when that doesn’t happen, we have such a hard time seeing God that it’s easy to conclude that there’s nothing there. Our hopes have been false. Or maybe we don’t overtly give up on God. Maybe we just stop coming to church regularly or we withdraw from the community in other ways. We are slower to help or even to engage with others. Inertia sets in. We stop praying. We drift away. The God thing is just too hard.
So, this morning when we hear Jesus saying, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven”, what exactly should we make of it? A little context here might help. At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus borrowed five barley loaves and two fish from a little boy in order to feed 5000 hungry people. The little guy gave up his lunch to take care of all these folks! The people had been so impressed by this amazing meal that they tried to make Jesus their king. “Not so fast”, said Jesus, and he got into a boat with his friends and took off across the lake. When the crowd finally caught up with him, they demanded that he give them more of that good bread. But Jesus had another idea. “I’m offering you something different”’ he said, “I’m offering you bread from heaven. Eat this bread and you’ll live forever.”
Now, next Sunday, as we hear this story continue, the disciples will say, “This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?” Right? I mean, who can accept that Jesus’s body is the only food that really nourishes? Who can accept that Jesus gives his own self– his own flesh and blood – for us? These teachings are difficult. These teachings are hard. I mean, they’re really just downright strange, particularly if you tend to be a literalist. “Wait, how can a person’s body be bread? Are we supposed to be cannibals?” See what I mean? No wonder so many drifted away. But there were a few who didn’t. Jesus turns to Peter and asks him if he and all the others close to him are going to take off too. But instead Peter says “Lord, where can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” There it is. It’s not because Peter is smarter or has more faith than the ones who decided the teaching was too hard. Remember, only a short time later Peter will deny three times that he even knows Jesus. But, at that very moment, in his very being, Peter knew where to look for help. He knew where to turn. He turned to the One who had said, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.”
Often, particularly in the midst of tragedy and chaos, we engage in magical thinking. We expect God to step in and fix everything, to turn the waters away, to stop the pain. But you know what? At the end of the day, we get something more important than fixes and solutions. We get God. In the midst of the storm, God is in the boat with us. We get the Sacrament of bread and wine where we can taste and see the Real Presence of Christ. Right here. God is at work in the midst of the violence of nature, the incompetence of government, the lust for power and control, the corruption and greed that seem so pervasive in our culture. When all the things we usually think we can count on come up empty – when we don’t know where to turn – it’s then that the Sacrament – the bread and the wine – call us back to clearly see God as close to us as the beating of our own hearts. In these ordinary things, we can hear God’s powerful words, spoken through Jesus who poured his life out for us–words of healing, forgiveness, acceptance, peace. The powerful Words of Life. When we open our hands to receive the Bread of Life, we are receiving Christ himself – suffering with us in his crucifixion, we rise with him in his resurrection— not out there in the great beyond but right here with us, walking along side of us, even in the midst of all the sufferings and tragedies of life, bearing those sufferings and tragedies with us. In these ordinary things, we see the extraordinary. On the other side of tragedy, on the other side of disaster, on the other side of suffering, there is Hope. As Doyt often says, it’s the thing behind the thing.
As I have been thinking about The Storm and about my beloved New Orleans these days I have been reminded of an experience of a truly sacramental moment in the midst of great suffering. I was the Chaplain at St. Andrews School in Austin in those days and over Christmas break, I took a group of high school seniors and faculty to New Orleans to work for the Diocese of Louisiana in the Jericho Road Project which was helping folks to rebuild their homes following Katrina. Our job was to gut houses so the reconstruction work could begin. Now these houses weren’t empty. Pretty much all of them still had furniture, clothing, appliances, even food left behind – the remains of a life that had forever changed as the waters rose. Most of the contents were unsalvageable and we simply would pull them out of the home and into various piles onto the curb to await the trash pick-ups. Now, we had been told in our training that there were some things that might be salvageable, like of all things, Polaroid pictures which aren’t ruined by water like photos from other cameras, so be on the lookout for items like these.
One day we were working at the home of a lady named Mrs. Blanche in the Lower Ninth Ward. Mrs. Blanche’s home, unlike several others on her block, had survived the Storm, but was still a complete mess. She and her 10-year-old granddaughter were living in a FEMA trailer, which was really little more than about a 10’ x 15’aluminum box, that was parked in her tiny backyard. Mrs. Blanche bore about her an air of great dignity and great sadness. It turned out that she had lost her daughter, the mother of her granddaughter, in The Storm, and even though we were there over a year after The Storm, it felt as if her loss had only occurred the day before. Mrs. Blanche was so kind and thoughtful, offering us water and telling our students about life in the Lower Ninth Ward before Katrina. She also told us how sad she was that all of her family mementos, including the only photographs she had of her daughter, had been lost in the disaster.
So it was with much excitement that Charlotte, one of our students, while looking through the sodden remains of a cardboard box found buried in a closet, discovered what looked to be an old photo album. Opening it, Charlotte found about a dozen Polaroid photographs, including some of Mrs. Blanche, her granddaughter, and her daughter. There were also some other photographs of Mrs. Blanche’s daughter by herself. Charlotte asked me what to do with the album and I suggested she take it to Mrs. Blanche who happened to be standing on the tiny wooden front porch of her FEMA trailer. Watching Charlotte walk towards the porch, I could see a look of recognition in Mrs. Blanche’s eyes. As Charlotte handed her the photo album, the tears began to stream down Mrs. Blanche’s face. That moment, that snapshot if you will, of Charlotte handing Mrs. Blanche the long-lost album containing the only photos of her dead daughter, will stay with me forever. The moment was Eucharistic. It was sacramental. As Charlotte placed the photo album in Mrs. Blanche’s hands, it was as if she was offering her the Bread of Life itself. Christ himself was present in that moment. The photo album and the loving and compassionate heart exchange between two human beings was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. That’s how the Prayer Book defines a sacrament and that’s exactly what this was. An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
So in the midst of suffering and loss, God was present bringing healing and Hope. From that awful tragedy, I have saved a photograph of a sign hand painted on the side of a ruined house in the Lower Ninth Ward. It says: “Katrina was big, God is bigger.” Yes, indeed. Whoever painted that sign could have been with Peter and the others that long ago day in Palestine. “Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Even in the midst of tragedy and loss, you, Lord, have the words of eternal life. You are with us, always!
As you come to receive the Sacrament in a moment, as you open your hands to receive the Bread of Life, open your heart to Jesus. In the bread and the wine he is just as present to you today as he was to Mrs. Blanche and Charlotte and all of us that day on the porch, just as present as he was to Peter and his friends so long ago.
Whatever your needs, whatever your fears, whatever your uncertainties, you will find eternal life in the palm of your hand. We come to you today, Lord, open handed and open hearted. It is YOU who have the words of eternal life. Open our hands, open our minds, open our hearts to hear and know and receive you. Open our hands, open our minds, open our hearts to hear and know and receive Hope.