Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Something really fascinating happens in our reading from Acts today. So here’s the story: Paul is on his way by ship to Rome (where he’ll eventually be tried and killed), and the journey has been disastrous from the start. A brutal Nor’easter has battered the boat, the crew is panicking, and there doesn’t seem to be much by the way of hope. Paul has tried to be as encouraging as he can…while still providing an “I told you so” moment because the sailors and soldiers on board wouldn’t follow his advice on when to set sail from Crete—to be fair, they probably figured that Paul the tent-maker wouldn’t have too much edifying to say about piloting a ship through a storm. So after 14 days of uncertainty, fear and hunger, Paul gathers the passengers and crew…

…and invites them to lunch.

Likely it wasn’t much—the text only mentions bread. But the way the author of Acts describes the lunch Paul sets before the assembled folks has distinct Eucharistic overtones. Now, it’s highly unlikely that the Paul who preached against receiving the Eucharist without discerning the Body of Christ would have celebrated the Eucharist in public for a largely non-Christian crowd. But I’m convinced the author of Acts had the Eucharist in mind as well as the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 when they wrote: “[Paul] took bread; and giving thanks to God in the presence of all, he broke it and began to eat. Then all of them were encouraged and took food for themselves. (We were in all two hundred seventy-six persons in the ship.) After they had satisfied their hunger, they lightened the ship […].”

There’s a lot that’s wonderful here. A desperate lunch becomes a sacramental meal. In the midst of the chaos and anxiety of life’s storms, a simple act of breaking bread reveals the Eucharistic heart of community, reveals the Sabbath Rest of peace and refreshment that springs from that heart, and points to a reality to which the Eucharist always seeks to draw our attention: the whole universe and everything in it is sacrament.

And people are encouraged! Which is to say: their hearts were strengthened within them.

There’s more, too. Paul says of this lunch to the group, “It will help you survive.” And after blessing and breaking the bread, Paul eats it. When the priest at Eucharist communes themselves first, it’s actually a similar sort of situation. It has nothing to do with precedence and nothing even to do with their close proximity to the Precious Body and Blood on the altar… apart from that proximity more keenly enflaming their desire for it! Rather, it has more to do with modeling a relationship to grace: which is to say, we are meant to desire it and meant to receive it so that we can become its instruments, so that we can become its vessels and ministers, so we can share it and pass it along. It’s something we’re all called to do in our daily lives. As my seminary dean put it, the situation is analogous to a group of folks lost in a desert: one goes out to find water and, having found a spring and having drunk from it, they return to the group with joy to say, “Look! I’ve found water! This is water! I’m soaked with it! Drink from the spring! I did it! I’m refreshed! There is life here! Share in this with me!” The person who found the water becomes a living sign not only of the water’s presence but of its goodness, and is more able to draw people to the life-giving spring. More able to strengthen the hearts of others.

The wonder, then, is this: in eating the bread of his lunch, Paul himself became a living sign of the peace and the life he knew God desired for everyone on that boat—Paul’s life became an invitation to share that peace, that life, through the simple act of eating and sharing bread.

Friend, the Eucharist not only helps us survive, but empowers us to become living signs of the life to which Christ is drawing all the world. Each of us is called through the waters of baptism to receive the Bread of Heaven and to become signs of Heaven's own life of love here and now.

How might you be called today to live a Eucharistic life? What simple acts of community, of sharing, of love, of lunch (!) might reveal you to be a child of grace, a sign of grace and peace in stormy times? How might grace make the whole substance of your life become transparent to the sacramental reality of all things…to the very Life of the One who is the Author of every Sacrament?

May your heart today and the hearts of all you meet be strengthened and quickened by the life of grace living in you!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+