The Overlooked Sacrament

Made Flesh

When Jesus sat at the table with his friends and suggested they take up the bread and the cup of wine in front of them as his own body and blood, Christians didn’t understand that to be a clever way to emphasize, say, the importance of a steady bread diet. Or that we should support the wine industry. 

No, for two thousand years, followers of Jesus have taken that “THIS = ME” statement to be a mystical invitation. We made it a central act in our worship. 

Across the globe and over many centuries, believers have reached out open hands and opened mouths to receive lousy crackers and chunks of bread as the very being of God entering our bodies. We sip whatever juice or wine is offered in worship as something much more: the life blood of heaven, the DNA of the divine, to transform our own. We hear Jesus’ words not as a behavioral command but as an invitation to connect—physically and spiritually—with God. 

Tradition in the West has called this imagination “sacrament.” The East has used the (I believe even more delicious) language of “Holy Mysteries.”

As a jail chaplain, gang and migrant pastor, then prison reentry organizer for the last 20+ years, I’ve wondered if we Christians have overlooked the sacramental mystery in Jesus’ other famous “THIS = ME” teaching: in Matthew 25, our scripture this week. 

We usually trot out this passage as the “do-gooder” proof text. As if Jesus were crossing his arms and saying in a very dramatic and manipulative way: “Now remember, you selfish mortals, I take social justice very personally. When you forget them, it’s like you’re doing it to me!”

I think we’ve missed something. Something much more wonderful than two millenia of ethical arm-twisting.

When I first wandered into Skagit County Jail in rural Washington State over twenty years ago for Bible studies, it wasn’t to care for the men locked in there wearing red scrubs. It wasn’t to address the injustices of mass incarceration. That came later. No, I stepped through those automated steel doors in the dark of winter as an overchurched young man desperately seeking God. 

Several guys sitting in our crude circle of chairs to hear good news in the ratty paperback Bibles—guys my age, in gangs, with tattoos on their faces and hands—leaned in and asked me, in whispers, if I could visit them after the group. A pastor visit. They wanted to connect.

In the tiny visiting rooms usually used by lawyers that the guards offered, I sat across a tiny table with some of these men. We ended up laughing, almost every visit. These men offered me their hands and, as I held them, as we prayed, they wiped their tears and snot on their shoulders, rarely letting go of me. 

In those rooms, night after night, I felt a rush of affection humming through my hands. I was gently possessed with a mind much larger than my own, certain that each dude before me was someone God has been aching to hold since the beginning of time. I heard myself speaking this love out loud to them, as if a divine parent were flowering through me, such sweet presumption, before any analysis or doubt or theology could bind me up. Though I’d only met this man an hour earlier, it felt like I was high or drunk with belonging: that I had found my brother, and we were held in the love we’d always been looking for.

I kept going back. It changed my life.

Most nights as I left the jail, I found myself skipping down the cold staircase, inspired and at peace—everything I had sought for years in musical worship, morning devotion, solemn Eucharist or monastic prayer retreats. I was hooked. I no longer needed sermons or proof texts to convince me of God’s uncomplicated heart towards us knuckle-headed humans. 

But finding all of this in a crummy jail? Why did this surprise me?

At the culmination of Jesus’ ministry and teaching in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says much more about being tangibly found in the overlooked among us—the outcast, the naked, the foreigner, the poor and hungry, the prisoner—than his brief statements about the bread and wine.

What if this profound teaching was never primarily about ethical performance, but instead Jesus telling us where to find him? Is this the most overlooked mystical portal for us to know him and hold his millions of open hands? Jesus seems to imply that, in the end, this is the only thing that matters.

Dwelling Among Us

1. What sacraments did you grow up being taught, if any?
2. How have you normally heard “You did it unto me” preached?
3. What if this is the most overlooked sacrament of the last two thousand years? Our temples in America are on the decline. But the people Jesus described are all around us. What if the next two thousand years of Christian gathering, worship, funding and spiritual practices circled around this other Holy Mystery?