Beauty, Bread, and Beer

Lammastide

A Reading from Deuteronomy:

When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, “Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.” …

You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

A Reading from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians:

The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. As it is written,

“He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor;
    his righteousness endures forever.”

He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Bread and beer form the basis of our civilization.

Around 8,000 B.C., the age of the oldest cities mentioned in the Bible, humanity underwent our first Agricultural Revolution. We ceased being hunter-gatherers and settled down, planted fields. We established permanent settlements, measured off acreage for grain, and developed a complex organizational hierarchy that allowed us to produce food in abundance.

We cultivated the earth, cared for it, as Adam cared for the Garden. We developed mathematics to measure grain yields and writing to record output and storage. We built temples to give thanks for the harvest and raised armies in order to protect it. Abundance led to leisure, which led to specialization, which led to technological advancement, increasing wealth, art, literature, and quality of life. Not that it was all roses and sweet-cream, mind you. Civilization comes with costs as well as benefits. But that was a price we gladly paid for bread, for beer, and for beauty.

Today is Lammas Day, the Loaf-Mass. It is a feast of firstfruits, like those described in the Hebrew Bible. Jews and Gentiles alike rejoiced at the harvest, at the abundance of the earth. And their natural response, our instinctual response, is gratitude. Thank You, to the Founder of the feast. Thank You, to God of all Creation. Thank You for the gifts not just of life but of liberty, of leisure, of literature and the arts.

Thank You for the grain that grows and the beer and brews and the bread that rises with a life all its own. Thank You for the secret arts woven deep within the earth that You have given us reason enough to unravel. Thank You for the grain; Thank You for the crop; Thank You for the animals who are both our servants and our sustenance, our companions and fellow creatures for our pilgrimage through this world.

Thank You for the gifts of words and numbers, mathematics and music, all made possible by the unspeakable miracle contained within each and every single seed: the spark of life; the spirit of growth that makes us human, makes us more than beasts, and little lower than the angels themselves. Fields brought food, food brought feasting, and feasting fueled fantasy to life. All our accomplishments, all our technological wonders, all our civilization, made possible by the farmer with his hoe and a six-inch layer of topsoil.

Bread is a miracle, brothers and sisters, as is its liquid counterpart, beer. They are paired inextricably from the earliest records we have. In ancient Egypt, the brewer and the baker always shared a wall between their shops, because they both utilized the same yeast. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is bread and beer—along with the love of a woman—that take the wild man Enkidu and tame him, civilize him, make of him a hero. Anthropologists used to think that we did all this, revolutionized human existence, for a steady supply of bread. But chances are we really did it to enjoy a drink or two.

We think of bread today as something common, something boring. The Bible does not see it as such. Scripture’s memory is long enough to know that bread is something miraculous, heavenly, a godsend in the truest sense of the word. Bread comes down from Heaven, Jesus says, bringing life to the world. That’s why Christ Himself is our true Bread of Life, so that we may eat of Him and never go hungry again, but rather rise up from death with the lifeblood of God within us.

Little wonder, then, that Christ chooses to come to us still in bread and in wine. Little wonder that He who rose from the dead would now raise us all up as well, as God’s own bountiful harvest of life, a field of wheat forever rising green.

Today we celebrate something very simple: the beginning of the harvest, the first sheaves of grain. But think what all is contained in that tiny sheathed seed. The entire history of humanity, all our art, all our science, all our philosophies and adventures, all made possible because God causes life to arise from that which has been buried in the earth. Beer and bread and beauty, the taming of our passions and the mastery of our world: all of this is a gift forever too wondrous for words.

And so today we give thanks, as we ask God’s blessing upon these simple, miraculous loaves of bread. And we stand in awe of the God who so loves us, and continues to lavish us with the superabundance of His grace, each and every day.

Cheers.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

A Blessing for Lammas:

Brothers and sisters in Christ, the people of God in ancient times presented to the Lord an offering of firstfruits as a sign of their dependence upon God for their daily bread. At this Lammastide, we bring a newly baked loaf as our offering in thanksgiving to God for His faithfulness. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life; those who come to me shall never be hungry and those who believe in me shall never thirst.” Let us pray:

Holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God, graciously deign to bless this bread with Thy spiritual benediction, that all who eat of it may have health of body and soul, and that they may be protected against all sickness and against all the snares of the enemy. Amen.

Lammas loaves are taken to the four corners of the sanctuary.

One is brought to the altar. All are raised for blessing:

Blessed are You, Lord God of all Creation;
You bring forth bread from the fields
and give us the fruits of the earth in their seasons.
Accept this loaf, which we bring before You,
made from the harvest of Your goodness.
Let it be for us a sign of your fatherly care.
Blessed are You, Lord our God,
worthy of our thanksgiving and praise.
Blessed be God forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.