The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Who has seen Christopher Nolan’s, “The Odyssey?” The movie presented a classic spin on the Homeric epic poem. It was beautiful, fascinating, entertaining, and moving.

During the movie, a concept was presented numerous times and seems to play a key role undergirding the plot. The concept was “Zeus’s law.” This was a sacred duty of hospitality towards others, particularly because the other person – the stranger – might just be a god in disguise.

Gods in disguise.

This concept keeps tumbling in my mind.

Odysseus seems to encounter divine beings in unlikely places throughout the movie, and every time his path is changed, his life transformed (often, as the Greek gods can be a bit fickle, for the worse).

Gods in disguise. Gods encountered. A life transformed.

A similar concept bubbles up in the Holy Scriptures.

God appears to Abraham under the oaks of Mamre, Abraham shows the three people deep welcome and hospitality, and his wife Sarah, in her 90s, conceives a child (Genesis 18:1-15). 

Disguise, encounter, transformation.

Christ Himself declares, in Matthew 25 (mentioned last week) that we meet Him in the face of the oppressed, damaged, and vulnerable; “what you have done to the least of these you have done to me.” (Matthew 25:40). God in disguise.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrew writes, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” (Hebrews 13:2). 

God (or in this case, angels) in disguise.

And of course, in today’s account from Genesis, Jacob wrestles with a man all night and wins. He asks the man his name, he is not told it, but Jacob is renamed Israel. For “you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” (Gensis 32:28).

And then he is permanently injured on the hip. Stunned, he seems to realize he has wrestled with God and lived. He is permanently changed.

Jacob encounters God in disguise the mess and dust and mud of the world, an exhausting struggle where he is left limping – yet blessed; and made a blessing for the world.

This trope of disguise, encounter, and transformation plays out.

The hidden, or disguised, quality of God is something not often talked about. 

This is of great interest, thankfully, the Rev. Dr. Katherine Sonderegger, a modern, renown theologian who writes in her first volume of systematic theology, that God is pleased to be hidden in God’s “particular and glorious epiphany – to be the Unseen, Utterly Unique, Invisible One, hidden in the midst of his people.” (https://www.christiancentury.org/critical-essay/how-katherine-sonderegger-finds-delight-humble-god)

God is in disguise, hidden, invisible. We encounter God. We are transformed.

But in what ways is God hidden to us? How do we encounter God? And in what ways are we transformed?

To more fully understand this, we look to the incarnation.

It is the incarnation which paradoxically hides the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, the invisible, infinite, transcendent Oneness of God which is bound up in the very helpless, bounded, frame of a human being in Jesus Christ. 

The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is significant for many reasons. The incarnation affirms the goodness of physicality, of materiality, of the body because God takes on human flesh (John 1:14). It reminds us that invisible God is made known in mess of creation.

Christ becomes the visible inbreaking of the invisible God.

And it is in Christ that the invisible God is disclosed – paradoxically in a form that none would expect – that of a human.

God hidden in plain sight. And by extension, God encountered.

The Gospel today shows us what happens when God in Christ collides with the masses of humanity. The clamoring peoples await Christ on the shore, and he “had compassion for them and cured their sick.”

The hidden God made known and encountered. The people’s lives transformed.

And then the great miracle of the loaves and the fishes. The hungry people are told to sit. Christ takes 5 loaves and 2 fish, blessed them, broke them, and gave them to the disciples to distribute to the crowds and “all ate and were filled.”

And perhaps the most wonderful thing about this miracle is that the encounter with God not only feeds the thousands of people present, but there is more food left over than was started.

Materiality itself is transformed by encounter with God. What was once scarcity is turned into abundance. What was once a hungry people are changed into those who are full. The hidden God is made known to the people in the breaking of the bread.

The Gospel today progresses not unlike that of the last supper, where Jesus institute the Eucharist – “do this in remembrance of me.” We believe that mysteriously, by the pouring out of grace by the Holy Spirit, the ordinary elements of bread and wine are turned into the very body and blood of Jesus Christ who – much like the bread in the Gospel – was taken, broken, and given out for the sake of the world.

And yet much like the food that fed the thousands, there is an abundance of grace to be poured out by Christ in the most blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.

The Holy Eucharist is the central encounter wherein the invisible God is made known to us today. This is why we reverence the altar – why we keep a candle lit at the tabernacle – because it holds consecrated hosts which are the invisible God made visible to us in this most simple of substances.

The shocking aspect of this is that God does not stay locked away in eternity. God breaks into the world, into the ordinary things on earth, into the fragility of humanity, into the simplicity of bread, the sharp sip of wine. 

God in disguise.

In the reception of the blessed Sacrament, we collide with Heaven.

With our hands outstretched, we grasp our God who grasps us, and we are fed the spiritual food – as our post-communion prayer says – and sated.

God encountered.

And in every instance of this shocking collision with the hidden God, bound up in the bread and wine, we are transformed.

God in disguise, the hidden and invisible God.

God encountered.

Our lives transformed.

The readings today invite us to renew our wonder, awe, and gratitude at the gift presented to us in the Holy Eucharist. The gift which we are about to experience, as we do every Sunday, at the altar.

And when renewed, when our eyes are opened to this marvelous reality, we become capable to be transformed. Empowered by Grace made tangible, the invisible made visible, we are sent out to be bearers of this grace.

We who have been fed by God’s own self in the Blessed Sacrament; We consume the infinite and are yet are not consumed by it in order that we may be sent out, “to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”

When our eyes are opened to God in the form of bread and wine, our eyes become open to God found hidden in the face of our neighbors, the stranger; and we are empowered by Grace to meet the needs of the world.

God disguised.

God encountered.

Life transformed.

As we approach the altar, look for God hidden in the bread and wine – so that when we leave, when Mass is ended, we may find God hidden in other places too.

Amen.