When I was in college, I had a great longing for something that seemed strange and alien to me. For that reason I really did not want anyone to know about this longing. This longing continued to drive me to the church because longings unfulfilled become overwhelming. The longings were not the everyday longings that we have—the longings for friendship, the longings for intimacy, the longings for accomplishment, the longings for rest.

Of course, the longings which drew me to church would get mixed up with all the other longings. It is difficult when one is young to tease out the different yearnings that we human beings have. It is not easy to distinguish between the desire for friendship and the desire for intimacy. It is not easy to realize when one desires achievement or when one longs for rest.

Still I was aware as a young adult of some deeper yearning that was more than all the other desires that I had. I was not experienced enough to know or even use many resources to explore this longing. The main resource I had was my religious life in the Baptist church. There we were taught that we needed to be born again, to seek after the ultimate religious experience, to be transformed by giving one’s heart to Jesus and to live in the certainty that one had a Savior and living Lord. This was the ultimate in life, and to be born again was to settle the heart’s deepest desire.

Still after several emotional events in my life, having been born again—and again, I found myself in a state of dissatisfaction. I kept trying to make myself right so that I might experience the fulfillment of that longing. Every person who is raised in a religious tradition will experience some dissatisfaction with that tradition. I began to look beyond the boundaries of my church.

I had already tasted of the masterpieces of English literature, and in college I was introduced to the classics of music. But not only music but texts set to music: the traditional texts to the mass of the Western Church, Robert Shaw’s recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-Minor Mass, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, Brahm’s German Requiem, and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms,.

At the same time as I was being exposed to great music, I was being introduced to great writers who wrote about things too great for me. Still I wanted to know more. One Sunday afternoon on the public broadcasting station I heard the voice of the British journalist and author, Malcolm Muggeridge. He was being interviewed about his conversion to faith after a career as a dedicated athiest.

I will never forget the moment when Muggeridge delivered to me the famous words of St. Augustine, words that would help me to understand myself.

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise, your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are due part of your creation, long to praise you—we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of our creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.

Grant me to know and understand, Lord, which comes first: to call upon you or to praise you? To know you or to call upon you? Must we know you before we can call upon you? Anyone who invokes what is still unknown may be making a mistake. Or should you be invoked first, so that we may then come to know you? But how can people call upon some one in whom they do not yet believe? And how can they believe without a preacher? But scripture tells us that those who seek the Lord will praise him, for as they seek they find him, and on finding him they will praise him. Let me seek you, then, Lord, even while I am calling upon you, and call upon you even as I believe in you; for to us you have indeed been preached. My faith calls upon you, Lord, this faith which your gift to me, which you have breathed in to me through the humanity of your Son and the ministry of your preacher.

–The Confessions, translated by Maria Boulding, Vintage Spiritual Classics, New York, 1997, p. 3

I continued to search the meaning of this faith and discovered the writings of Paul Tillich who in his greatest effort sought to teach us in the Twentieth Century what Luther had taught in the Sixteenth Century, that the true God of the universe is always free from our ideas and conceptions of God, that no sooner do we produce an image of God than does the “God behind God” elude us and remain shrouded in mystery.

But it was also Paul Tillich who taught me Luther’s discovery that the God behind God is the living, majestic One who loves all creation and especially God’s human creatures. The doctrine of justification by faith became real in Tillich’s formulation that God accepts you and me in spite of our unacceptability and that lack of faith meant simply the rejection of God’s acceptance of us.

It was during this university period of my life that I discovered through music the spiritual poetry of the Anglican priest George Herbert who lived at the turn of the Sixteenth Century. Ralph Vaughn Williams had set five poems to music under the title, Five Mystical Songs.

One of those songs struck deeply in a time in which I was searching for an understanding of faith that was dependable and that could sustain me in spite of all life’s uncertainties. The poem speaks of the post-Easter experience of all disciples who continue to live in relationship with the crucified-risen Lord at the fellowship table of his ongoing love feast.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

Dear congregation, during this Eastertide we have the luxury of feasting together at the Lord’s table where we recognize Jesus Christ in the breaking of bread and the pouring of wine.

It is no different today than it was 2000 years ago on the shore of Galilee. It is in the act of eating and drinking together that the person of Jesus confronts us so that we are simultaneously aware that we are not worthy to be at this table. Nor, however, are we in a position to refuse the Lord’s invitation to gather at his table.

When we share in the bread and cup of the table, we take in his body and blood so that we are nourished and nurtured for fellowship with Christ. It is in the reception of the Lord’s Supper that we are re-created in such a way as to serve God among God’s people, to love one another in this love feast, and to discover that we have much to give to others because God has already supplied what we need most, an understanding of ourselves as loved by God in spite of our failure and a calling to serve God in spite of our desire to be served.

It has been forty years since I so passionately sought an answer to the longing that I had as a young person. I still have that longing, but each time I eat and drink at the Lord’s table my yearning is satisfied. It is stilled by the promise that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is at work among us to raise us to new life filled with the promise of a future that God will on the final day bring to fulfillment at the heavenly banquet where we all eat in peace.

And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.