All in the end is harvest…

Christianity has many things in common with the other religions of the world.  But we are the only religion that says that God became a body, that God became a human being, that God became flesh as John’s Gospel says (John 1:14).  Our fancy theological word for that is the Incarnation, the enfleshment.
So we have material reality being the hiding place and the revelation place of God; where God is at the same time perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed.
The same scandal that the Jewish people had to deal with 2000 years ago, we have to keep dealing with—that the hiding place of God, the revelation place of God is the material world.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD)

The beauty of this morning’s Harvest Festival service at St. Mary the Virgin, my new Parish Church, was an almost perfect example of this. We celebrated not only Christ’s sacrifice and his resurrection, but his presence with us in the creation that was made through him, his feeding us with the true bread that came down from heaven, the real drink of his shed blood (John 6:48ff). His presence was hidden, in the bread and the wine, in plain sight—and yet his presence was in us and with us and among us. Truly, we are all members of the one Body, and each one of us is a part of it (1 Corinthians 12:27), and all creation is coming into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:21). We are free, free! If the Son sets us free, we are free indeed!