This Is The Body Of Christ, Fallen For You

Today's title comes from Sarah and I arriving at the communion rail where the pastor gives bread and wine (or grape juice, for those who prefer) at church yesterday. I fumbled the first piece of bread that Pastor Janet gave me, so I got another one though Sarah – who looks at me just before communion every Sunday and wants to go up to the rail and kneel if we're able to (depends how many communion assistants and/or pastors are there) – pointed out the bread on the carpet and I knew I wasn't going to reach out for it! The five-second rule does occasionally reign in our house, but in church?

I'm not sure whether I've just committed blasphemy with that – simply put, I recalled that a few centuries ago I would meet an unpleasant death for that, in the days when you believed the bread and wine WERE the body and blood of Christ, not simply representative of it. Dropping Jesus … not a pleasant thought. And with the last presentation of this season's MSU Summer Theatre, the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, premiering Thursday, the irony is not lost on me about a lot of things. But I digress.

This weekend in addition to celebrating my youngest nephew Trevor's second birthday with family Saturday and spending the day with our sister Mary at our house Sunday after we'd all cleaned Sarah and Jeffrey's rooms, I finished a book I'd been reading for months and set down because it was really dragging. I still don't quite understand the proof, nor do I think it matters in living life more abundantly, but the story of “Fermat's Last Theorem” and the three hundred fifty years or so it took between this French councilor's – yes, mathematics was not his first job, it was a hobby! – statement:

 

 

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

And the resultant proof – that is, why the Pythagorean Theorem (the best known statement of this truth) works with “a squared + b squared = c squared” but not if you put the numbers to any other power (say, cubed or to the fourth power, etc.) – may not make for the most fun reading as it clocks in at a hundred pages and required math to prove it like Taniyama-Shimura curves and Galois groups that had not been discovered by the early seventeenth century, this book for a history geek like me, Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma (ISBN 0385493622) was cool to read.

That's a whole sentence? Nuts … and on another bit of irony, I will never read Jesus' parable of the sower (Luke 8:4-10) quite the same way again. When the sower cast the seed, among the ground where it failed to grow was the one that had thorns on it, and thorns can be attachments that you and I have, perceived “needs”. Like my cell phone which I thought I'd lost at the credit union and got to work; then I came out to call it and found it ON THE DRIVER'S SEAT. I was much relieved, but I'm amazed how in two years that little black dialing device has become such an essential to me.

Something is sweet but it's good, David