The student work team and I had been laboring together for nearly a week, helping out in a rural and impoverished county which happens to be the same county in which I grew up. It was sad to see how much the area had suffered over the years, or had it? Was it just as destitute when I was growing up? It's hard to say. But working there was a troubling, yet holy experience for me. So, since we had just completed our final work day, the group had decided that they wanted to celebrate communion together that evening. So, I pulled off the highway at a small grocery store, and told them I would return as soon as I purchased "the body and blood of our Lord." They were aghast! "I thought that you ordered it from a special place, like a place that sells only to churches," exclaimed one worker. "No," I replied. "This is the kind of place that sells it. Of course, it remains ordinary until the words of institution," I offered in a feeble attempt to mollify them.
Why were they so surprised to learn that bread and grape juice come from the grocery store? Perhaps because communion is an extraordinary event, we expect that the place where we purchase the ingredients would be out-of-the-ordinary as well. Had I been able to bake the bread, at least, it probably would have seemed to be more special, more sacred. But where would I have purchased the flour? Same place, at the little grocery store along the highway.
So, is it really so difficult to understand why Naaman was insulted when Elisha told him to wash seven times in the plain and simple Jordan River? If he was to be cured of his skin condition, should not Elisha have come out of the house and waved his arms over Naaman and uttered some holy syllables? After all, he had already been dissed by the king, so Elisha was his last hope. Why was Naaman such a miracle snob? Perhaps he saw himself as a special servant of God and felt that he merited a special prophet of God to carry out the healing. We tend to be no less miracle snobs than Naaman was. We are special people, so we should have only the best, right?
Maybe Jesus sensed that snobbery in his own followers. His love mandated that he heal the leper, but he commanded the man who had been healed to keep quiet about who it was who actually performed the miracle. People would not see the act as something that could possibly eminate from a simple preacher, so they would ascribe the title of prophet to him, or worse, messiah. Miracle snobbery makes it impossible for folks to see the everyday miracles that God sends our way, and so we miss most of them. We look instead to the multimedia prophets and worship in the "smart" churches with all of the technological bells and whistles.
Even my wonderful students were taken a back at buying communion supplies at the corner store. What they did not realize was that the real miracle, the honest-to-gosh light show, was accomplished by their selfless labor all week long in a very dirty house filled with children and adults. The real Eucharist had already been celebrated, and the Body of Christ had already been offered and accepted. I feel certain that, in time, they saw it too. They were miracle snobs no more.
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