What is the difference between a church and an airport?  The question seemed less off-the-wall to me than it might as I waited in an odd corner of the Frankfurt International Airport for my plane to Zagreb.  Tired, stiff, with swollen feet and stupefied mind, I felt like the alien I was, not because of the Babel of languages, familiar and not, but because of the multiple ways of estrangement and alienation present all round.  A sandwich and pint in a food court are not much like the church potlucks I grew up with, much less the sparer yet richer meal of bread and wine to which I was invited.

On the other hand, oddly enough, churches and airports resemble each other quite a lot.  Both draw families intent on relaxing and workers intent on producing.  Both are filled with symbols pointing to basic values.  Both respond deeply to the mobility of contemporary Western society.  Though they different in many important, and obvious respects, their similarities, surprisingly match their differences.

Most importantly, both airport and church reflect assumptions about the best way to house human bodies.  They perceive the human body as a symbol of society, as the postmodernists have taught us.  The question is, what does the body signify?  To what does it point?  In answering this question, the airport (to the extent that it symbolizes the capitalist body at work and play) and the church (as it witnesses to a different sort of body) part company.

Take the airport first.  This monument to modern economic life teems with people of every skin color, every condition of fitness or otherwise, of beauty and its opposite.  No one comes to stay.  Even the tired gray-haired janitor pushing his cart of mops or the too-thin young woman at the perfume stand leaves.  Passengers head to business meetings in Bucharest and family reunions in Mumbai.  Life in its richness trudges from gate to gate.

But not before someone buys and someone sells.  Every available surface of the airport beckons the traveler to purchase and consume, if not here, then at home.  “Win an Alfa Romeo.”  “Drink Coca-Cola.”  And my personal favorite: “Seduce yourself: Quality cosmetics at duty free prices.”  A product leads to something like sexual gratification without the need for another human being.  Bodies without community jostle each other for the opportunity to use and be used.  The gospel of the airport is the good news that consumption creates happiness for those who move fast enough and far enough to make it all work.

Such a view may seem too bleak, for certainly much good happens in airports, and I prefer flying into them to swimming the Atlantic.  Yet when I think about another alternative, this monument to contemporary capitalism and its need for movement and marketing seems almost as bleak as I have made it out to be.  Another place for travelers exists, however, and its good news speaks of something deeper.

That other place is the church.  The church exists as both a place of refuge and a lighthouse, not merely a way station on the route to somewhere else.  We are not heading somewhere else, only here, for upstairs in the church a door opens to the palace of God.  No flashing lights and banal ads grace its walls, though, it is said, that the intercom plays angel choruses.

The church also contains bodies.  They come in every condition, including the broken and impoverished who rarely go to the airport.  The nomadic consumer gives way to another sort of body, for the assumption is that most of us need something more than objects to buy, use, and throw away.  We are not merely individuals wandering from ad to ad on our way to a destination of our own choosing, but ultimately our bodies carry with them the seeds of eternity.

How is a church different from an airport?  As I say, it’s an odd question.  But maybe not so odd, because when we ask what makes the difference between the two, we get to the bottom of the question only by recognizing that the difference in bodies provides the key.  And then we remember that the church teems with sacramentalized bodies – men, women, and children whose bodies get wet and regularly consume bread and wine.  Do those actions make a difference?  Do the sacraments offer a cure for the commercialized, regimented body of modern society?

As Sarah Coakley put it a few years ago in her provocative comparison of the church father Gregory of Nyssa with the feminist Judith Butler, “…what seems to be enacted [in the latter] is the gesturing to an eschatological horizon which will give mortal flesh final significance, a horizon in which the restless, fluid post-modern ‘body’ can find some sense of completion without losing its mystery, without succumbing again to “appropriate” or restrictive gender roles” (“Eschatological Body,” p. 70).  Much of contemporary culture seems to long for something it has come to believe unattainable.  In this longing for lost transcendence, the obsession with the body cannibalizes itself, leading through one transient pleasure to another, ultimately ending in despair.  The airport seems a fit symbol of that sickness unto death.

What alternatives do we have?  One biblical text that speaks to this question is 1 Corinthians 10, in which St. Paul as apostolic delegate seeks to rehabilitate a usable view of Christian morality by helping the young Christians in the metropolis of Corinth find a more integrated view of the body through the sacraments.  The twists and turns of his argument are worth noticing:

Brothers and sisters, I do not want you to ignore the fact that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and they all passed through the sea.  Yes, all were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.  Every one of them ate the same spiritual food, and every one of them drank the same spiritual drink.  For they ate of the same spiritual rock that followed them – and that rock was Christ.  However, since God was not pleased with them, they were scattered through the desert.

These are a model for us, so that we might not succumb to evil desires as they  succumbed.  Nor should we be idolaters like them, for it is written, “The people sat to eat and drink and rose up to carouse.”  Nor should we misbehave sexually, in the same way that they misbehaved sexually.  In one day, 23,000 of them died.  Let us not irritate Christ as they irritated Christ so that many died of snakebite.  Let us not grumble as some of them grumbled and were slain by the destroyer.  These things are benchmarks for us, written for the instruction of those of us on whom the end of the ages has come.  So, if you imagine yourself standing, pay attention that you do not fall down.  No temptation has overtaken us except common human ones.  But God is faithful, who does not permit us to be tempted more than we can handle.  Rather, God provides with every temptation an escape route so that you will be able to survive.

For these reasons, my beloved, flee from idolatry.  I am speaking as I would to wise people: judge what I say.  Isn’t the cup of blessing that we bless a sharing of the blood of Christ?  Isn’t the bread we break a sharing of the body of Christ?  Because there is one bread, we many are one body, for all share a common bread.  Pay attention to  fleshly Israel – do not all share in eating the same sacrifice?  What should I conclude?  That the offering to an idol or the idol itself is anything?  Or that whatever they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God?  But I do not wish you to share with demons.  You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons, nor can you dine at the Lord’s table and the table of demons.  Are we trying to make the Lord doubt our reliability?  Are we stronger than God is? (1 Corinthians 10:1-22; translation mine)

In this tangled web of back stories and side conversations, Paul makes an argument that much of our thinking on the sacraments must consider.  The crux of it appears in verses 16-17: “Isn’t the cup of blessing that we bless a sharing of the blood of Christ?  Isn’t the bread we break a sharing of the body of Christ?  Because there is one bread, we many are one body….”

In some ways, the argument seems counter-intuitive, especially in a world in which the call to “seduce yourself – quality cosmetics at duty free prices” makes sense to anyone.  Far from being a community of self-actualizing consumption, the church consumes in ways that build community.  Eschewing the ultimately self-erasing modern ideal of the autonomous, self-actualizing individual, the church perceives each body as part of a unitary, even cosmic body (an idea that one of Paul’s disciple, the author of Ephesians, develops even further).  Rather than saying that the Christian community enjoys some sort of mystical unity that the Eucharist symbolizes or evokes, Paul argues that unity is derived from a ritual, behind which lies a story.  People who eat together stay together, are formed together, begin to think together.  Consumption of a sacramental meal constitutes the community and each individual within it.  The gospel of the church really is different.

It is different for several reasons.  First, and most crucially, it has a different view of matter.  Paul begins this part of his discourse, which follows his long and painful discussions of immorality in previous parts of his letter, by telling the story of the exodus and wilderness wanderings.  “Our ancestors were all under the cloud,” he says, forgetting that the Corinthians as Gentiles had no ancestors in Egypt.  Or rather, Paul adopts them into the family by reading them into the story and offering them a new genetic history.

Yet he tells their family story in a particular way that reveals his view of things.  According to the church’s story, God provides generously, altering even matter itself for the benefit of the chosen people.  Like his Jewish contemporary Pseudo-Philo (Biblical Antiquities, 10:7, 11:15), Paul speaks of a rock following Israel through the wilderness.  He almost certainly picked up that conceit from Jewish synagogue sermons, which noticed that the Pentateuch contains two stories of miraculous water strikes after Israel complained of thirst, and that both stories spoke of the waters of Massah, even while the rocks in questions were in different locations.  While modern scholars would conclude that the two stories represent two different traditions that the editors of the Pentateuch preserved without trying to reconcile them, ancient readers like Paul found it more plausible to believe that the rock moved.

However odd – however unscientific – we might find such an explanation, it does offer in some ways a more hopeful understanding of the world than our raw materialism can.  A God who can free a people can move rocks.  More to the point, such a God does provide for the bodily needs of human beings, and therefore deserves our trust and loyalty.

Second, Paul’s understanding of matter allows him to see a synchrony, a parallelism between the redemptive work of God during the exodus and the redemptive work of God in the life of the small, confused house churches of Corinth.  Thus he can set up an elaborate set of parallels between Israel’s choice between loyalty and disloyalty and the Corinthians’ own.  And he can frame this issue decisively by posing, in effect, the question, “at whose banqueting table do you wish to eat?”  For Paul, any reasonable person would respond with a desire to eat at the table hosted by the most generous and genial sponsor.  Idolatry then becomes a matter of bad etiquette or rather churlish ingratitude.

Third, the bodies who are part of the story in which water comes from rocks and food rains from the sky must see their consumption patterns in new ways.  They must trust.  Just as the Israelites in the wilderness had to learn the rhythms of manna rationing (Exodus 16), so did the early Christians pray “Give us bread enough for the day.”  The radical trust of the church contrasts sharply with the process in which money buys services, friendliness is a strategy for sales, and hidden hierarchies and occluded rules operate to structure relationships in many directions.  Gambling on winning an Alfa Spider seems terribly safe in comparison.

Fourth, the bodies in Paul’s vision of church, as they consume bread and wine from the table of the rock-moving God, and as they avoid similar but radically different tables, jostle up against other bodies.  We evaluate each other differently than we might.  All seats in the church are in the first class section, and everyone there enjoys executive platinum status.  A bit later than Paul, some early Christians recognized this fact when they prayed, “Just as this broken [loaf] was scattered on the mountains and, having been gathered, became one, so may your church be gathered from the ends of the earth into your kingdom” (Didache 9:4).  Formerly scattered and shattered bodies came together at one meal and remained together as one church.

Fifth, these bodies experience temptation.  Paul, of course, is not a simple-minded fundamentalist.  He does not believe that “the devil made me do it.”  But he does believe that evil exists independently of individuals or even humanity writ large, and that, therefore, the cure for evil cannot derive from superior decision-making or better social programs, however valuable they would be.  For him, a new creation is in order, and in the Christ-event, it has already begun.  “Temptation,” then, does not mean a petty inclination to trivial deviations from rules, human or divine.  Rather, it means a radical distrust of God’s redemption of matter and bodies.  Paul describes such distrust as “grumbling,” “irritating Christ,” and most graphically, as eating at a table belonging to demons.  His evocation of the sulfurous, though a bit too medieval for the tastes of many of us, at least has the merit of signaling the seriousness of the discussion and the risks one takes by ignoring the implications of the sacramentalization of the body.

Sixth, the bodies in this community await redemption, not from themselves but into themselves.  As the poet Wendell Berry beckons,

Come into the life of the body, the one body
granted to you in all the history of time….
Come into the dance of the community, joined
in a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal
love of women and men for one another
and of neighbors and friends for one another.

Hence Paul’s obsession with having the Corinthians avoid behaviors that would interfere with their ascent, as bodies, to God.  Hence Exodus’s frustration with Israel’s carping and proclivity to self-enslavement.  Unlike many secular views of the body, which embrace heroic sexuality and conspicuous consumption as ways of hiding the ultimate emptiness and pointlessness of human existence, the church baptizes and shares the Eucharist precisely because it rejects the idea that bodies signify only themselves.  As the postmodernists have taught us, bodies are always symbols.  They always point beyond themselves to something else.  The question is whether that something else is merely a given culture’s self-understanding or if it is perhaps something much larger, perhaps even something eternal.

And finally, this last point is decisive.  The Lord’s Supper, Paul thinks, marks an invitation to participation in a long-running story.  The Eucharist is a sort of cast party for the actors in the only drama that matters.  Far from being bodies jostling from one destination to another, consuming to satisfy hungers or impress others, the church’s story proposes a more hopeful alternative, bodies that will express the wholeness of creation, not because they exhibit an approved-of external beauty, but because they have become fit vehicles for the presence of God.   As the sacraments remind us – as we enact in our baptism and the sharing of table – ours is a story of good news.  The best news of all.

For Further Reading

Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union,” in idem, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998),162-63.

Sarah Coakley, “The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God,” Modern Theology 16 (2000): 61-73.

Raymond Collins, First Corinthians (Sacra Pagina 7; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1999).

Joseph Fitzmyer, First Corinthians (Anchor Bible 32; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

James Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Aaron Milavec, The Didache: Faith, Hope, & Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50-70 C.E. (New York: Newman, 2003).