Sermon 10/7/12
1 Corinthians 11:17-26, (1 Corinthians 12:12-27)
Room
at the Table: The Table Is Set
Since
the beginning of September, we’ve been exploring this theme of Room at the
Table. We’ve heard about the feeding of the 5000, and manna from heaven, the
parable of the great banquet, and about Peter’s vision of food declared clean
by God. And through our music and liturgy and visuals and anthems we’ve been
hearing about God’s table. I’ve had some of you mention that you felt like we
should be celebrating Holy Communion – that’s what everything has been pointing
to. And I hope that you feel that way, that today, you find yourself ready,
longing to celebrate this Holy Meal, like everything has been pointing us in
this direction.
If you had a chance to read my article in
our newsletter this month, you read some of my personal reflections about Holy
Communion, like about how my grandmother’s homemade bread was the communion
bread at my childhood church, and how I could never separate the smell of her
bread baking from the act of receiving the sacrament. But I left out one of my
less compelling communion reflections from my teenage years. I used to get
really excited for Communion Sundays when I was a teenager . . . because it
usually meant that my pastor would preach either a very brief or no sermon at
all! Oh yes, I would flip open the bulletin, scan the outline of worship, and
be filled with delight when I saw that there was no sermon because of
communion, or when the bulletin read “Communion Meditation.” I knew that
Meditation was a code-word for a short sermon!
I knew that some faith traditions practiced
weekly communion, though, and I couldn’t imagine that. I was sure that doing
something every week like that would take away the meaning, the special quality
of celebrating communion. Years later, though, when I was in seminary, I
experienced living in the midst of a community of faith 24/7 in a way that I
hadn’t before. And we had chapel services offered three times a week, with the
biggest service, the best-attended, being the weekly celebration of Holy
Communion. And I found that I loved it. I found that it was moving in a way I
didn’t expect. It was a bond that tied us together as a community. It was a
sacrament that drew me closer to God. It was a ritual that made the words that
were preached just before make more sense. Over my years of ministry, I have
found that celebrating the sacraments – baptism and communion – is one of the
greatest blessings of ministry. There is nothing that compares with the blessing
of baptizing someone, and there is such intimacy in saying, “this is the body
of Christ broken for you. This is the cup of Christ, poured out for you.”
Last week, we looked at Peter and some of
his spiritual journey as the early church was developing. Today, we turn our
attention to the teachings of Paul, and the instruction he was giving to one of
the new faith communities – the church at Corinth – a community mostly made up
of Gentiles who had become followers of Jesus. New Christians in the early
church – they had to work everything out. Everything was new. Everything was a
learning process of living out the faith of Jesus Christ. How would they be
community together? What of their old ways of living had to be left behind, and
what would they keep? Paul, the planter of so many of these communities, writes
in detail to address concerns he has, teachings he feels each place needs,
conflicts that already arise in the young churches. That’s the content of most
of Paul’s letters in the New Testament.
In our text from 1
Corinthians, Paul writes in particular about the celebration of Holy Communion.
Churches – just a fancy word for the gathered faith community – met in the homes
of church members. For practical reasons, they met in the homes of the richest
members, because they had the largest houses and the most resources, and could
provide the best setting for getting together. The church at Corinth met at the
home of a rich man named Gaius. We can glean some knowledge from verses of
scripture about worship and communion practices. They probably met weekly, on
Sundays. They did many of the things that we do still – they prayed, both
spontaneously and with ritual prayers. They sang. They read scripture. They
shared testimony – their own experiences of God at work in their lives. They
celebrated the sacrament. And all of this happened over the course of a meal.
Worship was a feast – a full meal shared together. The bread, the Body of
Christ, was broken early on. The cup was given after the supper. But the meal,
the feast, and the sacrament intricately tied to it, were the primary, central
acts of worship.
Paul is writing to
address concerns he has about disturbing practices that have come up in worship
and especially in sharing the sacrament. In Paul’s day, like ours, people came
from many different economic backgrounds. But proper roles for people according
to their classes were more structured. We still have plenty of class differences.
But in Paul’s day, when people of all different backgrounds came together to
feast and worship – things got complicated. In an early Christian household of
a wealthy person, like at the home of Gaius, the host of the Corinthian church,
a home would have an open air center atrium, and a room called the Triclinium –
a dining room with three-sided couches, and an open side for servants to bring
in food. There were places for about a dozen people to sit – to recline
actually. Imagine meals taking place while everyone stretched out on lounge
chairs. But worship feasts would bring in many more than a dozen people. So
everyone who couldn’t sit at one of the dozen seats had to be served their food
in the atrium. Guess who got the dozen seats on the couch?
Of course Gaius, the wealthy host, and his
wealthy friends. Not only that, but Paul indicates that he’s discovered that
those seated in the Triclinium were either arriving before the working poor or slaves who were members of the church,
to start their meal early, or actually eating in front of them, first, while
the others looked on. And further, food of different quality and quantity was
served to the wealthy church members. So Paul says that some members are
getting drunk on good wine, while others are going home from a worship feast hungry. Can you imagine, at worship, if
we sat according to economic status, and served better communion bread to those
of a higher status. Outrageous, right? What a horrible distortion of the
beautiful meal left to us by Jesus! But we can’t blame the people of the
Corinthian church too much. They were only replicating in their brand new faith
community exactly what happened in the rest of the social lives. In the other
clubs, organizations, and associations they were a part of, this pattern was
exactly how things functioned. You might all be part of the same group, but the
societal divisions were still firmly in place.
Paul writes to remind the community what it
means to be the one Body of Christ. He is passionate
about this. He can’t say enough about how important understanding what it
means to be the Body of Christ is. He says that if the Corinthians continue
practicing the Lord’s Supper as they have been – well, it isn’t actually the
Lord’s Supper at all. You can’t call the practices they’ve engaged in the
Lords’ Supper. Paul says, repeatedly in his writings, that when we are in
Christ, we are new creations. They are baptism words – in Christ, there is no
longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but we are all one in Christ
Jesus. Paul means this with a sincerity, with an urgency that I find it hard to
even convey to you. In Christ, we are new creations, and we are part of One
Body. People were used enough to participating in religious ceremonies that had
symbolic meanings. But Paul – he understood that the power of belonging to
Christ was real change in your life
and in the world. Real change. Real transformation. For Paul, that meant that
your identity, so entrenched in societal standards – your gender, your
ethnicity, your status – it was nothing, nothing anymore, because of Christ.
Paul wanted the community at Corinth to know
that being a Jesus follower meant real, actual, concrete changes in the way you
would live in the world and treat other people. If you come to the table
together, if you feast together, if you share in the One Body of Christ
together, you better expect some real changes
in how you live. And so when Paul writes in the very next chapter, chapter 12, about
us all being different parts of the body, hear the import placed by Paul’s
repeated emphasis: we are one body, one body, one body in Christ Jesus. He doesn’t say it lightly. He doesn’t say
it to sound pretty of poetic. He means it. We are part of each other if we are
part of Jesus. And we can’t be part
of Jesus if we won’t be part of one another, part of every other person in the body of Christ.
We still struggle to get Paul’s message. But
on this World Communion Sunday, I want us to think about what it would mean if
every time we celebrated the sacrament, we remembered that if we want to be
part of Jesus, we’re part of each other too. Not symbolically. Not to be forgotten as soon as we leave this
building, or even just this time of worship. Not to be forgotten when we’re
stuck in traffic, or in classes, or at work, or at the store, or confronted
with racism or poverty or bullying or divisions, not to be forgotten when we
want to put up walls between ourselves and those who are Other. Because of
Christ, because we are One Body, there is no one who is Other. There’s only all
of us. What if we remembered?
Friends, beloved of God, the table is set. There’s
so much room here. Come, come to the table.
Amen.
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