Sermon 10/2/16
1 Corinthians 11:17-26, 33-34
Church Happens … When We Gather at the
Table
Today we’re concluding our worship
theme “Church Can Happen Anywhere.” We’ve been studying 1 Corinthians, both in
worship and in Bible Study (which, by the way, will continue, and we’d still
love to have you join us in it!), and learning some lessons from Paul and the
early church. We started by talking about how we are all important parts of the
body of Christ – and though we are many, we are one in Christ Jesus. We were
reminded that church isn’t something we can do alone. It can happen anywhere –
but only together, only with each other, only when we remember that we need
each other. We talked about the passion that Paul had for sharing the good news
of Jesus, a passion that let him cross boundaries and borders, getting to really know people, in order to better
offer them the gift in Jesus that he’d experienced. Paul called the Corinthians
– and calls us – to pour our whole selves in to the task of sharing the gospel
– ready to bring church everywhere and anywhere. We talked love. Church can
happen anywhere, unless we try to be church without love. Love and action go
hand in hand, as we build each other up. We challenged ourselves to increase
our ability to love one another by practicing some of the action words Paul
used. And now, in a way, we find ourselves back at the beginning. We’re talking
about the Body of Christ again. Specifically, Paul is writing to the
Corinthians about how they celebrate together in the Lord’s Supper. And so as
this particular worship theme comes to a conclusion, it seems only right that
we hear Paul’s teachings about communion on a day we celebrate World Communion
Sunday.
World Communion Sunday was started by a Presbyterian pastor
named Hugh Thomson Kerr nearly 80 years ago. He wanted there to be a way to
celebrate Christian unity and encourage our ecumenical relationships, our
relationships across different Christian traditions. He wanted something that
would celebrate our interconnectedness. After all, there is so much more as
brothers and sisters in Christ that brings us together, centers us, grounds us,
than there is that divides us. What better way to symbolize our unity than at
the communion table, where we recognize that there is only one body of Christ,
even though there is such a wonderfully diverse collection of members that make
up that one body?
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.” In The United Methodist Church, holy communion and baptism
are the two sacraments we celebrate, gifts from God to the church, gifts Jesus
called us to practice, gifts through which we can experience God’s grace, gifts
that help us deepen our sense of belonging in Christ’s church. Sharing in Holy
Communion, then, is an essential part of what it means for us to be church.
Children have some of the best communion theology I’ve heard.
They’re smart. They listen. They participate. They learn as they share with us
in the sacrament. At my childhood church in Westernville, my grandmother baked
all the loaves of bread for our communion services. Often, on Communion
Sundays, she would bake me and my brothers our own little loaves of bread to
have. Once, Todd, my youngest brother, when he was about 4, was eating his
bread in the backseat of the car on the way home from church. And he’s eating
the bread, and all of a sudden says, “I’ve got the bones of Jesus back here!”
He knew what it was about.
I think of a family at the church I
served in New Jersey. They had a little boy named Tristan, and the parents just
didn’t want him to take communion yet. They thought he was too young. And
Tristan would come up with his father during communion and instead of bread and
juice, I would give him a blessing. But he was visibly disappointed every time.
And finally, one time, when he came forward, he looked up at his dad with
pleading eyes, begging, without words, to be allowed to have communion. And his
dad looked a bit resigned and nodded his permission. And Tristan gave an
excited “Yes!” and a fist pump, and received communion for the first time with
a face lit with joy. He knew what it was about. I’ve already had lots of
children here in Gouverneur ask for seconds at communion. “I want another
piece” is not an uncommon statement. And I’ll give you a second piece if you
want it. After all, communion is supposed to be a meal, a feast, right? These
kids know what it’s really all about. Do we?
Paul was concerned that the new church at Corinth was
completely missing the point of the communion meal, and he writes to correct
them in some of his strongest words in 1 Corinthians. Remember, I shared with
you a few weeks ago that early communities of Jesus followers 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. And the
church at Corinth met at the home of a rich man named Gaius. Worship time happened
over the course of a meal. Worship was a feast – a full meal shared together,
like our worship service and Fellowship Feast all rolled into one. 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. 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. We are one body in Christ Jesus. 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.
On this World Communion Sunday, as we think about what
sharing in this meal means to us, 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? I know I need to
remember.
Today, when I say the prayer of consecration as we celebrate
communion, I’ll say, “Make [the bread and cup] be for us the body and blood of
Christ so that we may be for the world
the body of Christ.” We, the
church, we are the only body of
Christ in the world. Christ is alive among us, always, but we are the body of Christ on this earth. So we come to the table,
ready to renew our commitment to embody Christ in the world as fully as we can.
Seek each day to see with the eyes of Christ, so that when we encounter others,
we look with the same compassion with which Christ looks. We are the hands of
Jesus, reaching out to all the people to whom Jesus reached out: the unclean,
the unwanted, the untouchable, the unloved, the unaccepted – our hands must
take theirs. We are the feet of the body, and our feet must take us where
Jesus’ feet took him. Among people who didn’t look like him or worship like him
or practice the traditions he practiced. Into homes that no one else would
enter. Into places where illness and disease left little hope.
We – broken,
on our own, but together, Christ’s body – we are the body of Christ in the
world. Teresa of Avila, a nun who lived in the fifteenth centuries,
wrote this poem that has become one of my favorites:
Christ has
no body but yours,
No hands,
no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are
the eyes with which he looks
Compassion
on this world,
Yours are
the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are
the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are
the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are
the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has
no body now but yours,
No hands,
no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are
the eyes with which he looks
compassion
on this world.
Christ has
no body now on earth but yours.
When
we gather at the table, and when we are sent forth from it, into the world, we
are the body of Christ. Amen.
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