*This sermon was presented on World Communion Sunday, October 6, 2013, at Zion Mennonite Church, Hubbard, Oregon
World Communion Sunday began
in 1933 as a celebration of a local Presbyterian church and then spread throughout
the Presbyterian Church. It was observed on the first Sunday of October. It
began in the context of a world of political strife and strong nationalism. In
1940 it was adopted by the Federal Council of Churches and was promoted as a
celebration to churches worldwide. It is a day to celebrate, through sharing in
communion, Christian unity and ecumenical cooperation.
Do we really need a special
Sunday set aside to celebrate communion? Is it really important to have a
special day to recognize within our isolated congregations our connection to
the Christian church throughout the world by celebrating communion? Is this
just another innocuous day that means very little in practice, but allows the
church to symbolically join hands around the globe, sway and sing “We are the world”?
So, why bother with celebrating World Communion Sunday? A pinch of bread, a thimble
of juice. Remember Christ’s death. Remember the church is in other countries.
Ho-hum. Is that all this is about? What’s the big deal with celebrating World
Communion?
The church in Corinth didn’t quite understand the
significance of celebrating communion for the unity of the church. The Apostle Paul’s primary text on communion is set
within the context of an extremely divided church. The church at Corinth was
divided over leadership, economics, spiritual gifts, and theology. If there
were Democrats and Republicans back then, they probably would have been as
divided as our Congress.
Paul used communion theology
to address the issue of church politics. I’m speaking of “politics” not in the
sense of partisan politics, or a secular government, but rather how we govern
our lives together as a people. In other words, the politics of the church is
how we seek, in all our diversity, to live together and share at a common table
as citizens of God’s kingdom governed by our primary allegiance to Christ. The
problem Paul addressed in his letter had to do with bringing the old separations
of the divided table of the world into the celebration of Christ’s unifying
table of communion.
When you come together as a church, I hear there are divisions among you. For Paul, coming to the Lord’s Table as a divided
congregation was not only a spiritual and moral problem; it was a theological
problem. To be the church and to be divided is a contradiction. To share at
Christ’s table and to be divided is inconsistent with who we are and
whose we are. Communion is not only a
ritual of remembrance; it is an identity-marking ceremony that proclaims our
allegiance to the one crucified Lord Jesus Christ. As those who share in
communion with Christ, we are no longer divided by those things that mark off
individuals and groups within the world. Using another identity-marking ritual,
Paul said to the divided Galatians:
As
many of you as were baptized into
Christ, have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek,
slave or free, male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
Being in Christ, symbolized in both baptism and Eucharist, means human
divisions and boundaries are no longer a priority in identifying who we are as
a people.
The church is one in
communion as it partakes in the one body and blood of Christ. Christ’s body is
not divided. So, to partake of the bread and cup as one body, while still being
divided, is to nullify the very meaning of the Lord’s Supper.
When you come together it is really not to
eat the Lord’s Supper. To eat bread and drink wine as a divided people is
simply a supper. It is not the Lord’s Supper. I wonder if the church today has
ever come to share the bread and the cup and it was simply a meager meal.
Paul points particularly to
the economic division within the church that was manifest when the Lord’s
Supper was celebrated. In the early church communion was not a separate
liturgical practice within a worship service. It was a natural part of a shared
meal, known as an
agape or love feast, during
which special prayers and blessings were offered over the bread and wine as
part of the meal
. It appears that at
the church of Corinth the wealthier members would bring lots of food and wine
to this common meal, which was not “common” in the true sense of the word. They
would eat, drink, and be merry, while the poorer members went hungry and
thirsty. They considered their food a private possession and not something to
be offered up as a common possession of the one body of Christ, the church.
It’s kind of like when a church member withholds their regular offerings to the
church because they disagree with the pastor or a leader believing that what
they have brought as an offering to Christ’s church is really their own private
possession. Withholding money that is meant to benefit a body of people because
of disagreements is not something we see happening today (House), is it?
The rich at Corinth
considered what they brought to be a private meal and not a common meal and
therefore, it was not the Lord’s Supper.
For
when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and
one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat
and drink in? Do you show contempt for the church of God? Leave your
divisions at the church door; the divisions of economics, class, race, gender, ideology,
nationality, and partisan politics. In its essence, the church is undivided.
Communion re-presents the church as one. It is a ritual of remembrance of our
one Lord, who gave his body and blood to be our peace, as Ephesians says,
“breaking down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians
2:14). To celebrate the body and blood
of Christ, our peace, with our divisions still on display and active is to turn
the Eucharist into an empty and meaningless ritual.
It is for this reason that
Paul admonishes the church not to eat the bread or drink the cup in an “unworthy
manner,” that is, without first “examining yourselves” and “discerning the
body.” Traditionally we have thought this means examining our personal lives
for unconfessed sins
before eating
the elements. And “discerning the body” means understanding that the bread and
cup represent Christ’s body and blood, which takes away our personal sins. In
the context of Paul’s argument “the body” is primarily referring to the church
as the body of Christ. To eat the supper in an “unworthy manner” is to eat and
drink without discerning the one body of Christ, the church. For the rich
members of the church to eat from their abundance, while the poor members went
hungry, was to violate the essential unity of the body of Christ; to not
“discern the body.” We do not partake of the Lord’s table when we come with our
divisions still intact and intractable; clinging to my own possessions, holding
to my own grudges, marking my own borders, affirming my group’s ethnic or
racial privilege, excluding the gifts and calling of a certain gender, and
asserting our own national boundaries. That’s what it means to partake of the Lord’s
Supper in an “unworthy manner” and to not “discern the body,” the one body of
Christ. This bread represents Christ’s one body, broken on the cross, but also
signifies Christ’s one body, the church, spread like seed scattered across the
hills and valleys, borders and boundaries, across nations and races, languages
and political persuasions. Through this
common meal we get a taste of the
politics of communion.
Discerning the body is our
difficult and delightful task in the midst of a diverse, global church and a
divided, warring world. Communion has some rather radical implications, if we
are to partake of it in a meaning-full manner. The church needs to explore the
imaginative and practical consequences of a politics of communion. If communion
celebrates one church united by its allegiance to one Lord, what does that mean
for me and for the church today in the communities, nation, and world in which
we live? What would a politics of communion look like for us today?
A politics of communion cultivates the
unity of the local church. Conflict
and divisions within a congregation are painful and disorienting, as we all
know well. They are often based upon our differences, preferences, and personal
convictions. And those differences are part of what it means to be human. But,
sometimes those differences can rub up against each other until they cause
divisions. What we must remember is that the differences in our family
backgrounds, life experiences, ethnicity, race, class, age, gender, doctrinal perspectives,
personal musical styles, or who leads our congregation are not the essence of
what it means to be the church that celebrates communion. Those things are not
what unite us. We are essentially and fundamentally united in Christ Jesus. In
communion we remember the one body of Christ and celebrate the unity of the
church.
At the same time, to be one
in Christ, to cultivate unity, is not the same as enforcing uniformity. We
don’t necessarily always have to agree with one another. And that’s okay. To
expect the church to be a place where everybody thinks and acts like me is to
be a church of one! We are not looking to make cookie cutter Christians, but
diverse disciples of the one Lord Jesus Christ. The one bread of our communion
can be “multigrain.” Our unity is not grounded in all our diverse and
delightful differences, but rather in our one common Lord. Like a hundred different
pianos tuned by one pitch fork are in tune with one another, so the church
tuned to the one Christ is united.
A
politics of communion would cultivate the unity of the local church A politics of communion celebrates
ecumenicity. Our unity as
Christ’s church extends beyond our local congregation to other Christian
congregations. The history of Christianity and the emergence of denominations
seem to witness to the disunity of the church. Our differences have divided us
into Catholics, Protestants, Reformed, Charismatic, Pentecostal, Baptist,
non-denominational, Nazarene, and on and on we could go,
ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
With a history of
denominational divisions the work of the church in our day is to continue the
tough work of unity of the church across denominations. By that I do not mean
organizational unity, as if Christ calls us to be one huge denomination. Rather,
the church can be in unity even with our differences. Church
unity through ecumenical
cooperation does not mean we all become the same and lose our differences. We
have to learn the difficult dance of affirming our unity amid our diversity. Why
not think of the different Christian churches as the diverse hands, feet, eyes
and ears of the body of Christ, each bringing its uniquely different gifts into
one people?
Several hundred years ago, Augustine spoke of church unity
when he said; "In faith unity. In doubtful things, liberty. In all things
love". At the inception of the General Conference Mennonite Church it adapted
and adopted this slogan to address their differences and diversity as they came
together: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things
love.” Herein lays a potential for unity
not only among our own churches, but an ecumenical unity across denominations.
One place where ecumenical
cooperation seems to happen naturally is on the mission field. It appears that
when the church finds itself in an environment where it is in the minority and
not at the center of society, it tends to focus less on its differences and to
cooperate more.
As the church is decentered
and becomes more marginal in a post-modern, post-Christian society, denominationalism
will wane and be off less importance. There was a time when staunch
denominational identity ran through generations of families. A real change
regarding denominationalism started with the baby boom generation and has become
even more the case with Generation X and the millennials. They have little
concern for differences in denominations and denominational identity. Maybe
this is an opportunity, like on the mission field, for the church to
de-emphasize its non-essential differences and work at ecumenical cooperation. I
wonder, is this move toward a more postmodern, post-Christian society God
in cognito working through the world to
force the church to reconsider its essential unity and its vocation of mission?
Jesus’ prayer to God in John 17 was that his followers “may be one, as we
are one.” The politics of communion
celebrates ecumenicity.
A politics of communion upholds the
global church. The word
“ecumenical” literally means “the whole world.” So, true ecumenicity transcends
both our local and national boundaries to include the global church. We
celebrate World Communion Sunday as a reminder that the church in its unity
transcends the human boundaries of gender, race, economic class, language, and
nationality. Those are nice words, but when the rubber hits the road in
practice, the church may find itself having a hard time “discerning the body,” that
is, the global body of Christ.
One ideology that blinds us
to “discerning the body” is
nationalism.
Nationalism has become a religion that rivals Christianity, or should I say,
takes over Christianity, its narrative, and symbols. American nationalism,
sometimes hiding under the guise of “patriotism,” is a particularly pernicious
religion. It pledges allegiance to “one nation under god,” a tribal god of a
particular people. This parochial god has a divine mission for his favored child,
America. That mission first emerged during the American Revolution from the
Puritan John Winthrop in a 1630 sermon that imaged New England as a “City upon
a Hill,” a shining example for everyone to see. This same image was used by President
Reagan to speak of our nation. Unfortunately, this image from Jesus’s Sermon on
the Mount refers to his disciples. It has been misappropriated by politicians
and applied to America. The mission of America was couched in sacred language and
envisioned as a
Manifest Destiny, a
term coined by political writer John Sullivan in 1845
. It was our divine destiny to conquer and settle this new land. Although,
it was
manifestly clear to the Native
Americans, who lived in this land, that it was not their divine destiny to be
victims of genocidal slaughter, displacement, and cultural robbery.
Our nation came to see itself
as the “New Israel,” an image used of the church, whom God has chosen to be the
emissary of freedom and democracy to the world. Our mission is to remake the
world in our own image. Although the idea goes back to the early 1800’s, in
modern politics and the sentiments of most Americans we see our role in the
world defined by the idea of “American exceptionalism.” This doctrine holds
that our nation, our “democracy,” has a special, and one might say “saving,”
role to play in the world. We are not bound by international law or the
interests of the global community. We are bound only by American interests.
Most recently President Obama
intoned this doctrine of “American exceptionalism” to justify bombing Syria,
which is a sovereign nation, and where, I might add, 10% of the population is
part of the body of Christ. If we are “a city set on a hill” how could we bomb
Syria for using chemical weapons, when we decimated the cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein when he used chemical weapons
we supplied on his own people, just to name two brief examples? That’s because
those situations involved “America’s interests.” America is excluded from
hypocrisy and moral judgment, because we are “exceptional” within world
history. The problem with “American exceptionalism” is that many nations have held
to some form of “exceptionalism” and have justified all kinds of evil using it.
Besides, everyone wants to think that their people, their culture, their form
of government, are somehow special. The real difference is that America is an
empire with the power to enforce its supposed “exceptionalism” onto others.
Like many religions, the
nationalistic religion of “Americanism” calls for blood sacrifice; the bodies
and blood of our young men and women sacrificed on the nation’s altar of freedom,
or should we rather say, “America’s global interests.” It is this sacrifice
that binds our nation together as one. The death of those offered for our
nation abolishes our differences and brings us unity. The flag becomes a symbol
of our blood sacrifices, as the cross is a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. We unite
around the flag like Christians gather around the communion table. And yet, for
Christians it is the final and ultimate sacrifice of the body and blood of
Christ remembered in communion, which binds the global church together as one.
At the conclusion of his book
Between Babel and Beast, theologian
Peter Leithart suggests:
American churches need to commemorate the
final sacrifice of Jesus in regular eucharistic celebrations, and they need to
work out the practicalities of a eucharistic politics—the end of sacred
warfare, the formation of an international ecclesial imperium that
includes all Christians, the cultivation of the virtues of
martyrs, the forging of bonds of brotherhood (and sisterhood) that would
inhibit Christians from shedding Christian blood (152).
Communion presents us with an
alternative politics. Our politics of communion is shaped by a cosmic God and
an international community of believers, over against a parochial god of a solitary
nation state. As citizens of God’s realm we bear allegiance to Christ alone,
which does not mean that we have no responsibility toward the state or that the
state has no positive role to play or that we must hate everything about
America. Nor does it mean that every expression of church in the world is
faultless. It does mean that our allegiance to Christ and love for God’s global
church takes precedence over allegiance to the state. So, when the state seeks
our support to bomb places where our Christian brothers and sisters live, how
can we in good conscience violate the body of Christ?
How ironic that it an Air
Force chaplain shared communion with the crew of the Enola Gay before they
bombed Hiroshima. How blind to the body were those Christians who used the
Bible and just war theory to justify dropping the atomic bomb, a weapon of mass
destruction? How tragic it was that an “all Christian” bomb crew dropped the bomb
that decimated Nagasaki, which was not only targeted on innocent civilians, but
ground zero was the largest Christian cathedral (Urakami) in Asia! Nagasaki had
the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan! With those
two bombs alone we sacrificed over 220,000 innocent civilians in the name of
our nation, while still today we claim it was
necessary to end the war. Allegiance to a nation took precedence
over allegiance to Christ and his global church. Where was the “discernment of
the body?”
Communion is a place for us
to begin to rethink our politics. My old friend John Stoner said it well. His proposal
became a popular Mennonite Central Committee poster, which reads:
A modest proposal for peace; Let the
Christians of the world agree that they will not kill each other. This is
only a first step. But, that simple proposal has radical and political
implications. It’s as radical as the simple truth that our communion with
Christ, remembered and celebrated in the bread and cup, makes the church one.
Simply put, our communion in
Christ binds us together with Christians worldwide. The one church of Christ
takes priority over our particular nations. That is what we celebrate on World
Communion Sunday. The love of God has no boundaries. The gift of Christ’s body and blood is
transnational. It cannot be contained within one nation. The Spirit of the
church is universal. And so, with the second century Christians, we pray to God:
As this broken bread was scattered over
the mountains, and when brought together becomes one, so let your Church be
brought together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom (Didache, 2nd
century).
Like the church at Corinth, the community of Waxahachie, Texas of 1935, as
depicted in the movie Places in the Heart,
was divided. The story begins with death and desperation. Sheriff Royce
Spalding is accidentally killed by a young black boy, Wylie, who has been
drinking at the railway yards. White vigilantes drag Wylie through the streets with
their truck and display his broken body in the view of Edna, the sheriff’s wife,
and her children as the community’s blood sacrifice. Edna does not project her pain onto every black person she meets. She even covers
for Moze, a black drifter and handyman, when he is caught by the law for stealing
her silverware after asking her for work. She ends up hiring Moze to help her
grow and market cotton in order to save her home from being repossessed. The
banker, who holds the deed to her place, negotiates with Edna to also take in
his blind brother-in-law, Will. Eventually after Moze is beaten by the Klan and
defended by Will, he leaves this new makeshift family he has grown to love. A
woman, her small children, a black man, and a man who was blind, see clearly what
caring across their differences can mean. It created a diverse, loving
community, sharing in the bread of peace and the wine of hope.
The final scene of the movie is a rather strange scene of communion. It is
a service of communion taking place inside a small country church. The pastor
reads 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. Love
is patient and kind…Love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things. The elements of communion are passed down the pews from one member
to the next. It looks like a regular communion service until….after Edna’s
sister and brother-in-law take the cup, you see the men who dragged Wylie with
the truck, then Klan members, the banker, then there is Will, Moze, Edna, her
children, and oddly enough her dead husband, Royce, sharing in communion. Royce
finally turns to the young Wylie, who shot him, and passes to him the cup of
Christ’s blood. The final words of the movie are Wylie’s words to Royce….”Peace
of God.” It is one of the most striking and thought-provoking depictions of
communion I have ever seen.
Some interpret this final communion scene as an image of heaven, with
everyone forgiven symbolized in Christ’s shed blood. That may be part of this
final scene. But, it may also be a vision of what the church can be here and
now: reconciled, at one, undivided by race, class, age, disability, gender, politics,
ideology, nationality, and living in the peace of God.
+of+drumminghands_Clr.jpg)
