PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Acts 11:1-18; John 10:3-35                                                                        Com-Union
Sermon May 2, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

          Today we will celebrate the memorial feast called “the Lord’s Supper,” or “the Eucharist,” or “Holy Communion.”  Good Christians have disagreed over what this sacrament means—and there have been times when the disagreements became disagreeable.  There are three main views.  The Orthodox and Roman Catholic doctrine is that the bread and wine are spiritually transformed and actually become the real body and blood of Christ:  and so when a person receives the elements, eats and drinks, Jesus Christ himself becomes part of your own body and soul, and the power of his death and resurrection are applied to you.[1]  That’s a very powerful idea, and it has given innumerable Christians a way to deep fellowship with God. 

The Protestant Reformers established a different explanation.  They agreed with the Orthodox and Roman Catholics that Christ is really present in the elements, but present by the action of the Holy Spirit:  the bread and wine bring to us Christ’s body and blood on the cross, and the Holy Spirit makes it our own—our salvation.  Without causing any emotion, without creating a scene, the Holy Spirit brings the power of Christ’s death and resurrection to you.[2]  The Reformers also said that the church should include the preaching of the Word at the same time we celebrate Communion, because the Word of Christ is uttered into your heart by the Spirit. 

The third explanation originated in the Protestant Reformation too, but it came into its own with the development of science, the expansion of education and the idea of human progress.  This is the understanding of the Lord’s Supper that most American Christians hold in our time.  It is this:  that the bread and wine are symbols only, and their purpose is to stir us to remember Christ—his teaching, his death and resurrection, and his eternal life shared with us.  In this view there is no need for Christ himself to be “really present” in the elements:  what is necessary is that as we eat the bread and drink the cup, we remember Christ’s death until he comes.[3]

There are, of course, other explanations, but these are the three main ways Christians understand Holy Communion.  What I want to say today, however, is only hinted at in these formal explanations.  If Christ is really present, or really communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, or dwells in our memory and our hope—if this is real, then the Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places, maybe places we wouldn’t choose if it were up to us.  In other words, if Communion really has spiritual power, it  changes us.

          In the Gospel Lesson today Jesus is with his disciples—Judas has just left; and he institutes the sacrament of Communion.  Imagine what this meant to the people who were there.  Here was a group who had spent three years jostling each other for position and ignoring the way Jesus treated women as equals.  When Jesus gave the bread to pass around, he put them all on the same footing.  When Jesus said, “All of you, drink of  this,” the “all of you” announced the surprising removal of status.  We Americans talk about equality before the law, but even in America money and privilege make a difference.  In the ancient Roman empire of Jesus’ time those differences were incredibly great.  The life of a poor person was considered worthless beyond what she or he could produce for the market.  There was no middle class:  if you were lucky enough to be born in a family with a title and the property to back it up, you joined the pecking order of power:  the big cheese in a small town paid homage to the big cheese in a metropolitan center; and the metro cheese had better be on his or her toes or some jealous rival would buy a judge to take the farm away.  The metro cheese, say a nobleman from Alexandria, Egypt, had no influence in Rome unless he carried letters of recommendation from some bigger cheese who was known in Rome.  And the common people?  The common people scraped out a living, tried to stay out of the way of the powerful, and hoped that their children could take care of them in their old age.  In such a world as that, Jesus sat at table with his disciples, passed around a loaf of bread and said, “Take, eat—share in my body.”  And he invited every one of them to drink from the same cup.  And the women?  Them, too!  Jesus wanted the fellowship of his disciples to be a real com-munion, a real solidarity with him and with each other.  The Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places. 

          That First Lesson from the Book of Acts about Peter going back to Jerusalem and telling them that the Centurion Cornelius and his household had been brought into Christianity—that was a very surprising place to be led.  Christianity started out as a sectarian movement within Judaism:  that fact is clear from the description in the Book of Acts.  They worshiped in the Jewish temple, offered sacrifices there, participated in Judean political life, saw themselves as under the authority of the Sanhedrin.  At first all Christians were Jews, and they kept kosher.  Peter told his fellow Jewish Christians about his dream of a great sheet let down from heaven, full of animals; and not just animals that Jews are permitted to eat—there were pigs, shrimp, squid, lobsters, camels, rock badgers, rabbits, buzzards, ostriches and bats along with cattle, sheep, goats, carp and bass.[4]  Peter objected.  As an observant Jew he knew that a lot of these animals were forbidden; but God said in the dream that he may eat them.  And that’s when the messengers from Cornelius showed up at the gate.  They were ritually impure Gentiles.  Gentiles were forbidden from entering the Jerusalem temple any farther than the first courtyard.  But they wanted Peter to come talk to their master, Cornelius, who was not only a Gentile but a Roman soldier—an oppressor, an officer in one of the military units that the Empire had stationed in Judea to keep the colony in the Empire.  And Peter went.  Peter preached to the entire household of Cornelius, and they became Christians.  They became part of the fellowship of Christ’s disciples who share the Lord’s Supper—Jesus’ body and blood:  “all of you, drink of this.”  It now meant everybody, not just Jewish men.  The Christian mission was expanding, and there were Jewish Christians who didn’t like that.  It was a hard pill to swallow, and it took  decades for the primitive church to work it out.  The Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places. 

          Twenty years after the crucifixion the Apostle Paul started a Christian community in the Greek trading city of Corinth.  After he left they had some confusion about how to live out their Christianity, so Paul wrote them at least three letters and maybe as many as five letters, parts of which appear in our New Testament as First and Second Corinthians.  One of the big problems was the Lord’s Supper.  For one thing the city Christians got to the meeting first and ate up all the fellowship supper, so that when the country Christians arrived there was nothing left for them, and some of the early birds were actually drunk.  The Apostle called them up short and told them to stop treating each other unequally—they weren’t to live any longer like the Roman culture with its distinctions.[5]  Then he went on to write about what a Christian should be doing during the ritual of Holy Communion—he wrote:[6]  “Examine your lives, and then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.”  What happens when you take time to examine your life in relation to the spiritual and moral calling of Jesus?  If you have any soul at all, you get changed.  You get your sins forgiven, but you also get your sins corrected.  The Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places. 

          The same Apostle wrote to the Christians in Rome.  Again in the context of a passage about eating, he said this:[7]

This brings forward Jesus’ own teaching about “judge not that you be not judged.”  It isn’t about what you think—we all remember the words our grandparents used to talk about other people, you don’t forget that; this is about what you do in the fellowship of Christ.  You set social distinctions aside and affirm the diversity of thinking and serving.  This places the missionary living in horrible political conditions alongside the newly confirmed teenager just learning how to be a Christian with all these hormones.  It means Christians who speak Spanish are equals of Christians who speak English.  “The Lord can make them stand.”  Diversity in the family of Christ is not an evil thing.  The Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places.

          The Gospel of John places on Jesus’ lips these words:[8]

I can’t think of a better definition of “universalism.”  But universalism challenges ideas about belief and behavior, challenges ideas about who is in and who is out.  This challenge comes from Jesus.  The Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places. 

          Com-union.  The word comes from the Latin meaning “giving service together” or “sacrificing together.”[9]  But when God gets into the mix, we get pushed out of our comfort zone and into the joyful, exuberating, frightening, uncomfortable, redemptive place we need to go in order to become more.  Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper is not a brake-pedal on change in the church or in the life of the individual who eats and drinks:  it is God’s push to take the next step in love; and it stands at the very center of the church’s life.  I don’t know why people think Christianity looks backwards, when our God keeps pointing forward.  The Lord’s Supper takes us into some surprising places. 

AMEN