23 I received a tradition from the Lord, which I also handed on to you: on the night on which he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread. 24 After giving thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this to remember me.” 25 He did the same thing with the cup, after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Every time you drink it, do this to remember me.” 26 Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you broadcast the death of the Lord until he comes. (Common English Bible)
“Adventures in Churchland: A Visitor’s
Experience of Mainline Worship,” Week Five
The
20-year-old firefighter who also served as an EMT had just completed a 24-hour
shift, with a whole 30 minutes of it spent asleep. He did exactly what you might expect someone
in that state to do, something we may well have feared doing ourselves at one
point late at night—he fell asleep behind the wheel.
And
in doing so, he struck the car of a 30-year-old wife and mother of one girl,
who was then pregnant with her second child.
The daughter survived the wreck, the mother and her unborn child did
not. The firefighter was charged with
felony vehicular manslaughter, and being a county officer, was facing a stiff
prison sentence. He also “expected hate
from” the husband whom he had suddenly made into a widower and a father of a
dead child.
But
then a remarkable thing happened. This
bereaved husband—who, as it turns out, was (is) a full-time pastor—saw this as “his
opportunity to practice the forgiveness he had preached so many times before.” As he himself put it, “It wasn’t an
option. If you’ve been forgiven, then
you need to extend that forgiveness.”
Forgiveness, yes. But friendship? Well…for this kind of authentic,
from-the-soul forgiveness, yes. This
lethal wreck took place in the fall of 2006, over seven years ago. And to this day, every two weeks, the pastor
and the firefighter go to church together and have breakfast together. And I find that amazing, not really for the
pronouncement of forgiveness (although it is) or even for the continued
friendship (although it is as well). I
find it amazing because that relationship takes place over a meal, because like
the Passion narrative itself, out of the crucible of someone’s death comes a
holy meal and a chance to proclaim not only death, but resurrection.
This
is a sermon series that will take us all the way up to Ash Wednesday and the
beginning of the church season of Lent.
And this is a series about something that may or may not be new in the
slightest to us: Sunday worship. For
those of us who were born and raised in the church and have lived in the church
our entire lives, worship may be second nature to us by this point: some tunes,
some prayers, some preachin’, some bread and juice, and it’s off to Sunday
brunch. But for those of us for whom
church is an entirely new experience, this may all come across as one tin-foil
hat away from something utterly bizarre to you.
I think I can safely say that after reading Dan Kimball’s 2013 book,
“Adventures in Churchland,” in which at one point he conveys, in vivid detail,
his initial worship experience at a church that I instantly recognized as a
mainline Protestant church—a church like ours with a pastor in robes and an
organ in the sanctuary and the serving of communion—none of which are typical
trappings in many evangelical churches.
And Dan, having come in off the street, was both bemused and confused by
everything this church did as a part of its worship…but we do some of the exact
same things, and so it stands to reason that perhaps our worship is confusing
for newcomers as well. So, the point of
this sermon series is to not only explain why we worship the way we do, but
hopefully to equip you to do the same when other folks ask you why we worship
the way we do! We began by simply
talking about where we worship—our sanctuary, the church building—before talking
about how we worship, and though we lost a week of the sermon series to the
Snowpocalypse of 2014, we continued on by moving from talking about worship
music two weeks ago to talking about the whole listening-to-a-sermon bit, and
now we arrive at a ritual intimately familiar to all Disciples of Christ
churches: holy communion, or the partaking of the Eucharist. Dan writes:
The man in the robe held up a big golden
goblet and said some words. At first I
thought he was going to do some sort of magic trick and pull something out of
the goblet. But then I realized it was a
formal prayer he’d memorized. I wondered
if he was praying to the goblet, since he was staring at it and speaking
directly to it.
After the prayer, he (then) whispered to
the person at the end of the row and handed him the golden cup. This person dipped a tiny little cracker in
the cup, pulled it out, and ate it. Then
he whispered something to the guy on his left and passed him the cup. This guy also dipped a tiny little cracker in
it and ate it, passing the cup to the person on his left and whispering
something. The process repeated itself
down the row until it was my turn. The
woman next to me handed me the cup and said something about blood and “this is
for you” and something about flesh. I
did what I had seen the others do, not understanding what it meant or why I was
doing it.
And
I imagine that is probably true for all of us at some point in church—we participate
in some ritual or some exercise and don’t fully understand what it means or why
we are doing it. Maybe for you that was
watching a baptism for the first time and wondering why we dunk people in a
pool of (sometimes very cold water)…after all, church isn’t a college fraternity,
it isn’t like baptism is supposed to be some sort of hazing ritual. Or maybe for you it is wondering why we serve
coffee at every single possible church function, but for that one, I’ve got
nothing for you!
But
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that the practice of holy communion—of participating
in the re-enactment of the Lord’s Supper the night before He died—should hold
no such mystery for us: we should do it to proclaim Jesus’ death until He
returns to us again in the Second Coming.
Now,
that does not mean that holy communion should hold no mystery for us
whatsoever, otherwise there would have been no debate over all of those
different substantiation theories: transubstantiation, which dictates that the
bread and the wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus, or
consubstantiation, which says that the body and blood of Christ are present
alongside the bread and the wine, but that the bread and the wine do not
literally turn into the body and blood, or transignification, which posits that
the bread and the wine take on the significance of the body and blood, even if
they do not take on the actual physical properties of flesh, and so on and so
forth. If your head is spinning right
now, that is because I just condensed several centuries worth of theological
bickering into a single sermon paragraph, for which I am sure I shall be
roundly condemned by the saints in heaven for not doing their particular
interpretation justice, because, quite frankly, the whole practice of arguing
over holy communion defeats its very purpose: this is a meal that was meant to
draw the disciples together, not apart.
Think
about the Passover like you would a typical modern holiday, like the Fourth of
July or Thanksgiving: throughout the week you are busting yourself for your job
or whatever work you do, and you might feel tired and beaten down, but then,
the world steps in and says, at least for this one day, “STOP.” Stop, and grill some burgers with your buds
while you watch the fireworks. Stop, and
enjoy some stuffed bird with your loved ones while you watch football. Or…stop, and remember from whence your people
came: from a context of slavery and bondage in Egypt until God, through Moses,
liberated you and guided you to your home in Israel.
That’s
how religion is, at its most basic level, countercultural. It is where religion derives so much of its
power. When everything else in the world
gets to be too much—the deadlines and the burdens and the stresses—religious holidays
are what allow us to stand up and say “STOP” to that tweaked-out world. They are what give us an opportunity to keep
our heads above water.
And
that is something that we may be apt to forget with holy communion—what we are
really doing by participating in it is we are remembering a religious holiday,
the Jewish Passover, during a time when, in the midst of a hated and unwelcome
Roman occupation, most Israelites probably wanted to stand up and say “STOP”
that terrible, oppressive world as well.
It
is also why, I believe, why we should—and do—end our worship services with holy
communion rather than with my message. Ending
the service on me puts at least a little of the focus back on me, not on
God. We spend the other six days of the
week focusing on what other people say, and this is supposed to be the one day
a week when we are really supposed to focus on what God is saying. And what God is saying—through Christ—is what
Paul relays to us here in 1 Corinthians: that every time you consume the bread
and wine of the Eucharist, you are proclaiming that Jesus has died and risen
and that He will return once more.
And
why bother proclaiming that at all?
Because, quite simply, that desire for a returning Christ is what keeps
us going. It is what keeps the church
going. It is what keeps Christians
going, the gnawing, fervent, wildly hopeful belief that one day, maybe not
tomorrow or the next day, but that one day, God will become flesh again simply
because He loves us that much.
There
is a Latin saying, in vino veritas,
that literally means, “in wine, (there exists) truth,” and it comes from the
observations of the Greek historian Herodotus and the Roman historian Tacitus,
who observed that the Persians and Germans respectively would engage in
decision-making while drinking or inebriated, under the belief that one is not
an effective liar while intoxicated. In
other words, wine—or any alcohol—brings out
the truth in all of us.
But
I have to believe there is another dimension to this saying, because in this wine, in the wine (or juice, in our
case) of the Eucharist, there indeed exists truth, the truth of God’s grace and
mercy, poured out to the point of overflowing.
There exists the truth that over a meal, the unlikeliest of
relationships can be formed—a friendship between widower and firefighter, an
engagement between fiancé and fiancée, or even the rescue of a sinner, called
and redeemed, whose task when they get up from the table has become to call and
redeem other sinners.
There
are a great many reasons why we take holy communion every single week without
fail here, but perhaps the greatest for me is that it is what sustains that
unlikely relationship between myself and God.
Because in His wine, there is grace.
There is mercy. And there is
surely truth.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
23, 2014
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