July 31, 2016
Texts: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:18-23; Luke 11:1-4; I Cor 11:23-26
The worship mission group and liturgists have been discussing whether there is too much variety in the words spoken in our celebration of the Lord’s Supper. At their request, I want to talk to you about this sacred rite which is at the center of our life as a community. The best way I see to be helpful is to focus on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. If we can get clear about its meaning, I trust the words for celebrating Communion will follow. Gail Arnall has arranged for discussion today over lunch with liturgists and mission group, and I look forward to that opportunity to work on this together.
Something strange happened to me as I worked on this teaching. As you know, I am big on working from the lectionary and its framework. Let me remind you of that framework. In most cases the Old Testament text lays before us a provocative issue. The Gospel text relates Jesus and his ministry to that issue. Then the Epistle text tells us how the early church addressed it.
When I started my preparation I considered skipping the OT text for this week from the book of Ecclesiastes because I didn’t see any connection to the Lord’s Supper.
Here are some excerpts:
… vanity of vanities. All is vanity… All things are wearisome; more than one can express … What has been is what will be, … there is nothing new under the sun. … What do mortals get from all the toil and strain? … For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation, even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2b, 8f, 2:22f).
For your information, Ecclesiastes was written in the 3rd or 2nd century before Christ. It gives us glimpses of what a lot of people were thinking when Jesus began his ministry. Ecclesiastes understands that the world was created by God and that God unceasingly acts upon it. The human calamity is that we cannot make contact with this divine action because it is too deeply concealed. Moreover, as the author of Ecclesiastes sees it, human beings always miss the mark. Therefore this poet despairs of a life which he knows is completely encompassed by God, but which has nevertheless lost all meaning for him because God’s activity has sunk down into unattainable concealment. He is confronted with two irreconcilable realities – the eternity of God always above, beyond and out of reach and man’s condition that on his own he cannot get it right. Therefore, as a human being, he is vulnerable on all sides and life is totally insecure. Ecclesiastes is relevant to Jesus and the Lord’s Supper in that than it captures a widespread skepticism that Jesus faced particularly among the Sadducees who are major players in the Gospel story.
Moreover, the same climate of skepticism is powerfully operative in American culture today. A particularly vivid example is the strange bonding of evangelical leaders with the Trump campaign. I see no rational way to account for this other than the penetration of radical secularism even into ultra-religiosity. Another factor we face is that a climate of skepticism increases the power of propaganda. Frightened people shun complexity and become more and more subject to manipulation.
This skepticism is part of the cultural air that we in this room breathe. Its voice speaks inside each of us and competes for attention in our brains and souls. There is no escape from it. We have got to take it head-on. This leads us to the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. Ecclesiastes has done its job: raising this life and death issue of God’s reality and presence.
In the New Testament, Jesus is God’s reply to the human calamity described by Ecclesiastes. And the Lord’s Supper encapsulates and embodies Jesus’ reply.
Last Sunday, David Hilfiker spoke about our identity as participants in the Jesus movement. This is our identity as a community. This is who we are. We have elements of an institution—structure and expectations—but these elements are derived from our identity with the Jesus movement.
Participation in the Lord’s Supper is remembering our identity. The skepticism about God that confronts us out in the world confronts us here. The Lord’s Supper counters that disabling skepticism by grounding us in the Gospel. That’s the meaning of the Lord’s Supper in a nutshell. Now let’s unpack it.
During Jesus’ last supper with his disciples in the flesh, he adapted the Passover Meal with two innovations. First he held up a loaf of bread and said words that were translated into Greek and then into English as “This is my body.” Many scholars think that what Jesus meant was simply “This is me.”
Last Sunday, Kent Beduhn handed me the bread saying “This is Christ Jesus.” My spontaneous reaction was “Yes.” Remember Jesus’ promise “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of you.” There we were in that moment—Kent, me and Jesus—brothers in the movement.
Later in the Passover Meal Jesus introduced a second innovation. According to Paul, Jesus lifted a cup of wine and said,
This is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (I Cor. 11:25-26)
The cup has at least two meanings, one is suffering and a second is blessing. Putting these two together we get suffering that is a blessing. In Jesus’ reference to covenant, we hear echoes of the prophet Jeremiah:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days … I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest … for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
The cup also brings to mind the last petition in the Lord’s Prayer: “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” (Luke 11:4c) This brings to mind Jesus’ experience in the garden of Gethsemane when he sweat blood, suffering alone as his companions slept. We hear it again in the cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” We would not go wrong in hearing Jesus’ words over the cup as “This is my journey.”
Jesus died on the cross as a criminal. In the eyes of the Jewish elite and Rome, public crucifixion was a warning. This is what happens to deviants. Jesus’ followers were helpless to protect him. Jesus knew that. Only God could save him, and that night in the garden, in his phony trial and as he hung on the cross God was silent. It looked like skepticism won.
Then the eternal God played his hand. He vindicated his suffering servant and gave him a new body, not a physical body like the old one but an utterly new body that could walk through walls and be many places at the same time.
Many confuse resurrection with resuscitation. According to scripture, God did not resuscitate Jesus like Jesus had resuscitated Lazarus and others only for them to die again. God transformed Jesus as he has promised to transform us. This is a body that will never die. This is the body that joins us at this table as we partake and share with one another the bread and the cup. It is the liberated spirit referred to in the old African American story of the helpless slave surrounded by his torturers shouting: “You can’t kill me. I’ve already died.”
I have barely touched the surface of this great mystery. Acknowledging that, let’s do what we can and think about the possibility in taking the loaf and the cup, Jesus meant something like “This is me” for the bread and “This is my journey” for the cup. I am not proposing we drop the traditional language but stretch our minds as we think about it. I think the Lord’s Prayer helps us do that.
Luke opens chapter 11 with the disciples’ request to Jesus to teach them to pray. In teaching them and us to pray, Jesus outlined how he prayed. Start, he says, by holding in your mind that you are praying to a Presence deeper and wider than you can think, to whom you matter greatly. Jesus addressed this Presence with the intimate family name comparable in our time to “Poppa.”
Think about this from the perspective of child and parent then and now. If we were blessed with loving parents, no one was bigger, deeper, wiser that Father and Mother. We knew one thing with clarity. We mattered. Go back to your early childhood as you pray. Likewise for those of us who have been blessed to be parents, think of how you think of your children regardless of their age. The bottom line is that our children matter profoundly, no matter how complicated the relationship.
Tragically, a lot of people in our culture carry a deep wound at this point which feeds the ever lurking skepticism. Father was largely absent, in some cases unknown, in other cases mean and abusive, withholding. If that is your history, pick the most loving adult in your life, your mother, an uncle or aunt, teacher or coach, foster parent – someone to whom you mattered unequivocally.
Then proceed with two specific thoughts: “Hallowed be your name” and “Your kingdom come.” This is how Jesus prayed. When we eat and pass the bread this is the “me” we are passing. This is the person we are following, who keeps us on course, who helps us shun the voices within of radical skepticism and allow recollections that bring to the surface of our minds praise, gratitude and acknowledgment of God as God.
William Stringfellow in his book Count It All Joy gives a keen insight into hallowing God’s name. He says,
Let all religious people beware. Their earnest longing for God is predicated on the reservation on their part that it is necessary for them to do something to find God. The Word of God in the Bible, however, is that God does not await human initiative of any sort but seeks and finds us where we are, whatever it be.
This is how Jesus thought about God. This is the Jesus we share in eating the bread.
Next Jesus teaches us to pray “your kingdom come.” The Lord’s Prayer divides into two parts. One part is getting oriented. The second part is making requests from that orientation. . The petition “Your kingdom come” is Jesus’ mantra. This is now the mantra of the Jesus movement, what it is all about.
In this petition Jesus is teaching his disciples then and now to pray as God’s servants and his beloved daughters and sons. Part of our praying is noticing evidence of God’s vision showing up in life going on about us.
For example, I will hold in my heart forever the awareness that came to me several weeks ago when the L’Arche community worshipped with us with Sito and Crisely as liturgists and teachers. That Sunday, we learned from L’Arche members a simple unpretentious way of praising God in public. Those folks led and we followed lifting and waving our hands. At one point in the service we heard a loud protracted bodily sound. The sound came from Walter. Emily Owsley told me this is what Walter does when he is happy with something. As a severely handicapped person it was purring like a cat, Walter’s way of participating and expressing joy and pleasure in our worship. In that service it occurred to me right then that we were seeing and tasting the kingdom of God in operation. The old walls of division between the gifted and the challenged were gone. We were worshipping truly as one. The gifted are challenged and the challenged are gifted.
Here is another example of what I consider evidence of the kingdom of God coming. My youngest daughter, Grace Taylor, is the principle of the North Star Elementary School in one of the poorest counties of Colorado. Many of the kids have poor self-control and low self-esteem. They are frequently disruptive. It is exceedingly difficult to work with so many special needs kids and the normal kids at the same time. One or the other gets slighted.
Grace was here for a visit a few weeks ago. We were having a conversation about where Grace wanted to take her school. As she was sharing her dreams for the school she kept mentioning three words: engaged, joy, confidence. I said that those three words sounded to me a compelling vision – students and teachers fully engaged in the work of learning, experiencing joy in the process, and growing in confidence. The question was how to move her school from here to there.
Grace shared with me recently assigning two of her teachers the task of finding the best training program to equip teachers to help children with behavioral problems and attention deficits. They found the program recommended by the school system seriously lacking, in fact counter- productive. Then they found an alternative that was producing significant results. Grace studied this program, bought into the staff’s recommendation, and proceeded to seek approval and financial support from her higher ups. Her supervisor actively discouraged her, urging her to work harder with the old program. Refusing to be daunted Grace raised the gap in funding and in a face to face meeting of her team with her supervisor she refused to back down until she won over enough of the supervisor’s team to give the program a one year trial. During this time I was praying every day “Your kingdom come.” As Grace reported step by step the progress and the obstacles, I couldn’t help but think this vision and this project is God’s business. These kids, their teachers and Grace the Principle matter to God.
The second half of the Lord’s Prayer includes three specific requests. Suffice it to say that this is a very earthy prayer and shows us Jesus as a very earthy man. “Give us each day our daily bread” includes the whole range of human needs with the proviso that we trust God by thinking one day at a time. Some assistance takes time to materialize and requires our investment.
The next petition is: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” This includes the baggage of resentment and the recognition that before God every single person on earth matters. That includes our enemies who threaten our well-being.
The final petition is “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” This is what Jesus was wrestling with in the Garden of Gethsemane. God’s answer came in Jesus’ words as he died on the cross, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” One interpretation of this petition is “Lord, protect me from getting in over my head while I recognize that some of us may be required to sacrifice our lives. Either way, grant me your salvation of transformation.”
To summarize, Jesus is God’s answer to the human calamity. The Lord’s Supper embodies Jesus’ mission. The Lord’s Prayer shows us who Jesus is.