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Once there was a young pastor.
He had just graduated from seminary and was about to arrive
at his very first appointment in the local church. It was
his first Sunday, and as he stood in front of this new
congregation for the first time, he experienced something
very confusing. During the service, the people who sat on
the right sat silently, folding their hands and closing
their eyes during the prayers. While the folks on the right
sat quietly in prayer, the people in the center spoke during
the prayers. It wasn’t unusual to hear from the center an
audible, “Yes, Lord!” or “Have mercy, Lord!” and even an
occasional “Thank you, Jesus!” If that wasn’t confusing
enough for our young pastor, when he turned to the left, the
congregation would stand during the prayers, with their
hands extended to the sky as if they were waiting for God’s
blessing to fall.
At every meeting of the church
council, the different factions of the congregation would
debate with one another about the proper tradition of the
church. Each side insisted their way of doing things was the
right way of doing things. Nothing this young pastor said or
did seemed to make any difference. Finally, in desperation,
he arranged a visit with the church’s 99-year-old founding
pastor who lived in a nearby nursing home.
When he met the old pastor, he
poured his heart out to him, asking him to help clarify this
confusing situation. “Which is the true tradition of the
church? Tell me, was it the tradition for the congregation
to sit silently during the prayers?”
“No,” answered the old pastor.
“Was it to speak out in
response?”
Once again, the old pastor said,
“No.”
“Ah, then the tradition was to
stand with one’s hands raised to the sky?”
“No,” the pastor said.
The young pastor responded,
“Well, there has to be some answer. What was the tradition?
What we have now is a bunch of different ways to do the same
thing!”
“Ah,” said the pastor, “Now
that was the tradition of the church.”
Different ways to do the same thing—a proper welcome to
World Communion Sunday, because in some places it will be
called “The Eucharist,” in others it will be called
“Communion,” in others it will be called “The Love Feast,”
and in still others it will be called “The Lord's Supper.”
And as varied as the titles, so will be the means by which
people come to the table, and varied will be the kinds of
bread and wine that will be found on the table. And if the
differences in names, means and elements aren’t enough,
perhaps the most perplexing differences will be in the
understanding that people and their pastors, deacons,
priests or ministers will have of what they are doing. So
many different expressions of the same thing! Welcome
to World Communion Sunday.
On this day of Christian unity,
some will come forward and receive unleavened bread in the
form of a wafer into the palms of their hands. They may or
may not then sip from the cup—which may be wine, or
unfermented grape juice, or even some other beverage in
those places where grapes are unknown. At the same time,
others will tear a piece of bread from a broken loaf, and
then dip it into the common cup. Still others will be seated
in their pews and will have individual cups and pre-sliced
bread passed from person to person. So many different
ways to do the same thing! Welcome to World Communion
Sunday.
On this day, some will partake
in the sacrament as a part of a full meal, or seated at a
table in a sanctuary of God’s presence, or in a church hall,
or a home, or a school building, or simply sitting in a
circle in a hut or in a clearing in the midst of a jungle or
forest, or in the middle of a place of sand and rock. So
many different places to do the same thing! Welcome
to World Communion Sunday.
But the differences don’t stop
there. Some today will regard the bread and the wine as
being fully and actually the body and blood of our Lord and
Savior. Others will regard the entire sacrament as an
important “memorial,” and see Jesus as being spiritually
present in a special manner but deny his physical presence
in the elements. Others will find a middle road,
understanding Jesus’ presence as being real in the eating of
the bread even though they still believe that the bread is
only a symbol. So many different ways of understanding
the same thing! Welcome to World Communion Sunday.
World Communion Sunday. This is
the Sunday where literally millions of Christians around the
world come together in different ways to do the same thing.
And it is on this Sunday that maybe, just maybe, the
Christian Church can say of itself that our differences do
not, or at least should not, divide us. On this day we say
that we are united despite our differences. And maybe, just
maybe, it is on this Sunday, on World Communion Sunday, that
we can glimpse the profound truth that we are united by our
differences. Today is the day when the worldwide church has
the opportunity to profess that it is not ritual,
denomination, church polity, church buildings, personal
theology or political persuasion that ultimately unite us.
And it is on this Sunday that we have the chance to say that
it is not the language we speak, the ethnicity we claim, the
race we were born into, the culture that surrounds us, or
the economic class where we currently find ourselves that
ultimately unites us.
World Communion Sunday helps us
become clear on what truly is the tie that binds—a living
relationship with the one whose name, whose memory and whose
presence sits at the very center of the ritual so many will
partake in this day. It is this relationship with the God
made known to us in Jesus Christ that unites us.
World Communion Sunday helps us
grasp the fullest meaning of that favorite verse of our
tradition: “God so loved the world…that he gave his
only begotten Son.” World Communion Sunday reminds us that
it doesn’t read that “God so loved me…”, it reads
that “God so loved the world.” The amazing thing to
then realize is that we live in the world that God so loved,
and that that 6,557,640,921 others live in this world that
God so loved. So it is on this Sunday that the Christian
church comes to embrace the fact that Jesus Christ is far
more than our personal Lord and Savior, he is the Savior of
the World. Jesus Christ did not live, die and rise again for
me alone, but for the entire world we live in—the world that
God so loved.
“Savior of the World.” We must
discover the fullness of the meaning of that phrase. Truth
be told, “Savior of the World” has been used at times to
limit, rather than to foster, the diversity that we are
called to with today’s celebration. It is a part of our
Christian history that European explorers and evangelists
often arrived on the shores of this hemisphere carrying the
banner of “Savior of the World,” only to use that title to
wipe out local culture, customs and languages. They did not
always understand Jesus to be the world’s Savior, but
instead the deliverer of a worldview. Too often it was
believed that to become Christian also meant to become
European. That is why if we can begin to grasp the depth of
this World Communion celebration, then maybe we can begin to
recapture the fullness of what it means to be in
relationship with Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World.
To understand the fullness of
this title, the fullness of this relationship and the
fullness of the day we celebrate, I could think of no better
place to turn than to the Apostle Paul. I love Paul. He is
my favorite of all the biblical writers. I love his mind. I
love his passion. I love his poetry. You see, I think we
have tried for so long to make Paul into a theologian, to
turn him into just an idea guy, viewing his writings as an
attempt to take the deepest mysteries of faith and reduce
them to understandable systems and rational proofs. To do
that is to rob Paul of his passion and his proclivity for
the poetic. You see, Paul’s writings are laced with songs
and poems. But unfortunately, because of the distance, both
cultural and historic, between Paul and us, we often miss
the poetry of Paul’s writings. Whenever Paul is confronted
with a tough, often unexplainable mystery of God, Paul turns
quickly from the didactic to the poetic—he literally sings a
song or pens a poem.
And is there any better language
than the language of poetry and music to help expand and
stretch our imaginations and challenge us to see and
experience things we have never considered before? Think
about it. I could preach countless sermons about the love of
God, but all we have to do is sing one verse of “Amazing
Grace” and we will experience something of that love on a
level far deeper than all our talking, thinking and studying
on the subject could ever hope to communicate. Poetry is not
to be studied, it is to be experienced. Overanalyzing it can
sometimes choke the spirit out of it.
And so, it is on this day, as we
come to the table with Christians from all over the world,
when we look to discover what it means to be in relationship
with the one who has been called the Savior of the World,
that we turn to Paul, the poet apostle, to glimpse something
of what all this might mean. In his letter to the
Colossians, Paul is writing to a young church trying to
understand who Jesus Christ is and how their relationship
with him was to challenge the deep religious (Jew and
Gentile), cultural (circumcised or uncircumcised), and class
(slave and free) divisions of his day. To help them
understand the fullness of this new relationship—this all
encompassing, category smashing, world transforming
relationship they found in Christ—Paul writes a poem.
Experience once again these poetic words of Paul:
He is the image of the invisible
God,
the firstborn of all creation;
for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created,
things visible and invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers
—all things have been created through him
and for him.
He himself is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.
He is the head of the body,
the church;
He is the beginning,
the firstborn from the dead,
so that he might come to have first place
in everything.
For in him all the fullness of
God
was pleased to dwell,
and through him God was pleased
to reconcile to himself all things,
whether on earth or in heaven,
by making peace through the blood of his cross.
Paul wants them (and in our
reading, wants us) to experience a new fullness of the
relationship found in Jesus Christ—to see in all things, all
people, all races, cultures, countries and creeds the love
of God found in Christ Jesus our Lord. Paul’s poetry
challenges his listeners to see that Christ is already in
everything and that everything is already in Christ. Paul so
passionately proclaims, as only a poet can, that in Jesus
Christ, all things hold together. He does not say that all
things become the same. Eugene Petersen’s contemporary
translation, The Message, puts the Colossian poem
like this:
So spacious is he,
so roomy,
that everything of God
finds its proper place in him without crowding.
Not only that, but all the
broken
and dislocated pieces of the universe—
people and things,
animals and atoms—
get properly fixed and fit together
in vibrant harmonies,
all because of his death,
his blood that poured down from the Cross.
If we are to understand the
poetics of Paul, then to call Jesus Christ the Savior of the
World is not an attempt to make everything look the same,
but instead it is an invitation to see Christ in all the
differences that surround us. It is an invitation to say
that if Jesus Christ is the bread of life, then that bread
need not only be white bread, but it can be the flatbreads
of the Middle East or the sweet breads of the Islands. The
bread of life can be the rich wheat and rye breads of Europe
or the fry breads of the Native Americans. The Savior of the
World may be made known in the tortillas from Mexico and
Central America, the corn breads from the African American
culture, the Injera bread from Ethiopia, and rice from Asia.
If the love of God found in Jesus Christ is the love that is
reconciling and saving the world, then it is absolutely
necessary that it feed people, nourish people, love, comfort
and heal people, in the cultural forms, customs, languages
and styles that will sustain them. Any attempt to erase or
eradicate them, especially when it is done in the name of
God, is to deny God’s presence in those very people and
places.
That is the real potential of
World Communion Sunday, to come together with millions of
Christians from around the world to say, “Just because I
don’t recognize it doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it, and
just because I don’t understand it doesn’t mean I can’t
learn from it, and just because I have never experienced it
doesn’t mean that God is not present in it.” World Communion
Sunday does just that. It frees the global church to be the
global church, united in its diversity. Tonight, when we
come to this table, we open ourselves to the exciting
possibility of meeting Christ in ways we never could have
imagined.
So many
different ways to do the same thing. Now there is a tradition
worth holding onto!
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