Sermons

Table Manner and Family Matters

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  October 5, 2003                                                Mark 10:2-16

I imagine that the day we recognize today, World Communion Sunday, felt very different 70 years or so ago, when it was first recognized at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. Very different indeed. This church – regardless of its particular position on what was then known as Worldwide Communion Sunday – would most certainly have been a part of the sentiment of it all. Wonderful, romantic sentiment indeed, Christians from around the world all sharing the Lord’s Supper on the same day. Were it to be so, even on a day like today.

One of my predecessors in this pulpit, Paul Moore Strayer, most certainly would have embraced this idea. Legend had it that nearly every afternoon, Strayer would take a stroll with Walter Rauschenbusch, a twentieth century religious giant. Rauschenbusch, you will remember, was a well-known minister in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City and then moved to what is now known as Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, then located just down the street from us. He was best known as the articulator of “social gospel” theology.

The social gospel, forged in places like Hell’s Kitchen and in the union halls of Rochester, New York, insisted that Christianity had a message to bring to society, to the culture, a message that demanded justice for all and that insisted that the gospel could deliver progress, could make a difference, an end to poverty, warfare, oppression. The “social gospel” persists. Martin Luther King, Jr. learned it and taught it and lived it. People like Reinhold Niebuhr critiqued it. Human progress has been generated by the tenets of the social gospel.

World Communion Sunday reflects that conviction well, its global intention and the great leveling that comes when we all take our place at the table.

But we often get in the way of our own best intentions. As Strayer and Rauschenbusch discussed these things, World War I happened. As the ecumenical movement gathered steam in the 1920’s and 1930’s, World War II happened. In the post-war era, all sorts of dynamics took over. Some of you remember Bishop Pike’s famous sermon in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, 1960, supported by Presbyterian Stated Clerk Eugene Carson Blake, that considered a kind of “super” denomination, an American ecumenical monolith.

That is why this day seems so romantic and sentimental, and why we must be more modest about these very things these days. Rather than a united church transforming the world, we are a church in conflict – within and without. Rather than a family of nation-states working to eradicate poverty and disease, we are a world at war.

One could almost become discouraged. And yet we are not. Because we remember with gratitude those who have witnessed to us about the way things might be. And we remember the story that draws us to this place, and we dwell in its possibilities for transformation – ourselves, our children, the church, the world.

We live not in the world of the imaginary, but in the world of the real, and we know that real work needs to be done, in the name of Jesus. That’s the heritage we share with those from our past, and it’s the gospel we share with all those who gather at Christ’s table this day – every nation, every persuasion, every affiliation – gathered not because of who they, or we, are, but because of who God is. Gathered not because of how things are, but because of how they will be.

Martin Marty once said that everything “united” seems to be spinning apart. The United Presbyterian Church. United Airlines. The United States. Thinking about unity and progress is not an easy thing these days. Our battles are joined on a greatly reduced plain these days – I am not sure what Rasuchenbusch would think, let alone Jesus.

Denominationally, we continue our squabble over who will be ordained, when there is so much more interesting work to be done in the name of justice and hope, service to be rendered by all people.

This week, an N.F.L. player of all people commented that he thought we had moved past all that, the “that” being racially charged comments. He was referring to a national media figure; he could just as well have been referring to a local radio personality. Might we move above and beyond, to the real issues? Might we talk about race, an honest conversation about race, which does not fall into stereotypes?

We will consider hunger more directly in a couple of weeks. Perhaps we might do so as a contribution to a larger conversation about those who have and those who do not, without allowing that conversation to become a caricature of itself.

Might we have a conversation about patriotism, and citizenship, in the wake of our ongoing presence in Iraq, that is more than sides virtually talking past one another?

And might we even have a conversation, and offer it to those who will listen, about human sexuality, and what is driving the anxiety in the current debate about our ordination standards. It is about the Bible, to be sure, and a good conversation is waiting on those issues. But it is about more than that. It is about who we are as children of God, and how we are to live with one another in God’s world.

One could almost become discouraged. But we would remember the old spiritual – “don’t ever feel discouraged, for Jesus is your friend, and if you lack for knowledge, he’ll not refuse to lend.” Where do we find the resources, the ethical, moral resources, that will help us live into the days God gives us and the ways God would seek for us to live? We do lack for knowledge, yet there IS a balm in Gilead, and we find it in many places.

We find it in the places where we would aspire to be more than we are, a kind of corrective that keeps us going. We most certainly will find it at the table this day; find it in profound ways as we receive the bread of life and the cup of the new covenant with a newly born awareness of who we are and who we are called to be. And we find it in the depths of Jesus’ words, the word, the story, as we encounter it today.

Jesus was in full teaching mode, and the crowds are growing, and the religious authorities are standing at the periphery, their concern growing as well. They interrogate him publicly, seeking to catch him up, seeking to trap his radical words in the legalistic understandings they carry with them. They give him a going-over on issues of marriage and divorce and adultery, such easy topics!

What Jesus does is focus on behaviors and relationships, rather than the letter of the law. Our tendency is to turn these things into a kind of moral scorecard. Jesus wants it to go deeper than that, a moral vision undergirded by faithfulness and the promise and responsibility of covenant. In marriage, to be sure, and in every relationship.

How might we as a church support and encourage all those in relationship, marriage included, so that the hope of that covenantal promise could be lived every day?

And then he considers again the role of children in the community. Today’s is not a conversation about that, except to say that in that era, children were considered to be non-people. Jesus said they were people, important people, and the very action of blessing that child was radical and revolutionary. Things have changed – somewhat. But let us consider our public schools, hungry children, children affected by poverty and oppression. How are we called to respond on this World Communion Sunday, this Peacemaking Sunday?

And, in this context, how are we called to support all these children who present themselves to us every Sunday? How do we transmit to them this moral vision, and allow them to transmit their own moral vision to us? How do we support those who care most directly for them: parents and grandparents, adoptive parents, foster parents, single parents, parents in location?

With every breath he takes and every move he makes, Jesus sets out for us a moral vision of church as community and church in community. It is radical, I will say again; it is counter-cultural and never easy. It is based on the premise of covenantal relationship.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas writes that “The church in its profoundest expression is the gathering of a people who are able to sustain one another…because they have been formed by a narrative, constantly reenacted through the sharing of a meal, that claims nothing less than that God has taken the tragic character of our existence into his very life.” (A Community of Character, page 180) “The church stands as a political alternative to every nation,” Hauerwas writes, “witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those who have been formed by the story of Christ.” (Page 12)

We have been formed by this story, and at the heart of the story is a meal. If baptism is about being welcomed, then the Lord’s Supper is about living out that welcome, in ways big and small.

This day, hatched in another era, is forged in every new moment, each new context, yet the quest for welcome remains ever with us. This day, as bread is broken and the cup is poured, we look at our own lives as we gather at the table, and we look at the table itself to see how we are doing, how the welcome is living itself out in the real world.

It was said many years ago that 11:00 a.m. is still the most segregated hour in America. How are we doing? How are we as citizens of the world doing on welcoming?

How are we doing on bringing the demanding ethics of Jesus to our conversations on race, on war, on the economy, on human relationships – even our most intimate ones?

How are we doing on bringing the compelling demands of the invitation to this table, so that World Communion Sunday is truly that?

Theologian William Placher reminds us that the fourth-century church father Cyprian said: “Do you think that you (truly) celebrate the Lord’s Supper, for your eyes, overcast with the gloom of blackness and shadowed in night, do not see the needy and poor.” (In Jesus the Savior, page 127)

In a moment, we will gather at this table, to be fed a most extraordinary meal. We will gather and partake, not because we are worthy, but because we are invited guests. We will gather because we are part of a great, great story. And then, a few minutes after being fed by bread and cup, we will depart.

There the story does not end, but rather begins, as we, with our hearts and hands and minds, with our words and actions, seek to build a table that is big and wide, seek to set a table that tells a story, seek to sit at table with all God’s children, all God’s children, all God’s children. Amen.