October 5, 2003

World Communion Sunday

A Spice Cabinet

By Leslie Kennard

Fasten your seatbelts! We are going to take off gently; we’ll fly smoothly for a while, but we are scheduled to encounter some turbulence.

Today is World Communion Sunday. In Canada they call it Worldwide Communion Sunday - and I think I like that better. When I think of Worldwide, my mind travels farther. When I think of communion as being worldwide, I think of how communion might be celebrated in other churches–Saint Mary up the street, the Lutheran church where I spent my teens, the Yale chapel where lay Protestant students serve communion to Catholic priests--, how communion might be celebrated in other cultures–like the Massai who ALWAYS mix the milk of the cow with the blood of the cow and that liquid is as holy as it gets! Or Christians in Mongolia who wrap themselves in furs to keep out the frigid air and huddle in tents. Or the Ukrainians who gather in sanctuaries that are among the most magnificent in the world with gold and silver and crystal and incense. The beauty stuns one into awed silence. On this Sunday especially we are reminded that Christians are not all like us - Christians are as different as God can make them, coming in every size and color, with every possible taste in food and music, with unimaginable languages and customs. Yet as different as we all are, we are, as Christians, in communion with one another. This is just incredible.

In the dictionary, to be in communion with someone is “to feel in close touch with, to share an intimate feeling with, to feel as one with.” (OED) When I think about the people with whom I share my thoughts and emotions, I think of course of my closest friends. We choose our friends most often BECAUSE they share our thoughts. Our friends are often people who in one way or another are the most like us, because they are often the easiest to be with. They understand us, and they accept us. Our friends are, in a sense, predictable. Even those friends who are capricious in nature are still predictable in a way - while we may not know what they are going to say or do next, we are pretty secure in knowing that there are some things that they will NOT say or do, specifically a real friend will not deliberately say or do something that will hurt us. A real friend KNOWS where to tread lightly.

As we go through life, we get pretty good at identifying people who are like we are. You know how you walk into a party or a big picnic or onto the beach at Patriot’s Park and as you scan the crowd, you gravitate toward some people and avoid others. The extroverts have an easier time than we introverts do, but I think almost all of us, when we glance around a crowd, we see people we like, people we already know, people who are like us.

Here in church, we focus on the ways in which we are all the same - we are here to worship, we are here for fellowship, we share some common ideas about how life ought to be lived. Sometimes we use religious language, and sometimes we use stories from the secular world - Bruce often quotes from books he’s read or from the New York Times. In worship, regardless of who we are and how we live, we come together in a special way. For this hour, our resentments soften, our faith takes on a fresh blush of life, we begin to think yet again that we CAN be part of God’s realm of love and peace and joy. I think this is especially true when we come to the Communion Table. First there’s the invitation, and then during the communion hymn and the words of institution, all our differences drop away. We forget our problems as we focus on the compelling power of the sacrament. And we finish by praying that God will strengthen us in our love for God and for one another.... And with that prayer, we turn away from the table and back toward one another.

This morning, I want us to take a moment and look at one another and see not only the ways in which we are alike, but I’d like us to look around and begin to see our differences. Take a moment and look around - really look at the individual people in the sanctuary.........................What a crew we are, huh? Some of us are young, some older, some golden aged; some dressed up in suits and dresses, some in jeans and flannel shirts; some like rock music and rap music, some like country and western, some like opera and classical and folk. Some think church ought to be serious and solemn, some think that we ought to worship God the way David did in the Old Testament with drums and dancing and great joy. Some of us work outside the home at a job or at school, some of us work in the home, some of us work AT home, some of us aren’t able to work. Some of us love working, some of us are counting the days until we can stop working.

Some of us love pets - with only two dogs, two horses, and one cat, I feel pet deprived, and Bill thinks one needs only one dog or one cat, and there are lots of us who don’t want any pets: they travel or they are allergic or they just aren’t into pets. Some of us drive SUVs, some drive big comfy sedans, some drive mini-vans or low slung sporty cars. I drool over the Dodge Ram 2500 pick-up truck with the Cummins diesel, though I’ll never have one. Some of us wear designer clothes, some of us are happy to do our shopping at the Salvation Army store. My daughter thinks a day at the mall is a day in heaven. Me, I don’t think that Hell is an eternal fire - I think it’s an eternal shopping trip. Some of us love Tex-Mex, some of us like Thai cooking, some of us love our meat and potatoes–lots of gravy on that please, and could I have extra sour cream.

We are a wonderful variety, aren’t we? And I’m sure that you will agree with me when I say that while our variety occasionally causes some friction, for the most part our variety, our diversity is what makes our church so active and energetic, so productive, so resourceful and spirited.

This is the case within our church, and I believe this can also be the case in our world. I know that’s a big leap - from the comfort of our sanctuary to the world, but leap with me. Many of you have heard me tell of the time I was in Africa and returned to my tent unexpectedly one morning to find my housekeeper joyfully singing and dancing as he waxed my floor. I was amazed - a man as poor as poor can be, in a part of the world where there is little food, no healthcare, no housing of any sort except for mud huts - and he was singing and dancing. I asked him what gave him such great joy and he beamed as he told me, “Jesus loves me! Jesus loves me!” That was 14 years ago, and if that man is still alive, then today he is somewhere gathered with his family and neighbors at a communion table.

And we know that Christians in China, even today, risk their lives when they gather to read the Bible and break bread together. Yet this day in China there are thousands of people gathered secretly in great danger so that they may partake of the sacrament of communion. No wonder we call communion a sacrament! The depth and richness of faith that compels people to gather even though it means they risk death amazes me.

Now that we’ve been to Africa and China, I’d like us to travel to a more scary and dangerous part of the world - the Middle East. Iran. Afghanistan. Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan. Qatar. And as we stand here in the middle of a street, look around at the people - women in their burkas, men in turbans, people with every shade of skin, long beards, people talking and bargaining and arguing in languages we don’t understand, people using gestures we don’t understand. We know that these people are mostly Muslims, some Sunni Muslims, some Shiite Muslims. Several times a day the call comes out from the mosque and everyone stops what they are doing and they drop to their knees to pray. When prayer time is over, they return to whatever they were doing. This is true not only for mothers tending their babies, fathers conducting business, and children in school. This is true for soldiers who believe that America is filled with infidels, that the American way of life threatens their vision of Paradise. And these soldiers - like many of our own - are willing to die for their beliefs. How does Worldwide Communion make sense on the streets of Baghdad, in the caves of Afghanistan? What would Jesus say to us if He sat with us in front of a CNN report on the wars in the Middle East.

When we watch the news at night and see that more soldiers have been killed, that civilians have been killed, that citizens are rioting and protesting the presence of Americans, I find it hard to imagine being in communion with people so filled with hatred. Not all Muslims, not all Iraqis, not all Arabs hate us. But Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and the members of Al Quaeda and many of the fundamental Muslims DO HATE us. They Hate us. They don’t just disagree with what we believe and how we live. They hate us.

On Worldwide Communion Sunday, we are called to be in communion with ALL of God’s children. We only break bread with other Christians, but the Jesus never said that we were to love only Christians. Jesus, a devout Jew, loved and BROKE BREAD WITH infidels and sinners, prostitutes and thieves and a murderer and lepers and an insane man and a man with leprosy and the list goes on. And I believe that when Jesus told the disciples, “Follow me” he meant live as he lived. And we are–each and every one of us-- disciples just as much as those first 12 men were. Check your seatbelts, because here’s the turbulence I told you about. If Communion has any real meaning, then I believe we are called to love our enemy to commune with those who hate us. That’s in the Bible.... So if Communion is going to make a difference in our world, then when we come to this table, we must come praying urgently that communion will make a difference in us.

Because, I’ll tell you, it’s one thing to love some group of people “out there” who hate me - abstract people without names and faces. But I have a HARD TIME loving - communing - with Osama bin Laden and the men in Al Quaeda. I don’t WANT to love those men. I don’t WANT to love the mothers I see on CSPAN who are cheering because their 13 year old sons were suicide bombers and are not heroes. That whole way of thinking and living is so repulsive and monstrous that I just want to reject all of them out of hand and not even think about them. Ever. Are you with me? This stuff is AWFUL - I can’t “commune” with people who think like this.

But when I let myself think like that, when I let myself feel like that, then I too am beginning to hate. I am becoming just like the men in al Quaeda and the suicide bombers in Palestine and the tribal leaders in Afghanistan.

And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to fill my life with hatred, to fuel all my actions with hatred. I want to be like Jesus - and that’s more than the sweet old hymn, Lord, I want to be like Jesus, in my heart, in my heart”. Wanting to be like Jesus is what drives my life. I’m not saying I AM like Jesus - Bill will tell you all about that–but I want to be LIKE Jesus, to be able to love and feel intimate toward every single human that God has created, and that includes Osama and Saddam and Idi Amin and members of the Ku Klux Klan. That’s a tall order. But one man, Jesus, loved SO WELL that peace began to break out in the world 2000 years ago when he broke bread. And I believe the Risen Christ call us to come to this table to become like him. When we take the bread and the juice into ourselves, we take the Risen Christ into our innermost being, and prayer by prayer, communion by communion, we continue to shed the light of love upon the darkness of hatred, and we do that by loving those who hate us.

It’s hard - I have days when it’s hard loving the people who LOVE me. But God rewards our efforts to love, and by God’s grace, with God’s strength, we can become as Jesus, able to love those who are different from us, able to love those who hate us. And one day, one day, God will rejoice because all God’s children, every color, every culture, every nationality will be in communion with God and with one another. There will be no more hatred, no more war. Imagine it! Believe it! Amen

The Invitation

I invite you to join me at this table of love. We are invited to bring to this table all of who we are, our doubts and our certainties, our hopes and our dreams, our fears and our faith. Come: the banquet of life is ready.