Arise! Rejoice! – and Feed
Scriptures:
Isaiah 65:8-10
Revelation 3:14-22
We’ve just come through the most important part of the church year – and, no, I’m not talking about the Attic Sale, although for some of you maybe that IS the most important church event of the year. Of course, I’m referring to Easter and this period of time we call “Eastertide” – the 50 days that follow Easter leading up to Pentecost, which we often refer to as “the birthday of the Christian Church”. So, this is a kind of “in-between time”, yet it is a time of great significance as we journey from resurrection to new birth. It is also a time when we can emphasize each day that we are an Easter people – that as the contemporary hymn by Avery and Marsh puts it, “every Sunday is Easter Sunday from now on.”
At the same time today is the first Sunday of the month, and so we are about to participate in that which we always do on a first Sunday. No, now c’mon, I don’t mean Congregators with hot dogs and hamburgers – our minds do tend to turn toward food, don’t they? I’m referring, of course, here to food for the soul – the communion service which is regularly a part of the first of each month. And precisely because it does come each month we tend to take it somewhat for granted – become blasé about the significance of it.
What I’d like to explore with you today is the relationship between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and our participation together in taking communion. This particular communion service, happening as it does on this Sunday of the in-between time as we prepare for Pentecost, has a special significance that makes this communion unusually important for each one of us.
Of course, there is the historical relationship between resurrection and communion. The Last Supper was the central event of the Passion Week as Christ gathered his disciples around him and shared with them the last moments of his earthly ministry before repairing to the garden and beginning the chain of events that would end on Sunday morning. Our communion service, mirroring that Last Supper, becomes our act of remembering – the way in which we participate in Christ’s understanding of what must be suffered for the sake of the world.
But there is more. When we receive communion this is like a miniature resurrection. Resurrection, among other things, means a renewal of life – an affirmation of the possibilities and the glories of life in the face of inevitable death. Communion, along with being an historical remembrance, is also meant to restore life. By confessing our sins, by hearing the words of assurance and forgiveness, by accepting the invitation to take these elements, we are given a chance to look deeply into our souls and root out from them whatever is there that keeps us from responding fully to God’s will for our lives. By taking this bread and this cup in an attitude of repentance, we are saying, in effect, “I do not want the deadnesses of my soul to control me; I want to be renewed – rejuvenated – restored – to the fullness of a fulfilling life.”
The Roman Catholic church understands this dynamic quite well when it says that a person who is not in a state of grace cannot accept the Mass. What this means is that if there is something dead inside an individual he or she cannot be resurrected to new life unless that person comes before the communion altar with an expectation that grace is real and deadness can be purged. Now, from our perspective as Protestants we may feel that this attitude about the Mass has been applied too legalistically, for whom besides God and the individual can really know the depths of one’s soul? But there is an insight here that should not go unnoticed by Protestants – that for communion to have for us the fullness of resurrection rather than just be an act of remembrance we must be ready to purge deadness from our souls.
That may strike you as a rather harsh term – “the deadness of the soul”. But what that phrase reflects is a somewhat poetic way of referring to what goes on inside of us when attitudes and behaviors get in the way of a whole relationship with God and with one another. You can count along with me the more obvious of these – hatreds, prejudices, anxieties, holding grudges, pride. (I’ve been watching the recent film version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice while working out in the morning, and it’s fascinating to see how Elizabeth’s pride in doing things her own way and prejudice against the moneyed class keep her from recognizing what is truly in Mr. Darcy’s soul.) But there are some less obvious deadnesses of the soul, and I’d like to share three of these with you this morning as we prepare ourselves to take communion.
The first is indifference. The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. When you know a passionate hatred, at least you are involved, but with indifference there is no possibility of involvement, and the soul becomes lazy and too easily satisfied. That’s the problem the author of the book of Revelation was facing in writing to the church at Laodicea when he cries out: “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Pretty harsh words. But for this ancient writer there was no middle ground – you couldn’t, like Charlie Brown, be wishy-washy when it came to choosing between allegiance to the risen Christ and participating in the rites of the emperor cult. The choice, if it is made for Christ, must be decisive.
Dr. Lynn H. Hough asks this question about these Laodiceans, and perhaps about us: “Had Christ died on the Cross and suffered the great passion in order to produce such lukewarm disciples?” The response of the author of Revelation to indifference is almost vitriolic: “I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Yet, this angry response is then toned down by what follows: “I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” Here is the invitation to the intimacy of a common meal – like the one we participate in today – and the invitation to move far beyond indifference.
A second deadness of the soul is the desire for spiteful revenge. I know that it seems to be human nature to want to “get back” at someone who has hurt us. Sometimes it seems as though the Golden Rule really reads: “Do unto the other as that person has already done unto me.” Yet, if we believe that the life of Christ images humanity as God intended us to be, then personal revenge does not have to be a part of our lives. Now, of course, there are legitimate grievances against injustice – after all, Christ did throw the money-changers out of the temple. The trick is to recognize when it is appropriate to take action against real injustice – like the marches and demonstrations last Monday lifting up the unfairness of current immigration policy – and when what we are experiencing are petty slights and hurts that lead us to want to give retribution in kind. We’ve talked before about the need for forgiveness and reconciliation as crucial elements of a Christ-like life. It is certainly the case that holding on to a need for revenge leads to a deadness of the soul that keeps us from participating in the resurrection of reconciliation.
A third deadness of the soul is not responding to the joy that is there in life. We tend to classify people as having “happy” or “grumpy” dispositions, but we know there’s nothing inevitable about this. Each one of us can have our moods. Yet, despite the depression of the moment, that can be caused by any number of things, we know down deep at the heart of the matter that the basic purpose of life is to express joy. You remember the song we all used to sing at church camp: “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart” – which expresses a fundamental truth about the very nature of the world. (Incidentally, I used to love to get to the tongue-twisting verse toward the end to see if we could get our mouths all the way around it – you remember?: “I’ve got the wonderful love of the blessed redeemer way down in the depths of my heart.”).
Now, you may feel that I’m being Pollyannaish to say that joy is fundamental to the human condition in the light of all the headlines about political corruption in Las Vegas, an unending war in Iraq, and gas prices. Well, first of all we should remember that happiness is not often seen by the media as newsworthy – conflict is their stock-in-trade. But more importantly, the fact of resurrection points to our joy in the risen Christ as overpowering all those negative newspaper headlines. It is significant that our remembrance of resurrection, at least in the Northern hemisphere, comes in the spring, when we begin appreciating anew the joy of life to be found in nature (we have to devise a different metaphor for the Global South, when Easter appears as the seasons turn toward autumn and winter). Refusing to accept that joy which is the very warp and woof of life is to contribute to a deadness of the soul that may never find resurrection.
Communion – and especially this first communion that we receive after celebrating the Easter event – challenges these and other deadnesses of the soul and leads them through death to resurrection. It can do this, first, because it is a community action – through it we know we are supported in our efforts to overcome our own deadnesses by the strength of the fellowship here gathered. We reaffirm this aspect of communion when we hold our individual cups and wait to drink all together as the community of Christ in this place. Second, it can do this because in eating this bread as individuals each one of us is reminded that we already know Christ’s love for us; his refusal to let death – his death or the death of a soul – be the final word restores our souls. And finally, it can do this because by this act of taking communion we re-acknowledge God’s action in the world. In this service of remembrance of Christ’s death we know that creation leads inevitably to resurrection, and that our individual deadnesses, which we have created, have the possibility of being resurrected because God has acted and does act in the world. In these ways we know that communion holds open for us, year-round, the reality of resurrection, and we can join in this sacrament casting off our deadnesses of the soul and being resurrected to a renewed and fulfilling life.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
May 7, 2006