COME AND GO
Scriptures:
Exodus 16:6-12
Matthew 8:5-13; 11:28-30
Sometimes on past communion Sundays we have looked at words which are similar to communion and which help us to understand the meaning of this sacrament – words like common, community, and communication. There’s another word – actually, the simplest of the lot – that can also help us see why it is meaningful to have this table spread before us: come. Whether we are doing the bidding (“Come, Lord Jesus”) or whether God is calling us (“Come to me”), this is a word which sums up much of the Christian response to divine revelation.
Jesus tended to use action verbs: “Say”, “Do”, “Be”. Christianity does not come from a passively-oriented, wait-and-see-what-God-will-do kind of thinking, as some Christian groups have tried to put forward. Christ spoke in words like “feel”, “love”, “work”. Reduced to its basic essentials Christ’s message to his followers is the title of this sermon: “Come and Go” – realized in phrases such as “Come to me, all you that are weary…,” “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…..” In our worship services we try to witness to this message by coming for the service of praise and the service of the word and sacrament and then going forth into our service to the world. This same basic thought is carried in a rollicking folk-song that Harry Belafonte sings which has as its refrain, “Come and go with me to my Father’s house, where there’s joy, joy, joy in my Father’s house.” Some of this joy also comes through the verses of this folk-song: “It’s not very far/Come just as you are….. There ain’t no signs of hate/Folks all integrate….. Come, let’s have a ball/Good times had by all.”
In its simplified way this folk-song emphasizes why Christ’s “Come” is a call to be heeded: the joy to be found in God’s service, the fact that God accepts us as we are and that we do not have to come before our Lord pretending to be something we are not, the recognition of the full worth of other people so that it is impossible to show “signs of hate” – all this and more is implicit in that “Come”. But it is significant that the song begins with the line “Come and go with me.” It is the rhythm of coming into God’s presence and going out to describe the joy experienced there to everyone that is the basis of our faith.
To some extent in recent years the emphasis in our church life has fallen on the side of the “Go” – and that’s certainly an emphasis that our denomination, the United Church of Christ, would encourage. Going into all the world has meant involving ourselves with public issues, seeking to eradicate all vestiges of racism and sexism and homophobia, listening to what non-Christians are saying to us. This “Go” emphasis has been an important and necessary balancing reaction to a church which has too often tended to become a closed community, which has emphasized the differences between the Christian and the non-Christian rather than reaching out to all, which has evolved almost a “tight little island” mentality that separates the realities of life away from the truth of the gospel.
But what we are increasingly coming to understand is the rhythmic nature of Christ’s “Come and Go”. The “come” of communion when added to the “go” of going into all the world gives each Christian our calling to witness to the fullness of the gospel. The call of “Come” does not always or necessarily mean to come into a specific church setting, but it does mean that wherever the location may be we will have so divested ourselves of self-concerns that we can truly come into the presence of God. The sacramental nature of communion in particular helps us to do this. When we come before this altar in attitudes of confession, forgiveness, openness to God’s will, we are coming in the full sense of that word – without looking behind to see who is following, without worrying about the insecurity of unworthiness, without feeling as though we are doing God a favor by being here, without concentrating on the fears and dislikes which keep us from responding in love to those people whom we feel have wronged us, without, in other words, all the human inhibitions that normally keep us from responding to God in the ways we know to be true responses. In this way communion spells out for us the “why” of Christ’s “Come to me.”
The “why” of this “Come to me” can be understood in three ways. First, communion calls us to come even though there is great disturbance in our lives: despite despair, disappointment, frustration, futility, fears. When the people of Israel were gathered in the wilderness – having made the decision to rebel against their Egyptian slave masters, and before they had widespread knowledge of and trust in God’s love for them – such disturbing feelings were very real. When you are in a new situation where you are not even sure where the next day’s breakfast is coming from, trust in God is a difficult feeling to inspire. Yet, Moses – who had his own disturbances since he was not an eloquent speaker and who at times despaired over the faithlessness of the people – could go to his brother, Aaron, and out of complete trust have Aaron say to the people, “’Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.’” The promise then held out to them parallels in a remarkable way the symbolism of our communion: “’At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread…..’” What was important for Moses and the Israelites (and us) is that out of their acceptance of this pre-Christian communion the people would “…know that I am the Lord your God.’”
This same sense of relief from the disturbances that hold us back works its way through our gospel text as Christ holds out to those who are caught in the vortex of human difficulty his presence: “’Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Again, it is through communion that we are able to recognize the strength that coming to Christ gives, for the communion service asks of us only that we come seeking that rest. In these symbols of Christ’s body and blood we then find it.
The second “why” of Christ’s “Come to me” we have already touched on in the Belafonte folk-song: the unrestrained joy of being called to come to God. Now, this may seem to you at first glance to be the exact opposite of our first reason, which has to do with recognizing the disturbances of despair and disappointment. But it is not unusual for the religious impulse in humanity to cover all of our most intense feelings – our feelings of greatest despair and our feelings of greatest joy. It is when we realize that our own abilities are not enough to embrace a situation fully that Christ’s “Come to me” makes the most sense, and this realization usually comes at the times of great despair and of great joy. Communion celebrates the joy that women and men have found in coming before the Lord’s table.
The third “why” of Christ’s “Come to me” is in order to be called into God’s service. This is the “Go” impulse which places us back into the rhythm of renewal and witness. At the close of the communion ceremony we are entrusted with these elements that symbolize Christ’s service to us so that as we go about our daily lives we will know that now we are Christ’s hands and feet and mind. There is no other to do his work except those who come to this table and thereby receive the command to go.
In the first passage from Matthew that we read, a centurion had sought out Jesus to heal his servant. All of these reasons for coming were at work in this story. First, of course, there is the despair over the mysteries of illness which so frustrate our desire to be of help by relieving pain – there are certainly many of us who can identify with that! But when the centurion told Jesus a little about himself, Christ recognized the essence of faith in the man. Here was a man who was both under a higher authority – the Roman army – and yet who had a sense of authority in his own right. In a sense, he was a bit like Christ, for he, too, could tell his men to “come” and “go”, and they respected his authority. Each of us has something of this kind of authority over the lives of others, even if it is simply our children when they are young, and sometimes it is this human authority which we have that often keeps us from coming fully to Christ. The centurion realized that neither his own authority over others nor the authority over him (the Roman army) was sufficient when he came up against the reality of a paralyzing illness. And when Jesus saw that the centurion realized this he exclaimed, “’Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.’” Because the man had come to him in despair and Jesus had received him in joy, Christ could then say to him, “’Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.’”
The rhythm of “Come and Go” is central to our style of life – our world-view—as Christians. Another way of understanding this rhythm is through the hymns we have sung this morning. We as struggling humans reach out for God: “Come Thou Almighty King, Help us thy name to sing; Help us to praise…..” God then calls out to us as in another hymn: “Come Unto Me, Ye Weary, and I will give you rest…..” And then we respond through our going out and our acts of service: “Come, labor on. Who dares stand idle?..... And to each servant does the Master say, ‘Go work today.’” As we approach the communion table this morning may we come in response to the call of the Christ and then go as he sends us to be his servants and his witnesses to all people everywhere.
Amen
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
May 6, 2007