Scriptures: Psalm 50:7-15
I Corinthians 10:14-17, 23-26; 11:17-26
Have any of you ever tried to do computer dating? No, I thought probably not…although there are those who swear they’ve found their soul mates through this practice. (Actually, I saw an article in the paper just this morning about texting dating – sending potential dates to your iPod or whatever as a text message. Computer dating is already passé. How quickly things change.) Anyhow, you probably know how computer dating works, I imagine: women and men feed information about themselves into a computer and receive in return a short list of possibly compatible dates. Now, obviously a large part of what you need to feed in is data about your personality traits so someone else can judge whether your personality and theirs might mesh (frankly, it might be easier just to take a Myers-Briggs test). A fairly simple way to get at one’s personality is to have the person check off one of two opposites – such as “even-tempered” or “quick-tempered”, “go-getter” or “laid back”. A little while back a magazine carried a brief news item that said: “The Compute-a-Date questionnaire of Chicago’s Compute-a-Service bureau…ranks ‘religious’ and ‘worldly’ as polar opposites in its checklist of personality traits.”
Why are you not very surprised? All too often this is the image projected both inside and outside the church. Somehow we’ve managed to communicate the idea that it is impossible for those who love, are concerned about, and are involved with God and religion to love, be concerned about, and become involved with this world as it is – despite that key assertion from John 3:16 that “God so loved the world…..” And so we set up these two categories: the sacred and the secular – and never the twain shall meet, at least not in a meaningful way that does justice to both realms. Yet, in discussing the attitude of the earliest Christians to Holy Communion, Hans-Ruedi Weber says, “…the celebration of the Eucharist reminds us that the separation between the sacred and the secular is unchristian. (Our Lord took ordinary daily food as the elements of His body and blood.) Having participated in the Eucharist, we must struggle in our daily lives to bridge the gulf between the sacred and the secular.”
Over the years we have sought for some self-understandings of who we are as a people of God – the church of Jesus Christ here in this place. Following Paul, there are three titles that we might assume for ourselves to satisfy this search: first, we are a “peculiar people”, in the sense of having a unique calling which recognizes the demands God has made on us and on the world; second, we are a “missional people”, in the sense of going out to be involved with the suffering of the world (Ann and I just went to a conference yesterday on “Becoming the Church that Tomorrow Requires”, which talked quite a bit about being a missional people – you’ll be hearing more from me about this subsequently); and third, we are a “pilgrim people”, in the sense of constantly seeking out the ways we can respond to God and the world. But these titles or definitions still leave us with the question of “how” – how do we bridge this gulf which so often separates the sacred and the secular? And an answer to this question begins to take shape when we look at what happens when we participate in the service of Holy Communion.
For the earliest Christians the Lord’s Supper was not a special service, held once a month, as we do, and surrounded by a mystical meaning which was somehow clothed in a kind of magical transformation. No, it was more like our Congregators – a time when the faithful came together to celebrate their new-found joy, the fellowship of those who had responded to this Good News, and the everyday things of their lives that had been given renewed significance by this marvelous thing that had happened to them. Indeed, the earliest communion services were called “love-feasts”, and they frequently included a full meal along with the sacramental acceptance of the bread and the wine (or, in our case, the grape juice). Then, as now, “breaking bread together” meant two things: sitting down to eat a meal together in the fellowship of a group with a common purpose and the breaking of the bread that signified Christ’s body.
In the context of a common meal we can begin to see some crumbling (pun somewhat intended) of that gulf between the sacred and the secular. At that meal in the early church all sorts of things were brought to the attention of the group: the difficulties of the day, the good news of a pleasant (and important) conversation, the things bought and sold in the marketplace, the depressing news that another wave of persecution was starting. It may be difficult to capture the feeling which this mixture of the ordinary and the noteworthy brought to the Christians gathered around that table. But maybe there is in your memory a meal you can recall that seemed special and significant, when daily concerns were brought to the table and really listened to, when the grace before the meal had a singular quality of seeking out God’s presence, when the news of the world which you’d just been watching on TV or on your computer was thought about and discussed, when there were times of thoughtful and thankful silence. Now, I know that this kind of experience would be unusual in the fast-paced society ours has become, where family meal-time is nearly a thing of the past and eating a meal is most often seen as just a means to an end, hurried through as quickly as possible in order to get back to TV programs or iPod music or text-messaging – or maybe even for some of us good-old-fashioned reading the newspaper.
Nevertheless…nevertheless…it is this kind of experience that is being offered when we gather around that table which is called the Lord’s. The invitation that is offered, the proclamation we all make that this is “the joyful feast of the people of God”, the consecration of these elements and of ourselves which we present as a prayer – all of these can become catalysts to bring ourselves and the things of our daily lives together in a sacramental fellowship that transcends – that bridges – the too limiting ideas we have of “sacred” and “secular”, of “spiritual” and “worldly”.
Here’s an example of a unique kind of communion service which particularly points to the involvement of ordinary things and events with the Lord’s Supper. It takes place in Scotland. In one parish there in that northern country the minister (who would sometimes be called the “dominie” if he or she was serving the Church of Scotland) goes into the homes early in the morning during the week, and a communion is served for the people of the neighborhood – especially the men as they prepare to go to their day’s work. The bread and the wine (or some kind of juice) that would just normally be there in the home are used, and the events of the day to be are offered to God. In this communion service there is no artificial separation of the church and the home or the worship of God and the events of the world. Here the gulf of sacred and secular, saintly and worldly has indeed been bridged.
Now, to return to the early church: there were problems that arose in the administration of the love feast. By the time Paul was writing to the church at Corinth, probably in 54 or 55 A.D., a spirit of divisiveness had crept into the practice of communion. Partly this had come from the influence of pagan sacrificial feasts in the Greek world, and partly it had come from internal divisions within the Corinthian church. Paul’s comment then about fleeing from the worship of idols comes from his concern that the true host of the meal – the living Christ – is not being recognized. The sacrifice that Christ made of himself is quite different from the sacrifices made during these pagan feasts, which is mainly a way of trying to appease the gods. So, to put this in modern terms, all things of this world may be brought to the meal, but they are brought there in order to be brought under the influence of Christ – not as a way of offering appeasements or rationalizations. The meal is not to be used as a means for self-advancement, but rather, as Paul writes (and here I’m using the Revised Standard Version translation, which is clearer for our purposes), “Let no one seek (their) own good, but the good of (their) neighbor.” (Sounds familiar, no, after what we said last week?) Paul adds, “For ‘the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s’” – quoting Psalm 24. In fact, that first line of Psalm 24 makes the point about there being no division between spiritual and worldly wonderfully in poetic language: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…..” This is echoed again in the 50th Psalm: “For every wild animal of the field is mine…and all that moves in the field is mine….. Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving…I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” Paul’s point is that everything belongs before the Lord’s table so that the sacrifice may indeed be one of thanksgiving and not one of self-advancement.
Not only everything but also everyone belongs, and here is where the issue of divisiveness creeps in. People were being excluded, and even at the meal itself individuals would go ahead without waiting for the fellowship of the community. When Paul says specifically, “…you come together as a church…” he means that this is not a private dinner party where coveted invitations are sent out only to certain privileged people. Rather, the Lord extends the invitations, and they go out to everyone. What’s more, this spirit of divisiveness kept the Corinthians from actually communing as a fellowship. Professor Clarence Craig has said, “We are not to conclude from this passage…that Paul disapproved of holding an actual meal. What he opposed was the individualism which did not require waiting for the group and the inconsiderateness which would humiliate God’s poor.”
So…what can we learn from these experiences in the Corinthian church in the First Century? How does all this help us today in bridging the gulf between the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the worldly? What these experiences tell us is that the effort to bridge that gulf requires both an external act and an internal diligence. When we come before this table it should be to dispel any differences that divide us as the people of God. If communion is approached with this attitude and with the realization that all – all – of our differences disappear when we form around this altar, then we will be enabled in fact to bring all the things of our everyday world into the fellowship that is thereby provided. All those things which might seem to fall into either one realm or the other can thus come together before the host – which is the Christ – so that we will see the secular in the sacred and the spiritual in the worldly as God works out God’s purposes for the sake of the world.
If our communing is seen in this light, we should never again have to have a computer dating questionnaire that puts “religious” and “worldly” as opposites, because we will indeed have been participating in the process of establishing the Lordship of Christ over all the ordinary things of this life. If this is our approach to this sacrament, then it will be true, as our text says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lords death until he comes.”
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
November 2, 2008