Ephesians 2: 11-22
World Communion
Sunday/ 5th October 2014
World
Communion Sunday is one of my favorite Sundays of the year. As a child, I assumed that “World” really
meant world and that on this
particular day Christians everywhere celebrate the Lord’s Supper. It used be to
called Worldwide Communion Sunday, which probably formed this impression. I had
this vision of billions of Christians sharing this meal, an event that
powerfully binds every Christian together.
All
of this was shattered twenty-four years ago this weekend. It occurred on the first
Sunday in October. I arrived for worship
at St. Leonard’s Parish Church in St. Andrews, Scotland, where I served as an
assistant minister. It was my first Sunday with the congregation. It was
Harvest Sunday, a kind of Thanksgiving celebration. The Table was full of the fruits of the
harvest, but the Communion elements were no where to be found; no bread, no cup.
I asked the minister, Lawson Brown, “Isn’t this World Communion Sunday?” And he said, “What’s that? Never heard of it.”
And that’s when I discovered that World Communion Sunday is an American thing.
It had its origins at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh in
1933, later adopted by the entire denomination in 1936, and then in 1940
endorsed by the National Council of Churches for all of its members.[1]
So, no, all the Christians of the world
are not sharing Communion today. Many
are, but not everyone.
I still like the image of a true
World Communion Sunday. It’s the vision of a particular church sharing in the
larger work of the Church. It’s an event
that lifts up the global Church and acknowledges the wide diversity of the body
of Christ. Communion celebrates real
community. We celebrate our connection with Christians around the world, united
by the Holy Spirit. North and south and
east and west are here at this Table. It’s a vision of unity that we give to
the world. Think of it: diverse people and cultures united in their
worship of Christ, demonstrating to the world that it’s possible to share a
meal together, to eat and pray and work and worship and serve together. Communion implies multiplicity and
difference, diversity. Everyone is
invited. Isn’t this a word that the world
desperately needs to hear? Actually, we
need more than words, we need to see words enacted, embodied, which, if you
think about it, is exactly what’s occurring here when we celebrate the Lord’s
Supper. Here is God’s Word of grace
enacted, embodied, real and tangible in bread and wine, for the entire world to
see.
Communion. Eucharist. Lord’s Supper. Mass. We have different names for this essential meal. It’s a symbol of Christ’s unity with the
Church and the Church in unity with itself.
And yet we know that this meal is also a painful sign of the disunity
and division within the Church. This
meal is supposed to be a symbol of peace.
But we quarrel over what occurs in the bread and wine. Who is allowed to receive the elements? Who can come to the table? Is it a table or an altar? And who is allowed to be its celebrant, who
is allowed to say the words of institution? Can a woman? What do we call those that do preside,
priests or ministers? You know the
drill. We’re so divided.
It was Robert Frost (1874-1963) who
said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Walls can be good. Boundaries are good, especially healthy
boundaries. “Good fences make good
neighbors.”[2]
Often, though. Not always.
It’s tough to a have relationship through a wall. It’s tough to be in community with your
neighbor when there’s a wall going through the middle of it. Think of the wall that divided East from West
Berlin, separating German families for decades.
 |
| The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9th November 1989. |
Consider of the so-called Security Wall or Separation Barrier, whatever
you want to call it, which stretches for 430 miles, cordoning off the West Bank
from the rest of Israel, a wall designed to separate, divide, and split people apart,
particularly Palestinian families.
The Church has never been immune to
division. One of the first flashpoints
for the Church was the enormous Gentile-Jewish division. This tension is found throughout
the New Testament, both explicitly and implicitly. Do Gentiles have to become
Jews in order to worship Jesus? If not,
then how can Jews share a meal with Gentiles, particularly Communion? The Gentile-Jewish tension is explicit for
the Ephesians. It’s tearing the
community apart, just as it did in Corinth and Rome and elsewhere, wherever
Gentile and Jewish followers of Christ tried to worship together in
community. How can there be peace in the
Church when there are struggles like this?
The author of Ephesians, probably Paul
(or least someone heavily influenced by him), being a consummate pastor-theologian,
knows that Christ’s death and resurrection has created something new in the
world. Where before there was alienation
between God and humanity, now there is peace through Christ. The first eleven verses in Ephesians 2 speak
to this vertical relationship, of peace
between God and humanity, of an end to enmity.
The next eleven verses speak to the horizontal
relationship. Because the vertical
relationship is true, the horizontal relationship changes accordingly. Because we know peace with God, peace with
our neighbor, can follow, must follow.
There was a time when Israel was alienated from God. There was a time when Gentiles were alienated
from God. There was a time when Jews and
Gentiles were alienated from each another.
“But now”—but now!—“in Christ
Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of
Christ.” Why? How?
“For [Christ] is our peace, who has made us both one (Jew and Gentile), and has broken down the dividing wall of
hostility…that he might create in himself one
new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile us
both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an
end. And he came and preached peace to
you who were far off and peace to those who were near; …” (Eph 2:14-18).
Reconciliation between God and humanity,
when it’s fully understood—that is, personally, psychologically, existentially—will
inevitably yield reconciliation between Jew and Gentile, indeed reconciliation between any disparate groups. Peace is a sign of the presence of God. Peace is holy. It’s what God desires for God’s
children. Making peace is therefore
holy. Peace is a sign of God’s goodness
and blessing (Matthew 5:9). Peacemaking
is a divine act.[3] Jesus calls us to be peacemakers because he
is, himself, a peacemaker, and because he knows that God is the ultimate peacemaker
and therefore the peace-giver.
“So then,” Paul writes, “you are no
longer strangers and sojourners to one another, you are fellow citizens with
the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).
When Christ is at the center of a community,
there is space for everyone Christ calls into that community. We’re free to make space for everyone. And this is crucial, because the Spirit is
continually drawing people into the Church, all kinds of people. People who
think like us and look like us and smell like us—and plenty who don’t! Because the Spirit is drawing people toward
Christ, the Church will always have a wide and wild diversity. It’s supposed to be this way. And the Church is always healthier and
stronger and more effective in the world when it’s diverse. If you have investments and work with a
financial planner, you know that portfolios are healthiest when they’re
diverse. We need bio-diversity in order
to survive.[4]
The same is true for the Church. Our
love for Christ, Christ’s love at work within us allows us to embrace
difference, such love yields diversity.
When we worship Christ, when we know of his love for us, we’re free to
really see and then love and then welcome everyone else—without fear. Christ
loves diversity.
Christ might love diversity, but that doesn't mean his Church always does. The Church might have long-ago solved the
Jewish-Gentile question, for which, as a Gentile, I am grateful. But there are plenty of other divisions and
factions ripping the Church apart these days.
Writing back in 1935, the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr
(1894-1962) said, “The crisis of the church…is not the crisis of the church in
the world but of the world in the church.”[5]
Niebuhr wasn’t saying that the Church should become a monastic community and
retreat from the world. We need to be in
the world, Jesus said (John 17:14-15). But as William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
lamented, sometimes, “The world is too much with us.” He wasn’t talking about the Church here, but
it works.
Divisions in society have always
made their way into the Church. Just
look at how the Church split over slavery.
But these days the increasing polarization of American society, spurred
on by the political divides in the country, broadly defined as conservative or
liberal, is wrecking having upon this country, and the world suffers as a
result; it’s also tearing the Church apart.
But we’ve been here before.
The
Jewish-Gentile division within the early church is eerily similar to the
conservative-liberal divide in the contemporary Church. The Jews are the voice of tradition and are
therefore, by nature more conservative; the Gentiles, well they’re just being
Gentiles, but from a Jewish perspective, they are the liberals, ignoring the
traditions of the Jews, ignoring the dietary regulations, for example. Paul was
originally on the side of tradition; after his encounter with Christ, he
changed. He became something new. In many ways, Paul is a liberal Jew who loves
the Gentiles. As a result, people don’t know what to do with him—both Jew and
Gentile alike. The Jews are furious with him and the Gentiles don’t trust him.
So, is Paul a Jew or a Gentile?
Is he
conservative or liberal?
Yes.
From Paul’s perspective, being
either a Jew or Gentile is always secondary
to being found in Christ. To be in
Christ means the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has crumbled away
because Christ has come to make peace.
When we are in Christ, therefore,
all labels and categories and factions—all of which have their origins in the
world!—can dissolve away. When we are in
Christ, conservative and liberal become meaningless. They were never biblical categories in the
first place—you’ll never find these words in the Bible. If conservative or
liberal remains one’s primary self-designation, then that means Christ is
secondary.
Personally,
I wish we would stop using these words in the Church. As I’ve said many times, I can’t stand these
labels—all of them, liberal, conservative, progressive. They’re insidious. They might be useful classifications outside
the Church, but they don’t have a place within the Church. A church shouldn’t have a conservative agenda
or a liberal agenda; it should worry whether or not it has Christ’s agenda, God’s agenda, the Spirit’s
agenda—pick one, because they each share the same agenda. Maybe if the Church was more obsessed with
its divine agenda, there would be fewer disagreements and divisions in the Church. Sometimes God’s agenda will appear very conservative;
sometimes it will look very liberal or progressive; sometimes it will appear to
be nothing less than radical, radical to both a conservative and liberal—and all
of these perspectives, whether it’s conservative, liberal, or radical, are all
imposed by us upon God’s agenda depending our point of view, where we’re coming
from, depending upon where we were raised and when and what our family of
origin considered important, depending upon our life experience, our race, how
much money we have in the bank, how much suffering we have endured in
life. All of these—and more—will shape
our perspective. But the only thing that really matters in the Church is that
we are here to worship and to serve Christ. It’s the source of our peace. We can be at peace because Christ is at work
in us.
Labels—Jew and Gentile or conservative
and liberal—become barriers between us, they separate us from one another. There’s nothing holy about them. In fact, it’s the opposite of what God
desires for the Church. What Paul came
to know, personally, and then gave
his life to, was the profound and dazzling idea that in the end, these categories
are meaningless in the Church and will, in time, devastate the Church.
It’s significant that Paul never
says that Jews should become Gentiles or that Gentiles should become Jews. Instead, Paul’s experience in Christ allows
him to transcend the two groups to
envision a third option, something else entirely, which contains both groups, which
elevates both groups into something new, what he calls a “new humanity”—kainon anthrōpon—a new expression of
humanity now transformed to serve the greater glory of God.[6]
What
Paul came to discover was this: we have been called into the Church because God
in Christ is trying to build something new through
the church, that something new is a new
humanity—a true household of God, built upon the cornerstone that is
Christ, “in whom,” Paul writes, “the whole structure is joined together and
grows into a holy temple in the Lord,” (Eph 2:11). Why? So that you and I together
may become a dwelling place for God. That’s the miracle of the Church. Whole. Together.
People will come from east and west
and north and south—from everywhere, every direction, every every—to sit at Table in the kingdom of
God (Luke 13:29). When we gather at this Table—and every time we gather—we
should have the entire world in mind. As
every false category melts away we demonstrate to the world “a still more
excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:31).
Here is the Lord’s Table of
peace.
A
peace the world cannot understand, but desperately needs.
So,
come, world, come to the Table of peace.
[1] On the origins of World Communion Sunday.
[2] Robert Frost, “Mending Wall,” North of Boston (1915).
[3] Michael J. Gorman, The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of
the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement (Eugene, OR: Cascade
Books, 2014), 65.
[4] Listen to Michel Martin, a
journalist with NPR, on the generative power of diversity & faith. Martin talks with Krista Tippett at the Chautauqua
Intuition. See also Katherine W. Phillips’ article, “How Diversity Makes Us Stronger,” in Scientific
American:.
[6] I propose that Paul’s
understanding of the “new humanity” is an example of what Carl Jung (1875-1961)
called the “transcendent function,” which occurs at critical moments of insight
and transformation. “The shuttling to and fro of arguments and affects
represents the transcendent function of opposites. The confrontation of the two positions
generates a tension charged with energy and creates a living, third thing—not a
logical stillbirth in accordance with the principal tertium non datur [no third is given], but a movement out of the
suspension between the opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of
being, a new situation.” “The
Transcendent Function,” The Collected Works
of C. G. Jung, Volume 8 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972), 67-91. This insight emerged in the writing and preaching of the sermon. I’m sure others have made a similar
connection, but it was new for me. This
parallel has considerable implications for the way we understand Paul’s
theology and for a Jungian approach to the Christian experience.
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