Thursday 17 September 2015

Sermon Opoho Church Sunday 2nd August, 2015 Pentecost 10

Readings:  Exodus 16:2-3, 11-15,   John 6:24-35

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our sustainer.  Amen.

Aren’t you going to ask me into your home?

This week we explore further the thoughts of Rowan Williams from his book ‘Being Christian’[1] and today we talk about Communion, Eucharist. 

Jesus was absolutely into hospitality – he had a deep understanding of the importance of sitting round the table sharing food with others, talking, breaking bread together.  But more than that, he understood how important fellowship was - wherever he went people gathered, drawn to the genuine hospitality of soul that he offered.  And there is no doubt that he also understood the incredible weapon that was exclusion from hospitality and fellowship – when some were invited and others not - how hurtful, how diminishing it was for the rejected.
For Jesus met with everyone, those on the invite list and people definitely on the rejection list - the priests, the soldier, the tax collector, the woman at the well, the list goes on.  He met and shared hospitality with them all.  His indiscriminate generosity and the willingness to mix with proper and improper people (often at the same time) was, I Suspect, embarrassing at times to those around him but could not be denied by the writers of the Gospel.  It was obvious: when Jesus sought out company, the end result was a celebration and often around the table. 
This begins to give us what Williams calls the most simple and yet worth saying thing about the meaning of gathering around the table.  In Holy Communion, Jesus tells us that he wants our company – inviting us to be guests at his table - welcomed and wanted, all of us, and by doing this, challenging all the rules of protocol or status or invitation only.

But there was something else that Jesus did – and this is demonstrated beautifully in the story of Zacchaeus.  Jesus said: ‘Aren’t you going to ask me into your home?’  He draws out hospitality from others.  Zacchaeus would never have dreamed to extend that invitation by himself, but through Jesus welcome to him, he felt able to welcome Jesus into his home. 
Around the table today, throughout the world, the same thing happens – Jesus invites us to gather around the bread and wine, welcomed and wanted, and so we feel able to extend our welcome to Jesus to join with us here.  ‘Aren’t you going to welcome me into your home’ says Jesus to the people of Opoho?  And so the community of faith is created and sustained, here and everywhere, around Jesus’ welcome to us.

And this takes us into the next point Williams makes – that being invited as guests reminds us that we are given the freedom to invite others to be guests as well.  We have experienced the hospitality of God in Christ – our lives are therefore set free to be hospitable.  We are set free to make our communities of faith places of welcome for all those in need of solidarity, of fellowship – of offering bridges into warmth and care, of indiscriminate generosity and safe haven.  As a world wide movement, we can’t say we have always achieved that so well, can we?  And he challenges us with this statement:  “One of the most transformingly surprising things about Holy Communion is that it obliges you to see the person next to you as wanted by God.  God wants that persons company as well as mine” – something else that seems to be taking some time to sink in to a good number of Christians, yeah?

Williams also tackles the question of the sombre communion – something that Presbyterians seem to struggle with quite a bit.  In fact he quotes Queen Victoria as saying she couldn’t understand why the joy of Easter day has to be interrupted by such a sad happening as communion.  The starting point for celebrating communion, Williams says, should be just that.  Celebration! And so the sharing of food with the risen Christ is where we begin.  Through the locked door of Easter Sunday, into the room of troubled and uncertain disciples comes Jesus ‘Well, aren’t you going to give me something to eat?’  You can almost see them scrabbling around the cupboards for something to offer him.  And, too around the table at Emmaus, down by the shore of the lake ‘Do you have food to share with me?
Jesus is doing after death just what he was doing before – offering and inviting hospitality, continuing to welcome people to the table, each one of us.
I think some of us have probably lost sight of the invitation to celebrate new life, the risen Christ, in our concentration on the table as the place of sombre preparation for the shedding of life on the cross.  We don’t mean to, the words of hope and joy are there in the communion liturgy, but somehow where we have ended up treating this meal as a solemn ritual of seriousness, we are missing a good bit of the message of Christ’s hospitality, the celebration that the cross leads us to – the resurrection. 
So it is not that we bypass the Passover meal – but it is rather about how we understand it -  and for some the language we use distracts too (blood shed, body broken). Every time we celebrate communion, yes we commemorate his death but we also affirm the risen Christ and live in expectation of his coming again.  Jesus points us to the cross as being the sign of new beginning, of promise, of a door into hope.  So we remember the pain, and we celebrate the promise.

But equally communion is not and cannot be ever be just about the good times. To know the fullness of God’s grace we must engage with the realities of the Passover meal, hear the truths that come from the breaking and piercing of the one who came only to love and heal and save.  
I want to pick up on a couple of the things Rowan Williams has to say here. 

The first is that Jesus himself points us through the events of Good Friday into Easter Sunday, identifying his body broken and his blood poured out (the bread and the wine) as a sign of God’s future, and so, in the very moment when death is most certain, he is able to give thanks.  He is connecting his own experience, even this deepest darkest moment, with the reality of God giftedness to the world.  In the celebration of Holy Communion, we give thanks for God with us, even in, especially in the darkest experience.  And this impacts on the way we see the world – in every corner of experience, good and bad, God the giver is at work. In every object, every living thing we are to see the sacred, the sacramental.  Think about how this colours our approach to the rape of the environment, to the seemingly hopeless, to the everyday. Reverence for the bread and the wine is the beginning of reverence for the whole world and of the belief that God is at work in the world, everywhere and in everything.  And each time we fail to live by this understanding, when we exploit and abuse, we are denying the giftedness of God made known in Christ.


The second is also a more sombre moment – those who gathered around the table with Jesus at that Passover meal included those who would betray him – not just Judas but those who left him alone, those who were afraid and who denied him.  And still he broke bread with them all, even knowing in a couple of hours they would abandon him.  We all have the capacity to betray and to abandon – yet we are all invited to the table again and again.  We need to confront our capacity to betray and forget the gift of God to us when we come to the table,  but here’s the thing -  we are not to be turned away because of it – in fact it makes our need for being at the table greater.  Williams says  “The eucharist is not, in Christian practice, a reward for good behaviour; it is the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self enclosure and self-absorption, our pride and our forgetfulness”.  Our proper preparation for coming to the table is being prepared to be totally open to the gift of God’s forgiveness and respond with a willingness to transform our ways.

And so, in Holy Communion, the celebration and the sorrow, the Easter and the Cross are always there together.  And as we come together as Christians we come not to celebrate ourselves and how well we are doing, but to celebrate the eternal gift that is always there, and to give the thanks that is drawn out of us by that gift.  And we do this with the family of God, apostles, saints, and kindred thought out time and across the world.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.




[1] Rowan Williams.  Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer.  London:SPCK, 2014

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