The Eternal...

Mark 13:1-8

As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" Then Jesus asked him, "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?" Then Jesus began to say to them, "Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.

This is the Word of the Lord.

For weary pilgrims, who travelled the mercilessly hot, dusty roads with little to eat, scarce water to drink, and the constant danger of attacks from bandits or even wild animals, one thought kept them putting one foot in front of another – one vision in their mind’s eye, one dream: the sight of Jerusalem as they topped that last hill, laid out before them like an opened flower, and there, on a hill overlooking the city, its white walls and golden decorations so bright in the sunlight that it hurt your eyes to look for long, was the Temple. That sight made the journey worth it.

Never mind that the Temple was a work in progress. No one alive could remember it any other way. And although Herod had begun the Temple expansion and renovation only in the last sixty or seventy years, the priests had been sacrificing, Psalms had been sung, and God had been worshipped in that holy place, nearly nonstop, since 516 BC, following the return of the exiles from Babylon.

And what a renovation it was! The Temple walls and its buildings soared into the air, constructed bit by bit from huge stones, some as large as forty-four feet long, which had been quarried nearby and set painstakingly in place. The result was breathtaking, to say the least. It stood boldly as the epicenter of Jewish worship, the place where humankind came closest to touching the Almighty. It seemed eternal, indestructible. No wonder even the disciples were dazzled by its beauty.

We aren’t told in our reading this morning which of the disciples commented. It may have been one of the Twelve, or it could have been a relative newcomer perhaps someone so young that they had never been to Jerusalem before.

“Wow, look, Teacher, ain’t it awesome?” Words to that effect, anyway. I imagine the comment made Jesus stop, and turn to look at the walls and buildings and gold trim, all aglow in the afternoon sun. After a long moment, her responds, almost too softly to hear. “Yeah, it’s big. It’s pretty. But it’s temporary. Every last stone is going to fall.”

To the people within earshot, it may have sounded ludicrous. If the Temple leaders had heard it, they’d have considered it tantamount to blasphemy.

Yet many of the ones who may have heard Jesus’ words that day would still be alive when, in 66 AD, Jewish Zealots began a revolt against their Roman occupiers.

This first of three revolts, sometimes called the Great Revolt, started out well for the Jewish rebels. Roman sympathizers were driven out, a Roman garrison was overrun, and the rebels even succeeded in ambushing and defeating a Roman legion. It didn’t hurt their chances that, in the middle of their rebellion, Rome itself was in turmoil, enduring its own harsh civil war and four Emperors in a single year.

But the Zealots were far from a united front themselves, and infighting and power struggles weakened the rebels. The year 70 AD saw the Roman General Titus laying siege to Jerusalem with four legions, and that was the beginning of the end for this Great Rebellion.

Titus is said to have wanted the Temple to remain intact, so that he could make it into a temple to the Roman Emperor (his father, Vespasian), and the Roman pantheon of gods. Yet when Titus breached Jerusalem’s walls and street fighting ensued, the Temple caught fire and burned to the ground, utterly destroyed. Not a single shattered, blackened stone was left on another. The gold and valuables were looted and carried back to Rome in triumph.

As beautiful as it was, as indestructible as it seemed, and though it had stood in that spot, in one form or another, for five hundred eighty-six years, it was, in the end, temporary.

And what could be said of a force strong enough, an Empire powerful enough, to topple the very House of God? Surely such an entity would itself be everlasting, indestructible.

Well Rome certainly thought so. But counting from the moment Julius Caesar became sole ruler of Rome in 46 BC, the part of the empire that Rome controlled after the third century, the western half, fell in 476 AD. In the East, the part of the Empire ruled by Constantinople lasted another millennium, until 1453 AD… but it, too, eventually fell.

In the end, even the mighty Roman Empire was temporary.

With the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the system of priestly sacrifices, so integral, so foundational to the daily worship of Jewish men and women, ended as well. It was as temporary as the Temple itself.

Yet these daily sacrifices were necessary, according to the Law of Moses. The shedding of blood was vital, for without it there was no hope of covering the stain of sin from a holy God. If these were temporary, what hope could there be that humanity could ever, in any way, approach the Creator and at last be reconciled to God?

In answering this question, we see a glimpse of the enormity of the sacrifice that Jesus made, for each of us and for the world. Knowing full well what was at stake, completely aware of all he would have to suffer on behalf of a creation which would scarcely notice and in large part not care, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, sacrificed himself on the cross.

Hear the Word of the Lord from our lectionary, the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 10, verses eleven through twenty five:

“And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, "he sat down at the right hand of God," and since then has been waiting "until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet." For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us, for after saying, "This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds," he also adds, "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more." Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.

“Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

The temple sacrifices were vital, but they were temporary. The flash of the knife and the stench of burning flesh was effective but for a moment; the sacrifice had to be repeated day in and day out.

In Christ, the temporary has been replaced by the Eternal. When he cried out from the cross, “It is finished,” it was! In that one selfless act, God giving God’s own life to reconcile humankind to God, everything that could be done to wipe away the sins of the world was done.

In Jesus Christ, we have an answer to Empire as well. No earthly kingdom or empire or nation has ever lasted, not really. Every one which has risen has eventually fallen, and the citizens of the fallen one are enslaved by or integrated into the conquering one, or are else destroyed, and the pattern repeats itself again months or years or decades or centuries later. Kingdoms, empires, they’re all temporary.

Yet we who are in Christ, who have responded to the grace of God, are citizens of an eternal Kingdom, the now-and-coming Kingdom of God which shall have no end. Christ sits at the right hand of God because there is no more that needs to be done.

Not that there are no more Caesars or Herods – as long as there are countries suffering under the bootheel of a dictatorship, or power-hungry politicians saying what the people want to hear rather than what they need to hear, while the more crooked politicians simply buy the votes they need, there will be Caesars and Herods.

But the dictators will fall, and the politicians will be voted out. Power for the sake of power is, after all, ultimately self-destructive. Our eternal Kingdom of God is predicated not upon power, but upon service, upon what the writer of Hebrews calls, “provok[ing] one another to love and good deeds,” and upon the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ, who – even while we were still sinners – died for us.

As we enter in to this Thanksgiving week, let us each day reflect on the sacrifice of love God has made in Jesus Christ, for each of us and for the world, and let us be mindful of each opportunity to share that wild, boundless, extravagant love with all of those around us, near and far, next door neighbor or across town neighbor or neighbor in another state or country or culture or belief system.

And on Thursday, when we pile our plates high and gather around the table and break bread in the Thanksgiving meal, let us remember 3ith joy and true thankfulness the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for us all, and for every one of those neighbors I just mentioned. Once, for all, perfect and complete and eternal.

And may Christ be made known in the breaking of bread.

(Words of the Institution)

There Is No "Kid's Table"

This is the sermon for World Communion Sunday, and I am addressing one of those passages in the New Testament that has always scared me. As a result, I'm only including that text with the sermon; however, if you'd like complete readings for the service, you can add Isaiah 58:3-8 and John 6:1-15.

Did you know the first meal ever eaten on the Moon was Communion?

1 Corinthians 11:17-34

Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgement against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation. About the other things I will give instructions when I come.

This is the Word of the Lord.

When I was growing up, we’d spend Thanksgiving with Mom’s family in Shelbyville, Tennessee. The whole family would be there at Helen and Clay’s, driving in from Atlanta, Huntsville, and who knows where else. The kitchen table would be groaning from the weight of the food, and by the time Thanksgiving dinner was served, the smell had driven us half crazy with hunger. Then it would happen: the grownups would sit at the nice table in the dining room, and all us kids would have to go and sit on the carport! At the Kid’s Table!

Don’t get me wrong, now. It was an enclosed carport, and it was warm, and there was plenty of food, and I really enjoyed spending that time with my cousins and all my extended family. But every year, I’d be jealous of that dining room table. The Grownup’s Table. Oh, how I’d dream of the day when, at long last, I was finally old enough! Old enough to sit at the grownup’s table.

Funny thing is, as we all got older, we found that we didn’t really want to sit at the grownup’s table. We preferred sitting out on the carport, where we could talk about the things that interested us. Sure, one or two of us tried the grownup’s table, but we always ended up back down on the carport.

The years have passed, and we don’t go to Shelbyville anymore. We gather in Huntsville, and the kids’ table is for our kids, and the grownups’ table doesn’t have to be as large as it was to hold us all. But we’re all there, still the same cousins, at the table with our parents and aunts and uncles, the same conversations, same jokes, same massive amounts of food.

And yes, the children who sit at the Kids’ Table still dream of the day they’ll sit at the Grownup’s Table.

I start here because I think, though Paul never sat at the kids’ table for an American Thanksgiving meal, he understood the feeling of close, familial fellowship – the familiarity, comfort, and joy among those who share a common bond of blood and history. He understood this, and what’s more, he saw that this level of familiarity, love, and the bonds of blood and experience was an integral part of the Christian worship experience.

If you think about it, we can trace the history of Christianity through Christ to the earliest experiences of the Hebrews becoming a nation by way of meals. The night that the Angel of Death visited the Egyptians, passing over the Hebrews because of the smeared lamb’s blood on the doorposts, the soon-to-be-freed slaves ate a final meal in captivity. As they sojourned in the desert, God fed them with manna. As they entered and settled the Promised Land, their calendar was populated by feasts and celebrations.

And Jesus used the unleavened bread and the wine of the Passover meal to start a new food-centered tradition, Communion, Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper.

It was a common practice among many cultures to begin a meal with a ceremonial breaking of bread, and to conclude it with a ceremonial offering of wine. Since Jesus had done the same thing with the Seder meal, beginning with the bread before supper and using the Cup of Blessing afterward, it made sense that the Lord’s Supper be celebrated as part of what came to be known as the Agape Meal.

The idea was that the church, which met in those days in the houses of believers, would break the bread of communion, then sit down to a common meal, sharing food and familiarity, telling jokes and stories and singing songs around the table, growing in love for one another through the language of food and drink, and conclude with the sharing of the Cup.

Well, that was the plan, anyway. In the church at Corinth, things got a little out of hand.

We aren’t sure what all was going on, but it seems to have started out innocently enough. Like I said before, these churches met in the homes of believers, and usually these were the homes of the rich folks. The homes would have been built with rooms opening out into a courtyard, and the main dining room would have only been large enough for perhaps 20 people. The rest of the church would have gathered at tables in the courtyard. It was simple logistics, you see.

Now, either everyone at the Corinthian church was expected to bring their own food, or the food was being served first to the people in the main dining room – and, of course, in a society where class mattered, the friends and affluent associates of the home’s owner, the elite, the preferred were the ones seated in that room. Those in the courtyard would have been much poorer; in fact, many of them would have been slaves. If they were to bring their own food, there would have been little or none; if the food was being provided by the homeowner, by the time it got to the poor folks there was none left. Either way, you see, those with the influence, money and power were gorging themselves and drinking too much while the poor could only look on. The common loaf, which was to break through the barriers of race and class and gender and privilege, had been thrown aside in favor of the status quo of Corinthian society. The common cup, meant to be the lifeblood of community, of love and support and a common history, had been kicked aside while the privileged people became drunk, and the marginalized felt their throats parch.

Seeing this, Paul knew that this was no more the Lord’s Supper than a snow-cone in July is Thanksgiving dinner. His words were harsh, because they needed to be harsh. They were frightening because the Corinthian elite needed to be scared into seeing, perhaps for the first time, just how far they’d come from the pure joy of fellowship into the seedy loathing of class envy.

I have to tell you that, even knowing all of this, Paul’s words in this passage have always scared me. “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgement against themselves.”

I’ve always worried about what it meant, in our context, to eat the bread or drink the cup in an unworthy manner. How is it we are to discern the body? Does God require perfection before we can approach the Table? And what does it mean for the person who stands behind the Table to officiate the sacrament? Surely there is no way that I am worthy to do this thing!

Of course, there isn’t any way I am worthy. There’s no way any of us can be perfect enough to “deserve” the sacrament. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? The Lord’s Supper isn’t about being worthy – it’s about being family.

I’ve been in churches all of my life. I’ve seen the Lord’s Supper performed as an ordinance and a sacrament, I’ve been welcomed to the Table and, in some churches, excluded. I’ve seen plates passed around as we sat, I’ve stood in lines and I’ve knelt at altar rails, I’ve drunk from the little cups and from a large common cup, I’ve had grape juice and I’ve had wine, I’ve dipped communion wafers and chunks of French bread and sections of pita bread into a cup, I’ve had communion with Ritz Crackers and Dr. Pepper once. I’ve even seen a church run out of bread and juice, but the elders scrambled to find more so all could take part.

I have never, even once, seen a Kid’s Table. I have never, even once, seen the “in” group take communion while others sat in the courtyard, hungry. Even where I was not allowed the elements, I was able to receive a blessing from the priest, which was, in its own way, taking part in the sacrament.

On this World Communion Sunday, we gather at this table as a family, and we gather in the presence of the Body of Christ. Not here, in these elements, but here, in this gathering. We are the Body… and not just us, but every church in every city in every country on every continent, as the bread is broken and the cup is passed in whichever way that congregation chooses to do it, all of us, every one – we are the Body!

In the ancient cathedrals of Europe, we are the body. In the mud huts of the Congo, we are the Body. In the sleek, modern churches of suburbia, we are the Body. In the cinderblock home churches of the inner city, we are the Body. In the well-known churches that broadcast their worship services, we are the Body. In the underground churches in China and the Middle East, we are the Body.

And there is no Kid’s Table, no benches in the courtyard. All are welcome. All are family.