Sermons

“The Lord’s Supper” or “The Chewy Center”

Habakkuk 2:1-3; I Corinthians 11:17-34a – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 26, 2020

Worship/Life Series #5

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that our faith might be renewed as we remember the significance of the feast you set before us.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

So here we are at last.  For five weeks, we’ve been talking about the need to focus on God’s vision for our congregation, using Habakkuk’s call to “make the vision plain.”  We’ve reminded ourselves of our commitment 18 months ago to cultivating vitality and growth in ministry and membership, and specifically, of the centrality of our presence and participation in worship as part of that effort.  It matters that you showed up today.  Would you say that after me?  “It matters that I showed up today.”

We have located this season of renewal at Vista La Mesa within the broader context of the Disciples of Christ, particularly the 2020 vision put forth by former General Minister & President Dick Hamm that calls us to be a “faithful, growing church that demonstrates true community, deep Christian spirituality, and a passion for justice.”  We were reminded that Christ is the reason we’re here; Jesus was God showing up for us, which is why we, in turn, show up here.  We talked about prayer in worship and how we can engage with it more fruitfully.  We explored what the preaching moment really involves and how it only fully happens when we all – speakers and listeners – do it together.  We learned about some specific ways to participate in both prayer and preaching more effectively.

And so, today, we’re finally here, ready to talk about the Lord’s Supper – communion, as we most often refer to it, or the “chewy center” as I’ve decided I’d like to call it.  Because it really is the best part, isn’t it?  Disciples love to talk about communion.  Whenever we have conversations about worship, it is clear that communion is the hands down favorite part of worship for the vast majority of people here.  Indeed, the centrality of communion in the Disciples tradition is probably a big reason many of you are here, rather than somewhere else.  We love to talk about it.  We preach about it at least once a year, on World Communion Sunday, the first Sunday in October.  But the ironic thing is that, on another level, it’s actually rather hard to talk about communion because one of the primary truths of the Lord’s Supper is that it’s beyond words.

It’s not that there aren’t any words involved; it’s just that more so than any other part of the service, this is the moment when we also move beyond words, when we stop talking and start listening.  And it’s not just that the spoken words stop, but that our other senses are engaged more fully.  We’re no longer just hearing, we are seeing and touching and smelling and tasting.  Communion is the part of the service that most fully engages our whole being.  As we sang earlier, “Taste and see the grace eternal.  Taste and see that God is good!”

This is a wonderful and blessed thing.  It means that communion operates on multiple different levels within our minds and hearts and communities.  The “beyond words” nature of communion means that there are many ways to experience it.  When the Worship Committee met earlier this month, we were working on clarifying our congregational vision for worship.  During that conversation, one person recalled the joy of quietly greeting fellow church members of the body of Christ with smiles and gentle touch as we move through the aisles receiving communion by intinction.  Another appreciated the opportunity communion provides to settle down within her soul and be with God.  Communion can be joyful; it can be soulful.  It can be jubilant and loud or intensely focused and quiet.  It is communal; it is personal.  It is both the most embodied thing we do in worship and the most mystical and mysterious.

There is a danger inherent in the fact that communion is beyond words.  This experience touches us at levels of our being that are non-verbal and often non-rational.  That is a gift, but also a risk.  When we do something so important and impactful, over and over, like we do communion – something that affects us at very deep, subconscious levels, in ways we can’t entirely describe in words, there is a high likelihood that we will begin to think the way we do the ritual, rather than the God it points to, is the holy thing.  We are easily caught in a rut and begin to make an idol of our particular practice of communion, instead of worshiping the Christ we encounter through the ritual.

Let me give you an example.  I grew up in a Disciples church that was pretty formal and “high church” as Disciples congregations go.  Communion was very orderly, accompanied by solemn organ music and carried out with utmost decorum.  Everyone knew where they were going and got there smoothly.  The sanctuary had very clear, straight front-and-back aisles, so it all gave the impression of a well-oiled machine.

Then I went away to college in Minnesota, where Disciples churches were few and far between. I joined a United Church of Christ congregation.  Now, of course, the first problem was that they only had communion once a month there.  But this led to another problem, from my perspective, because it seemed like they didn’t do it often enough to know what they were doing.  The sanctuary was more of a fan shape, with multiple aisles and weird little triangular sections of pews.  The servers, it seemed, just wandered around, trying to make sure they got to everyone.  Communion Sundays felt like total chaos to me!  It was upsetting.

It was also around this time that the communion hymn, “Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ” appeared on the scene.  I don’t know if you know this, but “Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ” is based on a Jamaican folk melody.  So there were these people wandering around – fairly joyfully, mind you, if less purposefully than I would prefer – and this song we were singing was almost, dare I say, bouncy!  Bouncy!  Who ever heard of such a thing?  My 18-year-old worship sensibilities, formed with love in a respectable, reverent community of faith, were quite challenged.

You can probably guess how this story turns out, based on the fact that we’re singing “Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ” as the Hymn of Going Forth today.  It turns out that there’s more than one way to do communion, and that is a gift from God.  When we get too used to doing it a certain way, we lose sight of the point.  We make an idol of our methods and narrow the channels through which the Holy Spirit reaches our hearts.  We forget that it is God who is the primary presence making worship happen and try to insist that it’s dependent on whether we’re doing it “right” or not.  Indeed, when we make methods our idol, we can even be distracted by someone else approaching the Lord’s Supper differently, because our need to police their behavior becomes more important to us than attending to God.

You may remember that we changed things up with communion last summer.  Not only did we add in two new months when we served the elements by intinction, but we shifted it so that we were singing the communion hymn while coming forward.  There were a variety of reasons for doing this, but not least among them was simply to do things differently, to help release ourselves from the idolatries of method.  It was interesting and perhaps not surprising that the people who said they loved it were mainly people who are newer members of VLM, while the ones who struggled with it the most were primarily those who have spent most of their worship lives here in this one congregation.

We worship a God of renewal and innovation.  We cannot afford to lose sight of that in our worship practices.  Even as we provide an experience that helps us find rest and comfort through familiarity and structure, we must make room for practices that help stretch our hearts and our minds and the minds of our hearts, because that is how we grow to know God more deeply.

In addition to the many ways to do or approach or practice the Lord’s Supper, we are also blessed with the many layers of meaning inherent in it.  To say that it is beyond words is not to say anything goes.  Christ is the center, not our own wandering minds, and so Christ is the one who sets the agenda.  The Lord’s Supper is about sacrificial love, both the love Christ shared by giving up his life, and the love we are called to share in response.  It’s about forgiveness and grace and thanksgiving and abundance.  It’s about the supremacy of Christ in this worship service, as we remember that he is the one who gives the invitation, not us, and therefore, we are unable to declare anyone unwelcome.  It’s about God’s solidarity with us, in taking on flesh, and it’s about our solidarity with one another, as we are re-membered into the body of Christ.

Paul scolds the Corinthians, because they are pretending to have the Lord’s Supper, but doing it without “discerning the body”.  In doing so, he reminds us that this ritual – which lives within our minds and hearts and souls, impacting us in ways we can barely articulate – also has ethical implications.  We cannot share in the bread and cup, the body and the blood at the table, without attending to the body of Christ that is all around us, the parts that are rejoicing and the parts that are hurting.  We are to “discern the body” so that our attempts at worship do not “humiliate those who have nothing”.  If our worship does not reflect the priorities of God and our lives are not impacted by our worship of that God and reflective of those priorities, then the meal we share is not the Lord’s Supper.

To confront this truth is to understand what it means to say that worship must be the center of our efforts to cultivate vitality and growth in ministry and membership.  Everything we do as a congregation needs to be rooted in our worship of God, our encounter with Christ and the gospel he proclaims.  The rest of the week, the world is working on us, aiming to twist our hearts with the temptations of consumerism, tribalism and the myth of redemptive violence.  We gather here on Sunday to have our souls restored.  We come seeking God’s grace and strength so that we can resist the forces of evil and dehumanization.  The ethical implications of this meal, in which we declare that all God’s people are one, must be the ground from which all our other efforts as a congregation grow.

If we do not attend to the worship life of our church, by showing up and participating, the rest of our congregational life will wither away.  It matters that you are here.  Your presence and participation make a difference.  Worship is where we get back in touch with God, for whatever course correction we need this week.  Worship is where we meet Christ and have our souls fed once again with the bread of life and the cup of God’s mercy.  This is where our souls are restored, so that we can live the lives of love and grace that God is calling us to.  Let us pledge our hearts to showing up.  Alleluia and Amen!