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Scarsdale Congregational ChurchMini-Survey of Theological Context Shaping CommunionWorship and Music, Our Rituals |
Communion is celebrated in our church at least six times each year. Pictured here is the service on World Communion Sunday, October 1, 2000.
On World Communion Sunday on October 4, 1998, Phil Washburn's meditation
was a "mini-survey of the theological context that has shaped communion for nearly
two millenia." This meditation can heighten our appreciation of communion no
matter where or when we partake of it.
I have been asked to give some background on communion itself;
a kind of mini-survey of the theological context
that has shaped communion for nearly two millennia.
I must say, a mini-survey on this subject is virtually an oxymoron
given the shear magnitude of the subject matter itself,
but assignments are assignments--so here goes.
To begin with it's important to remember that the first Christians were all Jews.
For quite some time, actually, the Jewish followers of Jesus
continued to worship much as they always had.
Those living in or near Jerusalem
continued to offer sacrifices in the Temple as all practicing Jews did.
They weren't known as Christians yet.
Wouldn't be called Christians, in fact,
until well after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70
The word itself is first used not in Palestine but in the Syrian city of Antioch
350 miles north of Jerusalem and altogether outside Palestine.
It's the Hellenistic followers of Jesus who are first called Christians.
Here's what happened.
Great tension built up between the Jews of the diaspora
and the non-Jewish followers of Jewish Jesus--
the gentile followers, the Hellenistic followers.
The gentile followers of Jesus (the "Christians" or
followers of "The Way" as they were also known)
begin to insist that Jesus had been raised from the dead,
that he was not only the long hoped-for messiah of Israel,
but the emotionally longed-for savior of the entire world as well,
and that his spirit was still very much with those who believed in him.
It will take many more years to develop a theology of the trinity
and designate Jesus as the second person of it, as the Son of God--
"very God and very man"--as tradition puts it.
But thus high view of Jesus is nascent by the end of the first century.
And, as you might imagine, it doesn't go down well--not with most Jews, anyhow.
These new gentile followers of Jesus, these Christians,
are soon unwelcome in the synagogues of the diaspora.
The two groups begin to attenuate.
For their part, the Christians become embittered--
deeply resent this rejection of them and their savior
by the very people, who, they, feel, should have accepted him.
The Christians begin to worship on their own in a different way...
a way that usually includes a communal meal...
a meal that in itself recalls the communal meal of the Last Supper,
and that for faith evokes the presence of their risen Lord.
Jesus is a new Moses--one who delivers his followers, who births a new people.
The parting of the Red Sea--
a walking through water, the birthing of a new people--
is echoed in the waters of baptism.
Where temple worship had been a re-enactment of the divine victory
over the chaos-monsters of death and destruction, oppression and suffering,
which always involved the shedding of blood,
so too did communion contained these timeless themes.
The early church meals evolve into the sacrifice of the Mass.
None of this happens over night, of course.
But by the Middle Ages you have a the service of the Eucharist--
which means "a giving of thanks."
It is celebrated at every Mass.
In a way, it is the Mass.
It is a giving of thanks for the sacrifice on the cross
embodied in the sharing of bread and wine--
the receiving of which make possible a spiritual union
between Christ and the faithful.
Over time it came to be believed
that not only is Christ present in the service of the Eucharist
but that Christ is actually present in the elements themselves...
in the bread and the wine.
This idea got set in theological cement in the doctrine of transubstantiation.
This is the notion that at the consecration of the elements by the priest
the whole substance of the bread and the whole substance of the wine
are changed into the body and blood of Christ, that they really become that,
only the appearance of being bread and wine remaining.
It's the miracle of the Mass.
Martin Luther, and the Reformation, repudiated transubstantiation
and opted for something called consubstantiation.
This is when the presence of Christ presence
is united with the bread and the wine.
The bread and wine are still bread and wine
but the mystical presence of Jesus is infused in them.
If this sounds like not much of a difference,
if it sounds a bit philosophically muddy,
it is.
And it's a perfect illustration of the fact that Luther,
for all the vitriol of his rebellion against the pope,
never did move very far from his origins in the Church of Rome.
The Calvinists, however, did move farther off.
Reformed Protestants began to talk of the elements of the Last Supper
as symbolizing... merely symbolizing the presence of Christ--
not somehow containing that presence in themselves.
The Calvinists wanted less mystery and more Word,
less ritual and more plain preaching.
Actually, a fierce debate erupted very soon in the Reformation
between Luther and a fellow named Zwingli--a Swiss theologian--
over precisely this difference...
Luther arguing for consubtantiation of course,
and Zwingli for communion as being symbolic of the Last Supper--
no more, no less.
The debate split the Protestant reformers down the middle.
I mention this simply to remind us that communion...
this communal meal... this community-creating meal
has also, over the centuries, been highly divisive of community.
It has been used to define Christian community--
but as often as not that definition has been about who can receive it, who can't;
who's in, who's not;
who believes, who doesn't.
It has been a lightening rod for controversy and division: often is still!
In our more ecumenically-minded century, however,
there have been strenuous efforts to overcome this unhappy history--
not completely successful, to be sure, but impressive nonetheless.
Modern theology has attempted to redefine communion
as a foretaste of the eschatological banquet--
the great all-inclusive meal at the end of time
when everyone will be reconciled in and by the love of God.
Rather like the last scene in the movie, Places in the Heart,
where people who in life, have betrayed each other, hurt each other,
been viciously prejudiced against each other,
hated and even killed each other,
are finally united in a service of communion
in which all these tragic ruptures and alienations are finally overcome.
It is a vision in which our enemy-hood
and all the sins that crucify are, finally, redeemed.
So it is that what communion means has a long and complex history.
But that finally gets to the question
of what it may or may not mean to us here... to each of us...
to you in particular.
We are of many religious backgrounds here,
and some of no religious background at all.
We are, in this church, a gathering variously of
Protestants, of Catholics, of Jews and that proverbial "other."
We've chosen to be this way.
Like it this way.
It means, however, that what each of us here makes of communion,
how we understand it, what we take it be about,
is all over theological lot, and outside it as well.
This must be acknowledged right off.
Still, what communion means to you will, in the end,
have to do then with two things:
with how you respond to its essential content;
and with what you bring to the experience of receiving it.
An analogy is in order here.
If you commute to work, on the train say, there are two things involved:
what it's about--to get to and from work--a kind of ritualized habit
that you may not give much thought to...
and... and it's about what you bring to it.
This is to say, you can make use the commute...
the time can be used... you can bring something to it...
it can be made more meaningful.
You can read, meditate, get some work done, catch a little more sleep,
play cards, or a game on your lap top.
You can day dream, or plan the rest of your day... whatever!
All these things are what you bring to it.
And that's good.
You should.
In fact, you really can't help but bring interior needs and uses to the time itself.
It's the way we're made.
But still, for all you bring to it,
what it's fundamentally about is getting to and from work.
In short, these two things abide:
"what it's about" and "what you bring to it."
Communion, too, involves a "what it's about" and a "what you bring to it."
It can serve all kinds of interior needs,
but in the end, it's still about something.
It's not simply a spiritual Rorschach test.
It doesn't mean just anything at all.
At bottom, what communion can be about for you
has to do with the Last Supper and with what Jesus means to you...
has to do, theologically speaking, with your Christology.
You can have a high Christology or a low Christology.
A high Christology emphasizes the divinity of Jesus--
the self-sacrifice of God for our sins.
A low Christology emphasizes the humanity of Jesus
and what it means for us to try to be Christ to each other
in our very human and flawed ways.
High Christology tends to involve more sacramental mystery.
Low Christology leans toward symbol,
is more a "pointing to"... a pointing to human possibilities.
My own Christology is rather low.
If you have guessed that over these past 15 years of preaching,
I may then as well go ahead and admit that right out.
But I don't ask that you have my Christology.
If yours is high, I can appreciate it, because I think I well understand it.
What this has meant, though,
in conducting the service of communion here in this place
is a certain intentional blandness of liturgical expression.
This, in order, frankly, to try to bridge a rather wide Christological diversity.
For my own part, for all my low Christology, I'm no Unitarian.
Though there are plenty of things I choke on in the Christian tradition,
I'm still in it--warts and all.
The Dali Lama once visited a town in the region of Pondicherry--
Auraville--in India...
a place peopled by religious folk from all over the world
who, in their spiritual and political idealism and diversity,
think of themselves as citizens not of particular countries,
but of the world.
They consider themselves sort of "global people."
They were making this point about themselves to the Dali Lama
who gently replied, with a twinkle in his eye,
that he thought perhaps we're all from somewhere.
Ever so subtly he suggested that they likely had more identity given them
by wherever they had come from
than they were willing to admit.
So with communion.
It says that in this place, in this tradition, for all our diversity,
we're from somewhere.
It has to do with what it's about here.
It has to do with our identity as a Christian community.
Amen.