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Thursday, February 17, 2011
Communion: God's Progressive Dinner
Exodus 12:14-21; Acts 2:37-47
There's something about eating and drinking that brings people together.
I don't just mean that they sit up close to each other at the table, important as that is in its own right. When you're face to face that way, words are spoken and heard with ease -- everything from "Pass the salt, please" to "Care for seconds?" to "You'll never guess who I saw the other day" -- and suddenly nothing else exists but you two or ten and the topic at hand.
And I'm not just thinking of potluck socials or business lunches, where the tasty meal is a means to another end like building community or closing a deal. Their validity is affirmed by church boards and the Internal Revenue Service alike. And me.
More fundamental, and much more profound, is the way two or more people sharing a meal are bound together by the common food and drink they ingest. From ancient times, serious occasions have been marked by ceremonial meals -- Passover, Holy Communion, treaties, royal weddings, and the like. In each case, more or less consciously, those who dine together are saying, "Now you are one with me, and I with you, as much as this lamb/bread/wine/cake has become one with my body and blood." Modern technology defines and describes the mechanics of digestion with great precision; the older symbolism managed to intuit the meaning of meals more than well enough.
The earliest Christian church, according to the second chapter of the Book of Acts, knew this principle and lived it out with joy. There, in the holy city of Jerusalem, they grew in numbers and in spiritual health by carefully observing four daily disciplines. One of them was eating and drinking together from house to house, and not just any meal, but the ceremonial one we now call Holy Communion.
In my first of four sermons on those spiritual disciplines and why I want our church to live by them today, I ran the risk of sacrilege by calling Communion "God's Progressive Dinner." And lived to tell about it.
Why, you may wonder, did I take such a holy ritual and trivialize it in terms of a creaky old party tradition? If you really want to know, then...
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:33 PM
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Count Your Blessings
Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12
The day I preached on Christ's "beatitudes" -- the string of blessings he pronounces at the start of his Sermon on the Mount -- was the very first "Fred Korematsu Day for Civil Rights and the Constitution" in California history. Talk about God's perfect timing...
Mr. Korematsu, who died in 2005, was a longtime member and elder in the First Presbyterian Church of Oakland. But that's not why Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger had authorized the commemorative day. He was being honored instead for his lifelong campaign for the vindication and compensation of Japanese-Americans whose families had been "interned" during World War II -- deprived by their own government of their property, their freedom, and their dignity.
As a young man, Fred Korematsu refused to be relocated and went into hiding. He was captured and interned after all, but he filed a legal case which in 1944 was heard and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1988 a federal judge overturned that ruling, and in 1998 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
What, you may wonder, did any of that have to do with Jesus' laundry list of blessings?
Well, what would it feel like if your government forced your family to leave behind everything that wouldn't fit in two suitcases and go into a fenced camp until someday that government decided you could come back outside to re-enter normal life as best you could? And what if the best your pastor could come up with was "God bless you"?
That must be how it felt to Jesus' listeners when he said, "Blessed are you if you're poor... if you're sad... if you're powerless... if you're starving... if you're picked on and kicked around and ruined all unfairly...."
If that's the best this would-be Messiah can offer, maybe we'll wait for another one to come along!
Or maybe he knew something they hadn't learned yet. Maybe blessings aren't as simple, or sentimental, as we're used to thinking. Hmmm.
I am absolutely convinced that's the gospel truth. And I think you'll agree with me after you...
Listen to the GODcast!
posted by Jack Buckley at
5:27 PM
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