TEXT: Mark 10:2-16
Walking the streets of Paris, you cannot fail to see reminders of some sad but heroic event of the Second World War. Just down the block is a memorial to Alfred Lelluch, who ran a clandestine radio station for the Resistance and was shot by the Gestapo in July of 1944. These memorials remind me of one of the more important experiences in my early ministry: an international pastors’ conference near Dortmund, Germany. Clergy from several countries were gathered, and I heard the story of the Dresden-Coventry Reconciliation Group. Men from Germany confessed their sin and responsibility for the Nazi war machine and its destruction of Coventry with its beautiful cathedral. Men from Britain confessed their sin and responsibility for the retaliation that destroyed Dresden, the ancient center of German culture with no military significance where 100,000 perished from incendiary bombing.
Before this gathering I had only read of the Coventry-Dresden circle and its great work to reconcile Europe in the years since the war. Now I sat with some who had lived the fear and horror tell of the suffering and healing, heard them tell of sin and repentance and the struggles to bind up a broken humanity. Their shared experience was the confession of night terror perpetrated by their own hands. Their symbol was the Coventry Cross of Nails, found in the rubble and forged when two spikes in the medieval roof where welded together by the fire that destroyed the cathedral. Their text from 2 Corinthians 5: “In Christ is a new creation…from God who gives to us the ministry of reconciliation. So now we are ambassadors of Christ. God making his appeal through us.” And their seal? The communion of the Lord’s Table, which knows no boundary or ideology.
Sometimes we wonder of things ever do change for the better. Their communion could have as easily been the bread and cup shared as a symbol of English-French unity after the Battle of Agincourt, in the middle of the Hundred Years’ War. These clergy I met in 1972 were disciples of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young and martyred German theologian, and his English patron Bishop George Bell. Theirs was the spirit that launched a new reformation of the church after 1945: to pull its collective head out of the sand of history, to engage and to confront the world’s agenda, to deal with massive social pain and betrayal, to serve Christ by naming, and reuniting and healing the fractured places in God’s world. But! … just as the church could not overcome the rising tide of nationalism in 1415, for which Agincourt was a symbol, and whose war went on another fifty years, so too in recent decades the church has not held political leaders accountable for divisive policies. It has turned away from its mission to heal its own divisions, turned away from its confrontation with the powers that carve up the world. Most of all, it has sought its own retreat and comfort.
Only this time, we should know better. The world of violence and fear, from which we strive mightily to shelter our children, needs those of us who call ourselves disciples of Christ. For, in the words of a mighty hymn, we know that it is still true that:
Races and peoples, lo, we stand divided,
And sharing not our grief, no joy can share;
By wars and tumults, love is mocked, derided,
His conquering cross no kingdom wills to bear.
The difference is that now words of hatred and division, so long accepted, are seen as the poisons they are. Because of the various forces that are bringing our world together, the church in its better moments chief among them, the continuing divisions, the ongoing points of fracture, are all the more scandalous. We need again to question our comfortable assumptions by understanding more deeply what Christ had in mind. What we require is the spirit found in these two little stories read from Mark today. One speaks of divorce, the other of children, but behind them both stands a larger truth that teaches a higher law of human communion, ordained by God. that all questions our conventional assumptions and legal wisdoms. No, you may not divorce her because you want to; your union is of a deeper nature than your customs. Women are more to be honored than your swift dismissal allows. No, we do not exclude children from our circle, for their very vulnerability is our model for how to approach God. Just so does Jesus turn our world around.
Maybe there is such a thing as human progress after all. Eighty years ago a hundred men could be lynched in the American Southland with not too much of an outcry. Now a racial slur can bring legal penalties. Then we carried all sorts of misguided images about anyone not of north European stock. Now a famous, or infamous, right-wing talk show host (hired by a sports network to hype its ratings) has to resign for saying the bigoted things over national TV that he’s been peddling to his radio listeners for years. In the USA it used to be that a gang of white guys chasing a black man were called the Klansmen. Now they are called golfers. So maybe there is some progress to see.
Therefore, today we join with millions around the world in the act of liturgy that unites us. We differ, we two billion Christians, in as many ways as our diverse and fractious world does. But in this we are united: this one, this singular ceremony of deep memory, living presence and promised hope. The Holy Communion, the Lord’s Table, the Last Supper – whatever you call it, it is the Eucharist, which means in its original Greek and means now – Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving indeed, for this meal brings us together in ways not otherwise imaginable. This great social witness cutting across all social barriers has helped bring wholeness and healing to our earth.
When we look deeper, however, we realize that while true communion leads to social witness, it does not begin there. True, we need our social prophets in a world that has made so much progress in understanding and which also – when we look at the wall being built in the West Bank – has far to go. We are seeing the prophetic spirit right now in the questions and protests against “globalization” from Seattle to Prague. Still, the truth of the matter lies not first in the barriers to world harmony this communion jumps, but in the healing of the inner person whose breakage is the source of all global division. The fracturing of God’s world begins with tiny cracks in each individual spirit: the little loss that will not be turned to gain, the small deceit which was so easy to pull off that a larger one presents itself, the sad betrayal or abandonment or lie we experience from one we trusted and which, being tucked away or brushed aside, now comes back to poison our ability to care. There no sin of social horror that did not first begin as a corruption of an individual soul.
In fact I would be willing to bet that here is where almost all of us start, with the healing of our own personal fractures. Some dark night you wonder: “Does anyone really care about me?” Is there, when we come right down to it, anything, anyone at the heart of things who gives a hoot if we live or die? Then, if we are lucky (and most of us here have been), we may hear in a way that answers: “This is my body, broken for you.” And we take it in our hands, and into our hearts, and know we are part of One who cares very much.
The bread of life prompts the next question. “Can my errors, my sins every be lifted from me?” No matter how sophisticated we may become, there are times we do not like ourselves very much and are not proud of a path we may have taken. “Can I be forgiven this grievous mistake, these debilitation and degrading habits, that great and secret sin that has eaten away at me for years.” Then again come the words drifting through the ritual: “This is my blood of the new covenant, shed for you.” Forgotten, no; but forgiven always and especially when there is in us a corresponding desire to be forgiven and to make the necessary amendments.
It is then, I believe, that the wider question comes into view. “Have I anything in common with my neighbor?” Cared for and forgiven, how may we come to terms with this astounding society in which daily we rub shoulders with many we will never know ? How shall we understand peoples across the globe to whom we know we are linked but can’t feel it? We ask this only to find ourselves at the table of the Lord and to realize there that we have in common our longing hearts and our need for fulfillment. When with sisters and brothers everywhere we reach out for the same loaf and reach into the same world of hope, the fractures begin to heal.
Now there is only one essential question left. If we are loved, and if we are forgiven, and if we are connected to others – all around this table, how shall we make it live? Why, by loving, forgiving and connecting to the neighbors around us, all of them. God, whose silent spirit has touched our inward beings, awaits our actions as his ambassadors. The final stanza in the hymn started earlier reads:
How shall we love thee, holy, hidden Being,
If we love not the world which thou hast made?
O give us brother love for better seeing
Thy word made flesh and in a manger laid.
For truly this meal we share with millions today is an agent of our own inner health, perhaps the most powerful spiritual mediator we have to repair, forgive and connect the broken heart. But Christ’s meal is – at the same time – a reminder of the hope he brings to our world. And it is out there – after all – in our homes, our classrooms and board-rooms, our work places and play grounds, our assembly lines and assembly halls, our legislative chambers and executive suites that the work of Communion awaits us. It is there the breakage of our hearts becomes the fractures of our world, yes, but it is there also where the healing of our spirits makes possible the caring unity of God’s whole people.
Amen.
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