Every week, I enjoy tinkering with our church
marquee.
I probably fuss over it much more than it’s worth. Just talk with Debbie Crown, our Office and Property Manager, who, after I communicate to her the message-of-the-week, pulls out the marquee letters for me – sometimes, two or three times as this pastor changes his mind!
It’s an old marquee – a blast from the
past, perhaps. And yet, I feel that that modest and somewhat old-school
rectangle presents our Good News face to the busy Bethesda world that drives by
it each day – traffic backing up on Wilson Lane during morning rush hour from
Old Georgetown as far as Exeter. It’s a bit of a battered face, that marquee –
dog-eared and about to receive a face-lift. But it’s a helpful face
nonetheless.
Some of you can crane your necks with me
this morning on the lawn and – if your eyeballs or eyewear holds – make out what’s
inscribed this week. It reads, “9/2
10 AM … WORSHIP ON THE LAWN! … “THE
CHURCH’S GREATEST SCANDAL?”
Being the introspective thinker I am –
sometimes to a fault – it was my thought that this title might draw a couple of
folks to worship, wondering, “Gee: What salacious scandal in the broader church
will the pastor be addressing this
Sunday?”
Until I heard, quite independently of
one another, two church observers wonder what the connection was between
worshiping on the lawn and any scandal that might be going on at our church …
But
maybe there is some connection
between our worshiping in public and what I have found to be the church’s
greatest scandal.
Maybe there is some connection – in a positive way. A way our annual Labor Day
Sabbath worship on the church lawn quite symbolically – quite seriously – embraces, with the guidance
of today’s scripture from Mark’s gospel.
For this is not a worldly scandal of a fallen
church I am referring to. A church more concerned with preserving its own
institution than promoting social restitution – though we do fall prey to that.
No power, property, personalities, or prestige is involved with this disrepute.
And best of all: This is not about sex.
Picking up on Jesus’ theme on recent
Sundays, it’s not a worldly scandal of a fallen church I am addressing today. Instead,
I am lifting up a Church universal that is scandalous in its witness to the
world. Which, after all, is the Church at its best – or so Jesus and Paul and
our earliest witnesses envisioned it.
And it’s not only the Church universal
at its best, it’s Jesus’ Jewish theology at its best: profoundly spiritual and
social both, a scandal world-shaking and earth-quaking in its implications. So spiritually
and socially scandalous, that many first century Christians were dubbed
outright cannibals. Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of this man they
called their Savior and their Lord.
Yes,
it’s the scandal of this table. The Lord’s Table.
For those of you present several of these
past four Sundays, you may have noticed a theme in the gospel series of lessons
known as the lectionary each week. A rich tapestry of a theme, woven out of
images celebrating Jesus as the bread of life and the cup of the new covenant.
And yet, hewing to the mainline
Protestant playbook, we did not celebrate Communion in any of those Sundays.
Why? Practically speaking, I imagine
it’s difficult to celebrate Communion when there’s a different preacher each of
those Sundays – filling in the August pulpits. And who cares about Communion
during the summertime, anyway? And I imagine it’s difficult to celebrate
Communion these three Sundays – four, today – when we are now celebrating it
each Sunday in Advent and each Sunday in Lent, preparing for the new birth of
Christmas and the rebirth of Easter in a rightful bread-into-cup,
death-into-life matter. And I imagine it’s difficult to celebrate Communion more
than 12 times a year: the typical number of celebrations that used to be
first-of-the-month here, and now are organized around the church seasons and
special events such as Pentecost Sunday and World Communion Sunday. The numbers
of so-called Communion services have not changed.
And all those “I imagines” are where
this pastor feels we as Protestants in the Presbyterian tradition fall imaginatively
short. For the great scandal – the great
offense – of the gospel of Jesus, the Christ, is this: that in a world where
political division is commonplace and meritocracy and McMansions are a given,
this table may be the only place where both diversity and unity is symbolically
celebrated anymore.
Symbolically
so. And seriously so.
For
symbolically and seriously, gathering around this table is a demonstration of
justice.
All can eat at our Presbyterian table: on Saturday at Bethesda Cares’ lunch,
and on Sunday in our post-Worship fellowship. Not to mention the homemade bread
often given to guests who join us for Worship, or the bread we would break with
any one of them afterward. For this table symbolizes not just a matter of our
Sunday piety. All are welcomed. It’s here God’s world is healed.
In
the Mark story today,
connected to his send-up of their meal purifications, Jesus lambastes the
Pharisees and scribes in another way. He reams them out for bypassing the
needed support of mothers and fathers by taking their Medicaid dollars and
directing them “as an offering to God.” “Thus making void,” he adds to his
cohorts, “the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And
you do many things like this.”
The Pharisaic tradition … of piety and
propriety. It can be our own! Pre-empting justice. Forgetting the roots of our
faith: Our God is an abundant God to be chewed on, freely and extravagantly …
and not a spirit of scarcity full of righteous hot air.
The
abundant God celebrated at the common table. It’s actually where we get the
word Presbyterians from. From the seven in Acts chapter 6 who served at the
tables when the earliest Gentile widows in the church were being neglected by
the Jewish Christians in the daily distribution of the food. The disciples
kvetched, “It’s not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to
wait on tables.” I resemble that remark! And so the presbuteroi – Greek for Presbyterians, elders serving the tables –
were appointed. Being Presbyterian was not about proclaiming the word. Not
originally, anyway. Being Presbyterian – originally – meant being of service.
As long as we are returning to our Presbyterian roots: Let us know that the primary image used to represent the earliest Church was not the cross. The primary image was food around a common table. And why not, when the act of eating together was the greatest expression of social intimacy there was in the first century Near Eastern world? Only people of the same class ate with one another. Not the Christians. They were scandalous! And we can be, too.
For
breaking bread around a common table – not contemplation on the cross of Christ
– was the dominant metaphor for the life of the earliest Church. From
the clandestine fish drawings on the catacombs to the communal meals daily in
their homes, the eating practices of our first century forebears sabotaged the
purity code of you-eat-here and we-eat-there that Jesus attacks headlong today.
It was a purity code that would govern and circumscribe virtually every move of
their life. Lest people forget their place, the purity code kept masters among
masters and slaves upon slaves and women among women and lepers among lepers –
simply because the masters knew the rituals and had the means to keep the
rituals, and so those who didn’t … Well,
the attitude was simple: To each their own – just eat with your own.
And now here comes this Lord’s
Supper, feeding-of-the-5000 cabal:
feasting at a common table, top priority on every Christian’s ethical plate!
Here this motley crew – our motley
crew – gathered, from A-to-Z: the functionally agnostic to the frenzied zealot.
Unaffected, unadorned, largely unordered dining – this done in remembrance of
Jesus. Not in a carefully-coiffed, cube-and-cup way, but plenty for all, with
God’s wide and wildly diverse creation indiscriminately represented. A complete
overhaul of power – radical would be a better word – in a world where food was
scarce and the people you ate with carefully ordered otherwise.
No
wonder the Apostle Paul saved his harshest words for the rich holding their own
“Communion” apart from the poor. He admonished those limousine liberals in
Corinth in this manner: “When you come together, it is not really to eat the
Lord’s supper.” The Lord’s Supper was a worship given, you see – it was not
just spiritual and liturgical, it was social and it was justice. Paul
continues: “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? … I do not commend you!”
I have to wonder, with the anthropologist Rene Girard, if our long Protestant affliction of celebrating Communion so piously and with propriety, so delicately and so daintily – with elders serving in long black robes and the bread cookie-cut into tiny cardboard cubes – served as our way of so sanitizing the broken flesh and so controlling the shed blood of Jesus that the messy Good News justice we proclaim in the act of the serving could conveniently be overlooked, if not totally forgotten. The all-inclusive Gospel, which midst our rites and rituals and silver plates can all-too-easily morph into a hygienic display of piety versus a discipleship hunger that all be fed.
In our church’s life and ministry,
this is a time we are tempted toward such exclusive expressions of piety.
Several of our members have moved on as in recent days – to other states, other
nations, and to the Church Triumphant. And so our thoughts naturally tend toward
contracting the table rather than adding another wing. We rally our psychic wagons, and get busy rearranging our
emotional furniture as the keepsakes of a bygone church find new homes. We find
ourselves prone to fears of “membership retention” and bone up on wishful
thinking of more programs and activities. All the while God’s all-inclusive
program and activity known as intergenerational ministry continues all around
us.
For in case we haven’t noticed, we
are a small church now. Look up –
look around: We have been so for nearly a decade. Now that’s the case, and
since most of this grand facility is not being used by our membership anymore
and is instead being used in creative new ways as a place for healing, we can no
longer escape into grandiose projections. Pretenses of big-church fantasies are
erased. And so perhaps it’s time to
start celebrating God’s small church gift.
And God’s gift to us of being a
small church is this: We can now take more risks. We
can now take more risks of being inclusive in our healing ministries in ways a
larger church cannot and will not take. They cannot and will not, because they have too much to lose.
Exhibit
A: Del Ray could have easily found a home in a church with a three-figure
membership and a seven-figure budget. But they found a home here, in their
discussions with us – and the daily place for healing they could create for
themselves, in a Sunday-only space we had worn for decades like loose flesh.
Exhibit
B: We are a More Light congregation. Only slightly over one percent of all Presbyterian
Church (USA) congregations declare in this way their unconditional openness to
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. As for our larger sibling
congregations nearby – Bradley Hills … Saint Mark … Chevy Chase … National, and
Potomac: None of them can do it. And none of them will do it.
Small churches have less to lose.
And so small churches like ours find themselves set free. Set free, to live a
life vibrant and vivacious in Christ’s all-inclusive faith.
A faith centered ‘round the symbol and reality of this common table. A table where the spiritual healing of being included in on the Good News meal focuses not on frantically piecing our lives back together – lest the whole as we have known it becomes crumbled and swept away. But a table where all who claim the human condition are called to ingest of their brokenness and imbibe of our wholeness: “their” transforming into “our”. And any and all can do so, thanks to a biblical narrative where God claimed such brokenness and wholeness as God’s incarnated own. For when the bread of the heart of anyone, anywhere breaks – the bread of God’s heart is the first to break.
And that’s the church greatest
scandal it has to offer to the world: This common table of broken bread and
healing cup. Common to all … Reserved for none. Our call to God’s world,
saying: You belong here. You are welcome here. We want you here. No exceptions. You belong.
Which is, after all, our small
church’s greatest gift: That we can actually hear that call. That we can
actually… pull it off.
Whoever has ears to hear … Let them hear.
