{"id":1272,"date":"2011-10-06T18:17:56","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T18:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=737"},"modified":"2017-08-26T15:26:28","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T19:26:28","slug":"world-communion-sunday-and-the-brokenness-of-the-body-oct-2-doug-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/?p=1272","title":{"rendered":"World Communion Sunday and the Brokenness of the Body – Doug Johnson – Oct. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

View Archived Sermons<\/a><\/p>\n

Listen to this Sermon\u00a0<\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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I Corinthians 10:15-18<\/span><\/p>\n

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\t<\/span>As many of us are painfully aware, several Mennonite churches in British Columbia have cut themselves off from TUMC, in effect excommunicated themselves from us, as a result of our process several years back regarding human sexuality.1<\/sup>\u00a0 Excommunication in the history of the church has generally been reserved for much more important and grave situations.\u00a0 For instance, around the year 190, the first \u201cstrong\u201d Pope in the Roman Catholic tradition excommunicated all churches in Asia Minor in a dispute over the date of Easter.\u00a0 [Yes, the very serious, the very grave date of Easter (if no laughs.)]\u00a0 All laughing aside, just as in our situation, the dispute ran much more deeply and involved stark differences over such matters as the interpretation of scripture. [Pause].\u00a0 In Pope Victor’s case, the question at issue was in fact a continuation of the first really hot question for dispute in the early church.\u00a0 Excommunication, or in the Menno tradition \u2013 the ban.\u00a0 It’s the perfect sermon topic for World Communion Sunday.\u00a0 Or so I hope.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I’ve entitled my sermon today World Communion and the Brokenness of the Body.\u00a0 If I had the chance for an alternative title, it would be drawn from our passage from I Corinthians 10 this morning.\u00a0 It would be \u201cBecause there is one bread.\u201d\u00a0 Verse 17 of chapter ten, \u201cBecause there is one bread, we who are many are one body.\u201d\u00a0 Now there’s a more appropriate entree into a World Communion Sunday.\u00a0 Wouldn’t it be so much easier to simply rip such a phrase from it’s perch and parade it about, a stick with which to beat all those who push Christian division over the embrace of diversity, multiplicity, and difference.\u00a0 Yes, yes indeed.\u00a0 But perhaps it would be better yet to slog through mess, the morass, the madness that surrounds Paul’s eventual insistence, One Bread, One Body.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Jodie and I have written extensively on the larger setting of this passage – initially, a cumbersome 50 page term paper, now reduced for publication to a few short pages in a wider article on Christian-Jewish dialogue over Torah keeping.\u00a0 The Corinthian church had written to Paul to ask for his aid in settling a handful of vexing disputes.\u00a0 Some of them had to do with sex.\u00a0 Some of them had to do with doctrines including the Resurrection, and then this dispute, one over eating meat offered to idols.\u00a0 It is most certainly a continuing fallout over questions about whether and to what extent Gentile Christians should respect the strictures of Jewish law and practice.\u00a0 Some Corinthians, on the basis of Paul’s own regular teaching, proclaimed freedom to participate in the eating of idol offered meat in large social settings in pagan temples.\u00a0 After all, idols are all just so many fakes after all, there is but one God. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Paul spends over two chapters wrestling with this question and is actually circling back to the theme of that wrestling when he writes one of the most oft repeated and well-known passages in all of Scripture in I Corinthians 11.\u00a0 The words of institution for millions of eucharist celebrations throughout time and place:<\/span><\/p>\n

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23 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Paul’s so-called law free gospel was initially intended to free Gentiles to join the church, to overcome a growing divide between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians.\u00a0 In I Corinthians chapters 8 through 11, Paul has to deal with unexpected new divisions caused by people who support his view of law keeping.\u00a0 The church in Corinth, unlike other churches, seems to entirely agree with Paul over the lack of need for\u00a0 Torah keeping.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the church was rife with conflict, and it was as evident at the Lord’s Table itself as it was anywhere else.\u00a0 Some went away hungry; others went away drunk.\u00a0 While we’ve learned to fight about a lot of other things over the centuries, we can commend ourselves that we rarely have problems with Christians going away drunk on communion wine.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Though, Jodie and I have picked up a few entertaining anecdotes to tell in this regard over the years.\u00a0 There is often this question in Christian traditions that take the bread and wine much more literally than we are inclined to, that take the elements as the actual body and blood of Christ … What to do with the leftovers?\u00a0 Once consecrated can the bread and wine be simply left to molder on a table, be dumped down a drain, or perhaps here in Toronto … green binned?\u00a0 There have been a few different acceptable answers over time.\u00a0 Oft times, consecrated bread left over is fed to animals such as birds.\u00a0 In some churches we’ve been at, children do not participate in communion proper, but they are allowed to rush happily for what remains when the service is over.\u00a0 In one case,however,\u00a0 a Catholic priest is said to have become quite drunk in a parish where it was insisted that people of one variety or another must consume in a reasonable space of time any bread that has been properly blessed.\u00a0 Well, our drunk priest managed somehow to say the appropriate incantation over an entire bread truck.\u00a0 Some Catholics in the vicinity apparently had no appetite for bread for some months thereafter. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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In another situation, Jodie heard tell of a Methodist pastor in Britain who had a multiple point charge.\u00a0 He was thusly required to travel from church to church on any given Sunday morning to officiate at various services.\u00a0 On some mornings the wine chalices would be overfilled and the pews underfilled.\u00a0 In this tradition, any leftover wine must be consumed by the presiding pastor.\u00a0 By the last service in such situations, the jolly robed priest would waddle down the final aisle in a condition that would surely have please certain wealthy patrons of the church in Corinth.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Now all this might be fun, but could also seem like a real diversion from our main purpose here this morning.\u00a0 Not quite so fast.\u00a0 This question of the leftovers returns us to our situation at the end of the 2nd<\/sup> Century where Pope Victor excommunicated a great number of churches in Asia Minor in a dispute over the date of Easter.\u00a0 Have you ever wondered where the term excommunication came from?\u00a0 It may come from the way things worked in terms of leftovers for sometime during the first centuries of the christian era.\u00a0 Local churches would take the bread and the wine and then pass the leftovers to the next church down the line, and that church would pass their leftovers on still further.\u00a0 It would be as if we took our remaining bread this morning and sent it on to Danforth United Mennonite, who then passed their leftovers up to Rouge Valley, and so on and so forth until there was one great common union.\u00a0 Or, maybe, if we weren’t all spli
\nt up denominationally, we’d just walk our leftovers over to the Anglican church which is practically next door. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Eusebius, the eminent fourth century church historian and Emperor Constantine apologist, describes what happened during the quartodeciman dispute, quartodeciman being the fancy Latin term for \u201cthe fourteenth.\u201d\u00a0 I will explain what the significance of the 14th<\/sup> is shortly.\u00a0 Eusebius describes for us the apex of this dispute, which had apparently been simmering for generations.\u00a0 In reaction to a letter written to him by Polycrates, then leader of the bishops in Asia Minor, \u201cVictor, presiding over Rome sought to cut off straightway the churches of all the community in Asia from the common union<\/em>, together with those which neighbored upon them, on the grounds of heterodoxy.\u201d\u00a0 Pope Victor, then, ex-common-union-cated a highly significant portion of the catholic or universal church at that time.\u00a0 If the practice of passing leftovers to the next church was in place at this time, they were cut out of the passing, skipped over, avoided, the circuit was broken, the body of Christ universal had severed a limb.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In his letter, Polycrates had defended the practice of keeping a paschal celebration of Jesus as lamb,\u00a0 Easter as it has become known in the West, and they kept this feast according to the Jewish calendar’s 14th<\/sup> of Nissan, a date signficant to the Jewish celebration of Passover.\u00a0 The influential Roman church already remembered the Resurrection in keeping with a Roman calendar. Polycrates argued that it was long standing tradition in the Asia Minor churches to keep a feast on that day honoring Jesus as lamb, and that such luminaries as the Apostles Philip and John and several notable bishops including Polycarp and Melito had kept such a feast.\u00a0 Victor was not persuaded and, as a result … excommunication.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Stupid argument right, the date of Easter, a generational conflict that caused a major church split.\u00a0 The reason, from Victor’s perspective, was far from just calendrical.\u00a0 Interpreting Paul’s teachings on Torah keeping in a particular way, a doctrine hardened in the first centuries of Christianity that not only was Torah keeping not necessary, but that it is actually a mortal sin.\u00a0 The early church developed a two pronged approach to understanding sin.\u00a0 There were certain venial, or crassily bodily sins, for which one should and could easily procure forgiveness, then there were mortal sins which would cause spiritual death, eternal damnation, if not taken care of and forgiven appropriately.\u00a0 Victor and others like him based their understanding in this matter, it is thought, on II Corinthians 3:6, \u201cthe letter [of the law] kills, but the spirit gives life.\u201d\u00a0 Keeping a Jewish Passover Feast for Pope Victor meant endangering one’s very soul, and as the leader of a great flock, he felt it necessary to correct the error, to save the dissenting church members’ very souls.<\/span><\/p>\n

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You see, we might very much prefer that all Christians simply drop their petty differences and maintain an open table across denominations.\u00a0 Protestant denominations have by and large done this, but there are still major rifts between Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy.\u00a0 Jodie and I actually disagree on this, and it’s a very healthy disagreement I think.\u00a0 One of us will take the bread and the cup when we find ourselves attending a Catholic mass on occasion, the other of us will not.\u00a0 Are the issues that divide Catholics and Mennonites ones that should simply be glossed over so that we can present a common front at the common table?\u00a0 Perhaps, perhaps we ought to say one baptism, one body, one bread. But we are Anabaptists after all, aren’t we?\u00a0 Maybe we should be hungering and thirsting for a genuine unity with a common, open table as the celebratory end point rather than a step along the way. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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This summer when we were in California I attended different church services on consecutive Sundays where communion was celebrated.\u00a0 One was at the church where my family currently holds membership, the other was the church connected with the high school from which I graduated, and where I first became a member of a church.\u00a0 Both churches proudly station American flags to the right of stage from the podium.\u00a0 Both churches are populated by members whose political allegiance is to the \u201creligious right\u201d in the U.S.\u00a0 I can’t remember the last time I was at a service that served communion at either church, but lo and behold, back to back Sundays, or perhaps it may have been two Sundays in three.\u00a0 In the first service I was sitting with my mother and grandmother, dear, dear Christian women who nurtured me spiritually and physically and protected me from danger \u2013 two of the most important and beloved people in my life.\u00a0 At the second service, former teachers, my home congregation for many years.\u00a0 But with how I’ve come to understand the gospel and the way the American empire, especially the right, has moved, even to the point of openly embracing torture, I simply could not consume the bread and wine with those around me.\u00a0 So often in church history, indeed in Mennonite history, church discipline or the breaking of fellowship has happened over sexual matters. In these cases, I felt like I could not fellowship on account of acceptance of severe violence. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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But where exactly to draw the lines?\u00a0 Where exactly to take a stand?\u00a0 Do such stands matter?<\/span><\/p>\n

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Earlier, I gave Pope Victor’s position the very fairest reading I can possibly give it.\u00a0 Now that I’ve done so, it should also be noted that very prominent churchmen of the day disagreed with him. Eusebius reports that several letters, still in existence at the time of Eusebius, were sent \u201ccriticizing Victor severely.\u201d Among these was one from Irenaeus of Lyons. Before Eusebius, Irenaeus had been the great historian of the church.\u00a0 He specialized particularly in tracing the story of church heresies.\u00a0 Irenaeus pleaded with Victor to keep the peace citing the example of Polycarp and Anicetus, an earlier bishop of Rome, who had precisely the same dispute decades earlier, but had \u201cmaintained peace with one another\u201d continuing to share in eucharist.\u00a0 I could go on and talk about the ways this dispute and then reunification would continue to reverberate, and reverberate in ways not at all pleasant for Judaism, but I’ll leave off for now.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The return to a common union, perhaps to the sharing of leftover bread and wine, was surely something to celebrate in Victor’s day.\u00a0 A World Communion Day, as it were, with a very special meaning. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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It is nearly inevitable that there will be divisions in the divine yet human institution, The Church.\u00a0 For centuries and centuries the Western church has divided and redivided.\u00a0 A century or so ago, serious ecumenical efforts began to try to reconcile the most important of these differences.\u00a0 Then three decades ago, a milestone of sorts was reached in Lima, Peru with wide acceptance of the document Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry.\u00a0 It laid the groundwork in many ways for continuing discussions between Christian denominations, including, I suppose, the Catholic-Mennonite dialogue that ultimately produced the statement Called Together to Be Peacemakers.\u00a0 I am tempted to conclude with a suggestion that holding off on a totally open, worldwide communion table may actually be in the best interest of the church.\u00a0 On this view, even if painful, our division from Mennonites in British Columbia may be the proper way to deal with real differences between us, the right way
\n for us to try to figure out how actually to move toward unity at a deeper level. Perhaps, there are issues that we should hunger and thirst to resolve before a time of wonderful, common feasting.\u00a0 As Mennonites, for instance, we might hope that continued discussions about how to bridge our differences will, as in Called Together to Be Peacemakers, mean that our minority report on nonviolence and the Way of Jesus will have to be taken much more seriously by the church universal.\u00a0 This would be a major victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

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But last week I was also reminded of an oldie but goodie in the way of quotes.\u00a0 \u201cThere is no way to peace, peace is the way.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps there is no way to a common union, communion is the way.\u00a0 My mind is tossed hither and yon in this regard.\u00a0 And so I offer no great wisdom, no grand conclusion in this regard.\u00a0 Working through this history, presenting these issues might just have to be sufficient for this morning.\u00a0 And you know quite well that this is not my usual custom.\u00a0 I have opinions on matters large and small, and I am not afraid to speak them freely and to act upon them.<\/span><\/p>\n

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So instead, this morning, I offer this sermon as an entree to reflection before the cup and the bread which we share. Worldwide Communion: a reality, and a goal. Church schism and infighting, a reality. A brokenness which should cause humility, hope, a rededication to efforts at unity, and reason to remember the broken body of Christ.\u00a0 Broken for us.\u00a0 Broken by us.\u00a0 Broken that we might be, and seek to be One Bread, One Body.<\/span><\/p>\n

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And perhaps as we work for and await a deep shalom of Christian unity … maybe we might begin to think creatively about a regular and visible practice with our table leftovers!<\/span><\/p>\n

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View Archived Sermons Listen to this Sermon\u00a0 \u00a0 I Corinthians 10:15-18 \u00a0 As many of us are painfully aware, several Mennonite churches in British Columbia have cut themselves off from TUMC, in effect excommunicated themselves from us, as a result of our process several years back regarding human sexuality.1\u00a0 Excommunication in the history of the church has generally been reserved for much more important and grave situations.\u00a0 For instance, around the year 190, the first \u201cstrong\u201d Pope in the Roman…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3962,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/3962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}