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10/03/21 – Eating at the Children’s Table

EATING AT THE CHILDREN’S TABLE

October 3, 2021
World Communion Sunday
Job 1:1 , 2:1-10; Ps.26; Heb.1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16
Rev. Denise Clark-Jones

Today we celebrate World Communion Sunday, the day that, across the globe, Christians are coming to the Lord’s table. World Communion Sunday originated in the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America in 1933. The Rev. Dr. Hugh Thompson Kerr conceived of the idea during his term as General Moderator in 1930. The prevailing theology of the Mainline church changed dramatically following World War 1. Before the war, what is known as the “Social Gospel” was the primary theological direction of the Christian faith in the mainline church.  Fueled by the impressive array of human accomplishments and inventions it was believed that with good thinking and good actions humans had the capabilities to solve the problems of the world Christ directed us to attend. But the horrors of World War 1 shattered the optimistic view of humanity in that theology. A new generation of Protestant theologians, Richard and Reinhart Niebuhr, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer urged Christians to return to a humbler assessment of our human condition. As it has been said many times: “God doesn’t need us to be good, we need God to be good.”

With this new theological perspective, and the instability of Europe with the rise of German nationalism threatening, Rev. Dr. Kerr of Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA saw the need for unity among Christians to promote Christ’s peace in the world. The concept spread very slowly at the start. But within three years, the World Communion Sunday celebrated on the first Sunday of October at Shadyside was adopted by the entire denomination. Amidst the global conflict of World War 2, the body that is now the National Council of Churches began to promote the event in 1940. Today, Christian churches throughout the world are celebrating communion with us.

This is also the time our denomination receives the Peace and Global Witness Offering, which brings the sacrament out of the sanctuary and into the world. In speaking about the practice of Holy Communion, the Apostle Paul warned the Corinthian congregation against violating the spirit of the sacrament by the injustice of the wealthy members eating all the food and drink and leaving the poor members with none. When you come together; it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. 21For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk…you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing. 29For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves”. (1 Cor. 11: 20-29) For Paul, participating in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper demands the integrity of going out into the world and providing for those whose tables are bare. As early Christians took the remains of their meals together to the poor and sick, the Peace and Global Witness Offering is a way of continuing the ancient Christian practice of sharing what we have with brothers and sisters in need.

In our Old Testament reading from Job today, it is Job’s integrity that is put to the test. This is a morality tale of historical fiction most probably written in the early post-exilic years. It reads like a courtroom drama. Today’s reading gives us a brief introduction to Job, a man who “was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” Satan is not a name here, but a role. The one who plays this role is not the Satan who is the personification of evil in the New Testament. The Hebrew reads “hasatan,” meaning “the satan.” A satan was an accuser. Here, satan is depicted as the quality control officer in God’s holy realm. After God had praised Job’s righteousness and faithfulness, this satan suggests that Job might not be so faithful if God had not blessed him with many children and great wealth.

In the first chapter, God agrees to satan’s proposition of testing Job’s faith by taking away his wealth and children. But, even after his tragic loss, Job remained faithful. The satan was not as impressed as God and proposes that Job might not pass the test if his own body were afflicted. God agrees to a second test, but with the stipulation that Job not be killed. So, satan inflicts him with painful sores on his skin, from head to toe. Job’s wife witnesses his agony and demands: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” In essence, she is telling Job to end his own life to escape from his misery. But Jacob does persist in his integrity, refusing to be unfaithful. He responds: Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” We will continue our reading of Job in the next few weeks. Job remains faithful but not meek. Job does not stay in the garbage heap, covered in sackcloth and ashes. He rises and takes his turn to put God on trial. This story is to be continued…

The theme of retaining integrity in times of suffering continues in our epistle reading from Hebrews. Unlike other epistles, Hebrews does not address a congregation. The letter was written to Christians who were suffering for their faith and being tempted to give up. The title comes from its Jewish-Christian perspective. The author was concerned that members of the early church would drift away, exhausted from their service to a world that did not care, and even ridiculed and reviled them. I think of the health care workers who have worked tirelessly to care for Covid patients, now being threatened, harassed, and even physically attacked by anti-vaxxers and political ideologies.

In our secular society, we church members may feel some of that exhaustion. Bonhoeffer did. In his Letter and Papers from Prison, he wrote, in a poem from a Nazi prison, “Who am I,” about how he felt: “Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making faint and ready to say farewell to it all. (p. 348) At times, in our day-to-day life, we may feel we are struggling, and we become exhausted.

Inspired by Psalm 8, in which God is praised and given thanks,” the author of Hebrews quotes the psalm to give encouragement. “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.” (v. 4-5) What stirring words of affirmation! We matter to God. The author of Hebrews takes the message of the psalm and applies it to what God has done for us through Christ. God cherishes us so much that God became a human being through the Son, Jesus, to bring us into God’s family. Jesus knew our suffering, experienced it as we do. His ultimate sacrifice was for us, that we might be reconciled with God. Our faithful response is to be reconciled with our brothers and sisters, God’s beloved children also.

The author of Hebrews speaks to the integrity of our faith with this warning: “Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard so that we do not drift away from it.” (2:1) How easy it is to drift away, the slow, barely noticeable movement away from God and from the path Jesus set before us to lead us into God’s eternal kingdom. One little step leads to another before we find ourselves so immersed in worldly values and pursuits that we can no longer feel God’s presence in our lives and our neighbors become our competitors or enemies. On this World Communion Sunday, Hebrews challenges us with the question: “Do we treat our fellow Christians as family, as brothers and sisters? Do we support and help care for one another as a family?

In our gospel reading, Jesus approaches the topic of marital relationships in his debate with a group of Pharisees who ask him: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” This was an issue of great debate in the Jewish community. Roman law allowed for both men and women to divorce their spouse. Two lines of rabbinical thought disagreed.  Rabbi Shammai taught that divorce was only allowed in cases of adultery. However, Rabbi Hillel (the Elder) and his followers claimed a man could divorce his wife for anything that annoyed him – even a meal he didn’t like. I would have been a single woman begging in the streets! Cooking is not my gift.

The Pharisees set out to trap Jesus. Perhaps they were thinking of King Herod’s wife arranging for John the Baptist to be beheaded for criticizing the king for killing her husband and marrying her, his brother’s wife. When asked his opinion, Jesus refers back to Genesis 2: 24: 24Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Jesus understood the economic impact of a divorced woman in his society. By saying marriage matters, he was also saying that women matter. The way he treats women in the gospels attest to his belief that women’s lives matter. Jesus explained to the Pharisees that Moses gave the people of Israel a legal code that dealt with broken relationships and maintained justice. And because our hearts remained hard, God came to us. Through Jesus, we are invited into a relationship with God. In spite of our weaknesses, our failures in our relationships, we are loved and saved by completely underserved grace and mercy.

We live in a broken world and Jesus, living among us, knew our brokenness. It is from this perspective that we can hear the words Jesus spoke about divorce with the grace they offer. For those that experience the pain of giving their all to a marriage and it does not work, Jesus was not seeking to inflict more pain. He was addressing a law that enabled men to discard women simply by signing a “certificate of dismissal,” even for the slightest of reasons. He frames marriage in the context of creation as God’s good gift. God has created us for life in the community. God is interested in repairing our broken relationships and restoring our broken promises.

To further emphasize this point Jesus invited little children to come to him. Children were even more vulnerable than women in Jesus’ time. Only in Mark is Jesus indignant with the disciples for hindering the little children and only in Mark does Jesus bless children. Jesus chastises his disciples for treating children as if they did not matter. Jesus uses children as a sign of our entering God’s kingdom. We are called to strengthen the ties that bind us to each other and especially to the weakest and most vulnerable among us. By his words and his actions, with integrity, Jesus announces all children matter.

So, as we come to the table today on this World Communion Sunday, let us come as little children receiving the gift of God’s love and grace. This is an act of faith. If we believe we have a spiritual connection with God through Christ, then God will take this tiny wafer and cup of juice and fill our hearts with faith and our desire to be faithful. At Christ’s table, we are offered the gift of experiencing the holiness of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection that connects us to God eternally.  As our gracious response, we are challenged to extend that grace to others.  On this special day of Worldwide Communion, we are also reminded that the Body of Christ goes far beyond those with whom we share meals in our own church’s sanctuary. We must ask ourselves if so many millions of people can gather around Christ’s table, why are there so many hungry, homeless people and refugees in  this world? Being the body of Christ compels us to extend the same grace and mercy we have been given to people we will most likely never meet, and to follow Christ in living in the world in such a way that the integrity of our faith is demonstrated by our actions.

 

Amen. May it be so!

 

 

 

 

 

© Rev. Denise Clark-Jones, 2021, All Rights Reserved
Westminster Presbyterian Church | 1420 W. Moss Ave. | Peoria, Illinois 61606
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