“I’m OK – You’re OK” was a 1967 self-help book by Thomas Anthony Harris. You may have read it. Heck, it may have changed your life. Me? I’m more Gen X than Baby Boom, more Nirvana than Beatles, so not really my thing. Besides, I’m more like my esteemed colleague The Rev. Otis Moss III, who is beginning a sermon series titled “I Am NOT Okay.”
I mean, that cabin off the grid is looking better and better. The news is often terrible. Far too many of the neighbors I am supposed to love are complete idiots, and how exactly do you speak THAT truth with love? Things in general are way too complex, and I’m not just talking about that password that needed a number and a letter and a special character and three words in Esperanto that I’ve completely forgotten, or the difficulty of finding a plumber or a rental car. I’m talking about moral issues and conflicting values.
Take, for example, U.S. immigration policy, in the news and historically driven by white supremacy, sometimes, but not always, overt, as I have stated from this very pulpit. I am rightly disgusted by this history, and embrace the United States we are trying to build together, diverse and beautiful. I love Taco Tuesday and the music of Bollywood, African prints and Japanese animation, jazz and gumbo.
At the same time, I believe in a just and equitable economy and in addressing exploitative economics here and abroad, in being honest about the terrible legacies of slavery and colonialism and the ways these evils have made us rich as a nation while impoverishing others. I believe in the form of reparations that seeks to build capacity in the nations we have manipulated and exploited, that we have drained of resources and people or that we have used as proxies in ideological wars.
So I have been troubled in my spirit by the flood of refugees at the border. I have no problem rejecting the intentional cruelty of the last administration, for cruelty was a feature, not a bug, in their system. But I also don’t believe in unregulated borders. When a doctor from Ghana is driving a taxi in Brooklyn, that is one less doctor in Ghana. The problem is not that we cannot take in others so much as it is that the drain on poor nations, not just the brain drain but also the loss of hustle and drive, creates an un-virtuous cycle, where those nations become poorer and less capable with every wave of emigres.
And I worry that what I consider to be a fairly progressive and nuanced position on immigration, justice, and reparations is impossible to surgically remove from our sordid history of white supremacy.
One person who had little interest in nuance and even less in American white supremacy and neoliberal imperialism was the late celebrity chef and traveller Anthony Bourdain. In fact, he attracted controversy when, featuring Houston on a 2017 episode of his program “Parts Unknown,” he gave producers a simple edict: “No white people.” The result was good television that lived up to the name of the program, a look at the diverse cultures within Houston that were largely unknown to Anglos with privilege.
If that story broke today, Tucker Carlson would not be able to shut up about it, but then again, shutting up isn’t exactly Tucker Carlson’s thing.
Not that Anthony Bourdain was exactly guarded. I mean, the man once compared vegans to Hamas. Though Tuesday’s New York Times review of the new vegan menu at Eleven Madison Park was almost as brutal.
I’m totally okay if you choose a plant-based diet, which is actually good climate stewardship, though I can’t go quite that far myself. And honestly, I’m not quite as brave as Bourdain was. Sashimi, sure, but blood sausage? I’ll take a pass…
I choose another dangerous meal, for on this World Communion Sunday, I’d like to remind you that, done properly, communion is dangerous, and not just because we might spill the juice as we try to open these stupid little Covid-cups, the Happy Meal Jesus that so distresses my spirit.
No, communion for the early Christians was a radical and political act.
But let’s take a moment to locate communion in the theological tradition of which The Park Church is a part, of Reform Christianity, of Congregationalism, and of the United Church of Christ. And it starts with Huldrych Zwingli and Martin Luther meeting in Marburg in 1527. Luther, famous for his 95 theses and credited as the instigator of the Protestant Reformation insisted that the bread and wine used in communion were transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, the belief of the Roman church he was leaving. Zwingli, also a rebel from the Roman church, insisted that the bread remained just bread, that the wine remained just wine, that Jesus was speaking metaphorically when he said at the Last Supper “this is my body” and, later, “this is my blood.” For Zwingli, Jesus could not be bodily “seated at the right hand of the Father” and bodily and thousands of communion tables at the same time. The two great reformers wept, but could not agree, and we, in our particular heritage, follow Zwingli, for his Zurich Reform would produce Calvin, Puritans and Pilgrims who became Congregationalists, and even those Presbyterians Park’s founders left to form an Abolitionist church.
That is to say, our particular line of our United Church of Christ heritage believes that what happens at the communion table is symbolic, not literal, though we have long abandoned the creed that places Jesus “at the right-hand of the Father,” and have no theological test for membership. In fact, freedom of conscience is also part of our heritage, so if you want to believe the substances are transubstantiated or consubstantiated, feel free.
But, as I said earlier, the meal was radical and political and dangerous for the early Christian community and it can and should be for us too, not because some human speaks magic words, because, you know, I got no magic, but because eating together across the divides is an act of vulnerability that undermines all of the human systems designed to keep us apart, the ways we weaponized race and class. For race and class were very real in the Roman Empire as Christianity was spreading, and supper clubs and banquets were a thing, but those gathered to remember Jesus were not divided. We know this because in the one Christian community where the filth of class division was present, the church in Corinth, Paul intervened.
First Corinthians is mostly authentic Paul, with one notable misogynist insertion. It is one of the earliest Christian texts we have written, only a year or two after the earliest, his letter to Thessaloniki, and more than a decade before the gospels.
And there is good reason to believe the subversive message we see between the lines in Paul’s letter, for it matches the life and ministry of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.
Jesus had no interest in the lines created by polite society, by those who would divide. He knew people with privilege, people like Nicodemus, like Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. He knew middle-class folks like Matthew and working class folks like the four fishermen he called from their nets. But he also knew the broken, touched the broken, fed the broken, the bruised and battered body of a mentally ill man living in a cemetery, the burned body of an epileptic child, the threatened body of a woman accused of adultery, the bleeding body of a women with uncontrolled hemorrhage.
His own body, broken for us, for this is the story his disciples created for us, the meaning they made of that last night when they gathered, where he declared that the Kingdom of God was mightier than any Caesar, that love would win in the end.
Dangerous food and good booze is all about transformation. Bread and wine require crushing, require that strange other forms of life are introduced into the mash, require fire. There is no time for pretense at the table. Try to look good, to stand on ceremony, and you’ll starve, or end up stuffing your face in the butler’s pantry.
Maybe the most damning thing about the New York Times review of Eleven Madison Park is not that the vegan menu isn’t up to par, but is that there should be a New York Times review of Eleven Madison Park at all, that any place where we are nourished should be so removed from the world of real people. Give me the taco truck pulled up beside the brew pub any day of the week.
Its just bread. Its just wine. Or grape juice. Or cardboard and purple water in a plastic Covid cup. It becomes communion in community, not my magic, but your magic, in a place where the privileged and the broken come together, where race does not matter, and where healing and growth depend not on the size of your wallet, but on the size of your love.
I think Anthony Bourdain would have approved, mostly, of this longed for communion, of the church we want to be, of this nation we are trying to build, bold and strong, a little on the edge, and as diverse as the strip-mall dining in Houston, Vietnamese and Central American, Haitian and Indian, and with an apology to my vegan sisters and brothers, with a burger joint and some brew. May the Spirit lead us there. Amen.