Sermon delivered at Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
Video at vimeo.com/364710296
1 Samuel 21:1-9
Monday was my last day of freedom, though freedom might be a bit prosaic considering I’ve spent several weeks moving halfway across the country, unpacking, and generally setting up a household, which is mostly, but not completely, done, all while taking three classes online. I’m delighted to be here, of course, but gosh, moving is hard work. So there I was on Monday, one day left, with errands to run, a few minor projects I could reasonably hope to check off before starting work Tuesday morning, and I found myself at Target, considering those storage cubes, then walking by the clearance rack.
And Lo! There appeared on the clearance rack bed sheets in a size I needed. “Stranger Things” bedsheets to be exact, a product tie-in with that very successful Netflix series. I’ve slept on them now for several nights expecting totally jacked-up dreams, but not so much, at least not yet.
You see, “Stranger Things,” is an homage to the pop culture of my teen and young adult years, and it is a wicked creepy sci-fi horror, hence my concern that the sheets, one of the last things I see as the lights go out at night, might plant nightmarish seeds, visions of demi-gorgons dancing in my head.
At the start of the first episode of “Stranger Things,” four of the central characters, boys on the cusp of adolescence, are playing Dungeons and Dragons. I know a thing or two about that game. I started playing back when the rules were still in a set of small paperback volumes that might have come from a ditto machine, and were most certainly laid out on a manual typewriter.
It was a game where you could be anything except the nerd that you probably actually were if you were playing D&D. You might be an Elven mage, a Halfling rogue, or a stout Dwarven warrior with his trusted battle-axe.
And this was my conception of a battle-axe, something from fantasy, D&D and Conan the Barbarian, not a weapon real warriors used. Except, it turns out, they did.
One of the key players in the revolution that was Reform Christianity, our version of Martin Luther and that more famous man’s contemporary, died on the battlefield in full armor with a battle-axe in his hand, unwisely abandoning his Christian pacifism to defend his city from a coalition of Swiss Confederation’s Catholic cantons. So despite Yoder’s warning that we should not get caught up in the theological debates of the 16th century, we are going to take a detour here on World Communion Sunday to engage Huldrych Zwingi, cleric with a battle-axe, and the problem of what we mean when we repeat the words “this is my body, this is my blood.”
Zwingli’s reformation began in Zurich not long after Luther nailed his theses to the door. Initially seen as less threatening, the Zurich reformation would prove more radical in the end, and would experience an internal schism that would create an even more more radical reform, the Anabaptist tradition that gives us, among other things, thinkers like the Mennonite theologians John Howard Yoder and my great teacher, the late Gordon Kaufman. But the Anabaptists will have to wait for another Sunday…
Despite the key role Zwingli plays in our Congregationalist theological trajectory, and therefore in the theological trajectory that shaped the American identity, it is the name of a successor, Jean Calvin, that became associated with the movement. If Zwingli is mentioned at all, it is for Marburg, where a Hessian prince brought Zwingli and Luther together in an effort to reconcile the two reformers, who disagreed on a number of smaller issues, and one great issue, communion.
Zwingli and Luther were both influenced by the humanism of the Dutch philosopher Erasmus, quite reasonably considered the father of the Enlightenment. Luther was simply not willing to take that thinking to its logical conclusion. The two men agreed that communion, also called the eucharist or the Lord’s Supper, was not a sacrifice, as Christ was the final sacrifice. But Luther still believed that the bread and the wine were transformed during consecration. Zwingli, who had abolished the Mass itself with the consent of the Zurich council, believed that the bread was still bread and the wine was still wine, that they were just symbols, not the vehicles of grace. Bread is bread, just like the bread David and his troops would take from the Tent of Meeting as they fled from the mad king, Saul the insane. Bread is bread. You eat it.
This has far bigger implications than just what happens to bread and wine. It engages the question of whether clergy have some God-given mojo that makes the magic happen, that makes bread into flesh. This is all about control. Reform theology, our theology, bridles at the idea that anyone controls the flow of grace. The idea that only a pope can make bishops, only a bishop can make priests, only a priest can make the magic that changes souls, was repugnant to our spiritual ancestors. They did not think any man, and it was always a man, should stand between humans and the divine, at least not any man besides that singular man they claimed as their own, Jesus.
Besides, as Zwingli pointed out, Jesus used metaphor all the time. We’ve always played this game of picking and choosing which words in scripture were literal and which figurative. We’re willing to write off almost everything Jesus said about justice, about forgiveness, about wealth, yet this is where some choose to say, “No, he really meant that one. It really becomes flesh. That’s real blood in there.”
History tells us that Luther wept when he and Zwingli were unable to agree. Maybe he understood how powerful unity would have been for the reformation, but neither man would budge. So firm was Luther’s conviction that Zwingli was in error, that he told his followers that it was better to be in the Roman church than to be affiliated with Zwingli and the Zurich reform.
Centuries removed from these disputes, we are in full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, this country’s largest Lutheran body. One of the four major Christian movements that merged to form the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, had Lutheran antecedents, so Lutherans are as much our theological cousins as are the Disciples of Christ.
Given the collapse of religious practice in America, the heresy of fundamentalism, and the rise of white nationalist Christianity, we have far bigger worries than how we each understand communion, and even if we did choose to nit-pick, given how many members of the United Church of Christ are refugees from other traditions, it is hard to say there even is such a thing as a UCC position. We don’t really do theology in the UCC. We are not credal, don’t have a catechism or litmus test, for membership. Believe it or not, however, we do have this heritage, this theological trajectory, and the things our predecessors believed led them to do the things they did, things like the Amistad defense and the Abolitionist movement, being the first to ordain a woman and an openly LGBTQ individual, bringing the lawsuit that integrated the public airwaves, one of the first acts of the merged church.
So maybe, in reconnecting with that heritage, we are reconnecting to the charger that gave Congregationalists and the United Church of Christ the power to change lives. Because changing lives is what we are all about, right?
Let’s start by debunking the idea that Jesus came to found a new religion meant to replace Judaism, and that he created two sacraments for that new religion. Simply didn’t happen. Jesus preached a Jewish reformation, just like John the Baptizer, who might well have been his actual cousin. A comparison with John’s ministry might help us see what is so unique in Jesus’ ministry.
John the Baptizer preached repentance baptism as a closed community. You were initiated into the repentance community which provided protection from divine sanction, from the Day of the Lord, destruction and judgment. Though we have references to Jesus telling his disciples to baptize, it feels like the command at the end of Matthew, to baptize all nations, is a late addition to the text, possibly meant to co-opt the followers of John, for the repentance movement around John would continue after John’s execution at the hands of Herod Antipas.
If John’s community initiation rite creates insiders and outsiders, Jesus is oriented completely toward the outsiders, not just in Luke’s account, which places particular emphasis on women and others without power, but in all of the gospels, and indeed, in the formation of Christianity itself. It is exactly the radical openness of the table fellowship that characterizes the life and teaching of Jesus, his dining with those deemed unacceptable to good religious folks, his calling and healing of sinners and the unclean, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, his interactions with Gentiles, for despite mixed feelings, his is a ministry that changes Gentile lives too, long before Paul comes along.
The radical welcome of the table fellowship would be so central to the Jesus movement that correcting an error in it is a primary concern in Paul’s first letter to the church gathered at Corinth, the text we use in our communion rites, a letter we use constantly in the life of church. Paul the pastor warns that the well-to-do Corinthians are getting together first to drink the good wine before the riff-raff arrive, then breaking out the cheap stuff, the Thunderbird or Ripple of an earlier age. But Paul also warns the community not to treat the communal meal as just an ordinary meal, which is confusing, because Jesus chose the elements and practice of an ordinary meal in table fellowship as the way to remember him.
This is my body. Figurative language, not magic. This is my body, not bread but you, you gathered, you who will gather to remember me. Bread is bread. It is the church that is the body of Christ, Paul tells us. It is not a building, not an institution, not a priest doling out grace, forgiveness and sacrament in some arbitrary and capricious way. What is the lifeblood of the church? Not wine, good or bad or Welch’s grape juice. You are the lifeblood of the church, filled with Spirit, fickle and finite.
Jesus is not creating a closed community centered on esoteric rites and legalistic theologies housed in some special holy place you visit once a week or twice a year. They broke bread and drank wine wherever they gathered, in every home, at every meal, not the first Sunday of the month or once a quarter, as an excuse to bring out the good silver. Whenever you do this, remember me. Do what? Magic? No. Whenever you break bread together.
Communion is magic, is transformative, but not because I have D&D like magic powers, can cast a transformation spell on a loaf of bread, though that would be kind of awesome. Communion is magic because it is meant to be radically open, this table where all are welcome because His table was one where all were welcome, Pharisee and prostitute, the unclean and the scrupulous. Like those who erred in Corinth, we are in error if we look around this table and see folks who look just like us, images of middle-class respectability and boredom. The table of Christ is made up of the broken, the forgiven, those that society throws away. This is my body, those who gather in my name and remember me, the freaks and the oddballs, the trouble-causers and the peacemakers, the lonely and the addicted, all those who need healing, and those who have been healed. This is no place for the righteous and respectable, because why would those folks want their life changed anyway?
Can praying, breaking bread, and passing the cup be transformational? Can magic happen, not in a reordering of molecules, but it a reordering of lives?
I’ve seen stranger things.
Amen.