Preached by Winton Boyd on June 22, 2008
Text: 1 Corinthians 11:17-26;
Early this week, we expect to receive 18 handmade drums direct from Ghana. Because of the internet and international banks and friendships – we were able to dream about, order, partially design, purchase and ship those drums in a matter of a couple of weeks. As we were ordering, our friend Nani was in touch with his friend in Ghana who was literally in the jungles looking for appropriate trees. So, in the matter of a few short weeks, trees that stood in that jungle will be used as drums in this sanctuary. It is amazing.
Likewise, when our German guest pastor preached here about a year ago, his family could go online that night to hear a digital recording of that sermon from our website.
In so many ways, our lives are enriched by the shrinking global world. At the same time, the shrinking Global world brings sharp differences into view – differences in culture, religion, politics, and family dynamics.
When a group of pastors from Wisconsin traveled to Israel in 2005, we were able to meet and fellowship with a Greek Catholic priest in Palestine. All of us recognized that while this priest is world renown and travels extensively, and has done a great deal to educate children, he is autocraticand paternalistic. The female pastors in our group also realize that this priest acknowledges they are pastors, he rarely affirms their comments, asks them questions, or considers their opinions. In his part of the world, and in his church, he is not unique.
When members of this church shared worship with a small Pentecostal Church in the Dominican Republic, they were all welcomed, althought the LBGT members of the group suspected that were the pastor to realize how we live out our Open and Affirming understanding of faith, they would not have welcomed us to participate in the evening’s service of prayer and praise.
These two examples highlight issues that have become powerful forces of division, debate, schism, and even violence in the world and in the church today. In just a couple of weeks, the Anglican communion will sponsor its once a decade Lambeth Conference, gathering leaders and their spouses from around the globe. Because of one leader and his same sex spouse (Gene Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire), this could very well be the last Lambeth Conference, as that great worldwide church is on the verge of splitting up over the gay and lesbian issues.
Our church does not have a worldwide communion and our polity is congregationally based – but the differences we feel are not unlike those tearing about the Anglicans, the United Methodist Church, Presbyterians, and others.
Peter Berger, who has taught sociology and theology at Boston University, and directs the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. His research suggests that globalization has affected religious life in at least two ways. First, we can communicate with anyone about anything; whether you talk about crime or about politics or about religion. It results in situations like American evangelicals making a movie which is shown in Nepalese villages or Buddhist missionaries who walk around in Chicago.
A second result of this communication is that vast numbers of people are moving from a faith of “destiny” where they lived in a small, isolated world to a life of “choice.” Where Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Jews, and others once lived in relatively isolated enclaves and did not know anyone not like them, today those who practice the Protestant or Catholic or any other faith choose said faith over the wide variety of possiblities around them.
In a religiously plural world – people are not “destined” to be Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, or Sikh; they choose it. The more pluralistic our context, the more the life of faith is a choice. The challenge for spiritual communities – for congregations and traditions like ours – is to embrace a “chosen” religious practice that is meaningful, powerful, and generous towards the world – not restrictive, oppressive, judgmental, or polemic. Our challenge, in a constantly evolving world, is recognize God’s call to create communities that welcome choice, that welcome generosity and curiosity and hope for the world, not communities that offer an ethnocentric tribalism.
Jonathon Sacks, a London based Rabbi and author of The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations.
“On the one hand, globalization is bringing us closer together than ever before, interweaving our lives, nationally and internationally, in complex and inextricable ways.
On the other, a new tribalism, a regression to older and more fractious loyalties, is driving us evermore angrily apart.
One way or another, religion is and will continue to be part of these processes. It can lead us in the direction of peace, but it can equally, and with high combustibility, lead us to war.
Politicians have power, but religions have something stronger: They have influence. Politics moves the pieces on the chess board; religion changes lives.”
Our UCC Statement of Faith, which we read together last week, calls us “to share in Christ’s baptism and eat at his table” with people all over the world. It is our way, as Christians, of expressing that while being a part of a global church is a great thing, it is only through living life sacramentally, living life with a deep awareness of God’s grace, that we will be able to bridge differences in world view, faith practice, and theology.
Ironically, the celebration of communion has always functioned as a unifying practice, a unifying act of acknowledging our humanness before God’s overarching love and grace – even in divided settings.
As he broke bread with his disciples the first time, Jesus offered God’s presence as the healing power, knowing division had already set in among his followers.
This was true for the Apostle Paul as well. Gerd Theisen, biblical theologican, reflects on today’s text, noting that “some wealthier Christians in the Corinthian community who donated bread and wine for all at the meals were treating the common meal as a ‘private’ meal. In turn, regular members of the community would be expecting to have some ‘special’ food at the gathering, which they would not get. These members of lower social status were experiencing disappointment as the wealthier members ate and drank with their associates during the common meal and did not share any of their food with members outside their group. Paul speaks strongly to the wealthier members of the community, exhorting them with both social and theological arguments to create images and motivations for community and sacramental activity together.”
Because sacraments are moments when God’s grace is unusually apparent, they can, Paul’s ministry suggests, unite otherwise disagreeable and divided people of faith. Robert B. Kruschwitz, director The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University suggests that this is because the communion table forms us in faithfulness. As it celebrates God’s abiding and abundant presence and God’s faithfulness to humanity, it calls us to Christ and one another around the table. Even gathering around the table, as we do each week, reminds us that original grace, original mercy and blessing come not from our actions, but are inherent in being created in the image of God. The act of gathering, celebrating, and returning to this table is a formation activity. It creates a spiritual memory of sorts.
As people of faith, as people rooted in baptism, we claim participation in a faith community as a character shaping activity. We claim a faith that values fidelity and hospitality, as opposed to some of the traits encouraged by culture wars –self-centeredness and aggression toward others, and rigidity about being right.
Peter Berger concludes the interview I read with a story from his family. His oldest son is married to a woman from India who is a Hindu, not terribly practicing, but she is a Hindu. His son and his wife have two children, including a six-year-old granddaughter. They lived in suburban Maryland, and this little girl had fascinating conversations with her neighbors, other five-year-old little girls, trying to explain why her mother had a Hindu statue in her bedroom. For awhile there was a little girl across the street whose parents were missionaries for Jews for Jesus. It was fascinating, he notes, to watch how these two little girls tried to come to terms with each other. How different this setting was than the setting of this Austrian, Catholic grandfather!
Berger concludes that sociologically speaking (and I would add spiritually speaking) it is really much more important that these “low level” or ordinary conversations occur than conversations among intellectuals who meet in seminar rooms and issue papers.
It is also much more important that we engage in hospitable conversation and merciful action in the name of faith. It is not helpful to remove our faith from the equation all together. Pretending that religion has no role, or that a faith-less dialogue will heal the wounds religion and faith have created in the world more readily than a healing faith-based dialogue is short sighted and blind to the amazing rise of religious practice in our day.
Conversation and healing begin with relationships – be they among kindergarten children or coworkers, relatives and neighbors. Just as Jesus rooted the breaking of the bread in the grace of the Holy Spirit experienced WITHIN the community of the disciples, so will the healing and hope we engender as baptized and communion formed Christians be rooted in relationships.
I am reminded of a small Jewish synagogue in the now Muslim village of Shefferam in Israel. The last practicing Jews left the village generations ago and when they did, they entrusted the safety and protection of the building in the hands of their respectful and loving Muslim neighbors. The Muslim father and son and grandson and great grandson have now handed the keys to that building to one another. Father and son and grandson and great grandson have respected that building in a time of rising conflict between Jews and Muslims in their country because they respect and honor the relationship of their forebears.
Stories like these are a reminder that as we gather in faith, we root ourselves in a loving relationship with God, with one another. They are a reminder that as we move out from this gathering, as we view our lives, our relationships and even our enemies sacramentally, as we view them through the eyes of God, we go with the healing, caring, merciful power of God. May we never underestimate what God does through us. May we never lose sight of the influence we too can have on the hurts and afflictions of the world.
