Scripture: Mark 10:2-16
I can be pretty precise about this, even though it was forty-two years ago. It was a crisp, gorgeous fall afternoon, just about this time of year, and I was sitting in a college classroom wishing I wasn’t sitting in a college classroom. It was a course called Modern Religious Thought. We read mostly novels and talked about the deep religious concepts that were to be found in them. The teacher, Gerhard Spiegler, talked in a thick German accent that made everything sound profound. I had been liking the course a lot—up to then.
But on this particular day it was just too nice out; it was a day made to revel in and that could make you feel like there was not a care in the world. Inside, where I was being held prisoner, we were talking about atonement, and things were not going particularly well as far as I was concerned. People were saying a lot of things I didn’t understand or couldn’t get interested in. What I did understand I didn’t like. Professor Spiegler had just finished summarizing the traditional, orthodox Christian view of substitutionary atonement—briefly the idea that we are all sinners and deserve a terrible punishment, but that God loved us so much that he sent Jesus, God’s own son, to take the punishment on himself and thus spare the rest of us the punishment that we so richly deserved. I was not sympathetic. But at the age of 19 in my first religion class I was not prepared to argue the point, especially with a teacher who had a heavy German accent. So I was just sitting there being unhappy, glancing wistfully and wishfully out the window whenever I could.
Then I remember the teacher saying something to the effect of: “But you don’t have to look at atonement that way. You don’t have to believe in a god who tortures people and requires suffering in order to make up for sin. Atonement doesn’t have to be that. After all, he said, the word can be broken down so that it reads “at-one-ment” and there’s a whole lot of ways of thinking about at-one-ment.
Now, at the age of 61, that insight is no longer new. I have pointed out that atonement can be read as at-one-ment so many times myself and have heard it so often from others that it seems a little worn, maybe almost worn out. But when I was 19 it was a revelation. The idea of atonement didn’t have to be as mysterious or objectionable as it had always been to me. I still wasn’t sure that I knew what at-one-ment was supposed to mean, but it had the effect of opening a door for me, and as you see, I have always remembered the happening. I was still really glad to be released from class that day, but I walked out onto a beautiful fall day now with a different attitude, wondering what it would mean to be at one with God, in fact not just wondering but wanting to be at one with God.
That is a piece of the sermon for this morning. That’s all the sermon is going to be this morning—pieces—thoughts, questions, images, memories—pieces pasted together like a collage. (Thus the sermon title.) Here’s another piece.
This is World Communion Sunday. I have mixed feelings about World Communion Sunday. It was started back in the 1930’s in an effort to emphasize and symbolize the idea that Christianity is diverse and inclusive of people of all colors, classes, conditions, stations, races, nationalities, languages, customs, or rituals. Generally I have liked World Communion. I have felt it to be gently subversive of the tendency to think of Christianity as somehow linked up with North American ways of life, gently subversive of the parochialism that so easily infects the church, gently subversive of the little squabbles that separate Christians from each other. More positively, I have seen it as an opportunity to offer a vision of the church. If we can’t actually sit down around a table or break bread with people from other lands and cultures and churches, then at least maybe we can imagine ourselves doing that, receiving communion at least symbolically with people from Siberia and Samoa and Paraguay and Palestine and Kenya and Korea and India and Indianapolis, and saying to ourselves that we are bound together by something greater than what divides us, saying to ourselves that in spite of everything going on in the world, we are sisters and brothers, we who have chosen to take communion “together” on World Communion Sunday.
But then I have had other thoughts too. Christians are divided on all sorts of things. Some churches don’t participate in World Communion because they don’t observe communion. Some whole segments of Christianity don’t participate because they don’t like the politics of the segment that came up with the idea. Maybe instead of saying pretty words about Christian unity, we should give it up, the whole idea, just give it up, and focus instead on what really does divide Christians and what ought to, what is worth fighting about, which in my view are not questions about bishops and baptism, but major matters of justice and mercy. Furthermore, I have come to the point where I think Christian unity is not what we should be aiming for anyway, that unity with people of other faiths and no faith is what we need to be somehow struggling toward, not unity among Christians. I need communion, in order for it to be a sacrament for me, I need communion to be without the overlay of the idea that God needs blood as a payment for sin, and I need it to be without the idea that the purpose here is to promote the unity of the body of Christ, as opposed to everyone else. I need to be clear that this is an effort to envision and hold on to the dream not of Christian unity but of human at-one-ment.
Speaking of people of other religions, tonight for our Jewish brothers and sisters is the beginning of Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement. For some Christian people communion recalls the death of Jesus and involves or at least suggests those ideas about atonement, how Jesus’ death bought us our forgiveness. For some Jewish people Yom Kippur is the highest, the holiest of Holy Days, and recalls, as communion may for Christians, at least our need to be restored to some right relationship with God and with other people.
Yom Kippur also reminds me of the Yom Kippur War of 30 years ago, and of the long, sad, bloody history that it stands for and that is still very much with us. Is there any better evidence of our need for at-one-ment than that history which is not just theirs but ours? Is there any better evidence of the need for a whole huge weight of sorrow to be lifted somehow? Is there any better evidence of our human need to atone, to begin now to make up for what has been and to put things right. Is there any better evidence that theories and theologies don’t make it happen, that real forgiveness doesn’t come easy—Jesus does teach us that—that it requires atonement, hard work, doing things that will try to make up for the past and change the future, and that we humans don’t seem to be very good at it.
Wouldn’t it be better to begin with confession, to confess that we are in need, broken bread, broken lives, pieces of sorrow and of hope and of love needing to be put back together, but not knowing exactly how? Maybe we humans can find a unity in our need that we cannot find in our answers.
Yom Kippur is a time of fasting. Communion is a time of feeding. Here too, different approaches. Though not so different, maybe. Fasting is part of Christian practice too. It reminds me that there is discipline and effort involved in moving toward being at one with God. Communion reminds me that it is a gift, being one with God. Both are true. Fasting asks me to consider what I can do without, need to do without. Communion asks me what it is that I hunger for, what will feed me, nourish me. Both are necessary, two sides of the same coin, in fact. But I need Yom Kippur to remind me that atonement is not just something Jesus did but is a process that leads to at-one-ment, and that it is a long, hard, slow process that requires my involvement. It is not the theology of atonement that matters in the end, but the determined attempt on my part, on our part, to live as one.
When I take and eat at communion, I do not believe I am being told that if I eat this bread I will never again be hungry, not told that whatever I have done, I am forgiven because Christ died for me, not told that I should go home with a warm feeling in my heart, but that in remembrance of Christ I am reminded of the brokenness of my life, reminded that God comes to me in my brokenness, sometimes in the simplest of things like bread and juice, sometimes in pieces, in whispers or glimpses or touches, and reminded that the effort to be at one is costly. I take and eat and it is my hunger that is fed, a hunger to be at one, and I commit myself again to live with that hunger, to feed that hunger and let it feed me, and not to go away content.
I don’t mean these words as my statement on the meaning of communion. They are just the words that come to me today, and I leave the rest for other times and other words and for meanings that cannot be said in words.
But I do have a few more words—of a different sort. Words about the giftedness of our lives, and the meanings of communion that have to do with that giftedness. I am not at all well-versed in Buddhism or steeped in Buddhist ways of thought, but according to my limited understanding, a person with Buddhist sensitivities would probably have been listening to much of what I have been saying this morning and just sitting there smiling and probably shaking her head. I think the Buddhist point of view on all this might be that at-one-ment is not really a matter of discipline and effort, that we don’t have to re-commit ourselves to the task of becoming at one, that we don’t really have to attempt anything, that all that is not a good way of looking at things. I believe or imagine the Buddhist view is that the reality is that we are already at one, we just somehow don’t see it. So that what we need is to give up all this strenuous striving and simply to open the eyes of our souls and know that where we are trying to get to, we are already there.
I have been aware of this other way of looking at things, Buddhist or not, all along as I was thinking all my other thoughts and saying all my other words this morning, and I believe this other way of looking at things is also true, that it is another facet of the Truth that we can only see a facet at a time. And so when I ran across the words of a Jewish writer who seemed to be drawing on this understanding, his words also resonated with me, and I decided to end with the images this Jewish writer offered to me, a Christian on World Communion Sunday, in what I imagine to be a Buddhist sort of spirit. The following words are some mine, but mostly they are inspired by a Jewish writer who wanted to approach the traditional Jewish words, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” in a new way.
AT EVERY BOUNDARY, THE WORLD IS ONE
- And when we come to a doorway between the risky world and our safe homes, when we might believe these are two separate worlds — then we pause at the doorway to remember to remind ourselves:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. - And when we come to the doorway in time between our active rising up and our dreamy, sleepy lying down, the doorway between our grabbing hold of the world and our letting go of the world, when we might believe these are two separate worlds – then we pause at that moment to remember to remind ourselves:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. - And when we look at our hands and experience our eyes, when we might believe these are two separate worlds, the world of observing, watching, and the world of doing, making, the world of taking in and appreciating what is around us and trying to change and remake and reform what is around us — — then we pause to bind our eyes and hands together and we remember to remind ourselves:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. - And when we come to the gateway of our cities, the boundary of our own cultures and communities, when we might believe these are two separate worlds — the world where everybody speaks my language and the world of those out there who are alien to us—then we pause at that gateway to remember to remind ourselves:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. - And when we look beyond all human life at those beings that do not speak at all — mountains and rivers, ozone and oak trees, beetles and bees—when we might say they live in an utterly separate non-human world apart from us, and when we imagine that that world has no purpose except to serve us, then we pause at the boundary of our consciousness to watch and listen for what is holy and not human and to
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. - And when we might assert one thing is certain, inside my skin I know what’s what but everything outside me is mysterious and alien — these are two separate worlds—then we look at the fuzzy fringes of our clothing, we look at these threads of connection that bind us to the air around us and through it to each other and we pause at that moment to remember to remind ourselves:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. - And when we come to that final doorway whose other side no one has ever seen, and we might think that the world of life and the world of death are two utterly separate worlds—then we pause at that doorway to remember to remind ourselves:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
Today I will take and eat and know also that in these ways and in infinite mysterious other ways I am already at one. Amen
Jim Bundy
October 5, 2003