Scripture: Luke 10:25-37
I have spent the better part of this past week being sick with bronchitis and am still not fully recovered. I had promised myself that since this is a communion service and since we have a congregational meeting following worship today, that I would keep the sermon on the short side. With sickness entering into the equation, it was not hard to keep that promise.
I’ll be honest with you. You know I’m just getting into what will be a series of sermons on the teachings of Jesus, but I knew what I wanted to say today before I knew what teaching of Jesus I was going to talk about. I guess that means that I’m guilty of doing what so many people do, that is, use the Bible to support something we want to say anyway. In my defense, I will say that preachers do this all the time, even those who complain about others doing it, even sometimes those who sincerely think they are not doing it themselves. It’s not just the devil who can quote scripture to his own purposes. We all do it, at least some, and I have done it today.
I will also be honest with you and tell you that in what I want to say I know I will be repeating myself, not word for word, but the idea of what I have on my mind is something that I’ve tried to say in one way or another on a number of other occasions, including several other World Communion Sundays, which is what today is. World Communion Sunday or World Wide Communion has been around since the 1930’s. The idea was that on the first Sunday of October every year, Christians from all over the world, Christians from different cultures and different denominations, Christians worshiping in homes and on hillsides, in modest buildings and in fancy cathedrals and everything in between, would take communion “together”, that is that we would agree to observe communion on the same day, calling to mind as we did so, all our sisters and brothers in other places who were also taking communion with that idea in mind.
Observing World Communion Sunday was supposed to be a witness to the oneness of Christians who, whatever their differences were nevertheless united as members of the body of Christ symbolized at the communion table. It was a way of lifting up a vision of Christian unity that transcends geography and theology and all sorts of other differences, lifting up a hope that one day we would be able to put behind us all the quarreling that Christians so often seemed engaged in and that seemed so unbecoming of Christians, so unloving, so beside the point as far as what being a Christian ought to be all about.
World Communion Sunday was never a practice that all Christians bought into, not even close. But in some circles it was a significant day, and many churches in the United Church of Christ and other major denominations would acknowledge it in some way. The hope of greater Christian unity seemed worth devoting a Sunday to every so often, and World Communion Sunday was one of those occasions.
I’m not so sure that very many churches nowadays pay it very much attention. Maybe it’s because there is so much passionate disunity in the church these days, disunity even within a single denomination, much less within the larger field of Christianity, so much disunity that Christian unity just doesn’t seem like a very realistic dream to have these days. Some may not even be so sure that it is a dream worth having these days. I count myself among them.
In many ways the Christian church is in turmoil right now. Maybe turmoil is just a nice word for conflict, but I think I really mean turmoil, not just conflict. In major denominations as we all know there is conflict over issues relating to homosexuality and the church. But that is just the current issue that gets the most press. There has been and continues to be conflict over race and gender and stances regarding war and peace, to name just a few things, for many years now. In every denomination there are groups that have formed saying the denomination has gone too far in some direction or another, or not far enough. In every denomination congregations have withheld financial support, have left or are threatening to leave. It has caused people to argue over theology and their understandings of the church and their understandings of what it means to be a Christian. The conflicts the main line denominations are currently experiencing are not only about homosexuality. They have been there for a long time, have been building in intensity for a long time, and they need to be allowed to play out. The turmoil we are currently seeing in so many Christian denominations is part of a sorting out process that needs to happen, uncomfortable as it may be, and trying to sidestep that conflict, trying to avoid the turmoil in the name of Christian unity would not be a good thing. Probably not possible, but even if it were possible, not a good thing.
I’m not an expert on the world of evangelical Christianity, but my sense is that that segment of Christianity is also in some turmoil. Again there have always been differences of all sorts in the evangelical world. As an example, the idea that evangelical Christianity is essentially the same as what is often referred to as the Christian right has been challenged for many years by the group of folks who share our name centered around Sojourners magazine and the Sojourners community in Washington D.C. They have been fighting this battle for a long time, trying to get their brothers and sisters who identify as evangelical to embrace causes other than the right to life movement, trying to get the rest of the world to understand that evangelical Christianity and right wing Christianity are not necessarily the same thing. In recent years, however, their struggle has been less lonely as more and more evangelicals have publicly identified poverty and war and racism as matters of deep Christian concern. My point being that there is increasing turmoil in the evangelical wing of Christianity as well, turmoil that needs to take place and not be avoided in the name of Christian unity.
But beyond all that, what I want to say this morning is that what the world needs right now is not Christian unity, but a unity that transcends the Christian faith and all faiths. What the world needs right now is for Christianity and all religions to become unhooked from all the forces of violence in our world. What the world needs right now is for the Christian faith and all faiths to become voices of peace for all God’s people, voices of unity for all people, not just Christian people. What the world needs right now is for the Christian faith, and all faiths, to become less divisive and more unifying for all people, not just Christian people. Christian unity seems like such an insignificant thing to hope for in today’s world, such a meager dream to have. Christian unity, even if it could be achieved, even if it were a good thing to be achieved, can no longer be, if it ever was, our most fervent prayer. Even if it could be achieved, it would leave our most important work undone, and would leave us to live at risk in a murderous world where religion all too often plays a significant role in the killing. The communion table before us today needs to represent not just a Christian practice in which Christians may find their unity with each other. It needs rather to represent a vision of human oneness, a hope and a dream and a prayer that all God’s people may be one, a banquet table open to everyone.
So I went looking for a scripture along these lines, a teaching of Jesus. Trouble is Jesus didn’t have a lot to say about any of this directly. He did not live in a world of globalization. Islam did not exist. Christianity did not exist. The kinds of issues I’ve been talking about mostly did not present themselves to him. But there were the Samaritans, and I decided to choose the familiar scripture about the Good Samaritan. Usually when we talk about this story we focus on the fact that the Samaritan was the one who stopped to help, and we focus on the need to respond to people in need and sometimes get all wrapped up in questions about our own internal conflicts over such things, how guilty we should feel over all those times we have passed people by.
But the question that prompted the story was not whether and under what conditions we ought to stop and help someone by the side of the road. The question was: Who is my neighbor? We know that Samaritans were despised and discriminated against. Specifically they were people who had cooperated with the Babylonians when they had invaded and carried people off into exile (if you remember the story from Jeremiah). They had intermarried with the Babylonians and over the centuries had developed sort of a hybrid religion of their own separate from their Jewish cousins. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan not just to say that it’s a good thing to show compassion to someone who is hurt, and yes even Samaritans can do that. He told the parable to say, quite simply, the Samaritan, this despicable infidel, is your neighbor, that is to say, your sister and your brother. I hear him saying that he was called not to reform the Jewish community or to create a Christian community but to build a human community.
So are we…called to be building a human community. If striving for Christian unity is a part of that process at all, it is a very small part. In our world it is crucial for religion to cease to be a source of competing claims to truth and salvation and become a source of unity, human unity, transcending religion. In that spirit may we come to the communion table on this World Communion Sunday. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 5, 2008