Sermon: In the Breaking of the Bread

First Presbyterian Church

April 19, 2026, Easter 3C

Luke24:13-35

 

In the Breaking of the Bread

 

 

One of the characteristic features of Luke’s gospel is that Jesus and the disciples spend an awful lot of time at the dinner table or otherwise gathered around food.

More broadly one could argue – and at least one author has – that one of the underlying themes of the gospel is hospitality – both the ways in which Jesus sought to minister to those around them through the practice of welcome, the practice of enabling others to feel “at home” in his presence, and the ways in which such hospitality was (or was not) extended towards Jesus – whether Jesus was made welcome or not.

But the specific hospitality context of a meal does come up awfully frequently in Luke’s gospel. There are at least ten different accounts in Luke in which the action taking place is either a meal or is something that takes place in the context of a meal; six of those stories are unique to Luke, not found in any of the other gospels. In addition, another seven accounts in Luke feature meals or eating or food in the context of Jesus’s teaching to the crowds or to the disciples, or sometimes in the context of conflict with the religious authorities, such as the incident in which Jesus’s disciples were criticized for plucking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the first appearance of the risen Christ that Luke records in his gospel features a meal as its turning point.

We start on the road, though. Two of Jesus’s followers – not among the twelve, but clearly followers who had been with Jesus for some time – were, for reasons we don’t know, walking from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus. We might wonder if these two are guilty of the same breaking-fellowship error as Thomas in last week's gospel reading

This is on the third day. We find out later that this is after the women have come back from the empty tomb, as recorded in the first part of this chapter, but at this point no one has actually seen Jesus. We have accounts from the women of the tomb being empty, but no sign of the risen Christ.

We hear that these two, one of whom will be called Cleopas a few verses later, are talking about “all these things that had happened.” We tend to presume that “all these things” are those events that happened in Jesus’s last week in Jerusalem, particularly from the Last Supper forward through the crucifixion. It might also have included that curious report from the women and Peter, who each went to Jesus’s tomb and saw it empty.

Whatever their subjects of discussion, they were so caught up in them that they didn’t notice the man who had caught up with them from behind. (Remember, we know it’s Jesus, but they don’t.) When he asks what they’re talking about, the two followers act as if it should have been impossible for anyone in Jerusalem to have missed the events surrounding Jesus and his crucifixion. They recite those events to him (again, not recognizing that it is Jesus), including the odd reports about the empty tomb. In doing so they reveal, in the words “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” that after all this time they might not have truly understood just what it was for Jesus to be the Messiah – not the military conqueror, but indeed a suffering servant and a true spiritual redeemer of Israel and of all.

It is this that Jesus picks up on and expounds upon as he begins to teach them, one more time, how all the things that he had said and done had been “necessary.” Going all the way back to Moses and working through all the law and the prophets he proclaims to them once again how all of his life and his teaching and, yes, his suffering and death, had been “necessary.”

What happens next, as the two travelers come to their destination, demonstrates that for all that the two disciples might have forgotten or misunderstood, they had remembered one thing, perhaps the most important thing. They had remembered how Jesus taught and showed them how to be his followers.

They remembered the table.

Not just the table at which Jesus had only days before broken bread and poured a cup and talked about his body and blood, and kept using words like “do this in remembrance of me.” Surely they remembered that one, but they seem to have remembered all those other meals and all those other tables – the one with five thousand fed by just a few loaves and fish; the one at Zacchaeus’s house, where a skinflint tax collector suddenly started making alternate plans for the distribution of his estate; the banquet at the home of another tax collector, Levi, who had dropped his whole business at a word to follow Jesus; the evening at the home of Mary and Martha, with Martha fussing over every detail while Mary presumed to sit at Jesus’s feet with the other disciples; a dinner at the home of a man named Simon, with some of the most disreputable people around.

They remembered, and they wouldn’t let the stranger go without breaking bread with them.

The rest of the story is fairly familiar; the stranger, the guest, takes over as host and breaks the bread – I know that breaking of the bread – that’s Jesus! – only for him to disappear from sight; the rushed return to Jerusalem, where the disciples tell them about Jesus appearing to Simon (we tend to assume they’re speaking of Peter, but we don't know for sure); and then, in the remainder of the chapter beyond this reading, Jesus himself appearing before them and teaching them, one last time.

In the breaking of the bread they recognized Jesus, yes; but it was in Cleopas and the other disciple reaching out to the stranger, inviting them into their own meal and their own room and sharing their resources with him, that Jesus was welcomed and able to break the bread.

One is reminded of the stories from Genesis, how Abraham and Sarah unwittingly entertained angels and even Yahweh himself in welcoming the stranger. We are also reminded of Jesus’s own words in Matthew 25, that what we do (or don’t do) for or to “the least of these,” we do to Jesus himself.

Our call, at its most elemental and most basic (and one that a lot of Christians today reject), is to make welcome for the stranger, for the guest; for the disaster victim, for the refugee, for the migrant, for the sojourners among us, whoever they may be. This, even more than our prayers and offerings and worship, is how we welcome Christ among us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal); #246, Christ Is Alive!; #254, That Easter Day with Joy Was Bright; #249, Because You Live, O Christ

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon: Remember Me

First Presbyterian Church

April 2, 2026, Maundy Thursday A

Matthew 26:26-30; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

 

Remember Me

 

 

I have very distinct memories of the Lord’s Supper, when I was a child, looking for all the world like a funeral service. Table (and all the elements on it) covered in a shroud, the church’s deacons (no elders in that denomination), all male, dressed in black and looking exactly like pallbearers at a funeral…the only reason I didn’t immediately think of it this way was because, at that young an age, I hadn’t been to enough funerals to know. When I finally did see a couple of funerals and then saw the Lord’s Supper in church on a Sunday looking pretty much the same, I honestly think I was scarred just a little bit. It might have been worse if we’d had it more than four times a year.

Since then I have studied enough history to know that such presentation of the Lord’s Supper was not only common, it even came with official backing in at least one of the ancestor denominations to the PC(USA); its Book of Order described and prescribed exactly that kind of setup for the table, even to the point of how the shroud was to be folded when removed, and how it was to be replaced over the elements when the Supper was done. This was as far back, if I remember correctly, as 1796. There is a long history of treating the Lord’s Supper primarily as a memorial.

At this point in my life and ministry I can no longer believe that’s precisely what Jesus was going for here, as recounted by Paul in what we now know as the Words of Institution.

As Paul describes the scene (in what is our earliest written account of it), Jesus performs the acts we know – breaking the bread, filling the cup – and marks each one with the appropriate theological significance – “my body that is for you,” “the new covenant in my blood.” But then what does he say? “Do this in remembrance of my sacrifice”? “Do this in remembrance of my death”? “Do this in remembrance of what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

No. “Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Do this in remembrance of me.” Remember me. Remember the one who journeyed with you all around Galilee and Judea. Remember the one who taught you, who sent you out to preach and teach and heal. Remember me, the one with whom you shared so many meals at so many tables. The one who lived with you all these years.

Later in this same letter Paul will take issue with some in the Corinthian church who somehow doubt that Christ was ever raised from the dead.  It is one of the most impassioned parts of this epistle, and in the end Paul finally goes so far as to declare that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (15:17), and even further, “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (15:19).  But then the good news: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (15:20).

Even back in our words of institution, Jesus instructs his disciples that in the sharing of this bread and cup, we do “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (11:26). If all we have to show here is Jesus’s funeral, if what happened in this meal and then in the garden and finally on Golgotha is all there is to the story, then we really are kinda hopeless, aren’t we?

Do this in remembrance of me. Remember me.

The animated film Coco understands what power memory has. The young boy at the center of the story, who accidentally journeys into the Land of the Dead of Mexican folklore, is in the end rushing back from that land to be at the side of his "mama Coco"; as she is slowly fading, her memories slipping away, the boy sings to her a song that her own father had sung to her as a young child, before leaving the family to try to provide for them as a musician - a journey on which he ends up being murdered, unbeknownst to his family. That song had been made famous by the man who murdered her father and stole the song, presenting it as his own and becoming famous. But in these final moments, as the boy sings her father’s song haltingly to his mama Coco, the first sparks of life come to her face. (Any good music therapist will tell you that music can sometimes do this.) Her fingers begin to move, almost imperceptibly; her eyes open, ever so slowly; in the end, her own halting voice joins with the boy’s to finish the song, as she smiles for possibly the first time in years:

Remember me, though I have to travel far
Remember me, each time you hear a sad guitar
Know that I’m with you the only way that I can be
Until you’re in my arms again
Remember me

 

In this supper, in this bread and this cup passed among us, broken however imperfectly and maybe spilled a little bit, we remember Jesus, the whole life, the whole word, and in that remembering we are brought to new life, given a song to sing, a smile amid the tears of the everyday; we live in this testimony of the Christ who is coming again, and in whose life is our life.

Do this and remember.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Sermon: One Table

First Presbyterian Church

October 6, 2024, World Communion Sunday

Isaiah 25:6-9; Ephesians 2:13-22

 

One Table

 

 

You might have noticed that I've got my white stole out this morning, which is actually recommended for Sundays on which communion is observed. I don't usually do that, though. That’s because if the white vestments came out every time the sacrament should be observed in worship, we would never get to use any other vestments. There is no qualified religious authority or text that gives a good credible argument for why the sacrament should not be observed every time a congregation comes together for worship, even including such occasions as weddings and Services of Witness to the Resurrection. The first reactions against weekly communion came as anti-Catholic backlash in some Reformed areas during the Reformation, and over time that backlash morphed into the perceived “impracticality” of weekly observance, and sometimes into a desire to keep the Lord’s Supper “special,” which is to say, I guess, that nothing else about worship is “special.” But for today's occasion of World Communion Sunday, I'll use white.

The occasion of World Communion Sunday, marked today in many Protestant traditions, provides an occasion to critique those reluctances among many other things. It might be worth remembering that there is nothing else we do in worship that has quite the direct mandate as this sacrament, given most immediately by Jesus on the night before his death. The church at large was quick to make it the central feature of their gatherings, even if the teaching/preaching parts of their worship took up much more time. They sometimes got it wrong, as we see from Paul’s reprimand to the Corinthians in chapter 11 of his first letter to them, but they did it. It is, in short, a direct ministering of grace to his disciples, and to us who follow over the many centuries as part of the body of Christ.

I wonder sometimes if there’s something else at work in some churches’ reluctance to observe the sacrament more regularly. It’s a lot of work, especially when pandemic conditions have not forced these little two-sided containers of “bread” and “wine” upon us, to get together that much bread and (in most Protestant churches) grape juice for particularly larger congregation, to be sure. It’s also true that it takes time. There’s also the matter of the awkwardness of much theology about the table; is Christ really present in the bread and cup, or spiritually present (this would be the position of most churches in the Reformed tradition, like us Presbyterians), or is it all just symbolic? And there’s also the challenge of acknowledging Christ as the one who serves us all, when any idiot can look and see that I am not Christ, and nor is any other minister presiding at table this morning anywhere in the world.

But I wonder if the biggest obstacle for some churches is that this sacrament is something we share – not just among ourselves in one sanctuary, wherever we may be, but with all the church in all the world. That passage from Isaiah, with its references to "all peoples" and "all nations," reminds us that this vision doesn't merely date from Jesus's last meal with his disciples; it was the stuff of prophets' proclamations as well.

I’m not sure everybody likes that. Particularly in this country, it’s kind of a thing for churches – especially those on the presumed cutting edge of contemporary worship – to pride themselves on creating a distinct “culture,” of worship and pretty much everything else. The implied promise is that You won’t find this experience anywhere else. That attitude, honestly, can turn up in a church whether it plays the hottest new songs on the CCLI worship music charts or fills the air with the sounds of Bach and Mozart. 

The Lord’s Supper, though, is not unique, and is almost designed to thwart uniqueness. You break bread and pass it around, and you pour out the wine or juice and share it too. The bread will be different in different places, but it’s hard to be terribly different about the observance of this sacrament. We kinda have to share it, and not just with that church a few blocks away we don’t like. We share it with a worldful of churches in places we don’t like full of people we don’t like, against whom we’d much rather discriminate.

Among many other things this sacrament, and this particular occasion of observing it, does to us is this compelling to see ourselves not as some kind of “special” or “unique” outfit but elementally as part of Christ’s body, the church.

We don’t necessarily like that. I know there are probably some churches in this town where I’d be horrified to sit through a worship service, and my own past traumatic experiences make it hard to conceive of participating in much of anything with some churches. But that’s not up to me, and those churches are part of the body of Christ too. So to with churches in Haiti or Lebanon or Gaza or Afghanistan (to the degree that any churches are allowed to exist there anymore) or any number of places in the world that too many of our leaders and people demonize at every opportunity. 

And yet here this particular table stands, one of many around the world where bread and cup will be ministered on this day, with absolutely no checkpoints or gates or gatekeepers, open to anybody to whom the Lord calls. It stands as an open rebuke to the likes of the “church growth movement,” a seemingly innocuous thing in recent decades that promoted the use of things like “market segmentation” to encourage churches to seek out their members in moderately affluent, middle- to upper-class, and almost exclusively white neighborhoods – “people like us” as many churches would put it.

There are Christians at tables around the world on this day who are, to say the least, not like us. The reading from Ephesians reminds us, though, that even we ourselves were “not like us” before the working of Christ’s mercy and redemption opened the good news up beyond the Jewish origins of its earliest followers. We “Gentiles” – i.e. anyone non-Jewish – were the outsiders. You might even borrow a Jimmy Buffett song line and say that we were the people our parents warned us about. Indeed, those in churches these days who want to keep folks “out” are only “in” by the grace of God, and they really don’t like being reminded of that.

If they don’t like that, they really won’t like eternity. The feast we keep today is, again among many other things, a foreshadowing of the great feast to come. It will be a real "y'all come" feast, with God's children from all over - "all peoples" and "all nations" - joining in.

But for now, until that day in glory, we keep the feast here in this one small corner of the body of Christ, one part of a world of Christ’s followers, seeking to be faithful and to bear witness. And we share this meal with Christians all over God's good earth, whether anyone particularly likes that fact or not. 

For the whole church in the whole world, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #504, We Come as Guests Invited; #---, When Christ's own body comes to table; #---, As we go now from this table 

I didn't think this was a literal thing...

Holy Communion...Blues?

First of all, go listen to this. Nothing about this post will makes sense without it. (Cue readers: "and that will be different how, exactly?"...)



You can see this little ten-minute piece is labeled "Holy Communion Blues." The recording was made in 1965 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, not in a studio (clearly). The cathedral had invited a relatively popular local jazz pianist to bring his trio in for a special service of Holy Communion, complete with hymns and choral selections for which the trio would provide musical support. Additionally the trio played instrumental selections for other parts of the service, as here, while communion was being served.

The musician in question was relatively well-known locally, but not necessarily outside the San Francisco area aside from one hit, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," recorded in 1962 mostly to fill out an album of covers of tunes from the film Black Orpheus. A second album followed, in collaboration with a Brazilian guitarist, in which bossa nova and other Brazilian influences started to make their mark on his music. Enduring popularity, however, came later in 1965, when the trio provided music for a Christmas special featuring characters from the popular comic strip Peanuts. Vince Guaraldi provided some tunes for seventeen later Peanuts specials as well as the feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown, as well as continuing a non-Peanuts musical career until his death in 1976 (having just completed the recording for It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown earlier that day).

The Grace Cathedral service included all the expected elements of a high communion service (presided by a bishop, no less), with a choir of both men and boys for responses and hymns. Guaraldi's trio gives admirable support to those portions of the service, by turns swinging and grooving with the hymn tunes and liturgical responses without dominating or "taking over" the proceedings. More than most other commercial jazz projects, this communion service remained a service of worship (despite the unfortunate album title The Grace Cathedral Concert appended decades later), even when Guaraldi's trio played two numbers on their own.

I do own this CD and wear it out frequently, and did so before getting into the ministry. Since then (and even a little bit before) my favorite track has always been the one linked above, "Holy Communion Blues." It has remained a favorite even as the title has grown more and more vexing.

Holy Communion...Blues?

I come of that modern school of sacraments in which the sentence "This is the joyful feast of the people of God" sets the tone, very near the beginning of the sacrament, whether actually spoken or not. I'm not of the school in which the Lord's Supper (and that's the only thing you can call it) is basically a memorial service for the crucified Jesus.

And yet, I'm constantly brought to a halt whenever I run into this piece again. I can only stop whatever I'm doing (with the exception of driving, I guess) and listen, and I cannot stop from wandering off into the whole idea of holy communion blues. Seriously, if I could afford a jazz trio, or even just a solo pianist to be at our church for just one communion Sunday just to play this, I could die a happy preacher.

Quite likely the naming of this movement was not at all so intentional, as far as I know. It was played during communion, it was slow and reflective - not a swing or a stomp or a jump - so blues it is. (If anyone has any evidence to the contrary I'd love to see it. I think I'd actually feel better.) Still, that name stuck in my head for reasons I couldn't make out. Why did that juxtaposition of words so stay with me? Why, besides the understated effectiveness of the music itself, did that stick in my mind so much?

I may understand it better now.

As I've gone through all the lead-up to that surgery, with the anger and and frustration and despair that came with it, and now as I'm coming out on the other side, with emotions tending more toward sadness and melancholy, it makes more sense. It might make even more sense than Guaraldi (or whoever came up with that title) ever intended.

Every act of Holy Communion, or Eucharist or Lord's Supper, has some blues involved. It comes to the table with us.

The blues may come in the form of a broken body. Maybe it has suffered irreparable injury from outside, or uncurable disease from within. It may suffer from disease or from a cure worse than the disease. It may be moving inexorably towards final collapse or may simply be saddled with a chronic, non-fatal but ongoing condition. (I am coming to know this last well.) But so many of us come to the table with a broken body.

The blues may come in the form of a troubled, self-sabotaging mind. You, dear pastor, might never spot these challenges in the pews until it's too late: the housewife's ongoing but well-hidden depression, the former football star's deteriorating brain, the respected businessman's raging addiction, the retired schoolteacher's battle with dementia. So many of us come to the table with a troubled, self-sabotaging mind.

The blues may come in the form of old, encrusted burdens of sin and rebellion yet to be cast away. The communion hymn names two of the seeming heroes of the New Testament, Peter and Paul, each each confessing their unworthiness to be at the table - Peter for his denial, Paul (as Saul) for his persecution of the church. And yet the Host bids them come. Who knows what other past malfeasance goes unknown, its bearer unable to know or receive or accept that forgiveness yet waiting? Surely the blues may come in the form of old, encrusted burdens.

The blues may come to the table in more ways than I can possibly hope to name here - loss, grief, sorrow may be set off by so many tragedies of life. And there they all are, waiting at the table.

In the heavy evangelical church in which I was raised, much was made of making yourself "worthy" before coming to the table, even warning that "he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation unto himself." (Yes, it was sounded in King James English, and yes, it always seemed to be males only who were at risk at this.) This was of course meant to root out some unconfessed sin in the communicant, maybe even with some sort of dramatic confession?

I suspect, though, that far more people fear themselves unworthy to come to the table for very different reasons, or perhaps simply afraid to come and to be seen in all their brokenness and sorrow. Even now I find myself wondering what bizarre sabotage my rerouted body will commit against me when I finally get behind the table for the first time post-surgery.

Thing is, though, we are all bringing some kind of blues with us. It's entirely possible the worst brokenness that comes to the table is the brokenness that has no clue how broken she or he is. But we're all broken in some way, and we're all called to that table anyway, and we're not somehow supposed to turn ourselves into superheroes by the time we get to the bread and the cup. That's not how it works. We don't turn ourselves into perfect little Christians to get ourselves invited to the table; we come, broken or grieving or troubled or afraid, and are welcomed and fed by the One who knows all those broken parts and sorrows and troubles and fears, as pathetic as they seem to us, and that One who calls us and feeds us calls us sister, brother, friend. And we come away from the table made whole - not that any one individual is "fixed," but that we are made whole - we are made one body, the Body of Christ, and we go out not as merely a bunch of broken bodies but as The Body.

And it would be a shame to miss that over cancer, or dementia, or trauma, or CTE, or depression, or even this weird thing in my abdomen.

Come to the table. Come singing whatever Holy Communion Blues weighs in your heart, but come. Christ bids you come, and the broken, fearful, troubled selves that make up the Body of Christ await your broken, fearful, troubled self.

Sermon: The Refugee Jesus

Grace Presbyterian Church

January 1, 2017, Christmas 2A

Matthew 2:13-23

The Refugee Jesus

I wish I could simply preach a simple, carefree, Christmas-y sermon today. I wish I could just ignore this story and keep it cheerful. But this story resists easy cheeriness, and in the world and time in which we live, to ignore this scripture and the way it warns us would be an act of pastoral abdication on my part.

It is one of the most horrifying stories in all of scripture, and possibly the most horrifying in the New Testament, possibly aside from the Crucifixion. The “Slaughter of the Innocents,” it’s called. A frightened and angry tyrant, lashing out in his fear and embarrassment, ordering the death of untold numbers of infants and toddlers – all those age two or under in the town of Bethlehem – out of a raging desire to protect his own title and power. Surely we could never imagine such a thing, or the kind of figure who would commit such an atrocity.

This story slashes across Matthew’s nativity account like the sharp blade of a sword wielded by one of Herod’s men. It all seems fairly innocent at first, if a bit convoluted, as Joseph has to be persuaded in a dream to take his unexpectedly pregnant wife, bearing the Son of God by the Holy Spirit. The appearance of the Magi from the east, how much later we’re not really sure, adds both a curiosity and an element of danger to the event; the so-called “wise men” blunder into Judea asking the sitting king for the whereabouts of the new king, and have to be warned in another of those provident dreams to go home by a different route and not play into Herod’s hands by leading him to the child. (More about the Magi Friday night, when we observe Epiphany and share a meal together to mark the end of the Advent/Christmas orbit.)

At any rate, it would be so tempting to wrap up the story at verse 15, with the Magi following their alternate route and Joseph and Mary left wondering what to do with frankincense and myrrh on the way to Egypt. (the gold, on the other hand, you figure they might have an idea what to do with). Everyone’s safe, Matthew gets to make another of his “fulfillment” references by citing Hosea 11:1 as another prophetic box that Jesus checks off, and we all go home happy.

Herod wasn’t happy, though. And Herod didn’t know when he was beaten.

If the story ever appears in most Christmas celebrations (particularly when the lectionary doesn’t include it as it does this year), it happens only if the “Coventry carol” is sung. That carol dates from no later than 1534, as part of a “mystery play” performed in that city in England, and probably much earlier. This is the one that begins “lullay, lulla, thou little tiny child” which you might have heard before, but the whole carol lays out the horrible story, particularly in the second, third, and fourth stanzas:

O sisters too, how may we do,

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we sing,

Bye, bye, lully lullay?

Herod the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might in his own sight

All the young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee,

And ever mourn and may

For thy parting neither say nor sing

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

It is, if we’re paying attention, profoundly hard to read this passage without wanting to cry, or to cry out. Even as we can give thanks that the child Jesus was delivered it’s hard not to cry out with Rachel, whose lament from Jeremiah Matthew invokes here. Why, God? Why did these children have to die?

I made two mistakes this week that prevent me from crying out so. First, on Tuesday I saw a PBS program, titled Exodus, on the travails and hardships faced by refugees from war, economic depravation, and other world calamities – from Syria, yes, but also from numerous other conflicts in the Middle East and on the African continent, wars and tyrannies and persecutions we know nothing about in this country. Then on Friday I made the mistake of going to the Harn Museum, for the next-to-last day of its photography exhibit called “Aftermath: The Fallout of War – America and the Middle East,” which included among other things numerous photographs, again from war zones both famous and forgotten, images that make clear why so many are forced to flee their homes, becoming refugees. Then I was of course reminded of the recent re-conquest of the Syrian city of Aleppo, in which civilians who had managed to survive that war thus far were shot on the spot.

And so, even in the face of this story, I find my voice choking, unable or unwilling to cry out at the injustice of this slaughter recorded by Matthew, if only because if I do cry out “Why do these children have to die?” I am entirely afraid that God’s answer might just be “I was just going to ask you the same question.”

The table before us on this day, when the carols and praises are caused to stick in our throats and wilt in our hearts, reminds us that Jesus calls all of us to come; all of us, including Jesus’ fellow refugees, from Aleppo or South Sudan or Guatemala or anywhere from which any of God’s children flee death or despair or tyranny or abuse or death or death or death, calling them, and us, to life, and life together.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#113 Angels We Have Heard on High

#147 The First Nowell

#154 Jesus Entered Egypt

#133 O Come, All Ye Faithful

"Omran, Angels are Here!", Judith Mehr, 2016

Painting in response to the virally circulated photo of Omran Daqneesh, a five-year-old boy in Aleppo, Syria, after a bombardment in August 2016 that killed, among others, his ten-year-old brother. One can barely resist wondering where the angels were for the other children in Bethlehem, after Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had gone...

Sermon: Weirdoes, Little Children, and Other Advent Saints

Grace Presbyterian Church

December 4, 2016, Advent 2A

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

Weirdoes, Little Children, and Other Advent Saints

There are a lot of reasons I, and other people as well, find it necessary to resist the urge to plunge too soon into Christmas when Advent is still in progress. For one, this is not an area in which I think it’s a good idea for the church to follow the larger society, which has already extended “Christmas” to well before Thanksgiving and has got Halloween in its sights next (and after that look out Labor Day). For another, without the preparation and self-examination of Advent, Christmas too easily becomes a sentimental, even gooey exercise of cute decorations and rituals performed without meaning or substance, leaving us singing with Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?”

Another reason, perhaps not quite as important as the above but still one I appreciate, is that if you rush too quickly through or pass over Advent, you miss out on the weirdos and crazy stuff.

Take the Old Testament readings we tend to get during the Advent season. While there is some of the talk of judgment we expect from these old Hebrew prophets, Advent is the time when we get to delve into the opposite vein of this literature. And if prophets like Jeremiah or, here, Isaiah could be incredibly harsh and stern when speaking of God’s judgment, they are also capable of getting positively trippy when they turn to the fulfillment of God’s promises in a more, shall we say, optimistic vein.

Our reading from Isaiah starts off sounding a bit like last week’s reading, using the imagery of trees and stumps and branches to suggest a forthcoming new king out of the line of David, who was, you’ll remember, the son of Jesse. It’s again a prophetic utterance that sounds a bit like a wish-list for the Ideal King – “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” it begins, and goes onto add righteousness and equity for the meek and faithfulness – along with a bit of old-fashioned enemy-smiting in verse 4.

But then verse 6 arrives, and we seem to be off on something completely different. After all, no matter how good a king might be, turning predatory animals into grass-feeders is not likely to be one of his accomplishments. And yet here is where we get these long-beloved images of wolf living with lamb, leopard with baby goat, and cow with bear, as well as lions that feed on straw rather than prey.

But don’t miss the little children – the one who will lead them in verse 6, and the infants doing all sorts of dangerous things around snakes in verse 8 without being struck. While Isaiah’s readers and hearers would not have had the highly sentimentalized image of children that we do today, they would have recognized in Isaiah’s language that these children represent vulnerability. We don’t have to be told that the smallest children, the ones young enough not to understand the dangers of the world around them, are inherently and frighteningly vulnerable. The smallest toddlers don’t quite understand that playing with snakes will get you hurt or worse. But here, these children, these most vulnerable of all, are not at all vulnerable on God’s “holy mountain.”

Clearly this is a “not yet” prophecy. And yet it is a part of what we await in Advent, that coming reunion with our Lord when no one will hurt or destroy. We know all too much of hurt and destruction. We need to hear the crazy stuff. That’s where the hope is.

Still, though, wild and trippy hopeful story that this might be, I’m not quite sure it matches up with the straight-out weirdo that shows up in our reading from Matthew.

John, sometimes called the Baptizer, looked the part of the crazy man, and his diet also fit the bill. His sermons were a bit one-note – all about “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” and the like. He wasn’t very deferential to the respectable religious authorities; they were the ones who caught the most flack from John, and calling them “brood of vipers” wasn’t likely to gain John their approval. And this is the one who was “preparing the way” for Jesus. Maybe it takes someone a little bit crazy to get us humans to wake up to the coming Messiah.

If you do much social media you may have seen a photo that recently went “viral,” as they say, of a man with a sign. The man bore a full beard and had on his cowboy hat and flannel shirt – he was, by appearance, as clearly a Texan as John the Baptizer was, well, himself. He was standing in front of a mosque in a Dallas suburb, holding that sign, and at first glance it was easy to think “oh, no, not again,” expecting a story of one of the now more than 800 incidents of racial or ethnic or religious harassment since Election Day.

But it turns out the sign he was holding up, in front of the mosque, said, “You belong. Stay strong. Be blessed. We are one America.”

After about a week of anonymous fame (the kind of thing only the internet can do), the man stepped out to tell his story and what motivated him to make this striking show of support for his neighbors. He said, “This was about binding up the wounded. About showing compassion and empathy for the hurting and fearful among us. Or, in some Christian traditions, this was about washing my brother’s feet.” He then added Matthew 25:35-36 (it starts “I was hungry and you gave me food…”, you might remember) and the poem found on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor…”).

And God bless him, he’s a Presbyterian.

We need the prophets telling crazy stories and the people doing crazy things, because sometimes they’re the ones through whom God is speaking to us, maybe even yelling at us, trying to get our attention.

Even the table we’re about to come to is a little bit crazy. We are all over the map in terms of social status, family status, economic status, place of birth, political beliefs, theological beliefs, you name it. And yet Jesus expects us all to gather at the same table, be fed from the same bread and cup, to be united in him? In a world with as much division as ever and in which churches split over any- and everything, that really is a bit crazy.

And maybe it’s just the crazy we need.

For the crazy stories and weirdoes who point us and pull us and call us back to Jesus, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#87            Comfort, Comfort Now My People

#96            On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry

#378            We Wait the Peaceful Kingdom

#383            Dream On, Dream On

Sermon: Out of our Brokenness, Out of our Hope

Grace Presbyterian Church

October 2, 2016, Pentecost 19C

Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26

Out of Our Brokenness, Out of Our Hope

The first funeral I ever attended, or at least the first I remember, was in the church in which I grew up, when I was about fifteen years old. It was for a boy in our congregation, about a year older than me, who had been killed in a particularly horrific car crash. I can’t say that I knew him that well or that we were the best of friends, but I knew him well enough and we got along fine, all of which only magnified the shock for me.

I would say that it was a terribly emotional experience, but for the most part it wasn’t. One of my great weaknesses is my fear of my own emotions, and that was something that instilled itself in me from a very early age. So as best as I can figure, I somehow walled off that part of myself for that funeral, and busily preoccupied myself with examining an experience that (again, as best as I can remember) I had never seen before, and how it was different from what usually happened in that sanctuary on Sunday morning.

All the flowers. So, so many flowers. The casket placed at the front of the sanctuary, directly below the centrally-placed pulpit, open. The procession into the sanctuary, much more formal than one ever saw at that Southern Baptist church. The overflow of people, even more than on an Easter Sunday.

The service order was slightly different. The sermon was much more subdued than usual from our pastor, who despite being pastor of a relatively large downtown church in a small town, aspired mostly to be an old-fashioned hellfire-and-brimstone country preacher. And then the procession at the close of the service, again very different from the usual Sunday morning, was where I was finally undone.

My emotional guard was finally wrecked at the sight of the boy’s parents.

I knew them well enough to see, even at my callow age, how their utter grief was undoing them even at that moment. He was their only child, you see, and he had come relatively late in life. I had never seen the father look so beaten, so crushed, so … old. And the mother – normally a very proper Southern lady – was inconsolable, weeping without reservation and unable to make it down the aisle of the church to its back door without help from the preacher and other gentlemen of the church.

I suspect most of us have been in the place of that father and mother, weeping and mourning without consolation. But I also suspect many of us have been in the place where I was in that funeral, keeping emotions carefully locked away until they could no longer be suppressed in the face of the inconsolable sorrow of others. I doubt most of us have ever been in the place of the two speakers we hear in the two readings from Lamentations today.

To grasp the state of the Jerusalem of Lamentations we might need to go to Aleppo, the city in Syria that has been utterly devastated time and time again in the seemingly endless Syrian war, in which parties ranging from the Syrian regime to Daesh (what some call Islamic State) to Russia and others have sought to take it over or drive out others, leaving a city that is virtually no longer a city, but a blasted and ravaged ruin. We might need to hear and see the plight of those trapped in this blasted and ruined city, with no place to go to escape the ruin and no country in the world willing to accept them as refugees. We might need to see a truly hopeless situation to understand what the Daughter of Zion is singing in that first chapter of Lamentations. Even in the third chapter, where a tiny bubble of hope comes through, the hopelessness is still palpable.

Most of us have never experienced anything quite like this, like the ruined despair of Daughter of Zion, Jerusalem personified, altogether ready to blame God for their suffering no matter how many times Jeremiah (the presumed author of Lamentations) had warned them against their idolatry and sinfulness. I certainly cannot claim to know all of you well enough to know that for sure, but it doesn’t seem likely.

We still know ourselves to be broken, though, if we’re honest. We know, if we’re really being truthful with ourselves, what it is to be like my friend’s parents, no reserves left to cope or bear up under the grief. Most of us have been there, and if we’re honest we don’t kid ourselves that we’re ever truly very far from being in that place again. A death or grave illness for a loved one, a career reversal or loss, any number of other events that might lay us low and reveal to us our insufficiency and helplessness and (if we’re paying attention at all) our utter and complete reliance on the grace of God even to function.

We are actually marking two special occasions in the life of the church universal and this particular church, events that might not seem to have much in common. It is World Communion Sunday, in which we mark how the church, for all its diversity and even fractiousness, is still united around the table of the Lord; we are also marking in this congregation the beginning of our campaign to support the ministries and mission of this congregation, seeking to commit to the stewardship of our resources (yes, including financial resources, but also our physical resources and our time) in order to continue seeking out how to do Christ’s work in this particular corner of God’s world. To be honest, for a while there I was rather disturbed at feeling the need to connect those two events, particularly in the midst of a series of sermons from the weeping prophet Jeremiah. How in the world do all those elements make sense together?

Well, duh, preacher.

It is this very thing – our knowledge of our brokenness and utter reliance on God’s grace – that lies at the heart of both of these things.

We are driven to this table – we need this table – because we need God’s grace. We don’t come to the Lord’s Supper to congratulate ourselves on being such good Christians. Or if we do, we’re doing it wrong. The table is about our need for God’s grace, most strongly shown in the life of Christ, the healing and teaching and living and dying and living again that is our reason for being the church. Coming to the table is not about our lording it over others, reassuring ourselves that we’ve somehow “earned” God’s grace (pro tip, folks: that’s not “grace.”). The very act of the Lord’s Supper is all about the fact that we share with all the church the utter brokenness and need for grace that is the Table’s message and gift to us, the thing we share with sisters and brothers in the faith whether in Cuba or Colombia or Curacao or Cameroon or Cambodia. We way mark this particular Sunday as World Communion Sunday, but anytime we come to this table we share the inexplicable grace of God with the church in all the world.

But our stewardship is also rooted in this knowledge of our need for grace. It’s a bit like coming to the table; if we’re giving of our time or our money or of anything because we are convinced we’ve got our act together and we can be so benevolent as to give the church a hand, we’re doing it wrong. It is out our brokenness, the unshakable knowledge of our utter helplessness before God and need for God, that we give of ourselves or our treasure. We don’t give because we are convinced we’re going to save the world, or even fix our town; we give because we know the only One who can, and we simply want to be ready to be used for God’s purposes.

We don’t have to know the experience of conquered and ruined Jerusalem, the lamenting Daughter of Zion, to know our own brokenness, our own need for grace. We don’t have to be amidst the devastation of modern warfare to know how close we are to despair and utter grief without the sustaining of our Lord, and even sometimes with it. We may not be comfortable with it and certainly not comfortable admitting it, but we know it. But it is in that knowledge that grace can move in us and move through us, healing us and using us to heal. Whether at the table or in the offering plate, may we be ever coveting the grace of God to move within us, and then to move through us, for the healing of a broken world.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#317            In Christ There Is No East Or West

#203            Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love

#508            Come to the Table

#526            Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ

The devastation of Aleppo. You don't have to experience this, though,

to know what it is to be broken.

Sermon: In the Breaking of the Bread

Grace Presbyterian Church

April 3, 2016, Easter 2C

Luke 24:13-35

In the Breaking of the Bread

One of the characteristic features of Luke’s gospel is that Jesus and the disciples spend an awful lot of time at the dinner table, or otherwise gathered around food.

More broadly one could argue – and at least one author has – that one of the underlying themes of the gospel is hospitality – both the ways in which Jesus sought to minister to those around them through the practice of welcome, the practice of enabling others to feel “at home” in his presence, and the ways in which such hospitality was (or was not) extended towards Jesus – whether Jesus was made welcome or not.

But the specific hospitality context of a meal does come up awfully frequently in Luke’s gospel. There are at least ten different accounts in Luke in which the action taking place is either a meal, or something that takes place in the context of a meal; six of those stories are unique to Luke, not found in any of the other gospels. In addition, another seven accounts in Luke feature meals or eating or food in the context of Jesus’s teaching to the crowds or to the disciples, or sometimes in the context of conflict with the religious authorities, as in the incident in which Jesus’s disciples were criticized for plucking and eating heads of grain on the Sabbath.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the first appearance of the risen Christ that Luke records in his gospel features a meal as its turning point.

We start on the road, though. Two of Jesus’s followers – not among the twelve, but clearly followers who had been with Jesus for some time – were, for reasons we don’t know, walking from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus.

This is on the third day. We find out later that this is after the women have come back from the empty tomb, as recorded in the first part of this chapter, but at this point no one has actually seen Jesus. We have accounts from the women of the tomb being empty, but no sign of the risen Christ.

We hear that these two men, one of whom will be called Cleopas a few verses later, are talking about “all these things that had happened.” We tend to presume that “all these things” are those events that happened in Jesus’s last week in Jerusalem, particularly from the Last Supper forward through the crucifixion. It might also have included that curious report from the women and Peter, who each went to Jesus’s tomb and saw it empty.

Whatever their subjects of discussion, they were so caught up in them that they didn’t notice the man who had caught up with them from behind. (Remember, we know it’s Jesus, but they don’t.) When he asks what they’re talking about, the two followers act as if it should have been impossible for anyone in Jerusalem to have missed the events surrounding Jesus and his crucifixion. They recite those events to him (again, not recognizing that it is Jesus), including the odd reports about the empty tomb. In doing so they reveal, in the words “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” that after all this time they might not have truly understood just it was for Jesus to be the Messiah – not the military conqueror, but indeed a suffering Messiah and a true spiritual redeemer of Israel and of all.

It is this that Jesus picks up on and expounds upon as he begins to teach them, one more time, how all the things that he had said and done had been “necessary.” Going all the way back to Moses and working through all the law and the prophets he proclaims to them once again how all of his life and his teaching and, yes, his suffering and death, had been “necessary.”

What happens next, as the two travelers come to their destination, demonstrates that for all that the two disciples might have forgotten or misunderstood, they had remembered one thing, perhaps the most important thing. They had remembered how Jesus taught and showed them how to be his followers.

They remembered the table.

Not just the table at which Jesus had only days before broken bread and poured a cup and talked about his body and blood, and kept using words like “do this in remembrance of me.” Surely they remembered that one, but they remembered all those other meals and all those other tables – the one with five thousand fed by just a few loaves and fish; the one at Zacchaeus’s house, where a skinflint tax collector suddenly started making alternate plans for the distribution of his estate; the banquet at the home of another tax collector, Levi, who had dropped his whole business at a word to follow Jesus; the evening at the home of Mary and Martha, with Martha fussing over every detail while Mary presumed to sit at Jesus’s feet with the other disciples; a dinner at the home of a man named Simon, with some of the most disreputable people around.

They remembered, and they wouldn’t let the stranger go without breaking bread with them.

The rest of the story is fairly familiar; the stranger, the guest, takes over as host and breaks the bread – I know that breaking of the bread – that’s Jesus! – only for him to disappear from his sight; the rushed return to Jerusalem, where the disciples tell them about Jesus appearing to Simon (we tend to assume they’re speaking of Peter); and then, in the remainder of the chapter, Jesus himself appearing before them and teaching them, one last time.

In the breaking of the bread they recognized Jesus, yes; but it was in Cleopas and the other disciples reaching out to the stranger, inviting them into their own meal and their own room and sharing their resources with him, that Jesus was welcomed and able to break the bread.

One is reminded of the stories from Genesis, how Abraham and Sarah unwittingly entertained angels and even Yahweh himself in welcoming the stranger. We are also reminded of Jesus’s own words in Matthew 25, that what we do (or don’t do) for or to “the least of these,” we do to Jesus himself.

Our call, at its most elemental and most basic, is to make welcome for the stranger, for the guest, for the sojourners among us. This, even more than our prayers and offerings and worship, is how we welcome Christ among us.

We come to the table, and welcome Christ among us. Christ takes up the bread and breaks it, and we see our risen Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (PH ’90): “Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing!” (111); “Christ Is Risen” (109); “Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ” (514); “Christ Is Alive!” (108)