The Table-Turned of Hurt and Hope

"....on the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread..."

When Paul first wrote these words to Christians in Corinth, he was addressing a gathering of first generation Christians with very bad manners, to say the least. Paul had heard there were cliques in the church...folks at coffee hour who would only talk to their friends, say...or members of the body who would take the same seats at the table, week after week, so as not to mix with those they did not know or did not care to know. But more, he had heard that those who came first--the economically secure, say scholars, who could knock off work early--those who came first commenced eating and drinking before all had arrived. In fact, by the time the last members, the common laborers, were through the door, it had been reported to Paul that most of the food was gone and a good many in the crowd were drunk! I am drawn to these verses for the humanity they hold-in-solution and offer up as a mirror to the likes of us, some two thousand years hence.

Paul, however, was not so tender-hearted about the matter at hand. For you see, this behavior was not happening around just any meal or casual family supper. This was happening at the occasion of the Lord's supper, an already sacred tradition Paul had received from the Lord and handed on to them. In the words we will soon say to ourselves, the words of institution of our Lord's Supper, Paul reminds them and then reprimands them. If you are going to eat this bread and drink this cup without discerning the body, he says, without recognizing and honoring Christ's presence in and among the community...thus respecting one another, waiting for one another, loving one another...then you eat and drink judgment upon yourselves, missing the point and the grace given.

At the end, like a disgusted parent to an unruly child, Paul simply writes, "Wait for one another. If you are hungry eat at home...." Use your heads! Grow up.

Over the centuries, the church would seem to have taken Paul's words to heart, surrounding this meal with such pomp and circumstance, in the case of liturgical traditions, with such soberness and somberness, in the case of Reformed traditions, that we cannot help but do the sacrament decently and in order and with the best of manners. "The higher Christian churches," writes Annie Dillard, "come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy [she says] as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed." Even we Presbyterians, proud of our simplicity in worship, know that our manners are prescribed as regards this sacrament and, within the confines of this particular community of faith, we would appear to be behaving.

Though I think the outward appearance of table manners has little to do with what Paul is trying to say to us. In essence, he says, as we eat this bread and drink this cup together, we are proclaiming Christ crucified. We are publicly bearing witness to what God has done, for the world, in Jesus Christ. We are here not for ourselves--God in Christ is already for us: we are here for the sake of the other, for the sake of the presence of Christ in the other. As regards the Corinthians, Paul was talking about the internal divisions and disorders of that community of faith which did not proclaim Christ's love, but flew in the face of it.

Though listen again, my friends, on this World Communion Sunday, and imagine Paul addressing not that small house church of ancient Corinth, but hear Paul's words as though he were speaking, at once, to Christians gathered in every sanctuary throughout the world this day...congregations in Kosovo and Belfast, in Beirut and the parched Sudanese desert, in the barrios of Mexico City and makeshift Haitian sanctuaries pitched in a hurricane's wake, on Wall Street and Capital Hill, in Chestnut Hill and Germantown, the Mainline and in Chester: "...to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it....When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord's supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What!...do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you?"

And what he says to us--to Christ's church throughout the world marked by divisions too numerous to mention...marked by bad manners writ large, as some squander creation's resources while others starve--what Paul says to us are words of hurt and hope from a table-turned first by judgment and finally by grace.

Of all the nights it could have been, says Paul, it was on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, handed over, helped along by his friends to the cross. Paul was saying to that house church, even as his words address a world full of Christians divided, Paul was underlining our betrayal of Jesus [handing over of Jesus] as we sit at table. He is betrayed by our divisions, in his name. He is handed over by his present-day disciples, interested only in saving our own way of life, filling our own stomachs, feathering our own nests. He is helped onto the cross as our silence and insularity deny the power of his love to transform the politics of injustice and greed into policies of mercy and hope for the least of these.

Of course these words, if left on the level of global abstraction, can only be heard as mere words, said by a preacher to sound prophetic of a World Communion Sunday. Therefore, as Paul was direct and specific concerning the Corinthian community's manners, so we must be honest and specific about our own manners on the Hill. The manners in question on this World Communion Sunday, to be specific, are in part the manners we enact as Christ's church in this city.

I hear that there are divisions, says Paul. The divisions in question have to do with the great divide between our lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters struggling to exist with dignity and hope only blocks away. If we are to be worthy partakers of this meal, season in and season out, we cannot continue to stand apart, divided by economic and social class, as our neighbors down the Avenue literally beg for the crumbs from our table. One of the reasons I accepted this call was the opportunity to serve a church with resources, in a city full of challenges. And by resources, I do not simply mean a checkbook. I mean that we are a people with incredible gifts, with minds and hearts, with skills and abilities. To be sure, none of us has the time...but we do. We all make time for those things which matter most and, if it is Jesus Christ we mean to follow, if we are partakers of his body, then the neighbor must matter most of all.

What would you guess our neighbors down the hill have been left to conclude about the manners of the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill...about the bread we break and eat without them... about the distances we keep out of fear...about the invisibility of this congregation's outreach which, to use Paul's unminced words, shows contempt for the church of God and humiliates those who have nothing? What should be said to us, to you and to me specifically, about the sort of manners worthy of Christ's disciples, here on the Hill, at this table spread not only for us, but for the world?

What I am about to say, I say on behalf of a small band of members, a weary lot, frustrated at being always the folks to sleep with the homeless or help build a habitat for strangers or feed the hundreds of hungry people in this city. What I say I say because I love this church and long for her, more and more, to be enlivened and transformed by the gift of Christian community writ large, the gift of working together with neighbors in the glorious diversity of this Northwest part of the city. What I say, I say by way of invitation, an invitation which summons us toward the God who, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's words, "lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross....[the God who] is weak and powerless in the world, [which] is precisely the way, the only way, in which [God] is with us and helps us." It is an invitation to Christ's presence discerned on the streets of this city.

On Saturday, October 24 at 9 a.m., the church van, and as many other vehicles as are needed, will take as many as are willing to "give up" a precious Saturday morning: we are invited to the Germantown YWCA. The invitation, I repeat, has everything to do with discerning Christ's body in the world. The invitation has to do with witnessing a community, bearing witness as best they can, to God's transforming grace in the world. The hope is, we will be transformed too.

There at the Y, we will see the work of three women who have literally recreated the fourth floor of that building into a community of hope. They have begun an arts center, an afterschool program, a food cupboard run by a mother with infant triplets trying to exist without welfare, a nursing center of midwives, a support group for women with AIDS. Northwest Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network is there with a day room. Operation Handy has started to teach single mothers the life skills of carpentry and repairs. These neighbors want us to join them. They are begging for the resources we have, by God, been given and could give away were it not for the distances we keep, the skills we hoard, the time we seem unable to clear, the volunteers we have been ill-equipped to organize.

Again, what in the world has this to do with the Lord's Supper? It has to do with becoming a community whose manners are marked by an organic connectedness to the world Christ died to save, a world way beyond the doors of organized religion. It has to do with becoming a community whose manners proclaim our active love and unconscious identity with those the world has cast off, for in their faces we will see the Christ of God, hungry, naked, in prison visited. It has to do with Christ's real presence in the world--betrayed and broken...shared and raised up--with his grace given in the fray, with his forgiveness which alone makes us worthy partakers of a meal we in no way deserve and most desperately need.

The true presence of Christ is not on the table, my friends, but around the table, in a circle whose circumference goes round the globe and down the Avenue and sends us out of these doors proclaiming Christ crucified in deed. There will be no engraved invitations issued. Only the words of him who said, "Come unto me." My friends, he is in the world and awaits us. Only the words of him who, on the night he was betrayed, nevertheless, fed those who were to betray him...feeds us still who betray him still...that this table of hurt may, by his grace, be turned to hope for the whole, wide, world.

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