Eating With Paul (8/31/14)

Eating With Paul

John Shuck

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

August 31, 2014

Isaiah 25:6-10

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,

of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines

strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain

the shroud that is cast over all peoples,

the sheet that is spread over all nations;

he will swallow up death for ever.

Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,

and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the

earth,

for the Lord has spoken.

It will be said on that day,

Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might

save us.

This is the Lord for whom we have waited;

let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

1 Corinthians 11:17-3

Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, 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. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. 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 not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation. About the other things I will give instructions when I come.

We are spending the summer with famous and some not-so-famous meals of the Bible.   Perhaps the most famous meal for Christians is the Last Supper or the Lord’s Supper.     This meal has been the centerpiece for worship for the vast majority of Christians over the centuries.   It is overlaid with a great deal of symbolism and theological meaning.    In the Roman Catholic tradition it isn’t worship unless one participates in the eucharist with appropriately ordained priests.  The wafer and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus in the sacrament. 

Protestant traditions vary in how they understand the magic of it all.  For most Protestants, the weight of worship is in the preaching as opposed to the sacrament.     Some regard the Lord’s Supper as a memorial.   My Baptist background saw the supper in that way.   The best I could figure out how Presbyterians understand it is that Christ is really present but not literally present.    That is a typical way for Presbyterians.  Yes and no. 

Yes, the sacrament is more than a memorial.  Christ is present.  Stuff is cooking here.  Transformation is happening.   It is the means of grace through faith.   So it matters and it matters to do it with appropriate reverence.   But, don’t go too far.   It is not the literal body and blood of Jesus.  It isn’t magic.   It is symbol.    

I don’t think I have ever served a congregation that didn’t have discussion about this ritual. How to do it.  How often to do it.  Who can do it.  What it means to do it.  Why do it at all.  Should we rip and dip or sit and sip?  Do we say, "The blood of Christ?" or "Bottoms up?"  I shed no light on any of those marvelous questions this morning.    I say all of this to say that it has mattered to Christians over the centuries.  

I would add personally that it matters to me.  I have found myself often transformed by this ritual.   Nearly twenty years ago I participated in a communion service in the narthex of Riverside Church in New York City.   I was attending a conference and this was a special service as part of that.  This was before most denominations including the Presbyterians had begun to ordain openly gay and lesbian clergy.   At this communion service I attended the presiders and servers were openly gay and lesbian people.    It was an act of ecclesiastical disobedience or spiritual obedience.  

It was a first time for me to receive communion from an openly gay person as such.    As I received the elements I felt that what was happening was very important.  Communion is a ritual of boundaries, who can receive it, who can not, who can serve it, who can not.     Hanging over all of this are these ominous words from Paul:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

Paul was not afraid to dabble in superstitious rhetoric to make a point.  Don’t do this meal in an unworthy manner, or you’ll die!    I will talk about what I think he means by that in a minute.   I remember hearing those words in my little Baptist church as a kid before communion.  It was understood as a threat. 

“Don’t take communion if you are not right with Jesus. Or you’ll die!” 

Implied clearly in that imperative is, “If in doubt, you are probably not worthy.”

Communion was designed to scare the sins out of us.   We have centuries of mystery and authority and judgment over this ritual.    Forbidden.  Unworthy. 

In the midst of this, here are these gay and lesbian people who had been refused entry into the world of the clergy, not worthy for church, administering this forbidden meal.     I knew that was important.    

It was also important as I could see on the faces of those who received the sacrament, many with tears in their eyes, that this meal presided over in this way symbolized for them the power and possibility of acceptance.   Equality, yes.   But even more, full humanity.   Full embrace as children of God.   In short, worthiness. 

I felt as I participated in this that I would be needing to participate in a great many more rites like this.  Rites that symbolized rights.   But more even than that.  This spiritual ritual was the means of grace for material freedom.   But even more.   Full human dignity and not just for others, but for me.    I felt as though I participated in another level of meaning of this sacrament.     It was a feeling of being all one.   We are truly in this together.  We are worthy.

This experience of boundary breaking for me would be a way I would be called to sacramentally live my life.    As I took the bread from this woman, whom I assumed was a lesbian, although I wasn’t sure I had ever known one (this was before Ellen), and sipped from the cup, in the narthex, on the margins, on the edge, of this huge cathedral, I felt as though I was participating in a transformation of the world itself.   I was catching up, being caught up, as it were, in the Great Feast at the Heavenly Banquet.  You have to use images from sacred texts to describe it.     That was the power of this meal.    The power to exclude and diminish but also the power to make worthy. 

This ritual meal had nothing to do with the body and blood of Jesus or with Jesus dying for my sins, at least for me.  I did not think of myself eating his body and drinking his blood either literally or symbolically.   

The body and blood has been problematic for many.   Did the historical Jesus really institute a ritual meal in which a cup of wine and a piece of bread would literally be his body and blood?  That he himself would drink his own blood in the coming kingdom?  That is hard to imagine.   Certainly not literally.  Even symbolically, it sounds foreign.  It doesn't sound Jewish.  It sounds like Greek mythology.    

James Tabor in his book, Paul and Jesus:  How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, recounts this parallel in which:

One drinks a cup of wine that has been ritually consecrated to represent the blood of the god Osiris, in order to participate in the spiritual power of love he had for his consort, Isis.  P. 151

The tradition of the Lord’s Supper in which we symbolically or literally think we are eating and drinking the body and blood of Jesus is not from the historical Jesus.  

Jesus ate meals.  He ate some with his followers.  He may have had a meal in which he shared a cup and bread and said it had something to do with a great hope for a transformed world.     He, like other first century Jews, hoped in a messianic banquet, a banquet celebrating God’s justice.    Perhaps something like Isaiah’s vision:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,

of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines

strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain

the shroud that is cast over all peoples,

But the body and blood imagery?   That is from Paul.   Those words of institution attributed to Jesus were likely created by Paul.  

Paul’s letters are the earliest documents we have in the New Testament.    The gospel writers drew in part from Paul in creating their theological accounts of Jesus. Paul himself says, “I received from the Lord.”  Paul did not know the historical Jesus.  He had mystical experiences in which the risen Christ spoke to him.   He isn’t repeating information that he heard at an actual supper that Jesus had with his disciples.  He isn’t recounting the words of the historical Jesus as reported from them.  Paul created those words, or if you take Paul at his word, he is repeating what he heard from the Risen Christ himself in the midst of a mystical revelation.  

The gospel writers and later editors of the tradition picked up Paul’s theology and wrote it into the gospels, especially the story of the last supper or the Lord’s Supper.   When we participate in the Lord’s Supper by recalling the body and blood of Jesus, we are not eating with Jesus as much as we are eating with Paul.    For further reading, I would recommend James Tabor’s book, Paul and Jesus.  (Religion For Life interview)

There are other traditions for the words spoken in regards to this ritual meal.    But by the end of the second century, Paul’s theology dominated Christian theology as it does to this day.  But there were other paths.  Those paths could be worth exploring as we continue to create meaningful worship and ritual that empowers and transforms today.     This is from a document called the Didache.   Outside of Paul, this is the earliest record of a ritual meal:

You shall give thanks as follows:  First, with respect to the cup:  “We give you thanks, our Father, for the holy vine of David, your child, which you made known to us through Jesus your child.  To you be the glory forever.”  And with respect to the fragments of bread:  “We give you thanks our Father, for the life and knowledge that you made known to us through Jesus your child.  To you be the glory forever.”  P. 147-8. 

Nothing about dying for sins.  Nothing about body and blood.   It is about giving thanks for the life and knowledge of Jesus.  

Let's turn to Paul.

As James Tabor points out, the meal in Paul’s churches was a charismatic event.  People would gather until all were present.  In the course of this gathering of the body of Christ, that is the gathering of the people, the Christ-Spirit would be manifest and gifts of the Spirit would be demonstrated.   Speaking in tongues.  Prophecy.  Healing.   Ecstatic shouting.

These meals were wild affairs.  They were participatory.  You were united with this mystical Christ experience with others as Tabor says:

“By taking this bread and this wine into one’s own body, one is uniting with the body and blood of Christ.”  p. 152

Paul is concerned that people are participating in this meal in a destructive way.  Paul literally believes that people have become sick and died because they have participated in an unworthy manner.   In the first century, the world is filled with magic and spirits.   We can dismiss that superstition.  But Paul’s concern about eating in an unworthy manner is important.  What is unworthy?  What is Paul worried about?   

Paul appears to be concerned about the inequality of the meal.   Paul writes:

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 kind of messianic banquet is that?  That is the world, right?  That is the growing inequality we see today between the rich and the poor.  Paul is still enough of a Jew to know that this inequality is not the meal on the Lord’s mountain.   It matters how we eat.  The meal we enact ritually is the way we understand and participate in our world.   If our ritual eating is unjust, how can we expect to enact justice in the world? 

Paul combines Greek and Jewish practices and understanding.    He applies the body and blood language of Greek gods and applies it to Christ.  But he retains the emphasis on social justice that was preached by the historical Jesus and the prophetic tradition.   

Paul is reminding his Corinthians that it isn’t enough to have ecstatic experiences.  These experiences must be transformed into justice and love for all people and for all creation.     

This sacrament of communion can be a powerful, transformative ritual that calls us to acceptance and equality.   I feel that power when we celebrate it here and gather in the circle around the sanctuary.    It is the power of our community.  It is an expression of oneness.   Sometimes we feel it, like I felt it when I participated in communion at Riverside Church many years ago and many times since.

The point is not the ecstatic feeling.   Sometimes we don’t feel it.  But the participation remains.   The true sacrament is not the ritual eating and drinking.   

The sacrament is being bread and wine for the world.   

In fact, every meal is a sacrament.  We are taking in the energy of Earth and transforming that energy into actions and words.    As we participate in the spirit and community of Jesus, in the spirit of Christ, in the spirit of Paul, those words and actions are to be words of healing.   

Our sacrament is to heal and transform our world and to bring dignity and worth to all beings.

Amen.