Searching for Sunday, Part 4: Communion
Service of Worship
Eastern Parkway United Methodist
Church
March 14, 2021
Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor
Let us
pray:
The Prayer
of St. Patrick
I arise
today
Through the
strength of heaven;
Light of the
sun,
Splendor of
fire,
Speed of
lightning,
Swiftness of
the wind,
Depth of the
sea,
Stability of
the earth,
Firmness of
the rock.
I arise
today
Through
God's strength to pilot me;
God's might
to uphold me,
God's wisdom
to guide me,
God's eye to
look before me,
God's ear to
hear me,
God's word
to speak for me,
God's hand
to guard me,
God's way to
lie before me,
God's shield
to protect me,
God's hosts
to save me
Afar and
anear,
Alone or in
a multitude.
Christ
shield me today
Against
wounding
Christ with
me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in
me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my
right, Christ on my left,
Christ when
I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in
the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in
the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in
the eye that sees me,
Christ in
the ear that hears me.
I arise
today
Through the
mighty strength
Of the Lord
of creation.
John 3:
1-21
Jesus
Teaches Nicodemus
3 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named
Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2 He
came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a
teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are
doing if God were not with him.”
3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I
tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.[a]”
4 “How can someone be born when they
are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their
mother’s womb to be born!”
5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I
tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and
the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the
Spirit[b] gives birth to spirit. 7 You
should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You[c] must be born again.’ 8 The
wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where
it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”[d]
9 “How can this be?” Nicodemus
asked.
10 “You are Israel’s teacher,” said
Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11 Very
truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have
seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12 I
have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you
believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13 No one
has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of
Man.[e] 14 Just as Moses lifted
up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,[f] 15 that everyone who
believes may have eternal life in him.”[g]
16 For God so loved the world that
he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall
not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did
not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the
world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is
not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already
because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This
is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness
instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone
who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that
their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives
by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what
they have done has been done in the sight of God.
A Message
Searching
for Sunday, Part 4: Communion
Friends, we have now reached part 4 of this sermon series
based on Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans, and this week’s portion
of the book talks about communion.
What Evans tells us this week about communion has a little
to do with the nature of the sacrament itself, and a lot to do with the love
Christians are so comfortable sharing with one another when we have food in
front of us. I pray someday soon this pandemic will be under control and we’ll
be able to share meals again, because it’s a great tradition that goes right
back to Jesus himself. Evans, at this point in the narrative, is unchurched.
She no longer attends the church she grew up in, her church plant called The
Mission has dissolved, and she no longer attends Sunday worship at any
particular place. However, also by this point in the narrative, Evans has
published 2 books and has a very successful blog, and she’s being invited to
speaking engagements in churches all over the country where all kinds of
different meals are served. And it makes her reflect on the Big Meal, the Last
Supper, on how Jesus had something so important to say just before he was
arrested. He could have shared that message any number of ways, but he in his Divine
Wisdom believed it would hit if there was food.
We’ve done so much as mainline Protestants to make communion
clean, neat, and simple. We pour the juice in those little cups that you can
buy in bulk from Cokesbury, we cut the Wonder bread into perfect cubes, and we
present our beloveds with a sacred feast that you can ingest in two seconds
with nary a crumb shed. When Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, he was having
dinner with his 12 best friends, and they were all a bunch of dudes just
sitting at the table together. Evans lifts this up in the book and it fit my
imagination as well. When Jesus broke the bread and poured the wine, everyone
wasn't kneeling on a little padded bench and acting so pristine and put
together and mannerly, everybody was reaching over one another and there were
crumbs everywhere and they were knocking things over. I mean it's 13 young men.
They don't have great table manners, am I right? But communion was never
supposed to look like the cover of the Cokesbury catalogue or like a Martha
Stewart creation. Communion was meant to be a feast of love, of friendship, of
forgiveness.
Jesus knew the trauma they were all about to endure. He knew
one friend would sell him out for silver and all the others would flee. But he loved
them, not in spite of their tremendous quirks and shortcomings, but because of
them. Evans presents to us that this image of Church is what our Church should
always have been: a great big table where everyone is welcome, and where
everyone is enough.
You don't need to have the right job. You don't need to have
the right habits. You don't need to have the right behavior. You don't need to
be in the right relationships in your life. You don't need to know the good
people. You don't need to have a certain income, your skin color doesn't need
to look a certain way. Your body doesn't need to look a certain way. You don't
need to be one gender or gender identity. You don't need to have one marital
status or one sexual orientation. Your family doesn't have to look a certain
way. You are enough. God loves you.
While you try to absorb all of that, think about Jesus’
conversation with Nicodemus in John 3. Nicodemus is a man who definitely needs
to hear both of the core messages of communion: everyone is welcome at the table,
and you are enough. Neither of those messages are favored in Nicodemus’s faith
practice. He belongs to the elite group known as the Pharisees. He has the best
seat in the Temple, and he and his friends and ultra concerned with legalism. They’ve
made it their job to look down upon everyone else and judge whether or not they
were following the Law of Moses with surgical precision. It was a great place
to be if you happened to also be a Pharisee, and you got to be a gatekeeper of
the Temple community. Your reputation was nearly beyond question. But hardly
anyone else could measure up. If you weren’t a Pharisee then surely you ate the
wrong foods, cut your hair the wrong way, wore the wrong clothes, bathed
incorrectly, had the wrong kind of body (eg, female). You were not welcome, you
were not enough.
But Nicodemus finds himself at a crossroads in this story. He’s
starting to question if this faith practice really reflects the nature of God.
He’s decided to learn more from a man who has quickly become quite notorious
for his un-Pharisaic beliefs: Jesus. But he doesn’t want to risk his reputation
in case he doesn’t like what the Outlaw Rabbi has to say, so he comes at night.
No one will see him. But also, he comes at night, in spiritual darkness.
Nicodemus is a very intelligent man, but he still has a whole lot to learn.
Jesus immediately challenges Nicodemus with a piece of
information that he will only absorb through his heart, not his head: he must
be born from above. Many of our church traditions have turned this into a “clobber
verse”, and used it to heighten our Church’s exclusive practices. Many of us
have learned that you don’t get a seat at the table unless you’ve been “born
from above”, or again. Unless you can name the hour, minute, and second that
Jesus transformed you, you are not enough. I don’t think Jesus meant this. You
may have had one life-changing spiritual moment like Nicodemus in this story,
or like Paul on the road to Damascus, or like John Wesley leaving the Bible
Study on Aldersgate Street; you may have felt your heart strangely warmed on
one day unlike any other. Or not. Your faith might have grown little by little,
every day trying to do better than you did yesterday. You are enough. You are
welcome.
So after hearing all of these things, Nicodemus goes back to
his life as a Pharisee deeply changed, but we don't see the result of that
until the very end of the Gospel. Meanwhile, here we are. We are in our
churches in 2021, a year into a pandemic in this very tumultuous state of the
world. A lot of us are trying to figure out if our churches can live with the
world being the way that it is, if our churches will survive this pandemic, if
our churches will survive a lot of things. Even before the pandemic, attendance
and membership have plummeted in our mainline Protestant Churches since the
mid-1960s. This atrophy of the Church has hit one generation much, much harder
than any before it: millennials. People my age. A full 25% of people born
between 1981 and 1995 identify as a “none” in spiritual terms, a person who
belongs to no particular faith tradition. And, contrary to what so many of our
elders have heard and then repeated, it’s not because we don’t want to belong
to our faith. It’s not because we’re too lazy, busy, or immoral to start going
to church. It’s not Little League games or avocado toast for brunch keeping us
away from your steeple. It’s the people we’re afraid we’ll find under it.
You’re at a crossroads, Church, just like Nicodemus was in
this morning’s Gospel story. You can continue on with your legalism, with your “We’ve
Never Done It That Way Before” mantras, with your closed minds, closed hearts,
and closed doors. But if you do that, you will die. If you want to live, and if
you want my peers to give you another chance, then you need to drastically change.
To that end, in 2007 the Barna Group thoroughly researched
how Millennials experienced the Church, and openly shared their findings in the
hopes of helping faith groups emerge from decades of darkness and decay. The
Barna Group uncovered that Millennials are feeling very disillusioned with
Church. 39% of us said that we felt like we could find God somewhere else. 35%
of us said Church wasn't personally relevant. 31% of us reported that church
was boring. 20% of us believed God was missing from Church.
Only 8% of us said that we felt like Church was out of date.
We’re not looking for Church to be hipper or more fun. We’re not looking for
fog machines, praise bands, and pastors donning skinny jeans. We’re just
looking for Jesus, and for people who reflect his values and love. And we’re
crushed that we’re not seeing that. 35% of us felt burnt out by moral failures of
Church leadership. 87% of us experienced Christians as judgmental. 85% of us
experienced Christians as hypocritical. 70% of us experienced Christians as
insensitive to the needs of other people, and a whopping 91% of us experienced
Christians as homophobic.
It is not the role of the church to be legalistic. That is
not helping people find Jesus. It is not helping people find a comfortable seat
at the table. It is not the place of the church to cling so closely to the
letter of the Law that we are blocking out the Spirit of it. It is not our job
to sit here and strain out gnats. Our job is to just fling open the doors and
let everybody in. Our job is to get rid of all of these different barriers that
keep people from finding their way into a faith life, drop the attitudes, drop
the prejudices, drop the “isms”, and let people know that they are welcome, and
they are enough.
By the way, Nicodemus shows up just one more time in the
Gospel of John. Do you know where? At the cross, in the light of day. If we can
muster that kind of courageous faith, we can help our churches change to bring
the message of the cross to everyone.
Amen.
I invite you to receive this benediction:
Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard
your going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all of
God’s people we say together: Amen.
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