Sermon of the Week:
No Insignificant Question-Significant Hymns: For Everyone Born
A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on October 3, 2021.
Part six of a eight-week sermon series inspired by questions submitted by the Kirk community.
Special Music: I Thank You Lord
Hymns: O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright
For Everyone Born.
Keywords: Hymns, World Communion Sunday, Mystery, Science, For Everyone Born #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Mark 10:13-16
and Galatians 3:23-29
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469.
All rights reserved.
Life is full of mystery.
This doesn’t mean that, every day,
we don’t learn something new.
One of the amazing things about human beings
Is how much we have been able to learn
About how life works,
Science, medicine, history, art, engineering, social welfare.
We give thanks for every insight,
Every life-saving vaccine developed,
Every new theory tested and substantiated,
Every observation replicated.
But the deepest, most complex theories
That our rational capabilities can formulate,
That science helps us to understand,
Also highlights the fact
That there is still a depth of mystery
That goes way beyond it all, even so.
For example,
You can study biology, or human genetics,
And know everything there is to know
About, say, reproduction and fertilization,
About pregnancy, birth, and childhood;
But when you see a newborn child, for that first time
And those two eyes meet yours
with a look that seems to say “hey there new person”
You glimpse a mystery
that no physical explanation can ever fully explore.
It is the same with music.
The physicist can, in principle,
Explain what happens when a particular instrument is played.
Sound waves. String tension. Aperture.
But why Mozart makes us want to laugh and cry and dance,
Why you just start singing along to Don McLean’s American Pie
Or the Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine
Or Bon Jovi’s Livin on a Prayer
Or Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You…
When you hear it….
We know it is sound waves, hitting our ears…
And yet, it is MORE than that.
We can’t quite fully explain
Why some music is deeply consoling
and some is deeply disturbing…
That all remains in the realm of mystery.
We can understand, rationally, what life is,
You learn that in Biology 101,
But we can’t quite fully explain the why. Mystery.
We can explore, with granular detail,
DNA, Cells, organs, bodies, communities, nations, entire species,
And realize as we do so
that there is so much more to know, to learn, to explore,
the more we know the more we realize we don’t quite know.
And the deepest mysteries of human life—
love, death, joy, beauty,
take your pick—
have, for eons and eons,
pointed human beings toward the deepest mystery of them all
the mystery of God.[i]
///
What are some of your experiences with the mystery of God?
Some of the earliest moments I remember, in church
Were communion moments.
That’s not surprising.
Food has this ability to stick in our memory.
Think your mother’s go-to casserole,
Or what you were eating on that important first-date. Do you remember?
I remember, as a kid, sitting through another worship service
Doodling on my bulletin,
Trying not to make the oak pew creek
as I fidgeted next to my mother
And look: someone put into my hand these little cups of juice,
wedges of doughy bread
And I thought, hey, I could get used to this.
We used to go up to the communion table, after worship
To get the extras, you know.
I think my father frowned at this.
Years later, as I learned about Christ and him Crucified,
as the Apostle Paul puts it
As I learned about agape—
that’s the word the Bible uses for love,
for love that gives all it has for another person,
for the very love of God
and that story of deep compassion and ultimate betrayal and
unexpected resurrection
and life overcoming death
all because God loves you and loves me
and there ain’t nothing you can do about it
When I learned all that,
and they passed the juice and the doughy bread
and remembered the body and blood of Jesus…
that mystery…
I wept.
So much mystery.
So much I didn’t understand:
why me?
Why all this?
And even as an adult, so much
I know
that I really never will fully understand…
Now, there’s a science to making bread:
just enough wheat and water, and yeast too
If, unlike the Hebrews in Egypt, you’ve got time for the yeast…
Get the oven hot enough, but not too hot
The yeast eats the sugar in the mixture
Produces carbon dioxide, it rises
And voila: you’ve got bread.
And if you pull it out of the oven at the right time
And you leave it to cool..
it smells so, so, so good.
There’s a science to baking bread,
but none of that explains to me why the smell of bread
Reminds me of those early communions
The feel of the pew
The joy of knowing I am loved unconditionally
The tears of thinking about Jesus’ betrayal and death
Ultimately, the comfort of knowing that I belong to God.
And yes I also smile every time I taste the juice of concord grapes.
///
For me, it was around communion
that I first experienced the mystery of God as a comfort.
It might be different for you,
and maybe it’s not primarily mystery
that characterizes what’s going on
when God peeks into your life.
Maybe its comfort, or challenge, or disruption.
But even so, we gather this day for World Communion Sunday.
There is no more sweeping theological expression
of the diverse family of Christ
than World Communion Sunday.
In one sense, this is a uniquely Presbyterian celebration,
because World Communion Sunday began 88 years ago
at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh
before being adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in the USA
and soon thereafter by the Federated Council of Churches
and then by Christians all over the place.[ii]
But even as we note its Presbyterian roots
we can say that the celebration hopes to erode any attention
to creedal differences among believers in Christ.
That’s because today
we, in particular,
celebrate how people of every hue and tongue
men and women on every continent, and our continent
Pentecostal and Structured
Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant
Republican and Democrat, Green and Reform
Liberal and Conservative and Moderate
Mizzou Tiger and Jayhawk and Wildcat
(ooh, dangerous territory now)
Emergent and Stuck-in-the-Fifties
Gay, Straight, Transgender, non-Binary,
living on a dollar a day,
and living in a ward-parkway mansion
today we celebrate how ALL people are made ONE at this table.
World Communion Sunday: the radical invitation of God
the radical love of God poured out for you and for you and for you, and for me.
///
Now that is a mystery.
There is no small amount of irony
that a religion as fractious and as divisive as ours has been
finds a way to stop and celebrate our unity.
Some have said that you get three Christians in a room
and you’ll get four different denominations out of it.
Maybe five.
But I believe, in my heart,
that most of us mourn this human tendency.
It’s not just a Christian thing, though we certainly are good at it.
And it’s not, at its core, part of what our faith teaches,
not if we’re being true to the Gospel, to the message of Jesus.
We need to say so.
And we need to put words to what causes this division:
Sometimes we disagree about what’s important.
We elevate this. You elevate that.
This feeds me. That feeds you.
Ok. Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world,
Until we start saying that other people are not as faithful or good or true as I am.
Then there is the fact that
The things that divide us
Are the very things that allow some people to thrive,
People who use division to keep themselves in power
Rather than to add extra seats to the table, to allow other voices to be heard.
That’s part of it.
And then there’s this tendency to elevate
our people, our community, our team, our tribe…
And it becomes so easy, thereafter,
to denigrate people those who are different.
But then we remember
That it was Jesus who served those who were being excluded,
those who were being outcast and sent to the margins…
Jesus called THEM to participate fully in the faith community.
And it was Paul who reminded us that
there is no longer Jew nor Greek,
Slave nor Free,
Male and Female
for all of us are one in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And while we Presbyterians aren’t immune, certainly,
from this us-vs-them tendency,
as we said last week,
our founding documents clearly see us
not as THE faithful expression of the faith
but as A faithful church,
one part of several faithful parts
that make up the body of Christ.
///
Indeed, it is particularly because we are Christians
that we should mourn this tendency of human beings
to break apart, to judge one another, to assume MY way is THE way
and your way is most certainly not,
thank you very much.
And this is because we look to Jesus Christ himself
and see what Christ has done
and who he has loved
and HOW he has loved
and are AMAZED that WE, too, are invited, called, welcomed.
Christ doesn’t look to which jersey we wear
(how’s that for a corny sports analogy,
but it’s true, though we all know
God’s a Royals fan.)
Christ doesn’t look to which church we belong to
or what position on transubstantiation we believe in
or even whether our heart is loving enough, faithful enough,
generous enough.
Christ welcomes us anyway.
Christ welcomes THEM anyway…
to this table, the table of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
That’s world communion Sunday in a nutshell:
our UNITY in Christ despite our worldly differences.
///
The reason for that is that
This table isn’t about us, it is about God.
If it were about us, we’d all probably fall just a little bit short
And maybe some of us more than others.
But this table is about God
A God who is the source of love and of value and of beauty.
We human beings get to participate in that love,
Imperfectly, mysteriously,
Always seeking to do better.
And some of us do better,
And some of us do worse.
We make good choices, sometimes,
And sometimes we do stupid things.
Sometimes we can’t help ourselves—
Addiction, lack of good options.
Sometimes we certainly can, but we choose to do harmful things.
Sometimes we’re wrapped up in an understanding of the world
Of politics, of community, that is ultimately harmful,
that leads to bad habits, poor choices, painful relationships.
We are finite, fallible creatures.
And one of the lessons of Jesus Christ
Is that God intends to save creatures just like that.
That we are not abandoned.
That we are not alone.
And that’s why there is Jesus.
The one who does that, who is doing that.
Who stressed in his teaching—
The lost sheep
The lost coin
The prodigal son
The wedding banquet
The daily wages
The mustard seed
The good Samaritan
The feeding of the five thousand
The plucking of grain on the sabbath
The Beatitudes
The Lord’s prayer
The sheep and the goats
And on and on and on
That God intends to heal the broken, comfort the hurting
Feed the hungry, Right what is wrong,
challenge us to reject evil and to do the good.
As we said two weeks ago,
God never closes the door.
We may not understand how God does it,
But if Jesus teaches us anything,
It is that the love of God is a love that aims
For peace,
For justice,
And for reconciliation in the world.
And when we share communion,
We say that all are welcome here
Because it isn’t our table,
It is God’s table,
And it is a sign and a seal of that intent
Even if we, as human beings, imperfectly live it out
Even if we yearn for that day when
Lion will lay with the lamb, as it says in Isaiah,
When the powerful will use their power to lift up the less powerful
When racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia
And all of that will be overcome
Because we will see that we are all one in Jesus Christ
That God loves us all
That we are siblings, and therefore family.
This is something of what Jesus meant when he talked about
The faith of Children,
Children who, in their better moments,
see the world with compassion and equality and idealism, right,
radical fairness.
We are all one in Christ Jesus our Lord.
///
Today is World Communion Sunday,
And I chose this hymn, For Everyone Born,
For a day like today,
Because it is one of those hymns that brings this home for me.
I’ve spent a lot of time pondering, singing, wondering, praying about this hymn.
I’ve loved it, then struggled with it, and then loved it again.
It works on me, and I appreciate that
Because it reminds me that this work of reconciliation and justice and peace
Is bigger than just me.
For Everyone Born was written by
Shirley Erena Murray back in 1998,
And she wanted to stress the idea of basic human needs—
Food, shelter, safety, freedom to speak and to worship,
Within the framework of Christian thinking,
Within the teaching of Jesus Christ.
So the first verse, along with the refrain, goes like this:
For everyone born, a place at the table,
For everyone born, clean water and bread,
A shelter, a space, a safe place for growing,
For everyone born, a star overhead…
and God will delight
when we are creators of Justice and Joy, compassion and peace,
yes God will delight when we are creators of Justice, justice and Joy.
So we see that God wants human beings to thrive,
every human being to thrive,
and we are called to help create the justice, joy, compassion, and peace,
that will help bring it about.
The hymn then explores what a place at the table means
For some of the big areas where we struggle with this:
For women and men,
for young and old.
We might add others, too, but these are the two we find in the next verses.
So far so good.
And it also explores, next
in the most challenging section, at least for me,
What a place at the table means
for just and unjust, abuser and abused,
as it holds in tension our faith’s teaching about forgiveness and justice.
This is harder for me. Maybe it is for you, too.
Here Murrey was inspired by the Lord’s Prayer, right…
Forgive us out debts, as we forgive our debtors…
She was inspired by the story of the Prodigal Son
By the life of the Apostle Paul himself
Once a persecutor of the church,
then someone transformed into maybe its greatest advocate.
God does this sort of work, too.
Ultimately, we know, there must be justice for the victim of injustice
And the work of reconciliation is that work.
The Lord’s Table is a symbol of God’s desire to reconcile that tension
Not by papering over wrongs done,
or letting those with power continue to abuse it,
but by transforming hearts and minds
through rehabilitation and making amends.
But man that’s hard to get our heads around.
And it is not a call, or an urging, to have victims do or say or feel anything here.
How this all can be accomplished, certainly a mystery.
But that’s perhaps why it is God’s work, ultimately,
And work that might go well beyond our mortal life,
in God’s good and eternal time
But it is something that we are called to aim for
To understand, to see as part of God’s intention for us:
That healing where those who harm us will have to work to fix it
And where the things we do to harm others…the same.
In a world of justice, and reconciliation, and peace,
we’re called to do is to aim toward it more and more,
The best we can.
///
For everyone born, a place at the table.
That also means that there is a place for me. And for you.
That’s a good thing. A hopeful thing.
Maybe healing is possible, in God’s good time.
There are things that are a mystery,
and then there are things that you know,
Deep in your bones, things that are crystal clear.
I may not know why the smell of bread reminds me of my childhood
But I know that the power of communion sustains me
And breaks down all the divisions of our world.
I may not understand why Christ was Crucified
But I know that the meal God shared with us
Is enough to heal the wounds of the world.
I may not get why so many people seem divided in our land
But I know that, according to God
At the name of Jesus every knee shall bend
And that the love of God is more powerful than anything that seeks to
Make us enemies of one another rather than neighbors.
My friends, on this World Communion Sunday
May we celebrate that God moves through so many different people
And makes of us one human family in Christ
Of every possible language
Of every conceivable culture
In every land in this beautiful world God has made.
And may we claim our part as part of a worldwide community of faith
Who are called to make all of this about God, not about us
For the sake of God’s realm,
A world of peace and hope and possibility for all people.
May it be so.
Amen.
—-
[i] Adapted from N.T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (Louisville, Kentucky; Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) 19-20.
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Communion_Sunday, accessed October 2, 2021.
Photo by Kyle Nieber on Unsplash
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