@EUCC Sermons

I don’t know about you, but it seems that just about every wedding I have been to, been in, or officiated at, something memorable has gone wrong. Not catastrophically so, like perhaps someone running off with the bride before the ceremony like the end of the movie The Graduate, but something memorable. I have watched several flowergirls or ring bearers have complete meltdowns, and I’ve witnessed more than one best man drop the ring while handing it to the groom. But I think my favorite wedding mishap story was at my cousin‘s wedding nearly 40 years ago. About 10 minutes before the ceremony was to begin, the groom leaned over to get a drink of water from a water fountain, and ripped his tuxedo trousers right up the back. Part of the video footage – and it is on videotape, not digital – is of my aunt sitting there in her mother-of-the bride dress, hastily stitching up the trousers to avoid further wardrobe malfunction. None of these mishaps was catastrophic; the weddings went on. They were joyful occasions, and we all had something good to laugh about afterwards.

So it’s not surprising to discover that first-century weddings were prone to mishaps as well. In our story from John’s gospel, the mishap is a big one: they run out of wine.

Throughout this Advent season, we have been on a journey, on our way to Bethlehem. We started in Rome—a place of longing—and we heard again God's promise that even in the midst of trial and tribulation, there is hope. We journeyed on to Jerusalem—a place of waiting—and we found ourselves waiting for peace in a city whose name means “the place where peace is established.” We realized there that Christ brings not just inner peace, but a call to action, to be the peacemakers and strive to bring about the kin-dom of God here and now. Last week we visited Nazareth—a place of simplicity—and we heard again Mary's joyful “yes” to bringing the Light of Christ into the world. We watched with joy as our children reenacted their own creative journey to Bethlehem.

And now finally we find ourselves arriving in Bethlehem, a town just a few miles from Jerusalem, a small town whose name means “house of bread.”

Since our “sermon” was the children’s pageant, there is no manuscript for today’s worship service.

Sometime in the early 1830s, an enslaved young woman named Araminta Ross suffered a horrific brain injury. She was about 12 or 13 at the time, and her enslaver had hired her out to another farm as a field hand. She had gone into the village with the enslaved cook of the estate to help her purchase some dry goods at the village store. As she stood outside waiting for the cook, a young boy being chased by an overseer ran toward her and dashed into the dry goods store. The overseer picked up a two-pound iron weight that was used for measuring dry goods and threw it at the boy, but instead, the full force of this iron weight hit Araminta in the head so hard that it  shattered her skull and drove the fabric of the shawl she was wearing on her head into the wound where it stuck. Apparently, Araminta had stepped in front of the young boy to protect him.

She was carried back to the farm, but she had no bed to be laid in, and so they laid her on the bench of the loom in the weaving room. No one tended to her. And the next morning, she was expected to get up and work in the fields. Which she did. But she was unable to sustain any work. As one of her biographers said of her,  “the injury [caused] her often to fall into a state of somnolency, from which it is almost impossible to rouse her. Disabled and sick, her flesh all wasted away, she was returned to her owner. He tried to sell her, but no one would buy her.” Instead, her mother was able to nurse her back to health.

Sometimes, when I’m studying the lectionary texts assigned for the Sunday that I am preaching, I’ll read one of the texts and think, “Oh, no way. No way am I preaching on that text.” I’ll move on to the other texts, I will find them uninspiring, I will move back to the one that repulsed me, look at it again and say, "No, really; no way, no way am I preaching on that!” And then I will sigh and realize that the Holy Spirit is telling me that that’s exactly the text I’m going to be preaching.

That’s how I felt about today’s text from the gospel according to Mark. This text is difficult for a variety of reasons. It makes me uncomfortable in the way it prophesies destruction and war and famine. It sounds too mysterious and inscrutable and too much like the Book of Revelation. In fact, it so resembles some of the imagery and language in the Book of Revelation that it is known by biblical scholars as the “Little Apocalypse.” As a progressive Christian, I’m just not sure how I feel about predictions of the Second Coming, except as a study of academic interest. So, I figured that is where we’ll start today, with a little refresher course on apocalyptic literature. Because the Bible is full of it, and so is the rest of the world.

Today we are celebrating All Saints Day, a solemn rite of the Christian Church, whose history goes all the way back to the fourth century, when the early church began to designate a day to commemorate the Christian martyrs of the faith. By the middle ages, the day became one of celebrating all the saints, not just the martyrs or those officially canonized by the church, but all saints known and unknown. Also in the middle ages, the church settled on the date of November 1 for the observance, probably because, like a lot of other Christian holidays, the church decided to align All Saints Day with the pagan celebrations that were happening at the same time. In the cultures of northern Europe, especially the Celtic cultures of Britain, Scotland and Ireland, the celebration of Samhain was a day when the Celts honored the dead. In fact, most of our secular Halloween traditions are descended from the Celtic rituals of Samhain: dressing in costumes, going door-to-door and asking for treats, playing tricks on people, and carving pumpkins – although the Celts used to carve turnips.

Many other cultures in the Northern Hemisphere and beyond have set aside a day for honoring the dead, so the idea of All Saints Day or Halloween or Dia de los Muertos seems to be following a basic human need: to remember our ancestors, to invite them back into our lives for a time, and then to let them go again.

Today is World Communion Sunday. World Communion Sunday is not part of the traditional liturgical calendar and is not a practice of the ancient church. It is instead a modern commemoration, an idea that was cooked up by the Presbyterian minister Dr. Hugh Thompson Kerr in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1933.  He was hoping that by emphasizing the common sacrament of communion he could engender unity and demonstrate the interconnectedness of Christian churches, regardless of denomination.

His colleagues in the Presbyterian denomination thought it was a great idea and adopted it as a denominational practice by 1936, but it didn’t really take off as a national or worldwide phenomenon until the second world war, when it really felt like the world was falling apart. Kerr’s son recalls that, “It was during the [...] War that the spirit caught hold, because we were trying to hold the world together. World Wide Communion symbolized the effort to hold things together, in a spiritual sense. It emphasized that we are one in the Spirit and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” (1)

In 1940 the organization that was a predecessor of the National Council of Churches, promoted the idea of celebrating world communion Sunday; The practice became widespread, and Today, World Communion Sunday is celebrated around the world. (2)