2023.10.01 | Feasts of Love
Feasts of Love
1 Cor 11:17-26
Preached by
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
01 October 2023
Today is World Communion Sunday, Church! Today we celebrate communion with many of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians, the world’s largest religion. We’re so big, Christianity, is as Forest Gump said, “like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” There’s so much variation among us. Just here in the U.S., Christianity is quite a spectrum. I know we know all too well about that. And yet communion highlights for most of us–not all of us–a distinct point of unity. That’s what I’d like us to reflect on today, communion.
This past week in Bible Study we had 18 individuals share their family migration narratives. It was wonderful to hear all the crossings of rivers from Czech, Ukraine, Germany, Sweden, England, Ireland, Scotland, Mexico, El Salvador, Africa, the Philippines, and Vietnam, among other places in between. We didn’t discuss what might have been our ancestor’s communion traditions, but we could have, and I bet they would have been localized and varied. The importance here is unity and not uniformity.
To celebrate this special communion Sunday, I have on the communion table the first communion set given to me, by our congregation in Mexico City, Shalom Tlalpan. The plate is large enough for a good loaf of bread or many tortillas, and the chalice doubles as a coffee mug, a nod to our café con leche group. Shalom Tlalpan is a congregation that is part of a larger house church network in Latin America, and they rotate their meeting spaces among different houses. Most house churches have around 40 members, so when they grow much more than that, they spin off other house churches that also become part of the larger network. Not at all unlike how Paul and the early christians grew Christianity--there were no mega churches with escalators, starbucks, and stage lighting in the first century. Once you surge past 40 persons though, you really pack a home. We loved it. Of course, it was a little chaotic, but the sense of intimacy and closeness to one another was unparalleled--and might explain some of the dysfunction that we read about in Corinthians. However, as with our passage this morning, communion in many house churches today, as was then, is embedded in a communal meal known as an agape feast, or a love feast.
You see, many of the first christian churches met inside of private homes, not in elaborate church buildings like we find ourselves in right now. Right after Pentecost, Luke tells us in Acts 2, that the earliest of Christians, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts. (Acts 2:42-47). And in Romans 16, Paul addresses at least 5 different churches meeting in homes.
Christian Jews and Christian Gentiles fellowshipped and dined in ancient Roman homes. Well-to-do Roman citizens of the first couple centuries would have had what was known as tricliniums or banquet halls with connecting reclining lounges forming a U-shape. Of course there was no table like the ones we have in our western homes today, or like the one here on our chancel. Despite Da Vinci’s depiction of the Last Supper, there was certainly no long raised rectangular table in the Upper Room. Jesus and the disciples most likely would have eaten while reclining on cushions placed on the floor with the food on a low table.
Eating in the horizontal position was kind of akin to a status symbol, it was a bit luxurious--tbh, I still prefer eating my tacos standing up, I don’t think the selfies would be too flattering in the other position. The horizontal position, though, was also thought to aid digestion. So, this is the “new” element of communion that Pastor Brenda alluded to during the announcements. Joke, we’re not going to ask you to drink wine lying on your side.
But for those first few centuries, communion was much more than a cracker and a sip of wine. It was a communal meal, like I said, known as an agape feast, or love feast, agape being a Greek word for “love.” That’s why Paul got so bent out of shape in his letter to the Corinthians when some of the more well-to-do citizens who had the luxury and privilege of arriving to the feast early, would begin eating far in advance of others. If its central tenet is love and fellowship, we can’t commemorate the body of Christ without including all. I mean after all, it’s called communion. The English word “communion” comes from the Latin meaning community, but also from the Greek, κοινωνία (koinonia), meaning to share, fellowship, to have things in common. Paul, writes to the Corinthians, just before today’s passage, affirming that through communion, the blessing and sharing of the cup and bread, we are in koinonia fellowship with one another and Christ.
The sacramental action over bread and wine was originally part of the love feast, not unlike our potluck, where guests would take dishes to share. This is how Shalom Tlalpan would most often celebrate communion, in a packed house, embedded within a tasty love feast.
So, while the Eucharist was originally most often part of the love feast, the two eventually began to separate, especially after the time of Constantine. In 313 CE, Constantine and Licinius announced in the famous Edict of Milan, “that it was proper that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best.” Not only did Constatine appropriate the sign of the cross, but as the first emperor who supported the Church, he commissioned many Christian basilicas.
Many of the buildings of the church today are patterned after those very Roman basilicas. They had long porticos and functioned as public spaces. After Constatine patronized the church, it found itself meeting underground in homes less and less, and having communion less and less as a full communal meal in tricliniums, lying around eating and discussing, as was Jesus’ custom. With the advent of basilicas and actual church buildings, meetings occurred more often in longer porticos or naves with Christians’ attention directed to the front of the hall or room, like the set-up we have here today. And communion took its place at the front, rather than in the round.
While the liturgy of the Eucharist took rise, and the actual love feast took a back seat, it did not fall out of use for all Christians. The ancient Saint Thomas Christians of the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu, who trace their Christian origins to Jesus’ apostle Saint Thomas himself, still celebrate the love feast, using their pancake-like rice battered appam served with coconut milk. Closer to home, the Methodists, Church of the Brethren, Moravian Church, and the ecumenical House Church movement today have revived dedicated love feasts. And depending upon what Christian tradition of origin you were raised, you might have thought deviled eggs themselves were a weekly sacrament.
It is important to break bread with one another. Jesus knew the relational power of sharing a meal with others–whether lying on one’s side, sitting down, or standing up; imbibing fruit of the vine, or coconut milk. Authentic dialogue most often occurs over dinner. In the ancient world, meal time was often the most segregated time. Think back to primitive high school. Cliques and infinitely smaller social circles were on no better display than in the lunchroom or cafeteria. Am I right? Jesus in his ministry sought to bridge those social gulfs over meals. And it remained a sticking point in early Christianity among Christian Jews, but in Acts 10, Luke tells us that Peter had a vision that confirmed Jesus’s boundary crossings. No animal, food, or person was to be deemed unclean. And so, all could partake at the love feasts, and no dish would be turned away. There would be no more yucking anyone else’s yum. This said, to quote Michael Pollan, “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Being the first Sunday of the month, and also World Communion Sunday, in just a few moments, we will commemorate what took place in the upper room. At the Last Supper, Jesus established a new covenant to follow. To share the bread and the wine, “in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19-20). In this action, even though Jesus knew that his crucifixion was nigh, recollection of what empire, the state, will do to Jesus, and his ministry is all that Jesus asks of us. Jesus does not ask for vengeance, but for remembrance, and communion.
Understood in this way then, the bread and wine substitute sacrifice itself. Each time we partake in communion we are saved from sacrifice, and blessed in fellowship. Love feasts are the ultimate interrupter of reciprocal violence. This is why Paul exhorts us to examine ourselves and consider the whole body of Christ, the whole community, as we come to the feast.
Communion subverts what happened at calvary. As a community we gather around, not to observe an executed body on a cross, but to become, together, Christ’s body in the world. An inclusive meal with a radical welcome, that follows Jesus’ ethic of boundary crossing, eating together calls us into deeper communion, with each other and with God.
Every time we partake, we do so in remembrance of justice perverted, and to the flourishing of koinonia, fellowship toward the world as it should be, sharing and caring, regardless of class and isms. We collectively state, never again. In taking the bread and the wine, we place ourselves in solidarity with victims, the crucified. “To be reconciled to God then, is to, like Paul, convert from the crowd that gathers around victims, and to be reconciled with one another.” For this is our commandment, to love one another, and to partake continually of the agape love feast.
So, whether we pass tortillas, flatbreads, crackers, juice, wine, or coconut milk, may we do so with the intention of building beloved community. Whether we eat lying down, standing up, or seated, may we consider those around us. And whether we partake in homes or in large buildings, may we never forget that through this sacrament, we are all connected to Christ, and as the body of Christ, we are called to share feasts of love, wherever we go. May it be so. Amen.