2024.10.06 | Broken
“Broken”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
World Communion Sunday,
October 6, 2024
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
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)
Of course, the way that churches practice communion—the how of communion—and the theological understanding—the why of communion—that different churches have for this sacrament varies widely from church to church or denomination to denomination, and Christians have been arguing and splitting up over the meaning and the practice of communion for centuries. But most of us can agree on a few simple things:
it’s a practice that was established by Jesus as recorded in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke;
it was evidently practiced in the early years of Christianity as we heard from Paul in his letter to the Corinthians;
it involves the practice of breaking bread and pouring wine;
it is considered a fundamental sacrament of the church, whether that church is Catholic or Protestant or Eastern Orthodox
What kind of bread? What kind of wine or juice? How old does one have to be to take communion? Do you need to be a member of the church or not? What sort of transformation happens in the bread and wine, or in us? What do the elements symbolize? All these things can be argued. But the sacrament itself, the bread and the grape, and its institution at the hands of Jesus—we have all these things in common.
If you have been a Christian long enough, and attended worship long enough, the words that Dave read today from First Corintians are very familiar. Some version of these words—along with those in the passages from the three synoptic gospels— is read at every celebration of communion. It’s important for us to remember, though, when we consider this communion formula from Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church, that there’s some context that we often don’t consider when we hear this passage. And this context is important when we consider the meaning of communion for our lives today.
For one thing, “when Paul refers to the Lord’s Supper at Corinth, he is not talking about a liturgical ritual, celebrated in a church building,” [the way we celebrate communion today. At this early date, sometime in the mid 50s, in the first century, “there were no separate buildings for Christian worship. The Lord’s supper was an actual meal eaten by the community in a private home.” Each person or family would bring what they had to share, so there would be bread and wine, which were table staples in the first century, but there would also be a little fish and lentils and vegetables and fruits and cheese and nuts and milk sweetened with honey. We’re not exactly sure how the ritual was practiced, but “evidently, the sharing of the symbolic bread and cup of the Lord's supper occurred as part of a common meal.” (3) A banquet. A feast.
Earlier in the passage from first Corinthians, Paul criticizes the Corinthians because it appears that they are abiding by the hierarchical practices of Corinth’s Greek and Roman culture, a culture that would put people of privilege at the head of the table, where they would eat first and have their fill and those of low standing would get the scraps. This is not what is intended for the communal meal, Paul admonishes:
“When you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you [...]. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you proceeds to eat your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have households to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” (4)
In recalling the actions of Jesus at the table, Paul was hoping to re-emphasize one of the primary meanings of the sacred meal that they shared— that it was a feast that unified them, that brought them all together equally, so that all would have enough, and no one would have too much. The shared meal was to remind them that they are one—one body united in Christ.
I often wonder what Jesus would say about how we practice the sacred meal that he established. What would he think today if he walked into Eden church, and saw people sitting separated in our pews, partaking of a little piece of gluten-free bread and a thimbleful of white grape juice? Somehow I don’t think he’d really recognize what we do as the meal that he established. We’ve mass produced the mass these days.
We’ve domesticated communion, haven’t we? Just as we’ve domesticated the sacrament of baptism. Instead of immersing people into the living river the way Jesus was, we’ve brought baptism into the building, away from the natural source of the water, and we pour a little bit of tap water on people’s heads. And we’ve done the same with communion. We dole out a little bit of bread or wafer, and a little sip of wine or juice. It’s a far cry from the shared meal that Paul describes.
After all, we are far removed from the actual elements that are part of the communion meal. Unlike our ancestors or the early followers of Jesus, we are not the ones sowing the seed and growing the wheat and harvesting the grain and grinding it into flour and forming it into loaves and baking it. We are not the ones planting the vines and tending them and picking the grapes and crushing and pressing the fruit and fermenting the juice. Yet without those deeply earthy activities, communion doesn’t exist. Our celebration of the Eucharist cannot happen without someone being connected to the earth itself and to the growing and the harvesting of the grain and grape.
Of course, I know that the how of practicing communion is not as important as the why. The why can be found in the very word “communion” itself. The word is from theLatin that means, “fellowship, mutual participation, a sharing,” related to the word for common, meaning “belonging to all.” The why of communion emphasizes our relationship with God and with each other, united through the life of Jesus. But the what of communion—that earthy grain and grape leads me to believe that we miss something important when we domesticated communion and reduced the feast to a mere morsel.
I think we are meant to understand that communion connects us not just to each other as a community or as a church or even just to the memory of Jesus‘s life and death and resurrection, but it’s meant to connect us to that which is ultimately what gives us life.
The Rev. Dr. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, an Episcopal priest and environmental activist notes that “Communion [can remind] us how much God loves the whole creation, not just human beings—as if we happen to be the only species that God cares about. When [we lift] up the bread and [cup] during Holy Communion, all of Creation is lifted up. When [we bless] the bread and [cup], all of Creation is blessed. The [...] bread that is placed in our hands is made of wheat, earth and sunlight, of rainwater and clouds, of farmers’ hands and human labor. When we stretch out our hands to receive the bread, we take in what is natural and we take in Christ.” (5)
In the broken bread, we understand not only the broken body of Christ, but also the broken body of the very earth itself. The fundamental elements of our remarkable planet are intimately reflected in the sacraments, from the water without which no life can happen here on earth, to the flourishing plants that all creatures depend on for our sustenance.
In order for the elements of communion to exist, the ground must be broken into furrows for the seed. The seed must be split open so the grain can grow. And then the harvest breaks the stalks, and the grinding of flour crushes the grain. The grapes are crushed and broken open to make juice.
As the poet and farmer Wendell Berry reminds us, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.” (6)
The earth must be broken open so that we may live. The bread must be broken so that all may share. And our hearts must be broken open so we can be made whole in the love of our Creator. Friends, on this World Communion Sunday, let us celebrate together the breaking of bread. Let us remember that it is a feast, offered to us from the very body of Creation itself, so that we might be one body in Christ. Amen.
(1) “World Communion Sunday,” Presbyterian Mission Website, <https://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/worship/churchcalendar/world-communion-sunday/> Accessed October 5, 2024.
(2) ibid.
(3) Louis B. Hayes, Interpretation: 1 Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox, 1997), 193-4
(4) 1 Corinthians 11:18b-22 NRSVue
(5) Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, “A sacramental life: Rising up to take climate action,” Reviving Creation Blog, <https://revivingcreation.org/a-sacramental-life-rising-up-to-take-climate-action> Accessed September 25, 2024.
(6) Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1981), 281