Tag Archives: Communion

World Communion Sunday – Thinking Like Jesus

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Thinking Like Jesus

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2017

World Communion Sunday • October 1, 2017

Philippians 2:1-13

To hear the sermon preached, click below

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself – Philippians 2:1-13

What’s on your mind today? I went to a seminar once where the widely known lecturer, an expert at preaching and a professor began speaking to a room full of preachers by saying something like this: “I know that you are preachers and most of you have to go back and create a sermon this week. So I know a lot of you are thinking great thoughts, your mind is already full of what you want to say. But I want to speak today about the real question you should be asking: what’s on the mind of your listeners?” So I start out every week trying to think about that question.

Some people have taken it to a new level; they let their listeners text them questions during the sermon. I’m not quick enough to do that and while I use my iPhone to record the sermon, I put it on airplane mode. Of course, I really don’t know what’s going on in your mind today. Some I imagine are thinking about what comes next: lunch maybe or things to do, some are worrying, some are drifting off.

One thing on the mind of many of us is the damage done by hurricanes. How can we watch pictures of people, first in Florida and Texas, now in Puerto Rico, whose whole lives have been reduced to simply life itself. No possessions, no homes, just the basics of survival: food, shelter, water. At the same time, I can’t help but notice our Congress is focusing on creating a tax cut for corporations and wealthy people with the delight of a child writing a Christmas list. I notice the contrast in value: the emphasis on riches for the richest, the desperation of people for water that flows from our taps as easily as the twist of a wrist.

The contrast raises the question of value: what makes it worth it to a billionaire to make one more million dollars? What is life worth when you lose things, perhaps everything? What do we value? I lost my Tilley hat this week: a canvas sailing hat with a wide brim that could be bent to just the angle to keep a low sun out of your eyes and sweat stains from 30 years of sailing. It flew off in a gust of wind while I was sailing in gusty conditions with big waves and I knew there was no way to retrieve it. Jacquelyn hated that hat; she wouldn’t let me wear it off the boat. I loved it because I’d had it so long. Do you have things you love because you’ve had them a long time? What really IS valuable after all?

Roman culture was not so different than ours. Back then, as now, rich people drove culture, set an example and they did it by having expensive, valuable things. They filled houses with them; archaeologists dig them up today, mostly broken, because an archaeologist’s idea of a good time is digging in a landfill. But we know from pictures and written accounts and the occasional well preserved home that Roman lives were lived in a culture that clearly connected wealth and prosperity for honor and goodness.
So it must have seemed strange to the Christians in the Roman city of Philippi to hear Paul’s letter to them with its stunning message about Christ losing everything. This is how he summarizes the life of Jesus

…though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

No riches; no list of victories won, challenges met, games sponsored, statues erected, not even a list of charities he supported. But this stunning declaration: equal to God, yet emptying himself.

It’s an amazing thought. Jacquelyn and I are at that point in life where we are getting rid of things, and it’s hard. The wind and water took my Tilley hat; I didn’t have the heart to get rid of it. Selling stuff online or even in person takes letting go. And here Paul tells us that Christ let go of everything, without even ebaying any of it.

The Philippians knew slaves, saw them every day, Roman society was full of them, some of the Christians there may have been slaves. Everyone knew they were nothing, no one to emulate; no one saw a slave and said, “I want to become like him.”

What Paul is preaching is the action part of Christian faith, the day to day business of doing it, being it. And the key is: thinking like Jesus. Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus“, and he explains what this means: letting go of your own ambition, humility, serving others. The Book of Eli is a movie about a world after a total break down of civilization and its central character is a man who carries the last Bible. When someone asks him what it says, he replies, “Do a little more for everyone else than you ask them to do for you.”

Now today is World Communion Sunday; we celebrate today sharing in being the body of Christ with all other churches around the world. But what is the body of Christ without the mind of Christ? Sadly, today in some churches, people are being told that prosperity is the real treasure; in some, that it’s ok to exclude people because of who they love or how they love or how they look. But here Paul, here the scripture itself tells us what’s on Christ’s mind: loving others, seeking the genuine humility of serving others until life itself becomes just another Tilley hat that can be given back.

[Christ] he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

Today we will share the sacrament of communion, and it’s always important to remember the context of communion. Jesus knows where things are going; the gospel accounts unite in suggesting that he understood the betrayal Judas was enacting. He knows he is about to be arrested; he knows he will die. So what does he do? He throws a party.

It reminds me of my mother. For her 85th birthday, my mother suddenly asked my brothers and I to have a party for her. She had gotten word from her doctor a while before that her cancer seemed cured and she was feeling better. She wanted it at the same place my father’s funeral reception had been held, she wanted fancy food and music. So we put together the party, we had Frank Sinatra music—my mother never got over her girlhood crush on Sinatra—and it was only years later that I understood. My mother knew she was coming toward the end; she was giving things up, her house, most of her possessions, and she knew it couldn’t be too long before what she gave up included her life. She knew there would be a funeral; she knew there would be a party. She didn’t want to miss it.

Communion is the party celebrating Jesus’ final act of humility: he’s about to give up his life, for others, a final act of emptying. Now in this church we share communion by passing it hand to hand in the pews. That means every one of us serves someone else, hands them the plates of bread and the cups. As we serve others, we are reminded that serving others is what the mind of Christ means. Like children practicing setting the table, we practice here serving others so that as we go out from here, we will not go out simply with what was on our mind but with the mind of Christ. What’s on your mind now? May we go forward with the mind of Christ.

Amen.

Conversations Before the Cross 3: Samaritan Woman

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Conversations Before the Cross 3: Samaritan Woman<

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Third Sunday in Lent/A • March 19, 2017

John 4:5-42

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
– Emily Dickinson

Those words were written in the nineteenth century by Emily Dickinson but I wonder if they might not stand for the thoughts of the Samaritan Woman as she trudged down the hot dirt path to Jacob’s Well and saw a strange man sitting there. One more man who would by his averted glance, his sitting aside, demonstrate his contempt for her and all she was. One more person who would demonstrate indeed that he believed she was nobody.

She’s walking down the path at the middle of the day, the sixth hour. It’s an odd time to fetch water; water is usually fetched at the beginning and end of the day by young women who gather happily at the well. This woman has set herself aside and comes at the middle of the day for reasons about which we can only wonder. She is a minority in a culture of disdain. She is nameless even here in the Gospel. She is a woman in a patriarchal society, she is a casualty of relationships.

Boundaries

All these things are like boundaries around her. The boundary of Samaria: as much a psychological boundary as a national one, one of those boundaries human beings create which seems to outsiders artificial and yet to those who observe it is crucial to identity. How many years have we heard about the troubles in Ireland and yet which of us could distinguish between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant? But the distinction is life and death there.

Years ago the television program Star Trek had a show in which the crew of the Enterprise visited a world of enormous conflict between two races who were half starkly white and half deeply black. Captain Kirk, trying to make peace, arranges a meeting between the leaders of the two factions. He says, “I don’t understand, you’re both half white, half black.” But both combatants look at him in amazement. “But Captain!”, one replies, “He’s white on the right and black on the left; I’m black on the right and white on the left!”. Jesus asks the woman for a drink and she’s amazed!

How Would You Respond to a Stranger?

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” There she is with all her boundaries and someone enters her space. What do you think she expected? What do you expect when you, as a woman, walk into a public place and there is a strange and threatening man? I asked this question in Bible Class and every woman there said the same thing: “I’d avoid him”. She expects to avoid him, she expects to endure his silent contempt, she expects to be nobody. But he asks for a drink. And before he’s done, she’s begging him for living water.

There’s nothing more basic than a drink of water. Jesus asks for a drink and the woman asks for living water, the woman who was nobody, the woman who was nobody. The church is looking back and this is what they are remembering: once I was nobody. “I once was lost and now am found”, we sing. I once was nobody and I had living water poured on me and I became someone. One by one Jesus crosses the boundaries that have isolated this woman. He asks for water as if she were a friend; he offers living water as if she were family. He makes the well again a place to share for her, though she had been alone. Jew, Samaritan—we’re both thirsty, he seems to say. She wants to talk theology: a way to put the boundaries back. “What about where we worship”, she asks; “worship in spirit wherever”, he replies—that’s what God really wants.

Getting Personal

Finally, something happens that saves this from being theoretical and that’s the moment when he asks about her husband; that’s the moment when it becomes concrete, there’s a moment when it becomes personal. There’s a story about a woman in an evangelical church who was very judgmental. One day she got the Deacons to invite a noted fire and brimstone preacher to visit. He said, “God is going to judge everyone! Everyone who has take the Lord’s name in vain, you’re going to have God’s judgment!” “Amen!”, the woman shouted. “Everyone who has looked with lust is going to have God’s judgment!” he shouted. “Amen! Preach it!”, she said, rocking in her pew with her enthusiasm. “Everyone who gambles and plays bingo is going to have God’s judgment!”, he yelled. And the woman stopped rocking and said to her neighbor, the one who had won $5 just last night with her at bingo, “Well, now he’s stopped preaching and gone to meddling.” It’s one thing to talk about theology; it’s another thing to talk about personal things, private things.

“Call your husband”, Jesus says. That’s personal. “I don’t have a husband”, the woman replies. Whatever this woman’s history, and the church has imagined all kinds of histories for her, we know this: she has been dumped. We know it because the text says she has had five husbands and under the law of the time, she couldn’t divorce anyone, women couldn’t divorce their husbands, so five men husbands have left her. What does Jesus say to her? We don’t know; the text doesn’t t tell us but it is clear that whatever he says, she comes away from the encounter with a tremendous sense of acceptance, a deep feeling of having been heard and cared for, because her response is to ask, “Can this be the Christ?” He knows her: from his knowledge, she takes the courage to know him

When the Lost Are Found

It is the experience Paul talks about:

You see at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrated God’s own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

God didn’t wait for us to get right, God came when we were sinners, when we were a mess. God already knew us.

That affirmation about God is at the core of what it means to be Christian. Christian life doesn’t start when we know God nor is it founded on what we say about God. Christian life begins when we know God already knows us and loves us
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The church has all too often forgotten that we come from God’s knowledge of us to our knowledge of God. We have fenced the communion table, we have created boundaries which kept people like this woman out.

I want to say this one thing about the communion table: the invitation is for sinners. This table is a symbol that God is coming to us where we are, to give us the possibility of going to what God hopes for us. This table is a place to receive the food that can nurture us. And what is that food? Not just bread and grape juice. These are just symbols. They are symbols of God’s nurture, they are symbols of God’s call to move beyond the boundaries, beyond what we are, to what we can become.

Who Do You Meet?

Just like Jesus with the Samaritan Woman, every day we encounter people who don’t expect much from us. They don’t know you are a Christian; they don’t know you at all. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility of someone being nurtured. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility to share the well, to share the living water.

God has for each one of us, for me, for you, this plan: that you will be a blessing. And everything you need to be a blessing is right there if you will look around and see it. That looking around begins with the woman’s question. When she leaves Jesus, she says, “Can this be the Christ?” What do you think? Can it? Can you believe this is a Christ who can care for you despite all the boundaries?

What this finally means is: can you believe in hope? It’s frightening to believe in hope sometimes; it’s scary to believe in a hope beyond reason.

The movie Shakespeare in Love is the story of the young Will Shakespeare writing a new play he calls Romeo and Ethel, which you may know more familiarly as Romeo and Juliet. The movie has a romantic subplot and several conspiracies which all gather momentum near the end, as the play is put on stage. There are all kinds of obstacles and as they occur people keep rushing up to the stage manager and wringing their hands. To each in turn he replies, “It will all work out”. “How”, they ask. “I don’t know” he says. It will all work out—How?—I don’t know: over and over again.

That’s the hope Paul talks about; not a hope founded on reason, a hope founded on the faith that there is a God whose love is so powerful it can break the boundaries, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call out of nothing creation, there is a God whose love is so powerful it called Jesus Christ from death back to live, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call you to the same life. Share it, live it, offer it, as living water, as you share the well this week.
Amen