Here is the script of my sermon from this morning: Around the Table, Around the World ©2012 Molly Dowell Baum Isaiah 55: 1-9, Acts 11: 19-30, 1 Cor 10:16-17 About two and a half years ago, I was living in Zambia, in South Central Africa. It was Maundy Thursday. I was preaching at St. Bartholomew UCZ church in a compound in Lusaka. The rectangular church building was about two-thirds the size of this sanctuary, made of cinder blocks and concrete with a tin roof, and wooden benches—which were crammed with probably around 600-800 people. As I preached, a Zambian woman, an Elder, stood by my side, barely taller than the large pulpit. In a loud raspy voice she shouted out my message after me phrase by phrase, translating it into Nyanja. It was evening after a long day, and the sun had set by the time I had finished giving my sermon. We moved to the Communion Table, and I began the liturgy. Just before I was about to say the words of institution, the lights went out, plunging all of us into pitch darkness. Fortunately, I was at the point in the service where I have the rest memorized. But it was only a moment before hundreds of tiny lights twinkled among the congregation—folks had quickly pulled out their cell phones to lighten up the room. That night we celebrated communion together by the light of cell phones and one or two candles. It was a festive night. Row by row, the people danced up the aisles as various choirs sang. At the front, each person dropped their special communion offering into a slot for their district. Men and women Elders in black and red uniforms then handed out round wafers and tiny plastic cups filled with Mozoe (which comes from a concentrate that resembles a cross between Kool-Aid and Fruit juice). We started with about ten trays of cups, and as each was emptied, it was rushed to a small room behind the pulpit where ten people hurried to wash and refill the cups with Mozoe). Though there are many ways in which you and I are different from the people in this church in Zambia, there are many more (like the cellphones) in which we are the same. Most importantly, there is an underlying unity between us—together we make up the Body of Christ. We gather around the same Table, even on the other side of the world. This morning, and every year on the first Sunday in October, we have an opportunity to highlight this unity on World Communion Sunday. “World Wide Communion Sunday,” as it was first called, began in 1936 in Presbyterian Churches in the US and overseas. Only four years later the predecessor body of the National Council of Churches embraced the celebration and it spread to more denominations and congregations all over the world. Today in worship, and especially at the table, we celebrate our oneness with our sisters and brothers around the world, promote peacemaking and understanding, and look for the day when God’s reign over all peoples will be fully manifest. As we step into the flow of this tradition once again, we recognize the brokenness and separateness between us in the world today. And we recommit ourselves to unity, which begins with knowing a little bit about our brothers and sisters around the world. I’m delighted to be in the pulpit on this special day of worship, to share with you a few of my experiences around Christ’s table around the world. For the first two years of my ordained ministry, I had the privilege and joy to serve as the Phillips Talbot Global Ministry Fellow. This fellowship provided a pastoral immersion experience in the Global South. It is a mission project of a congregation in New York City, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. The fellowship was started in 2007, when the church finished a capital campaign for renovations, and put aside a tenth of the monies raised for this new project. The purpose of the fellowship is to help new pastors in the United States to learn firsthand what is going on in the church around the world, particularly in the Global South where the Christian population is expanding rapidly (countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Kenyan theologian John Mbiti puts it this way: “The centers of the Church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York…but in Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila.” As you may know, through the Global Ministry Fellowship, my husband, Pastor Ryan, and first I spent three months with the congregation in New York preparing to live overseas. Then we packed up and shipped off to Zambia to live and work for one year. After that year, we were given 3 months to travel within the Global South. We set our own itinerary, with the few guidelines that we should travel as close to the ground as possibl—the ways which local people traveled, by boat, train, bus; and that we restrict our travel to countries in the Global South—loosely defined as Non-Western, lower or middle income countries. Our ambitious itinerary included Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, and then Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The final six months of the Fellowship, we were back in New York, where I did a pastoral residency with the Madison Avenue congregation. These two years provided us with an amazing experience of the Global Church. What we were doing, and really the shape of mission work in mainline churches today, is parallel to the work of Barnabus and Saul in Antioch from our reading in Acts 11. (btw, this Saul is the same apostle who is renamed Paul and wrote the letters). Barnabus and Saul were partnering in ministry with the local church leaders, encouraging and adding to the efforts of a thriving church already in progress. The two of them lived and taught there one year, just as we were in Zambia for a year. And just as in our work we were collaborating with missionaries and church leaders already at work, so were they. There is a wonderful thing happening in this story from Acts. The coolest part is a little buried in the (history and) context though, and we need to know something about the city of Antioch in order to see it. Antioch was capital of Syria, and third largest city in the Roman world. It was like the Chicago of the Roman Empire. The city was built by Seleucis, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who named it after his father, Antiochus. Like many cities of the day, Antioch had a great wall around it. Seleucus knew that it would be a multicultural, multiethnic city, full of Africans, Persians, Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Greeks, Turks, Romans, and Jews. Historians tell us there were at least 18 ethnic quarters in Antioch. Seleucus knew that every race and culture thinks it’s superior to others, so he built walls between ethnic neighborhoods to protect them from one another and conflicts which might emerge. Now here comes the really cool part. We read in Acts 11 how the disciples who came to Antioch first spoke the word primarily to the Jews there, but soon some started speaking it to Greeks as well. The new church in Antioch quickly became as diverse as the city. Acts 13:1 lists five leaders of the church who represented three continents and four different racial groups. An extraordinary thing was happening in Antioch. People were crossing the walls to worship together. Up until then religion was an outgrowth of culture, confined to those walled-in ethnic groups. But in Antioch, God was doing a new thing, creating a new nation, and so they needed a new word for it--and they called the members of this new nation “Christians.” It was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians. (Acts 11:26). This strange new bunch of people crossing walls to worship together and share a special meal. Perhaps you’ve had an experience of crossing walls—or in contemporary times, crossing cultural boundaries—to worship, fellowship, and dine with other people to whom your only connection was your Christian faith…? I would definitely count my 2-year fellowship in this category—even the time in New York, as the upper East Side of Manhattan provides as much a culture-shock to a girl from Kansas, as does going from New York to Zambia. Most especially, I would count the time we spent traveling. As Ryan and I set off on our three months of travel throughout Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, we weren’t sure what we’d find or how we’d be greeted. We hoped to learn more about what God was doing in Churches in the various countries and cities we visited. What we experienced was an overwhelming welcome. We were welcomed like family—as a beloved brother and sister—by people who we had never met before and often to whom often our only connection was that we called ourselves Christians. One such experience happened in Laos. We were only in Laos for 5 days, and unlike many of the other places we visited, we didn’t have any previous contacts in that country. We did know the name of a Reformed denomination with which the PC(USA) is developing a relationship, The Lao Evangelical Church. On the internet, we found and called a telephone number for the headquarters in Vientiene, the capital, and then called the cell phone of the pastor of a church in a nearby village. After a few confusing exchanges, he passed the phone to his younger associate who spoke English. We got some very basic “directions”—basically just the name of the village and the fact that there was a Christian church there—and Sunday morning took a tuk tuk into the village. Once in the village, our Lao speaking tuk tuk driver was pretty confused, and we finally found the church by following the sound of singing. We drove up to a newly painted peach two story building, added our shoes to the pile outside the door, and joined about 80-100 people inside a large room on the lower level. Fans whirred overhead in the sticky morning as the people sang celebratory praise songs led by a group in front with guitars and microphones up front, and curly Lao lettering on the wall via an old school goose-neck overhead projector. Kids ran in and out of the open doors and up and down the aisle. The service was entirely in the Lao language, so we sat in the back and mostly observed--it was hard to participate much beyond humming and clapping, and bowing my head to pray silently along with the Lao prayers. But after the service, a young woman named Ped (“Pet”) found us and showed us around the complex of buildings. She shared with us the ministries of the church, and invited us to stay for a fellowship meal. Now this was something in which we could fully participate! In the same large room where we’d worshipped, the wooden benches had been pushed back and plastic table cloths rolled out on the linoleum floors. Steaming bowls of rice, vegetables, and soup were laid out in lots of communal bowls, out of which one just used their fork, spoon, or chopsticks to eat all together. Pet, the pastor and his wife, and some of the other young leaders who spoke English sat with us, and shared more about their church, and asked us about ourselves. Though this was not the ritual communion meal, this time of gathering in the Lord’s name around the table (or in this case on the floor) was a powerful experience of communion for me. You see, table fellowship, today as in Paul’s time, is an important aspect of our life together in Christ, of hospitality and sharing and belonging. Table fellowship is a wonderful opportunity to live out the unity of The Lord’s Supper each day. Every time we sit down together--whether with family and old friends, or new acquaintances whose ways are different from ours--when we dine together, we have the chance to experience the grace we receive and share around the Lord’s Table. And here at the Lord’s Table, we do indeed receive God’s transforming grace, which forms us into the Body of Christ so we may move out into the world, to serve and love all of creation. The cup of blessing that we bless is a sharing in the blood of Christ. The bread that we break is a sharing in the body of Christ. The Greek word translated as sharing, is koinonia, and also means partnership, intimacy, participation, community. That is what we come together to do and be at this Table—with Christ, with each other, with every other person in every time and place who has also come to his Table. As different as Christians may be around the world, we are united in our diversity through Christ, because we gather around his Table. We can greet one another not as strangers, but as beloved members of God’s family, even if that is the only thing we have in common. When we imbibe the Bread of Life which Christ offers us here, we take on our full identity in the Body of Christ. We dare to leave behind those labels and identities which our cultures of origin provide. Our primary identity becomes that of Christians. Living as the Body of Christ is a life of crossing walls. It is then that we become what Isaiah was prophesying: a new nation bound together by the love of Christ, to whom others will be drawn. Strangers even, from nations that you do not know will be drawn to us, because we have found relationship and unity with God and each other, which at the core every human is seeking. Around the Table, and around the world, around the corner, around Siouxland, may Christ truly be found in us today and forever more.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 04:57:18 +0000
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