ALL THINGS NEW November 1, 2009, All Saints Day Isaiah 25: 6-9; Revelation 21: 1-6a Michael Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: We all have family in the stands, watching in love. By your grace, O God, in Scripture may we hear what we need to hear more than what we want to hear. Then may we be strengthened to live our lives as people who have heard a word that makes a difference. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. Amen. I got called for jury duty last week. I d already postponed once, so there was no putting it off again. I took the Number 4 subway down to City Hall Station, trudged up Centre Street to 111, and reported for duty me and about 300 other New Yorkers looking none too happy to be there. I didn t get empanelled. But I got to sit for two days, from 9 to 5, in a big, quiet room in a fairly comfortable chair. I read two books that I d been meaning to read, but like jury duty, had been putting off. One was an old French biography of Calvin. The other was a recent book about the Sacrament of Holy Communion by a professor at Princeton Seminary, George Hunsinger. Dr. Hunsinger, you may remember, spoke at one of our Sunday morning adult education classes last year. Both books made an important point that I want to make the focus of this sermon. Both books reminded me that John Calvin, the reformer and theologian who so shaped our Presbyterian-Reformed tradition and whose 500 th birthday we recall this year, thought very carefully about the Sacrament of Communion. In his day, some more radical Protestants, eager to strip the sacrament of the layers of superstition that had encrusted it in the Middle Ages, were saying that Communion was nothing more than a human act of remembrance. The Sacrament, they said, was simply a re-enacting of Jesus Last Supper. When Christians celebrated it, they were just remembering, remembering the betrayal of that long-ago night and - 1 -
the sacrificial death of that next day. Christ, some of these reformers were saying, was present in no special way in the sacrament, no more than Christ was present in any gathering of the faithful for prayer or praise that did not include communion. But Calvin, as my jury-duty-reading reminded me, believed communion was more. He believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. It was, he wrote, no mere symbol, nor was it a simple act of remembrance. Calvin could make little sense of the medieval theory of transubstantiation. But, Calvin said, Christ is truly present in the sacrament, not because God has physically altered the bread and wine, but by the work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit moving in the hearts of faithful worshippers as they commune. This insight still shapes the way we understand the real presence of Christ in communion in our church today. My hope is that this sermon will help you to celebrate the sacrament, this day and always, in a way that pulls you deeper into communion with God and other people. As the word suggests, this sacrament is precisely that. It is communion. It is the experience of communication, of inter-relationship with God and others. - 2 - What Calvin taught about communion has often been misunderstood, even by Presbyterians. For some, the sacrament did become contra Calvin an act of merest remembering and generally somber, overly-introspective, even guilt-laden remembering at that. The problem is this: if the sacrament is only about recalling the night Jesus was betrayed and the day he died, the logical question becomes, How have I been complicit in that betrayal in my life? How have my words and actions betrayed my Lord? If communion is only about remembering Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the mood that inevitably shadows the sacrament becomes, of course, one of the duplicity, injustice, suffering, and tragic death. Some ministers report that attendance actually drops on communion Sundays. It s not true at Brick, but if celebrating the sacrament is only about How have I participated in betrayal and execution, I don t blame people for staying home. I
have a friend named Bruce Rigdon, a retired professor of church history and sometime pastor, who actually refuses to celebrate the sacrament of communion on Maundy Thursday because, he says, the mood of that night tends to set the tone for communion the rest of the year, utterly skewing the sacrament. An extreme stance to be sure, but I see his point. So when you come forward down the aisle in a few minutes and look ahead of you at the cross, do remember, but remember His whole life, remember Him taking children on his knees, remember the Sermon on the Mount, remember the parable of the Prodigal Son, remember bright Easter, remember the whole Gospel, not only two days of it. But don t just remember the past. The core affirmation of the Christian faith, the one trust at the center of it all, is that Jesus Christ is not just a wise teacher who lived back then, taught a bunch of things that we remember and try to do now, and then died too young. Yes that, but the scandalous trust that is the bedrock of our faith is that Jesus Christ lives, that the last word was not, after all, the cross, that in some way on the far side of mortal words, He is with us now as a living, empowering, guiding, and strengthening presence. Equally audacious is the resulting Christian hope that all who are in Christ, those living now, here and everywhere, and those who have lived in the past and died, all are somehow gathered in Christ and are present and accounted for in the sacrament, with us around a table that spans both time and space. This is the communion of the saints that we ll sing about in today s closing hymn. Never has this trust in the idea of communion of the saints been more poignantly portrayed than in Places in the Heart, a 1985 film starring Sally Field, a classic that merits another watch, by the way. - 3 -
The story is set in the cotton fields of East Texas during the Great Depression, a hard place in good times, harder in hard times. In the opening scene, a young husband, part-time sheriff and small-time cotton farmer, is killed in the course of an argument with a young black man. That young man is immediately lynched by a white mob. The white sheriff s widow, Edna, played by Sally Field, is left with two young children, a few acres of East Texas dirt, and a pile of debt. The local banker tells Edna to sell the farm, send the kids away, and move into town with her sister. But Edna is a woman with a will, and providence sends strange helpers to her door. First there is an old black hobo named Moses, played by Danny Glover. He begs a plate of food the night of the funeral, steals the family silver, is caught, returned and forgiven. He tells the widow he can help her grow cotton on her 40 acres if she ll let him. With her last cash, Edna buys cotton seed, and Moses moves into the barn. Next, the embittered brother of the local banker knocks on her door. He s played by John Malkovich. Blinded in the Great War, unloved and unloving, he has no place to go. His banker brother can t wait to get him off his hands. His name is Mr. Will, and he earns a meager living caning chairs while listening, over and over, to records for the blind. Into this strange household comes love, strangely enough, incrementally but believably. The widow s young son greets Moses the first time he meets him by saying, It was a black man killed my daddy. Even his anger is conquered by color-blind love. Blind and bitter Mr. Will, boiling with hostility, slowly joins this odd-lot family, his cold heart finally melting the day the widow s little girl slips her hand into his. They plant the cotton, it grows, and they pick it themselves in a race against time, pick it till their fingers bleed. But the victory is brief. The ugly hatred of the first scene rises again when the Klan drives the hobo Moses out of the county. - 4 -
The film might have ended right there a defeat and a few bittersweet human victories: the family mostly together, the farm saved, a young widow selfsufficient. But racism has the last cruel word, and the widow is still alone, her husband is still dead, a black kid was still lynched, and Will was still blinded in a stupid war. That s just how this broken old world is, you might say. A few little victories scattered across a landscape of tragedy. I expected the movie to end there, about where modern Hollywood usually would put the period. - 5 - But that s not how it ends. The last scene is set on a Sunday, a warmish fall day three or four months after that awful opening scene. The camera shows a little white church with a sorry steeple, too short by half. The choir, a dozen ladies in floral print dresses and plus a gentleman or two, sings lustily, but only lustily. The preacher stands to read from the Bible, Love is patient and kind; he reads, love is not jealous or boastful not irritable or resentful. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Then the choir stands again to sing. You see that the sacrament of communion is being served, the elements passed from one person to the next as we often do. They sing a sentimental old hymn: I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses; And the voice I hear, falling on my ear The son of God discloses. And He walks with me, and He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own; and the joy we share As we tarry there, none other has ever known. As the choir sings, the camera follows a tray of bread and grape juice. You see it passed from one familiar person in the film to the next: Edna s sister and her philandering husband, the banker who wanted rid of his blind brother, the country western band that sang at the party when the cotton was harvested, dressed in their gaudy cowboy shirts. Odd that they should be in church. You saw them leave town a few scenes back.
Then you see a black hand take a communion glass Moses, the hobo cotton farmer. He s back, you think, The Klan didn t have the last word after all, but odd he d be in a white church, not in those days in that world. Then the tray comes to the two little children of the widow who pass it to their mother. She then passes the tray to her husband, who passes it to the black kid who killed him in the fight, the kid the mob lynched. As he passes it to the kid, he says, The blood of Christ shed for you. The choir sings some more and the film ends. I was speechless the first time I saw Places in the Heart. I remember saying to myself, That s the Communion of the Saints, the Communion of the Saints, right there in a Hollywood movie. Both of the Bible passages that Daniel read twenty minutes ago imagine that same scene. Isaiah, a prophet who lived in days of great suffering and defeat, dares to promise that there will be, finally, a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines. He promises that that God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all nations, and he will swallow up death forever. Some 800 years later, one John of Patmos, a follower of Jesus living in exile off the coast of what we know call Turkey, will pen words echoing the Jewish Isaiah, words spoken now with a Christian accent: See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more I am making all things new. Know that when you come forward for communion, it is the Living Christ who meets you, no mere memory. And then, as you find your way back to your pew, know that the Living Christ goes with you Christ before you, Christ behind you, Christ beside you, Christ around you. You don t have to simply imagine this. It s the final truth, the last word that cannot yet be seen with the eye. - 6 -
And know this also; know that in Christ all those lost to us in this world are somehow in communion with us. In some way, they are seated to your right and to your left. You don t have to simply imagine this. It s the final truth. It s the last word that cannot yet be seen with the eye. This day, today, is a foretaste of that ultimate reality, that final victory. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 7 -