1 If you asked most people to name the most interesting verses in the bible, they d probably go through a lot of verses before they got to Galatians 6:11. It s not one of the ones that people usually talk about as a favorite verse; it doesn t find its way onto many bumper stickers or t- shirts or signs in the end zone, but for my money it s one of the most interesting lines in the bible. Galatians 6:11. It reads, See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand. It s not the stuff of inspirational posters. Here, Paul is near the end of his letter to the Galatians, and he s closing the letter, and for a moment he breaks character, his normal- person voice breaks into his Paul- the- apostle voice, and we hear something about Paul that I think is totally fascinating: he has bad handwriting. I have bad handwriting. I ve spent a lot of time these past few weeks writing thank- you notes to folks who gave me gifts at my graduation, and I m sure those of you who receive one of these notes in the mail will agree that my handwriting is terrible. It has always been atrocious the worst grade on my report card was always for penmanship. But then computers came along, and now I hardly ever write anything down anymore, since I type everything. So my already- awful handwriting got
2 even worse, because I m out of practice and my hand gets tired faster, and it gets sloppier and sloppier as time goes on. The only exception to this, strangely enough, is when I m writing in Greek. I have fantastic handwriting in Greek. But in English, as many of you will soon see, my writing is almost illegible. Paul was writing in Greek when he wrote Galatians 6:11. Here s a bit of context that might help make sense of that line, see what large letters I make when writing in my own hand. In the ancient world, literacy was nowhere near as widespread as it is today, and even for people who could read or write, it was common to hire out most of the writing to professional scribes. Maybe that s what I should have done with the thank- you cards. Even though Paul knew how to write, like most people he usually used a scribe or a secretary, to whom he dictated his letters. There s some fun evidence of this, by the way, in Romans 16:22, which comes in the middle of a lot of greetings that Paul is sending to people living in Rome. After 15 and a half chapters from Paul, verse 16:22 reads Tertius, the writer of this letter, greets you in the Lord. So in that letter, Paul has been dictating to a man named Tertius, who then slips in his own greeting at the end of Paul s letter.
3 In Galatians we don t know the name of the scribe Paul s dictating to, but it does seem that at the end of the letter, Paul takes the pen and finishes it himself. This was a somewhat common thing to do; it s kind of like how today, even after a typed letter or memo, we still sign our name by hand at the bottom. Finishing a letter in your own hand was a way of putting your personal touch on it. On the front of the bulletin you can see an early papyrus, from a collection called the Chester Beatty Papyri. This collection of papyrus contains copies of many of Paul s letters, copies dating to the late second or early third centuries. The page you see is actually the ending of Galatians; the verse 11, the one we re talking about today, starts with the last word of the second line, and goes down to the first word of the fourth line. Since this is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Paul s own letter, the difference in handwriting isn t there anymore; this one was written by a scribe. The letters are regular and neat, forming straight lines, and they are all the same size. This is the work of a reasonably good scribe. In contrast, Paul in Galatians 6:11 was probably writing in what scholars call an untrained hand. His handwriting looked like mine. He didn t have the skill to keep his letters small and regular, and as he wrote, he scrawled
4 across the page. He seems to be a little embarrassed by this, as he makes note of it, and he seems self- conscious about it but I think it s really, really cool. It s a fantastic view into the process behind the writing of the bible we have today. Here is the writing of the bible in Paul s own hand a hand, we are reminded, that was kind of chickenscratch. Scripture did not drop down from heaven fully- formed and neatly arranged, as some Christians would claim, but it was written by people, and sometimes it was scrawled. I was thinking about this verse as I was planning this service, and because this is a communion service, I was thinking about communion too. And as it turns out I ve been having lots of conversations about communion lately, with lots of different colleagues. Ministers will tell you by the way that sometimes something will bubble up to the top again and again; it ll find its way into conversation after conversation, and when that happens, it s good to pay attention to it, and it s even better to put it in a sermon. So I kept having all these conversations about communion. I was talking to my friend Sunny, who like me was ordained in the Disciples of Christ, and who is now serving a trio of rural UCC congregations in Nebraska. She called me up on the first Sunday
5 her churches had communion, and she said, in essence, Wow. Don t you think the UCC way of doing communion is really strange. Do we really have to do it this way? You see, she had the same experience as me: she found the way UCC churches usually do communion to be really formal and high- church, which is what I found when I came here six years ago. When I say this to George, he kind of laughs at me, since our way of doing communion is not really formal or high- church, but these things are relative; it feels that way to me. Communion the way it s usually done here feels foreign to me; it feels like trying on someone else s clothes, it feels like trying to write in someone else s handwriting. And as it turns out, George and I have been having a conversation about this for a few years now; I ve asked not to preach on communion Sundays because of that feeling, the one that I share with my friend Sunny, the feeling of discomfort and feeling inauthentic. There s nothing wrong with the way communion is done here; I rather enjoy it, actually; it s just not what I m used to, it doesn t feel like writing in my own hand. When I first arrived at First Plymouth, I presided at communion once or twice, and it just felt wrong to me, like imitating someone else s handwriting, and it must have felt
6 wrong to all of you as well, from all the strange looks I got. So for years I just avoided it; George handled communion Sundays. But this summer, some scheduling made it unavoidable: I was on for the first Sundays of June and July. Two communion Sundays in a row! So last month I put together a communion liturgy from a lot of different sources an attempt to do something fairly formal, while not writing in the hand of what George typically does. It still didn t feel right to me, but I didn t get as many strange looks, although one person after the service told me which part I had left out. So for this month, in thinking about this service, I emailed five or six of my Disciples of Christ friends to ask for their communion liturgies, in hopes that one of those would feel more right. The response was universal. Communion liturgy? What are you talking about? We don t have a liturgy, said of one of them. I just stand up and talk. Another person said it was a time to tell a story that he couldn t fit into the sermon. How different is that from what we do here? And keep this in mind: the Disciples do communion every single week, and the Disciples are the UCC s closest ecumenical partner; we are first cousins if not siblings. There s a decent chance the denominations are going to merge someday. So this feeling of communion here not being authentic to me came as a surprise.
7 But then I started thinking I started thinking about all the different communion services I ve been a part of. Some have been here, of course. Many were at the church I served before, a United Methodist church, with the Great Thanksgiving and sung responses and organ music. Many were at the church I grew up in, which I want to talk about in a moment. But there are a few communion experiences that stand out. One in particular was a Baptist church in the small Cuban town of Piedrecitas. This church was a small cinderblock affair, smaller than our chapel by far, where a woman named Rosalva was the pastor. This church had perhaps a couple dozen members, and so our group of ten or twelve from the college I attended really pushed the limits of that small church. But we had a great service, with a sermon in Spanish translated into English and lots of great music. When the time for communion came, they passed around trays of sliced- up hamburger buns, the only bread they had been able to get from the store on that day, and small Dixie cups full of a yellowish liquid we all assumed was mango juice. The time came to eat the bread and take the cup, and I knocked back what I thought was the mango juice and only then discovered that it was
8 actually a very, very powerful homemade peach wine. I have never before or since consumed anything that burned quite so much, and I have consumed North Carolina moonshine, but that s nothing to homemade Cuban peach communion wine. All at a cinderblock Baptist church in Cuba. Or I think about the communion services we ve had on mission trips with the youth group. These have been in hot and humid places, usually, on the last night of the trip when everyone is sunburned, exhausted, and intensely happy. We would gather in a circle, half the people dressed in the last half- clean mismatched clothes they have, the other half meticulously groomed and perfumed, trying to close the deal on whatever boyfriend or girlfriend they ve been trying to acquire during the trip. In those communions it was always about the common table, the experience of sharing so much time and space and so many meals together. It was always dark as people passed the bread and the cup, offering the bread of life and cup of peace to each other, and there was more solemnity and seriousness in those twenty or thirty teenagers than in any sanctuary like this one.
9 Or I think about communion I ve attended where I haven t been allowed to take part. At Catholic weddings and at Greek Orthodox services and anywhere my baptism is considered inadequate, I remember the feeling of not being included, of being explicitly excluded. It s not a good feeling, which is why I m so glad this table is open to all. And as I mentioned earlier, I remember the communion at the church I grew up in. It was part of the service every Sunday, just before the offering but after the sermon. The minister and two elders stood up front. The minister gave what is called a communion meditation, a short, 2-3 minute mini- sermon connecting the sermon to the ritual of communion. The two elders by his side gave prayers for the bread and the cup, and I ll never forget this one man, this enormous tobacco farmer country gentleman kind of guy, who always gave the prayer for the cup, and he always started it in exactly the same way. After the first person had prayed for the bread, he would begin his prayer for the cup with the words, In like manner Father God. Whatever he said after that changed week to week, but those first five words, in like manner Father God, never changed. As far as I know he s still there, saying them now.
10 Handwriting is one of those markers of diversity and difference. We don t all have the same handwriting, despite the efforts of our penmanship teachers, because we are all different. Paul s handwriting was untrained and scrawling, but it was his. My handwriting is barely readable, but it s mine. And when we try to write with someone else s handwriting, we call that forgery, we call that fraud. Perhaps that s what my friend Sunny meant when she expressed her frustration with the communion liturgy at her new churches; it felt fraudulent, like she was claiming something that wasn t hers. Perhaps that s why I ve avoided communion here for so long. Perhaps that s why when I haven t been able to avoid it, you ve given me such funny looks, because you can recognize the forgery for what it is. See what large letters I make when writing with my own hand! Authenticity is not always smooth and graceful. It can be rough around the edges. It does not meet expectations. Paul didn t feel his scrawling untrained hand measured up to the hand of the scribe. I ve never felt like I could successfully write in someone else s hand, like I could pull off communion in a way someone else does it.
11 So today I am going to preside at communion like I feel like I should. Depending on your perspective and your experiences will be missing parts, and it will be less formal than you are used to, and it will be a good bit shorter than usual. But it will be in my hand, authentic to me and what I know. This has been kind of a self- centered sermon, all about things I ve been thinking about lately. I hope you ll indulge me sharing one more thought I ve had lately. I think a lot about how my job relates to the jobs all of you have, or the jobs you want to have, or the jobs you had or wish you had had. I think a lot about how my work as a minister might be different from or similar to the kinds of work other people do. And I was thinking about that as I was writing this sermon. And I realized: this is a sermon all about me, which you re never supposed to do, by the way, they tell you that in homiletics class, but I never took a homiletics class, so that explains that. This is a sermon about my comfort and uncomfortableness, my experiences and biases. But I realized that most of you have had the same experience. Most of you live lives in which you attempt to write in someone else s hand, or else make your hand neat and regular enough to please other people. All of us live lives that are on
12 some level forgeries putting on a front for the benefit of others. And so my call to you as I close this sermon is to throw off that falsehood as best you can. Be who you are, be who God created you to be. There is built into the world of course a certain need to please others. But my charge to you is to avoid that as much as you can. Write in your own hand, whether your letters are large or small or scrawling or regular. Write in your own hand whenever you can, whether others can read it or not, write in your own hand because God can read it; God knows your hand; God knows what you are trying to say when you are being who you are. This is not a call to self- centeredness; this is a call to authenticity, messy sloppy authenticity, and a call to being who you are. Because you are welcome at this table no matter who you are. See what large letters you make when writing with your own hand. Amen.