A Community of Bread
Acts 2
June 3, 2012
“All who call upon the name of the Lord shall be
saved!”
So echoes the proclamation of Pentecost that we
recall this morning. Everyone, everyone, everyone shall experience salvation:
healing, wholeness, the deep peace of shalom, communion with the Creator and
with all of creation, in this time and for all time.
As the words of the prophet Joel put it, we’re going
to see visions and dream dreams. That is the gift of the Spirit and the promise
of Pentecost.
So I want to share a dream with you this morning.
This is not one of those grand, extended metaphors; it’s a real dream, the kind
you have when you’re asleep, and I had it a couple of weeks ago.
To understand it fully it helps to have been in
worship last Sunday, but since that was a holiday weekend many of you were not
in worship – which is why, as it turns out, we’re celebrating Pentecost today
and not last week when it actually fell on the liturgical calendar. That’s just
how we roll at Clarendon.
Be that as it may, the dream concerned the pile of
rocks that we had on the communion table for the Sunday of the Memorial Day
weekend. We shared an act of worship during which we recalled people who have
played significant roles in our faith journeys. It was a powerful piece of
community life, and a reminder that as we grow and change and live into the
next season of our life together we are grounded in powerful stories and
memories, and we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.
All of that is good, but the prospect of change
comes, nevertheless, always with some anxiety. So, as I was in the midst of
thinking about all that is going on I had this dream.
In the dream I had set up the communion table for
worship with a pile of stones, but when I walked into the sanctuary to begin
the service y’all had already begun and you weren’t doing what I had in mind.
You’d turned the table – literally. It was askew in the space and you had taken
the stones and were sharing them with each other and talking amongst yourselves.
I woke up thinking, “well, that’s an anxiety dream.”
But as I reflected on it a bit over the next several
days I realized that it was not, in fact, merely an anxiety dream. While I’m
sure there was some of that, what I actually received was both a calling and a
vision. It was a calling, a message about my own vocation, that was trying to
teach me a little bit about letting go, of holding loosely to the things I do
in order to let go of what is not properly mine to hold.
And, it was a vision of precisely the vibrant
congregation that God is calling forth in this place. It was, literally, a
vision of liturgy. Liturgy, that wonderful combination of Greek words that
means, literally “the work of the people,” and, in my dream, the people were
doing the work of worshipping God, of sharing their lives with one another.
Moreover – and here’s where the anxiety comes in –
you were doing it without the sanction of the institution of the church,
insofar as the formal holder of the office of teaching elder represents the
sanction of the institution, the authority of the formal church.
That’s what was happening on the day of Pentecost.
The spirit was saying to the huddled, fearful disciples, “get up, go out, and
be the people of the way that Jesus called forth.” The spirit was saying to the
disciples, “you don’t need to wait for the formal blessing of the religious
institution and the powers that be; you are the ones that you’ve been waiting
for!” And, the spirit was saying to the people – to all of the people, from all
places, from every background – “the amazing grace of God is for you, too! No
limits! No barriers! No fences around it!”
“Now, get up and go out and be the church!”
There are, of course, a million and one details to
that journey, and this is a brief homily not an org chart nor a road map. I
suppose it’s reasonably accurate to say that you’ll vote on the organizational
chart later this morning.
But, as Peter told the crowd in his great Pentecost
sermon, we have a model for the journey. We don’t have to invent it out of
whole cloth. The way of Jesus is before us: a way of loving neighbors, a way of
breaking barriers, a way of being the people of God for one another and for the
world.
We have discerned well here how we live into this
way. We have, as Joel promised, received dreams and visions, and the Spirit of
the Lord has been poured out upon us as God calls us to a particular way of
life centered on the fellowship that we share around this table.
I’ve been reading Wendell Berry this spring, and in
his wonderful novel, Jayber Crow, the
title character, in whose voice the entire story is told, offers an extended
reflection on the life of the church as seen from his multiple perspectives as
the town’s barber, the church’s sexton, and the community’s grave digger. I
think Jayber captures something essential about church that we’re aiming at,
and that, too often, the institutional expectations stand in the way of. Jayber
observes,
“What gave me the most pleasure of all was just
going up there, whatever the occasion, and sitting down with the people. I
always wished a little that the church was not a church, set off as it was
behind its barriers of doctrine and creed, so that all the people of the town
and neighborhood might two or three times a week freely have come there and sat
down together.”[1]
Something along those lines is the way of life we’ve
described in the mission statement we adopted this spring. The statement points
beyond the ways of being institutional church toward a way of simply being –
being the people of God following the way of Jesus. We’ve described this way of
life together in the mission statement that is printed on the back of the bulletin.
I invite you to join me in reading it together:
We welcome all*
to gather at table at Clarendon Presbyterian, to be richly nourished in
breaking bread and sharing cup, and to be sent into the world following the way
of Jesus to nourish all* our neighbors in body, mind and spirit.
*All means all: all races, ages,
genders, gender-identities, orientations, classes, convictions and questions.
That’s who is welcome to this congregation, to this
way of living in the world, to this table, because, to begin with, we are a
community of bread: taken, blessed and broken for the sake of the world. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
10:59 AM
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