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Rev. Mary Wilder Cartwright
September 6, 2009
“Here We Are All in One Place: Around Town and At the Table”
Mark 7:24-37
You may know the song, “Betty’s Diner” by Carrie Newcomer. Common Ground Band played it a couple of weeks ago at The Open Door service. It is a wonderful song that talks about different characters who come to Betty’s Diner to have their breakfast.
All of these are the folks of Betty’s Diner.
Here we are all in one place
The wants and wounds of the human race
Despair and hope sit face to face
When you come in from the cold.[i]
The song captures a vision of what it means to come to Holy Communion together around the table. We come in from the chill and cold of the world, from discouragement or disillusionment, and from our troubles and our stress. We come in laughing with a friend or perhaps falling in love. Sometimes, we come with nothing more important on our minds than a crossword puzzle. Other times, we are weighed down with griefs and troubles. We come to be fed and to be loved. We come here to be accepted just as we are. God has heard it all and loves us anyway.
The Great Thanksgiving states it very clearly. We turn away and our love fails, but your love remains steadfast. Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, and ate with sinners. In his ascension, Jesus promised to be with us always. Acceptance - always with us.
And yet acceptance doesn’t come easy even for Jesus. When he encounters the Syro-Phoenician woman, Jesus is encountering someone who is completely different from him. She is a Gentile and a woman. She is a person so far removed from a first century Jewish man that it is hard to imagine any two people who are any more different. She is a worldly person, and yet she comes to this simple man and asks for healing. She asks not only Jesus but ultimately as we hear this text as God’s people, she asks the church to set aside its assumption that God is here for only one kind of person. She plants herself firmly in the path of healing and hope. “Heal my daughter, if you dare, she says to Jesus, “if you dare to recognize that even those most different and most scorned in the eyes of the established religious authorities deserve to be fed.”
And Jesus says, “Yes,” and the demon is gone. The daughter is made well.
In the same way, Jesus encounters a deaf man who cannot speak clearly, a man considered unclean, flawed, and unaccepted.
And Jesus says, “Yes, be opened,” and his ears were opened, and he could speak plainly.
It is out of the “yes” that we come to understand Holy Communion as a time of great thanksgiving, a time of great joy. All who seek to love and serve God are welcome. Those who feel unworthy are welcome. Those who are broken are welcome. Those who are grieving are welcome and are given comfort. Those who are upset and anxious are welcome and are given peace. Those who are feeling rejected are welcome and are given acceptance. Those who are struggling to find themselves are welcome, and they are given an identity. Those who have no home are welcome, and they are reminded that in the church, they have a community. Those who are joyful are welcome, and they find here a place of gratitude and offering.
It is because of all these things and in all these ways that it is with delight that we come to the Table. We receive the gifts of bread and the fruit of the vine because they are for us the gift of God’s unfailing grace, the ground of our hope, and the promise of our sure deliverance from sin and death. In gathering at the Table, we come with joy to gather with others from far and near. We are fed with the presence of Christ, and we catch a glimpse of what it will be when all gather when God has brought all people into reconciliation with God’s own self.
Throughout the centuries, it is certainly true that local customs and the prevailing beliefs of the day have affected our celebration of Holy Communion. For example, in the West, as kings and monarchs became the strong rulers that they were in the Middle Ages and beyond, it was customary for people to kneel in their presence and to bow down as they came into the room. A penitent seeking mercy in the medieval courts would kneel before the judge. Kneeling as a sign of honor and respect and also of penitence affected how Christians began to receive the Eucharist or Holy Communion.
Medieval Christians might have knelt in honor to God, but in democracies, people do not kneel before officials of the state. To show honor and respect to leaders, we stand up. When the President of the United States walks into the room, everyone stands up. When a judge walks into the room, the first words out of the bailiff’s mouth are, “All please rise.” When we come into worship, we stand up as we sing, we stand up for the reading of the Gospel, we stand up for the Doxology as we give our gifts and offerings to God, and we stand up as we receive the benediction. We stand up to receive the gifts of the bread and the fruit of the vine.
In the earliest centuries of the church, standing was always the way of receiving. Larry Stookey, one of our finest United Methodist liturgical scholars, puts it this way: “Standing, far from simply being a convenience for those who have difficulty kneeling, is an ancient and venerable practice...[standing] is an affirmation of Christian hope. At the table, we meet our risen Lord and believe we shall share by grace in the resurrection; standing connotes the acts of being raised from the dead in ways that kneeling and sitting do not.”[ii]
Standing sometimes may feel a bit like rushing, being too quick about it. Certainly, there are appropriate times for a more contemplative and solemn celebration of Holy Communion, but those are few and far between. The Eucharist is not primarily a penitential rite. Penitence comes as part of preparing oneself for Holy Communion. We pray the prayer of confession, we ask God’s forgiveness, and we are reconciled with our brothers and sisters in Christ. We practice that active reconciliation in the passing of the peace, “The peace of the Lord be with you, and also with you.” You can’t say those words and be out of reconciliation or out of connection with your brother or sister. But those are acts of preparation so that when we come to the table, we get up off of our knees, stand, and receive the presence of Christ.
We come to the table with people of all kinds and in all kinds of circumstances, united in the fact that with all of our differences, our struggles, our disagreements, and our different personalities, each one of us is a beloved child of God. We are all united in the body of Christ. We are One, and we trust that with the others around us, we receive the presence of the living God in our midst. It is bread for the journey, strength for the days ahead, and practice and preparation for creating a community that is a witness to the welcome table of the Lord.
Newcomer’s song celebrates Betty’s Diner as a feasting place where people who are different gather and are accepted for who they are, but it is a song based on the Eucharist. It is a song that would not be possible without the example of the Lord’s Table. The chorus makes it explicit:
Let her fill your cup with something kind
Eggs and toast like bread and wine
She’s heard it all so she don’t mind[iii]
Betty is like Christ, welcoming people in, accepting them as they are, listening and caring and serving. You never know which person at the Table will be the one to say just the word that someone needs to hear. You never know which person at the Table will be able to say the right word of forgiveness. You can see it here, you can see it in heaven. Come and have your cup filled. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
In the text from Mark that we heard today, the deaf man is described with a word “mogilalon” which means having an impediment in his speech. It is only used one other place in the entire Greek bible. The only other place that this word is used is in Isaiah 35, verse, 6, a passage which refers to the glorious fulfillment of Gods saving purposes[iv]:
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water (Isaiah 35:5-7)
Jesus’ act of healing points to something much bigger than the healing of this single man. It points to a glorious vision of God’s hopes and God’s dreams for us, for the whole of the Christian church, and indeed God’s hopes and dreams for all creation. It is that vision that we prepare for and seek as we come to the Table. We catch a glimpse of what it is that God has in store for us and what it is that God wants for us. We sing of that vision today as we celebrate and stand and receive the bread and the cup. We stand up and sing the song:
I come with joy to meet my Lord, forgiven, loved and free.
With awe and wonder to recall his life laid down for me, his life laid down for
me.
As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends.
The love that made us makes us one, and strangers now are friends,
and strangers now are friends.
Let us come, stand, sing, and prepare our hearts and minds to come to the Table with great joy and thanksgiving for all that God has done for us. As we come, strangers we are but become friends as we gather at the Table.
[i] Newcomer, Carrie, “Betty’s Diner” from album, Betty’s Dinner, 2003
[ii] Stookey, Laurence H., Eucharist: Christ’s Feast with the Church (Abingdon, 1993), p. 123.
[iii] chorus, “Betty’s Diner.”
[iv] Williamson, Lamar, Mark: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (John Knox Press, 1983), p. 138.
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