New Testament Reading—1 Corinthians 11: 17-29
Toward the end of the first century, there lived in Rome a Spanish poet named Martial. In all, he wrote over 1,500 poems. In many of his poems, he used his sharp wit to satirize life in Rome. In one poem, he recalls:
I felt a little ill and called Dr. Symmachus.
Well, you came, Symmachus, but you brought 100 medical students with you.
One hundred ice-cold hands poked and jabbed me.
When you called, Symmachus, I didn't have a fever, but now I do.
In another poem, Martial comments on the dining practices of the wealthy in Rome. At the time, it was customary for a wealthy host and his special guests to eat better and larger portions while the other guests ate cheaper, second-rate food. About his friend Caecilianus, Martial wrote, “Tell me, what is this madness? While the throng of invited guests looks on, you, Caecilianus, alone devour the mushrooms. What can I wish on you to match such a huge stomach and such a throat?” He then proceeds to wish that Caecilianus meet the same fate as Emperor Claudius who died of a poisoned mushroom.
Aside from this wish, Martial’s indignation over Caecilianus’s mushrooms wasn’t that much different than Paul’s indignation over the eating habits of the Corinthians. Here were Christians who were coming together to share in the Lord’s supper, but instead of coming together as equals around the bread and the wine, some of the wealthy Corinthians had turned communion into a potluck where they devoured all of the goodies, all the peach cobbler, all of Cliff’s magical cream puffs, all of Ellie’s marshmallow fruit miracle, all of Cory’s stupendous cakes. Paul accuses the Corinthians of making the Lord’s Supper, their supper. Paul says, “For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk.”
Well, I admit I at first had a bit of trouble getting into this text. I thought to myself, “We just have those little pieces of bread at communion. Maybe sometimes someone gets stuck with a hard piece of crust, but it’s really not that bad. And, then, one can’t really get drunk off of grape juice.” But, after thinking about it for a while, my mind went back to an essay I read some years ago by a Princeton philosopher named Peter Singer. He was writing about famine in East Bengal. People were dying and the rich nations of the world were not giving the needed assistance. In his article, Singer made the argument that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” That seems sensible. Not very controversial. For example, imagine that you are walking past a shallow pool and you “see a child drowning in it.” Clearly, the right moral thing is to wade into the pool and pull out the child. You have the power to prevent the child’s death, and you won’t really sacrifice anything besides getting your clothes wet.
Well, one of the questions Singer raises is whether distance makes a difference. If we feel it is our moral duty to save a child ten yards from us, then why not feel it is our moral duty to save a child on the other side of the world in Bengal? All we have to do is write a check. For most of us, writing such a check would cost us very little. It’s about as easy as pulling a kid out of a shallow pool. So the question is whether the two situations place the same moral burden on us?
Well, Brooks, what does any of this have to do with church potlucks or communion? If we were eating a potluck in Bradford Hall with all of the delightful goodies, and if we were to then look in the doorway and see a starving child, wouldn’t we at least give the child a plate of food? But, then are we also just as morally compelled to do something for kids elsewhere who may not be immediately visible? There are the invisible kids not only of Bengal, but the invisible kids of Vancouver. The government reports that 17% of all children in the United States “suffer from hunger or live on the edge of hunger.” Given that Vancouver has a poverty rate slightly above the national rate, we can perhaps assume that a good percentage of kids in our city go hungry at times. On top of this, we can consider the rising cost of food as homes spend 13% more for milk, nearly 15% more for bread, and 30% more for eggs.
At the end of our Scripture reading for today, Paul says, “Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.” Maybe the way we do that today is by imagining the children of the world or the hungry children of Vancouver standing around our communion table with their eyes fastened on the bread and the juice. Maybe we then ask ourselves if this is truly the Lord’s Supper or if it is instead our supper.
Once we have examined ourselves, the question then becomes, “Now what?” Pulling out our checkbooks and collecting food are good responses, but in the face of the numbers given for just Vancouver alone, it is inadequate. We are simply not capable of saving every drowning child through charity. Here is where it becomes morally compelling to address matters in terms of public policy and the basic economic order of our society. To follow up on my sermon from last week, if we are to avoid becoming a religion of the ostrich with our heads underneath the sand, then at some point we need to ask ourselves how our church can engage policy issues. Can we find a way to productively engage policy issues even if we are not always in agreement?
To do this effectively requires more than simply thinking and talking about the issues. It requires a culture of prophetic engagement. In our scripture for today, it would appear that Paul was doing some prophetic cultural engagement. He was saying that the cultural values of wealth and status found in society are not supposed to be our values as Christians. He saw how something as vital and essential as communion had become corrupted. He was in essence saying, “We need our supper to become the Lord’s Supper once again.”
Prophetic cultural engagement is something that our church has already done in a number of ways. It can be seen in the Rules of Engagement display, the way our Vacation Bible School camp addresses environmental issues, our various adult education series, and the plans being made by our Christian Education Committee to learn about non-violent communication, a way of talking that allows people to productively handle conflicts and differences in everyday life.
Finding ways to make prophetic cultural engagement a way of life that stretches beyond Sunday and beyond supporting charities is perhaps one of the greatest challenges churches face today. Here is where we might be able to learn something from other countries as well as learning from our own history here in the United States. I was recently reading of someone from the U.S. who went to Turkey and discovered there an inspiring struggle for freedom and human rights among the Kurdish people. What struck this observer was not just “the depth of commitment but also” how the commitment was “so natural and without pretense.” It was “just a normal part of life, despite severe [and immediate] threats.&rdq
uo; I remember having a similar kind of cultural envy when I visited South Africa. Around a table of thinly sliced steak, I could share a communal meal with strangers in a township tavern and become enthralled by their ideas and stories about changing the world.
Our country possesses its own incredible traditions of prophetic cultural engagement. There were the consciousness raising groups of the feminist movement where women got together to think through issues of oppression that arose from their own lives, their own experiences—experiences of childhood, work, and motherhood. Ultimately, they wanted not only to raise their own awareness and the awareness of others but also to “prompt people to organize and to act on a mass scale.”
To take another example we can look at the music that has originated from this country. We can look to the spirituals. Today, we mainly sing spirituals in church, but originally, they served as a soundtrack for life. One former slave recalled, slaves not only sang at church meetings, baptisms, and funerals, they sang “to nearly everything” they did. They sang as they chopped wood. Using the chop of the axe to keep rhythm. They sang gathering cotton. They sang bending over washtubs. They sang rocking children to sleep. The former slave further recalled how when they got together to sing they would first sing religious songs. Then, they would sing songs about life, and finally, they would sing songs that brought the two together and these they called “spirituals.” She further remembered that a slave would “live his life over in the spirituals.” Singing, she said, was “the way he expressed his feelings and it made him relieved. If he was happy, it made him happy. If he was sad, it made him feel better, and so he just naturally sings his feelings.”
The famous black scholar W.E.B. DuBois referred to the spirituals as “sorrow songs.” He once said, “Through all the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” So it is, that right here in this church, we have a rich cultural heritage of justice and hope. We have the heritage of the spirituals, and we have the heritage of this table of grace, this table where we remember Jesus, and where we renew ourselves for the daily living of our faith. Amen.