“Thou Shalt Not Stamp ‘Null and Void’ On the Grace of God”
Sunday, June 13 2010 - communion, christ, table, galatians, grace, apostle, paul, children
Rev. Leah Atkinson Bilinski; June 12-13, 2010; Scripture Text: Galatians 2:15-21
An important note on the church of my childhood follows this sermon.
Some of you know that I have not been U.C.C. all my life. I was born into a Nazarene family – both immediate and extended. My parents’ (and my subsequent) journey away from the Nazarene church only came after we had relocated to the Midwest for my father to attend the big Nazarene seminary in Kansas City. That was before he discovered, much to the family’s chagrin after that big move, that he was at odds with the Nazarene church on several theological issues. So thus began our church-shopping adventures that eventually landed us in a small United Church of Christ congregation.
I was about ten years when we first walked through the doors of my first U.C.C. church. Right away, we all loved it. The congregation was welcoming, their new minister was wonderful, the laity were engaged in all aspects of church life, and the church's small group of youth quickly became my brother’s closest friends. We joined the church and all seemed to be going perfectly…until a few months later...when my parents were called to a church council meeting.
Now, that’s a pretty odd and disturbing call to get, you might imagine – and I think it must have felt a bit like being called to the principal’s office. But go they went, while my brother put up with another night of babysitting “the girls.”
When they got home, I was playing and didn’t really notice when they pulled my brother aside for a conversation. But when my mother called me to their room, I recognized in her voice a touch of disturbance – one of those warning signals you come to pick up on as a kid. I remember wondering what I had done wrong, what mischief I had gotten into, what it could possibly be that I needed to come up with an excuse for and fast.
I sat down on my parents’ bed, ready to think on my feet for a quick response, as they revealed what it was I had done wrong: “Leah,” they said, “There are some members at the church who aren’t used to something that you have grown up doing in the Nazarene church. It upsets them because they aren’t used to children doing it, and so…you are going to have to stop taking communion.”
Well, I was ready for a reprimand about wandering through the church (I fancied myself to be a bit of an explorer as a child) or perhaps on gorging myself on coffee hour cookies and other sugar I didn’t get at home. But I wasn’t ready for what my parents did say to me. And sitting there, I unexpectedly burst into tears. “Why?” I stumbled through hiccupped breaths. “Why don’t they want me to take communion with them?”
My parents spared me some of the details. They spared me knowing that there were a few people in the church who had out and out threatened to leave the church if the Atkinson children (and children of one other family) did not stop taking communion. They spared me their struggle – their anger – their sadness at being drug into an ultimatum, their initial desires to either force the issue or to leave a church that would disinvite anyone from Christ’s table. They spared me all of this, simply wrapping me in a hug and telling me, “Well, Leah, they think that you aren’t old enough to understand what it means.”
“I know what it means!” I cried, over and over, while my parents just held me in the embrace of their love and Christ’s. //
There is nothing quite so powerful as the feeling that God’s grace has been denied you…except perhaps, the feeling that God’s grace has been extended to you.
It took me a while to understand why my father did what he did next. The next month, when the communion trays began to make their way through the congregation, I sat with my hands in my lap and my head down, daring not to use anything more than my peripheral vision to glance down the pew, for I knew that there were eyes focused on my family in that moment. When the tray came to my family, I hurried to pass it on to my father, embarrassed by the attention I knew I was getting. And then I noticed: my father passed it on as well. The usher standing beside him assumed that my father just wanted him to hold the tray while he picked off a piece of bread, but my father put his hand up and shook his head, “no.” And the same with the cup. For four years, until I was confirmed, my father quietly ceased to take communion...so that he might be in communion with his children in those worship moments. / And in that way, I began to see again the grace of God that refuses to leave any of us outside the circle of the love of God, / whether young or old, male or female, of high I.Q. or mentally challenged, of this or that race, political party, lifestyle or nationality, sinner or saint. For as the Apostle Paul says, “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith” (Gal. 3:26).
It is this sentiment of God’s extravagant grace and welcome that you hear each and every time we prepare to take communion here at St. Peter’s: “This is Christ’s table,” we say, “And no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” Those aren’t just some words that Pastor Paul and I use because they are an expression of our beliefs. Those words/that acknowledgement/that sentiment of Christ has become important to you-here at St. Peter’s, and I’ve seen it particularly around the practice of communion.
Not once in the time that I’ve been here, have I heard a critique in response to the different ways that individual families choose to practice communion with their children. Some follow a wait-until-confirmation tradition that is important to them in that adolescent rite of passage. Others partake with their young children, wanting them, as early as possible, to begin to feel the grace of God and love of Christ that we as human beings can do nothing to deserve. /
On the contrary, rather than critique, I have heard great pride and joy from St. Peter’s adults and children as they talk about communion. As I have sought to get to know you, one of the questions that I have asked of many has been, “what is it that you love about this church?” And to that question, well over half of the off-the-cuff answers I have gotten have included a reference to the practice of open communion; – you are very proud of the fact that at St. Peter’s, all who wish to know the presence of Christ and the community of God’s people are invited to Christ’s table, period. Individuals may choose to refrain themselves, but the invitation of Christ is there if they desire to accept it. And it’s interesting to me, because it’s not just that St. Peter’s practice of communion has dominant presence in your answers, but I’ve noticed that there’s even something special about the way each person talks about this treasured practice of the church. / You aren’t always able to put it into words – what it means to you, but as you claim it, more often than not, there is a reverent pause in the air as you try to find the right words. And that reverence – accompanied by slight smiles and silence as you search for the right words, that reverence speaks to the Sacred at work, to the Holy Spirit in our midst and our glimpses that something greater is at work in what is going on when we gather around Christ’s table. // In a way, I’ve seen a communion around communion – a silent, unspoken, unseen taking of one another’s hands, a shared brainwave, a shared heartbeat around this grace of God moment in our lives.
The Apostle Paul and the other early Christian leaders experienced a similar shared heartbeat around which they sought communion. It too was difficult to put into words, and I think that’s why Paul spends much of the New Testament trying in various ways to do just that, to properly explain the grace of God moment extended to all people through the life of Jesus Christ. / His letter to the Galatians is an exercise in this explanation, and one to which Paul labors to put just the right words.
The Gentile Galatians are confused. They have heard Paul’s message that through Jesus Christ, all have been welcomed into the family of God. But they have also heard other voices telling them that yes, they are welcomed to join the family of God and the Jews who are now following Christ, BUT that there are conditions for their welcome into this family: Gentiles must be willing to do everything just the way those who have always been Jewish have done it; they must adopt ALL Mosaic law and practices, including, as Pastor Paul referenced last week, circumcision of males – no matter what their age. / “They must understand and practice the faith just like we do,” these Jewish Christians are essentially saying. /
To these critics’ misguided understanding of welcome through Christ, the Apostle Paul raised his voice, challenging their logic: “A person is not,” Paul retorts, “justified by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ…If justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing” (Gal. 3:16a, 21b). To say that Gentiles must adopt all of the Jewish ways of life under Mosaic law is to “nullify the grace of God,” offered in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:21a).
It makes sense to us, sitting here today, doesn’t it? Justification by faith in Jesus Christ – this doctrine that emphasizes the grace of God freely offered to us – it is an idea with which we have all grown up. Of course, we are afforded the luxury of having a solely Christian perspective. These earliest churches that Paul visited – they existed at a time when followers of Christ were PART of the Jewish faith. There was no such thing as Christianity yet; it was still a sect within Judaism. So you can see why this topic would be one on which new followers of Christ would go around and around. It’s much like any group of people in any church today, wanting the younger generations to experience worship, Christian education, confirmation, communion, etc. etc., in the same ways that they did...because it means something to them and they want that depth of faith for others. But depth of faith can also come…from looking around for the grace of God, moving in our midst.
Many of the devout Jewish Christians who were pushing Mosaic law for Gentile Christians didn’t hear what Paul was trying to say. They were too hurt. For they had taken his claim that justification does not come through Mosaic law to be a sweeping invalidation of their life, their faith disciplines and their way of being in the world. / With the Jesus Movement’s focus on the welcoming of Gentiles, I imagine they felt that meant that they were being relegated to the shadows. Behind Paul’s words, for them a banner was flying and to them, it seemed to say, “out with the old, in with the new.”
Have you ever felt like that? I know some of you have. And I’m going to be very open and honest about how I know that. This past week, I learned that a couple of church members (and no, I don’t know who you are) mistook an analogy I made about rummage sales in the May newsletter to mean that I was calling them “rummage.”
My heart broke to hear that. // Now one might think that in my saying that, that my heart broke to recognize that some of you still don’t know me well enough a year and a half after calling me as one of your pastors to know how much I love and cherish (and always have) relationships with older adults, the rich history of churches and the lessons of faith we can all learn from the way that things have been done. And that thought did come to me and trouble me, but the reason my heart broke when I heard this, was not because of what it claimed about me, but because of what it said about you and a bigger picture that has become visible to me: Some of you, sitting here today, and maybe others with hurt feelings of whom I’m not aware, sitting at home…DON’T FEEL VALUED. // That is the realization at which my heart broke.
Some of you have assumed that differences in pastoral attention between the past and the present (such as new attention to changing culture, a renewed focus on youth and younger members and multimedia, multisensory worship once a month plus special services) – that in these choices of focus is an either/or choice away from you, rather than a both/and step, vital to our church as we seek to ever extend the table of Christ.
This was exactly what the Apostle Paul was experiencing too. And that’s why he kept trying to readdress the issue – with different words and to different communities. It’s “both/and” he was trying to say, not “either/or.” It’s about a larger table, afforded us by the grace of Jesus Christ, to which we are all welcome. The Apostle Paul’s courage to speak the truth in love is what is giving me the courage to do the same today.
As we open our table to better welcome more and more people, as we engage the worldwide rummage sale that calls us to look away from our disciplines to remember the grace of God through Jesus Christ (around which our faith is centered), it doesn’t mean that your chair must be given up. It doesn’t mean that a “null and void” is stamped upon who you are and the beauty your created being has added to all that the rest of us are. It just means…that we all have to scoot a bit – to make room for everyone. To make sure that EVERYONE feels that sacred space where the grace of God dwells.
I know what it’s like to sit outside of that table. And whether it’s said or not, to hear that your time is “soon, but not yet” is very similar to perceiving you hear that “your time is past.” Neither are words uttered on the lips of God. May we ban them from our lips as well. // Or rather, may we replace them with this phrase: “My table is incomplete without you.”
Lord, may it be so. Amen.
Follow-up note on my childhood church: In anyone’s experience of church, in any congregation, there are moments bound to upset and frustrate one – even to the point of considering one’s departure from that congregation. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that my family chose to stay at our first U.C.C. church, a church in which I did come to feel accepted, loved, encouraged, empowered, enlightened and wrapped in the presence of a loving God. Southwood United Church of Christ in Raytown, Missouri, is a loving and welcoming congregation that has had the courage to live the questions of faith together for many years. Today, they live the table of Christ’s extravagant welcome better than any congregation I have ever known. Our world is so incredibly blessed by them. I am so incredibly blessed by them. I would not be in ministry today were it not for the ways in which they embraced and nurtured me. I can’t help but think how different and less-complete my life would be today if my family – in the midst of hurt feelings – had themselves chosen to walk away from Christ’s table by walking away from Southwood . Thank God for the blessings that abundantly do come when those that seek to be faithful continue to turn their faces to God and together, listen for how God is still speaking in our world.
