1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62
 
+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
      “Look, up in the sky.  It’s a bird.  It’s a plane.  No, it’s Jesus!”  Superman’s back, and more than ever he’s looking like Jesus.  Hollywood has cooked up a new version of Superman.  At long last, Hollywood has realized that there’s a huge, under exploited market for Christian-themed entertainment.  I wonder what Jesus makes of it.  I understand the promoters of the new Superman flick have even set up a website with sermon notes about the film, and they’ve successfully manipulated me – I’m talking about it even though I’ve not seen it.
 
      Possibly Hollywood is slightly warming to Christianity; management looking for some bucks.  In the spring, I saw the movie 42, the story about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, and it surprised me with how positively it portrayed faith and the church, and it also surprised me that it gave the impression that the biggest hero of the story was not Jackie, but Branch Rickey, a white guy, management, the man.
 
      Superman has always had Messiah overtones, a baby sent to save the world, and the new version may be an improvement upon my generation’s, the ‘70s version.  Back then I rooted for Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor, the villain, and Ned Beatty, his bumbling henchman; they were far more appealing, far funnier, far more human, than the painfully earnest, two-dimensional, goody two-shoes Superman, whose only charming line was when he used his x-ray vision to tell Lois Lane the color of her underwear.
 
      Moral strength and rectitude is so often portrayed as boring, annoying, and un-heroic.  It doesn’t have to be.  The bible proves that, and perhaps that’s why the new movie emphasizes Superman’s Messiah associations.  One reviewer called it “a Bible study in a cape.”[i]
 
      Many of the similarities between Jesus and Superman are on the surface because when you dig into Jesus there’s flesh and blood like you and me, he’s human, and when you dig into Superman there’s an alien, a Kryptonian.  There’s no incarnation, no affirmation of human goodness, human beauty, human truth.
 
      Superman and Jesus offer two much different visions of greatness.  A review pointed out:
Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound.  Jesus made the lame walk. Superman can see through people’s skin.  Jesus helped the blind to see.  Superman saves the world through his muscle and might and derring-do.  Jesus, according to Christianity, saved it in the most unexpected way possible.  He was no CGI superhero, but a man on a cross.[ii]
 
      And here’s what’s even bigger.  The work of Jesus continues in you and me, through you and me, with you and me.  The biggest problem with superheroes is that they swoop in and do it by themselves; they mostly have superficial relationships with other people.  They don’t have disciples.  When there’s trouble, they slip out of their mild-mannered disguise and into their tights and fix the problem.
 
      They create dependency; there’s no mutuality, no giving and receiving – just them acting to rescue us from the consequences of our behavior.  They preserve the status quo rather than, like Jesus, help us transform.  They don’t help us adopt better behaviors, better attitudes, better values; they don’t help us grow and develop; they don’t help us collaborate and work together; they don’t help us build relationships and find meaning.
 
      It’s the cult of celebrity – where our culture is now, trying to live vicariously through famous people rather than recognizing the opportunity for wholeness and meaning is in the people around you here and now.  Superman plays into the great man theory, that history is all about heroes who assert their will and make history.  We just wait around for someone to emerge to save us from ourselves, and we look on adoringly.  Jesus asked us to value everyone, the poor and neglected perhaps even more than the mighty and esteemed and willful.  And Jesus empowers everyone.
 
      Yet there’s something about Superman that appeals to our very best selves, that may blind us from all of his flaws.  He has all these amazing powers, but he doesn’t use them to gratify himself – not ever.  He’s trustworthy; he’s not a user; he’s as strong morally as physically; he dedicates his gifts for the common good, for truth and justice, not for his self-interest.  He told Lois the color of her underwear because she asked, not because he was checking her out.  What’s super about Superman is his lack of selfishness.
 
      Paul’s making the same point to the Galatians.  He’s writing to them because some Jewish Christian missionaries from Jerusalem are trying to get them to follow the law, to get circumcised.  The conflict among the Galatian Christians had become intense: some siding with Paul, others with the circumcisers.  Paul’s language “if you bite and devour one another” suggests the fighting had become quite savage, like wild animals.
 
      We see that from the very beginning of Christianity it’s been hard to keep the main thing the main thing.  So quickly, so easily, our spiritual lives can start majoring in the minors.  For Paul, the main thing is: love God by loving your neighbor.  The controversy about circumcision had distracted the Galatians from this.
 
      Paul’s basic message to the Galatians: “You live in the Spirit, not the law.  So don’t worry about circumcision.  You are free from the law.  But your freedom does not mean you do whatever you want to do.  Your freedom is not license to self-indulgence.  Life in the Spirit, freedom, means you don’t follow your selfish compulsions.  Freedom strengthens when you serve each other in love.”
 
      Today Paul goes on about not gratifying the flesh, not following the flesh.  Let’s be clear what he means, because Paul is often misunderstood as implying that flesh and the body are bad, wicked, unholy, as somehow opposed to the Spirit and the spiritual life.  That’s not Paul’s meaning.
 
      Possibly more than any major religion, Christianity celebrates our bodies, human flesh, and says that we experience God, in them and through them and with them; that our physical and material experiences can nurture our spiritual lives.  The Holy Spirit and the spiritual are not opposed to the human body or human flesh; the spiritual and the material form a unity.
 
      When Paul talks about “flesh” and “works of the flesh,” he means any kind of existence not centered in God.  Flesh is self-centered living.  Spirit is God centered living, living for the benefit of others.  For Paul, sins of the flesh are not only fornication, carousing, and drunkenness, but religious sins like idolatry and sorcery and social sins like selfishness, anger, dissension, factionalism, envy, jealousy.  Living according to the flesh is living opposed to the Spirit.
 
      The Spirit is what binds us together, promotes life and growth, and builds community.  For Paul, the flesh is anything other than Spirit life.  The law, accepting circumcision, is relying on something other than Christ; it is a work of the flesh, causing separation and division by retaining hierarchy.  Remember from last week Paul’s vision of the church as embodying unity and equality: Jew and Gentile equal, slave and free equal, men and women equal.
 
      Unity and equality, life in the Spirit does allow for conflict and disagreement and pain and disappointment.  Those are necessary parts of drawing close to other people, of binding together, of being intimate.  It happens whenever we try to become part of something bigger than ourselves.  It happens when our relationships deepen and become more honest, more real.
 
      In the section just prior to today’s reading, Paul in a rage against his rival missionaries, the circumcisers, suggested: “Why don’t those troublemakers, obsessed as they are about cutting, go all the way and castrate themselves?”
 
      And then just a few sentences later, as we heard, Paul is talking about the fruits of the Spirit: serenity, love, compassion, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control – that this needs to characterize us.  I love it – telling them to cut theirs off and at the same time preaching gentleness and self-control.  I find it so human, meaning so much a part of my own experience, of my own inner conflict between flesh and Spirit, between what is opposed to God and what is God.  Both parts are in each of us.
 
      Paul knows how difficult it all is, that none of us is Superman – that life in the Spirit doesn’t just happen, that we lose it at times, that we mess up, that we succumb to the way opposed to God, but ultimately we live in the Spirit, that’s what we are, that’s who we are, that’s what guides our lives.  That’s why we come to church Sunday by Sunday, to help lead us back to life in the Spirit.  That’s Good News.  Thanks be to God.
 
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
 
Lane Davenport
www.asa-dc.org
(202) 347-8161
 

[i] Paul Asay, “’Man of Steel,’ Man of God?,” The Washington Post, June 18, 2013.
[ii] Asay.

Isaiah 65:1-9
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 8:26-39

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

      Think about a group under stress, facing a difficult decision on a controversial issue.  It might be the Episcopal Church several years ago wrestling with sexuality, the Catholic Church considering transparency and reform, the NFL deciding if it’s going to address seriously the hideous, horrifying long-term damage its players do to each other, or a company like IBM trying to figure out, as it did years ago, whether its future lies with traditional hardware or being a services company, or it could be a political party: the Dems trying to come together on Syria or the GOP on immigration. 

      When groups experience stress and face crisis, they are making a choice: close ranks, protect themselves from the threats of the world, return to former ways and customs, to a previous purity, double down on the past; or, embrace dynamism, seek to adapt to a new situation, accept what is scary and foreign and try to learn from it, muster the courage for making mistakes and being wrong.  Every movement, organization, family, nation, group encounters these moments of crisis, whether to go back to former norms or forward and learn and develop new norms.  The solution is not clear.  These turning points happen in every age, in every place, to every group, to every person. 

      Paul’s letter to the Galatians addressed the crisis was: do you have to be a Jew to follow Jesus?  Paul had taught the Gentile Galatians that they did not need to become Jews to follow Jesus, meaning that men did not need to be circumcised.  If I had been a Galatian Gentile, that’d be a relief.  It would have been much more difficult, perhaps impossible, for me to pay attention to what Jesus was saying if following him required circumcision.  So the decision involved important missionary and evangelistic considerations. 

      No doubt, Paul was a great evangelist, and great evangelism begins with trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, being empathetic, seeing the world as another does.  Evangelism involves listening more than talking.  For all his passionate, vivid, excited language, Paul was a better listener than writer or speaker. 

      But the expediencies of evangelism did not cause him to object to Gentile circumcision.  He furiously opposed the circumcision party because they were taking the Jesus movement in the wrong direction: backward, toward being a narrow sect of Judaism based upon the law and not Jesus.

      Jewish Christian missionaries from Jerusalem had come to the gatherings of Jesus followers formed by Paul and had challenged Paul’s credentials and authority as an apostle.  They pulled out the Bible and pointed to Genesis where God’s covenant with Abraham required every male to be circumcised.  Ever since Abraham, more than fifteen hundred years before Paul, the mark of being God’s people was circumcision.

      Paul knew that changing the minds of his opponents, his fellow missionaries, was unlikely, but he made a strong play to hold the vacillating Galatians.  First, he strongly defended the authority and authenticity of his apostleship, an argument from chapter one we heard two Sundays ago.  Then, last Sunday in chapter two, Paul pointed out that the apostles in Jerusalem, like Peter and James, had approved Paul’s mission to Gentiles and had agreed that circumcision was not necessary.

      In chapter three, Paul addressed the explicit biblical command for circumcision.  He said, “Look, what set Abraham in a right relationship with God, what made Abraham righteous, was not circumcision, but Abraham’s trust and commitment to God, the fact that Abraham had confidence in God’s promise to make Abraham into a great nation, to be a patriarch with as many descendents as there are stars in the sky, and Abraham trusted the promise even though Abraham and Sarah were childless and well beyond child-bearing age.”

      For Paul, believing in God, trusting God, committing ourselves to God, is what matters; that’s what makes us offspring of Abraham, not circumcision.  Abraham first trusted, and later circumcision came into the picture. 

      In chapter three, Paul also rhetorically asked the Galatians, “You have all received the Holy Spirit, and you know that the Spirit has work in you and through you.  Did you experience the Holy Spirit because you followed the law or because you trusted God?”  Paul’s point: the Galatians had experienced the Spirit moving in them, among them, and long before the Jerusalem missionaries showed up and got them worrying about the law and circumcision.  Paul was telling them to trust their own experience and to send the circumcision missionaries packing.

      Galatians is Paul’s Emancipation Proclamation.  Christians are free from the law; Jesus has delivered us from the law’s bondage and made it obsolete.  Following the law does not set us right with God; trusting Jesus does.  The death and resurrection of Jesus inaugurates a new age: before Jesus, the law ruled; after Jesus, we have freedom in Christ.

      Paul saw the law as a kind of disciplinarian to help Israel, the people of God, grow up.  In today’s epistle, the Greek word translated as “disciplinarian” refers to a specific slave job.  The head of a household would authorize one of his slaves to look after his young child, to keep him in order, and to escort him to and from school until he had matured.[i]  Paul was saying that the law was sort of a nanny. 

      Paul meant that the law had a divine, but temporary purpose: to prepare people for the Messiah.  The law served to show people our selfishness, our sin, our separation from God.  The law helped humanity become aware of its sin, but the law did not remedy sin.  Jesus is the remedy for sin, the solution for our separation from God. 

      The image Paul gave us is the law as a disciplinarian to help Israel grow up, to mature toward adulthood.  So from the time of Exodus when Moses brought God’s law to Israel, it had nurtured and promoted Israel’s developmental process.  For Paul, it was for adolescence, a time of growing toward the adulthood offered by Jesus.  Adulthood comes with new freedom, but also with greater responsibility. 

      Before Christ, society organized itself and assigned status according to race and ethnicity, class and caste, gender and marital status.  This was life under the law, the old covenant, the old relationships.

      According to Paul, after Christ, a new order came into being, all one in Christ, a new family, all brothers and sisters, children of God.  Jesus had broken down the barriers to fellowship.  It’s a radical declaration of the equality of all in the sight of God; that none is preferred.  The church had to reflect this new reality. 

      Paul reasoned: if we trust God and accept our responsibilities as grown-up, mature followers of Christ, then we have new relationships of equality.  Paul called the church, those in Christ, you and me, to unity above all kind of division, be those differences be about theology, race, class, or gender.  Those differences exist and often promote injustice and inequality, but our responsibility is to rise above them.  If we can’t, then we need a disciplinarian.  We’ve not reached adulthood. 

      Now, frankly, Christians would be wise to refrain from considering themselves more spiritually mature than people of other religions.  We can find spiritually mature people in any religion.  Paul was trying to put these Jewish, circumcising missionaries in their place, to undermine their position that they were superior because they were circumcised. 

      The big picture: in Galatians, Paul offered a vision of God’s new creation, a spiritually mature community, one where there is unity, where people accepted individual differences, but these differences should not lead to hierarchy and superiority.  It’s a vision of unity and equality: Jew and Gentile equal, slave and free equal, men and women equal.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Lane Davenport

www.asa-dc.org
(202) 347-8161


[i] John Ziesler, Pauline Christianity, OUP (1983, revised 1990), p. 110.

1 Kings 17:17-24
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17
 
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
      What is human nature?  The psychiatrist Scott Peck would answer, “Human nature is to relieve yourself in your pants.”[i]  He’s right.  Ask any two year old, that’s what comes naturally.
 
      Think about the trauma of toilet training – the child’s trauma, not the parent’s.  When most of us were about two, a very large authority figure began to suggest that there was another way.  Not all of us immediately estimated this advice as helpful or necessary, especially boys.  It made more sense to let go when the urge struck rather than restraining ourselves.  But gradually, possibly out of desire to give something back to our parent or care-giver, we decided to give this new way a spin – to make a loving gift by using the toilet.
 
      A couple years later, by four or five, what had been profoundly unnatural had become wholly natural.  After this, a child still has moments of stress or fatigue or excitement and then forgets and has an accident, and not it feels unnatural.  So within two years, through parental love and care, the nature of the child has transformed.  They’ve seen a new way, and they’re willing to give it a go.
 
      Galatia is a rugged, inland region of what is today central Turkey.  Paul traveled through its cities once or twice telling people the good news of Jesus and setting up gatherings, mostly little groups of believers.  After Paul had moved on, Jewish Christian missionaries from Jerusalem came to this region and began to encourage the Gentile, non-Jewish, adult male disciples to get circumcised.  Paul had not made that a necessary part of following Jesus, but the Jerusalem missionaries challenged Paul’s authority and attacked his legitimacy as an apostle.
 
      Paul’s letter to the Galatians responded to this.  Paul was furious.  Unlike his other letters which begin with thanks and praise, he began this letter with invective, rebuke, condemnation.  It is his most polemical, angry letter, full of abuse, and while some of his cutting remarks are not without wit, he later regretted his lack of restraint toward these “troublemakers,” his term referring to the Jerusalem missionaries.
 
      Paul wrote his letter in either the late 40s or mid 50s, about two decades after Jesus’ crucifixion.  Right from the beginning, the church endured intense conflict with lots of uncertainty and confusion and animosity about what appeared to be very important issues then, but may seem to us relatively insignificant.  It’s helpful perspective for us looking today’s heated controversies – they’re not an aberration, but the norm.
 
      Paul took great offense from the claim of the Jerusalem missionaries that circumcision was necessary.  It meant that to follow Jesus it was first necessary to become a Jew.  Paul had discovered that Gentiles could become full members of God’s people without first converting to Judaism.
 
      This was the primary point of Paul’s Damascus Road experience.  Before then, Paul had been devoted to keeping Jews distinct from Gentiles, defending the purity of Judaism, insisting upon identity markers like circumcision and kosher laws and Sabbath observance, the outward marks of Torah, Jewish Law.  Paul was highly zealous, ready to use violence to enforce this separation.
 
      The vision of Christ on the Damascus Road transformed Paul’s understanding of God.  It’s no longer us versus them.  Paul still considered himself a Jew, but after his vision he saw that Gentiles were part of God’s purpose.  His perception of outsiders flipped; they weren’t to be excluded, but included.  God loves and longs for all people.  Before this moment, Paul could not have imagined a more outrageous notion than God desiring Gentiles, but God showed Paul that he was now reaching out beyond Israel, re-defining his people.
 
      Even more, Paul experienced God’s graciousness, his unbounded generosity.  Paul had been persecuting God’s son, trying to destroy his work, and yet God embraced Paul and called him to be part of the work.  It’s like Peter’s story, Peter who denied Jesus, abandoned him in his suffering, and yet received from the risen Jesus enormous new responsibilities.  The experience of grace strengthened Peter to care for others.
 
      Having also been on the wrong side, Paul came to see outsiders as necessary.  The experience of God’s acceptance changed his heart, expanded it, transformed his nature.  God called Paul to a new way.
 
      It’s important to note that God’s call to Paul did not make his life easier; it did not bring him wealth; it did not improve his health; it did not make him more content or comfortable.  A genuine call from God is not about what he does for us, not about our private well-being, but about what we do for him, what we do for the well-being of others, for the common good.   
 
      If you’re like me, you may occasionally wonder, “Well, what have you done for me lately, God?”  A genuine call from God is, “What might I do for you, God?  How can I be part of what you are doing around me?”  God’s answer to Paul, “You’re going to proclaim Jesus to the Gentiles.”
 
      The Damascus Road wasn’t so much a conversion: Paul didn’t change from being non-religious to religious, or from one religion to another.  Christianity was still a part of Judaism, separating but still part of it.  Paul was sort of changing parties, moving from Pharisee to Christian, moving from focus on purity to focus on the breadth of God’s love.
 
      He made this move as a result of a new understanding of God.  So the Damascus Road was more revelation than conversion, a new understanding that required Paul to do something – preach Jesus to the Gentiles.  Paul understood it as God commissioning him, calling him.  In the same way, baptism is accepting a call to be a Christian; it’s an assignment to make life about following Jesus, orienting our life around God, learning to love him and other people.  New insights about God call us to live differently.
 
      New insights about God also call us to see ourselves differently.  Paul took on a new identity, a witness to Jesus.  It gave him certainty about himself; it gave him confidence about who he was.  Paul endured one hardship after another: repeatedly flogged, jailed, beaten, shipwrecked, and robbed; constantly on the move; in danger from friends as well as foes; in danger in the wilderness and at sea; often standing alone; regularly without food and water; constantly toiling.
 
      His strength and courage came from his call, the certainty that he was working for good, and not in vain.  His confidence in himself came not from his achievement or success or competence, but his trust in God, that he was following his call.  It gave him courage to go against the grain.  We see Paul breaking free from his past, from his culture, his beliefs, and expanding his identity, renewing his identity.  Let’s be inspired by this.  Let’s make it part of our lives.
 
      Paul’s experience gave him confidence that God was working in and through his life.  It transformed him.  Scott Peck wrote,

     The two year old learning to change his ways, becoming something new, shows the remarkable human capacity for transformation.  The way we grow becomes more complex as we get older, but it doesn’t stop in adulthood,… well, at least it doesn’t have to stop.  As I get older, I notice more temptations to get set in my ways, more sure of my own opinions and the way I see things, and I see myself at times succumbing to these temptations.
 
      The good news: our bodies grow old, and we can’t stop the physical decline, but we can remain young and growing – spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.  It happens for those who remain open to and seek transformation.  The spiritually mature never stop evolving.  Our hearts and minds don’t have to grow old if we keep a bit of that adaptable two year old in us.  Let’s look for God, let’s expect God, to act to show us new things that open us to further transformation.
 
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
 
Lane Davenport
www.asa-dc.org
(202) 347-8161
 

[i] Scott Peck, The Different Drum, Simon & Schuster (1987), pp. 178-79.
[ii] Peck, p. 179.

Deuteronomy 8:2-3
1 Corinthians 11:23-29
John 6:47-58
 
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
      This month I’m preaching a series on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and other than today, Galatians is one of our readings each week.  So today some background about Paul and how we might relate to him.
 
      The first thing to keep in mind about Paul is his conversion.  It’s such a big deal Acts describes it three times, and Paul refers to it repeatedly in his letters.  Paul was on the road to Damascus, heading there to persecute and arrest people who were following Jesus, and a great light appeared to him, and he heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why are you out to get me?” And he replied, “Who are you, Lord?”  “I am Jesus, the one you are hounding.”  In this flash of light, Paul saw that he had it all wrong, everything upside down; he was deeply religious and devout, but he was working directly against God.
 
      There’s a medical diagnosis called “conversion disorder.”      When a person experiences extreme emotional or psychological distress, the brain may react by causing physical symptoms, like loss of vision.  The Bible says after Jesus appeared to him, Paul was blind for three days.  The intense anxiety, the horror, Paul felt about persecuting his Lord was converted into a physical symptom, blindness.  It was a tremendously humbling and confusing experience, but it helped him blossom into one of the greatest Christian heroes.
 
      Imagine yourself as Paul discovering you’ve got it all wrong and faced with having to make serious changes in your life.  You may know about this.  It’s happened to me… and more than once.
 
      Paul became a follower of Jesus, a disciple.  He came to see himself differently, to have different standards, and he became aware of how intensely competitive he was.[i]  He boasted to the Galatians about how early in his life, he had so much zeal for religious traditions, how he had advanced in Judaism beyond his peers. (Gal 1:14)  But once he started following Jesus, Paul understood that competition is often an expression of self-reliance, a desire to be better than others, apart from others, wholly independent.
 
      Paul considered his conversion experience, moving closer to God, to be an act of grace: entirely a gift from God, not something he had earned, not something he had deserved, not something he had won.  There’s no quid pro quo with God, no you do this, and I’ll do that.  Everything is gift.  This is the way God works.
 
      Paul’s conversion marked a break, a turning point in his identity.  His conversion changed his identity so that he consciously identified with Jesus, an identity that restrained his competitiveness.  He no longer saw his accomplishments as his own, but as something God had done through him, the Holy Spirit working through him.
 
      Competition is one of the great virtues of our world.  We’re saturated in it, and it’s so much a part of our world we usually don’t see it.  Our world’s cathedrals, sports stadiums, are temples of competition, dedicated to winning; our economic life about getting more; our politics about getting more power and influence; our social lives about getting prestige.  The way of the world: through competition, we get more, and that gives us the good life, competition as the way to feel good about ourselves.
 
      God operates in a different way.[ii]  The goal is not about getting more, but about giving, sharing.  When we share the things the world values: our winnings, our wealth, our influence, our prestige, then we have less.  When we share the things God gives – life, love, hope, faith, friendship – when we share these, we don’t have less.  We have more.  With the things of God, the more I share, the more I have.  The realm of God, God’s Kingdom, the body of Christ, operates not according to competition, but according to sharing, according to cooperation.
 
      Two ways of life, two stories to guide our lives, our sense of self.  There’s the way of competition, and the way of cooperation; the way of rivalry, and the way of sharing; the way of self-interest, and the way of the common good; the way of earning, and the way of grace.  Two ways of life.  I think of the Frost poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by.”
 
      What do you choose?  I find myself on the wrong road a lot.  Through grace, occasionally I take the right road.  The good news helps us have perspective to know, to become aware of where we are, to act as compass to re-direct us.  
 
      Paul thought that the Corinthians had chosen the wrong road, the road to competition, not the road to Damascus, to conversion, to transformation.  Paul wrote the bit from today’s epistle to re-direct them to God’s way.  Paul wrote that they were not really eating the Lord’s Supper.
 
      In the early days of the church, the Lord’s Supper probably felt not so much like a worship service, but more of a communal meal.  The problem for Paul was that social hierarchies of Corinthian society, the way of the world, were part of their gatherings.  The wealthy and powerful showed up, occupied the best seats, consumed their own food and drink, and sometimes got drunk.  The poor had little or no food and drink.  It was haves and have nots.  Christians met in someone’s home, and the hosts at Corinth shared their finer food and drink with the well-heeled members and cut out the others.  They did not even wait to eat together.  The gathering perpetuated the inequality of the society, the gap between the rich and the poor.  It did not reflect the reality of life with God, the Kingdom of God.
 
      Paul made two essential points in today’s epistle.  First, the Eucharist has to express our unity, our unity with God and with each other, that we live in a new relationship as beloved children of God, children without hierarchies of preference.  When Christians gather, there’s not supposed to be division according to social, economic, political status.
 
      In the epistle, we heard Paul demand that everyone eat and drink while discerning the body.  He means caring for our brothers and sisters, that together we form the body of Christ.  He was telling us that the Eucharist is not a private act of piety, not just about you and God, not just you and your friends, but rather a public, communal event, a coming together.  We celebrate the Lord’s Supper not to please God, not to escape from the world, not to give us thrills, but to unite us, to strengthen us to live the gospel, to send us out in mission.   
 
      Second, we eat the bread and drink the cup to proclaim the Lord’s death and resurrection.  It helps us to remember and be part of the story of Jesus.  The Eucharist is story and meal.  The first half of mass we have readings and a sermon where we tell stories about God acting to give us life, and then we have a meal that also recalls Jesus’ story, his death and resurrection.  We remember, and thereby identify with Jesus’ story.  It shapes who we are, what road we choose in life.
 
      In communion: Jesus gives himself to us and receives us into him, and we receive him and give ourselves back to him.  It’s sharing – everyone sharing.  There’s mutuality, interdependence, giving and receiving – the shape of all healthy relationships, the surest sign of life and growth.
 
      For me, the task of this church is found in Jesus saying, “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.”  The surest sign of life, an essential sign of life, is growth.  If the Eucharist is real and meaningful, if our worship is real and meaningful, then we don’t remain the same.  We grow as human beings, become more mature Christians, deepen our relationship with God.
 
      Spiritual growth means we don’t have the same view of Jesus, the same relationship with God, as we did ten years ago, or five years ago, maybe even a year ago.  Having life means we continue evolving, renewing, and deepening in the awareness of God’s love for me, God’s desire for me, God’s delight in me.  That’s Paul’s story, and it’s ours.
 
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
 
Lane Davenport
www.asa-dc.org
(202) 347-8161
 

[i] Terrance Callan, “Psychological Perspectives on the Life of Paul,” Psychological Insight into the Bible, Eerdmans (2007), pp. 127-136, on Paul’s competitiveness.
[ii] Jonathan Sacks, The Relationship between the People of God, Address to Lambeth Conference, 2008.