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Known in the
Breaking of the Bread
by the Rev. Rich Smith
April 6, 2008
Luke 24:13-35
Like a certain presidential
candidate, the people of Nazareth had a “pastor problem.” Well,
he wasn’t really their pastor, but he was one of their own, the local
boy who’d come home to preach his first sermon. It began well
enough, as he read the scripture lesson, from the prophet Isaiah: “The
spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach
good news to the poor... to proclaim release to the captives, and
recovery of sight to the blind....” With all eyes fixed on him,
he began to say, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your
hearing.” And they all spoke well of him, and “were amazed at the
gracious words that came from his mouth.” But then, he went and
spoiled it all with a few, shall we say, inflammatory remarks, that
filled them with rage and led them to drive him out of town, planning
to hurl him off a cliff, and they just about succeeded.
You know the story, about the beginning -- and
nearly the end – of Jesus’ public ministry. What did he say
that upset them so? It’s not on YouTube, or Fox News, but the 4th
chapter of Luke. Seems he brought up some moments in Israel’s
history that they weren’t too happy remembering. He pointed out
that in the time of Elijah there were many suffering the effects of a
famine, and the only one Elijah ministered to was a widow in Zarephath
in Sidon. And, he also reminded them, there were many lepers in
Elisha’s time, but the only one he cleansed was Naaman the
Syrian. The problem was, both of these were outsiders – wrong
race, wrong religion, wrong nationality. And God extended mercy
to them. Naaman, in fact, was a staunch enemy of Israel, a
military commander responsible for some fairly brutal atrocities.
So this was not even a very patriotic thing for Jesus to say, and of
course the people got angry.
But this incident is really just a foreshadowing –
not just of Jesus’ eventual fate of death at the hands of a violent mob
– but of what his ministry was to be about: opening God’s grace to
outsiders, to those who are not like us. Take his most famous
parable, which we know as the “Good Samaritan,” also reported in
Luke. We like to think that it is about being compassionate, and
on one level it is. I was born in a “Good Samaritan Hospital” –
and later twice went there for stitches – so I’m glad for the
parable’s inspiration. But when you realize that the Samaritan
was about the last person one would expect goodness and compassion to
come from – Samaritans were hated by the Jews – it’s like saying “the
good Taliban,” or the “good al Qaeda” – then you begin to understand
what Jesus was proclaiming, and what might challenge us to cross racial
and ethnic and class and religious divides.
And then there was the matter of meal times.
How often is Jesus portrayed as injudicious in his choice of dinner
companions? “This fellow befriends tax collectors and sinners and
even eats with them,” they said, eating together being one of the most
intimate acts one could engage in. Still is. To break bread
together is to break barriers. Jesus was always doing this, and
always getting into trouble for it.
Fast forward three years, and we come to the story
we read as our scripture lesson this morning, when on the evening of
that first Easter day, two disciples, walking on the road from
Jerusalem to Emmaus, encountered a mysterious stranger, who turned out
to be Jesus himself, risen from the dead. (By the way, you can’t find
Emmaus on the map. According to the historian Josephus, it was
destroyed by the Romans, in retaliation for being the seat of suspected
guerilla activity.) They spoke about their now-dashed hopes for
liberation, and about some weird rumors they’d heard about an empty
tomb. At first, they didn’t recognize him, even though there was
something familiar about the way he opened up the scriptures to them,
as they were once again “fulfilled in your hearing” and it wasn’t until
they sat down to eat together that “their eyes were opened and they
recognized him.” Immediately he vanished, and you can kind of
picture the disciples going “Duh!!!” Well, the Middle East
equivalent being rendered, “Were not our hearts burning within us...”
when we were walking and talking on the road? And so – afflicted
by a sudden case of “holy heartburn” – they ran out and found the
rest, and told how Jesus “had been made known to them in the breaking
of the bread.”
Now, I didn’t begin this sermon with that story, but
rather with the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, so that we might
understand this passage in context. As Luke presents the story of
the good news of Jesus Christ, he frames it as “word and sacrament” –
Jesus fulfilling the witness of scripture, and acting out what that
meant at table, in the breaking of bread, and doing both in a radically
inclusionary way. He opens the scriptures and practices an open
table.
And so when I come to break bread at the communion
table, I think not only of “the night on which he was betrayed” – the
traditional interpretation, making Jesus a sacrifice offered for the
forgiveness of our sins. I also think of what the meal
represented in its own context – a freedom meal, the Passover,
celebrating the arrival of the kingdom of God. And, then, I think
of all the meals that Jesus shared – meals with very strange guest
lists, meals that included all sorts of folks, meals that broke
barriers, that modeled reconciliation, that lived out the kingdom of
God as if it were already present.
And this week, at this table, I also think of tables
that forty years ago were officially segregated, but which became
scenes of the kingdom breaking in, places where heartburn was not
caused by the food but by the very presence of the inbreaking
Spirit. These tables were called lunch counters. Black and
white students tried to sit together at some of them, and were often
dragged away in handcuffs. People like then-Yale chaplain William
Sloan Coffin came to witness the inequalities and injustices and
witness to the ultimate vision of inclusion, and well connected and
well-heeled Yale alumni called the college President Kingman Brewster
and said, “You have a pastor problem...” But of course that
was not the problem – the problem is that prophets are never easy to
hear.
We cannot gather at our communion table today and
not remember that forty years ago this past week, Martin Luther King
was killed. It was 1968, a most momentous, watershed year. I was
a junior in high school. It was not only the year of King’s
death, but also Robert Kennedy’s, violence in the cities, and the
chaotic democratic convention. It was also the year I got my
guitar, which might have seemed self-indulgent escapism when so much
was going on – I thought I would use it to meet girls – but
one of the first songs I learned to play was “We Shall Overcome,” and I
quickly took to the protest songs of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, and
played them in local coffee houses, and through the guitar found an
entree into my church youth group, which gave me a way to understand
all that was happening in the world, and ultimately led to my life’s
calling.
It was a momentous time. The Viet Nam war was
raging, and King, well ahead of many church people and preachers, had
begun to publicly oppose it. This did not make him popular, and
even some of his own advisors questioned whether this was a smart move,
fearing that it would make him a more divisive figure and divert
attention and energy away from the civil rights movement. King
gave what was to be his very last sermon, on March 31, 1968, just
down the street at the National Cathedral. He spoke against the
war, but he tied it to the fight against poverty and for
equality. He said, “....we must find an alternative to war
and bloodshed. President Kennedy said...’Mankind must put an end to war
or war will put an end to mankind.’ The world must hear this. I pray
God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today
we’re fighting a war.
“I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust
wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.... This day
we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong
soldier....while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every
person... in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good
skirmish against poverty.
“Not only that, it has put us in a position of
appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. ...we are ten thousand
miles away from home...when we have not even put our own house in
order. ...we force young black men and young white men to fight and
kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home they can’t
hardly live on the same block together.
“The judgment of God is upon us today.... ‘Mankind
must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind,’ and the best
way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it
continues, we will inevitably come to (a) point... which could lead the
whole world to nuclear annihilation. It is no longer a choice...
between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or
nonexistence.” Forty years later, only the names have
changed!
And then, he went to Memphis to support the striking
sanitation workers. There he gave his very last speech in which
he said, “I’ve been to the mountain top...” According to
historical accounts, in the hours before he stepped out on the balcony
on that fateful day of April 4th, he was working on his sermon
for the next Sunday, to be delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta. He had just phoned in the title for the church bulletin:
"Why America May Go to Hell." Jeremiah Wright was not the
first one, you see, to raise that possibility, or to use the pulpit
provocatively.
King had actually used this sort of language in a
speech a couple of weeks earlier. He was speaking on Jesus’
parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the one where the rich man ignores
the poor man at his gate, and when the rich man dies, he ends up in
hell, tormented and thirsty. King pointed out that he didn’t end
up there simply because he was rich, but because he didn’t use his
wealth in a just way. “(He) finally went to Hell because he
wanted to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.”
“And I come by here to say that America too is going
to Hell... If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end
poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the
basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America
through her historians years (from now)saying, ‘We built gigantic
buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the
seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the
stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and
place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate
oceanic depths.’
“But (then) I can hear the God of the universe
saying, ‘even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed
me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and
daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for
them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.’ This may well be
the indictment on America that says.... ‘If you do it unto the least of
these my brethren, you do it unto me.’”
That was forty years ago, and this week,
that’s what I think of when I come to the communion table – a table
that by it’s very openness and extravagant welcome reminds us of the
contrasting truth that we still live in an imperfect and divided world
– where we still need to have that conversation about race, and where
King’s dream is still unrealized. We’ve come a long way, to be
sure, and yet – we are still divided in far too many ways by race; we
live in a country where one in fifteen black men are in prison, one in
nine in the 20-34 age range; where in Montgomery County, one of
the wealthiest in the country, we have had to rally to ensure funds in
the county’s capital budget for the refurbishment of the run-down
community centers in four historic black communities; where our news
media have been on a feeding frenzy with a few sound bytes that plays
on our worst fears and demeans the prophetic tradition of the black
church; and where still, as King pointed out in his final
sermon, the Sunday morning worship hour is the most segregated hour in
America.
This is reality, but we don’t have to accept
it. Forty years ago, when King was dead and hope was gone,
faithful people must have felt like those disciples walking on the road
to Emmaus. “We thought he was the one to liberate us...”
But, in listening to the Word and breaking bread, they found
hope. They took their case of “holy heartburn” and ran and told
others and the world began to change. And so can we!
Forty years ago this church did something.
This church, which had taken the risk a few years earlier of offering
housing to those coming for the “Poor People’s March” - a decision
which cost us a significant number of members - this church joined with
Lincoln Temple in the Shaw community to build affordable housing in an
area that had been burned out in the riots following King’s
death. (It even got mentioned in the Washington Post this
morning!) We still have an interest in Lincoln-Westmoreland
housing, with several members serving on the board of directors, though
most of us don’t know as much about it as we should. And we still
participate in the Shaw Community Ministries, represented on that board
by Barbara McDowell and Caryn Musil, and many of us providing
Thanksgiving baskets and Christmas presents.
We did something once. On our own road to
Emmaus, we reached out and joined with others to break bread, and break
barriers, and break ground. Maybe we can find a way to do that
again. For if this table means anything, if the message and life
of Jesus means anything, it means we’ve got to! My prayer is that
we may once again know Christ in the breaking of the bread – and may
God grant us a case of holy heartburn!
.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
Westmoreland Circle
Bethesda, MD 20816
301-229-7766
Email the church office: churchinfo@westmorelanducc.org
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Open and Affirming Congregation
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