Now I don’t praise you as I give the following instruction because when you meet together, it does more harm than good. 18 First of all, when you meet together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and I partly believe it. 19 It’s necessary that there are groups among you, to make it clear who is genuine. 20 So when you get together in one place, it isn’t to eat the Lord’s meal. 21 Each of you goes ahead and eats a private meal. One person goes hungry while another is drunk. 22 Don’t you have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you look down on God’s churches and humiliate those who have nothing? What can I say to you? Will I praise you? No, I don’t praise you in this.
23 I received a tradition from the Lord, which I also handed on to you: on the night on which he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread. 24 After giving thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this to remember me.” 25 He did the same thing with the cup, after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Every time you drink it, do this to remember me.” 26 Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you broadcast the death of the Lord until he comes. (Common English Bible)
“Sanctuary at Sixty: Five Acts of Worship to Make a Space a Sanctuary,” Week Five
I heard the voice issue forth from my left: “Sir, we’re going to need you to exit the terminal.”
I looked up from my phone, with which I had been catching critters on Pokemon Go, absolutely incredulous, thinking this must have been said to someone standing near me.
But there was nobody near me. The two security agents were addressing me as I was standing off to one side in Los Angeles International Airport. My flight from Portland had arrived early, and I was waiting for the flights of my mother and cousin to arrive.
“I’m sorry?” I responded, doing my sacred best to mask my incredulity and confusion.
The two agents repeated their command: “You need to leave, now.”
I looked around. Nobody else was bothering to look. Two airport security agents hassling a brownish man in a full beard when everyone else is free to go about their business is just another Tuesday in a post-9/11 world.
“Why?”
They repeated their command a third time, clearly beginning to lose patience: “You need to leave.”
I suppose I could have made a scene, demanded an exact reason for being ejected from a public space while waiting for my family’s flights to land. I could have stood up for myself and made them justify it.
But the blunt, unfortunate, painful truth of the matter is that in an airport, with a beard and my skin tone, standing up for myself gets me arrested, or worse.
So meekly, I let myself be escorted out of LAX. Emasculated and humiliated, there was little I could do besides wait in the hot southern California sun—for even in January, the weather does not change there, which I suppose is the appeal—for my family to arrive and take me from this inanity.
My mom and my cousin Hagop both arrived in due course and with the help of one of Hagop’s friends who is an LA native—never, ever try to navigate that traffic on your own—we made our way to the northern environs of the Los Angeles area, where in two different houses family awaited us.
Family whom we had never met, and whom I never knew even existed until I was almost thirty.
Because that is part of the wages of genocide—not only do they try to kill you, your family, your people, but their efforts make it so that even for those fortunate enough to escape like my great-grandparents, reconnecting with family afterwards can require a herculean effort. It had taken my cousin Hagop several years—plural—to track down our extended family and finally, by gathering together in the homes of my aunt Rita and my great-uncles Hratch and Hrayr, we had planned a reunion that only comes around once in a lifetime—a family reunited after decades apart.
Two dinners is a lot even for a tank like me to handle, but you can expect nothing less—Armenian hospitality, like Southern hospitality, is lavish in the extreme. Of course I was asked to pray, which I had to do mostly in English, but I ended each prayer in Armenian, with the most basic term of gratitude I could offer: Thank you, God.
Thank you, God, for family discovered. For simultaneously being both stranger and beloved. For a cultural tradition that honors the practice of gathering around the table, the breaking of bread, and the saying of prayers. And for a religious tradition that honors that same practice in the form of holy communion.
This is the final installment of a sermon series conceived for a special moment in Valley’s history, the 60th anniversary of our Gothic revival sanctuary, which was completed in October 1961. We celebrated the 70th anniversary of Valley’s planting back in the spring, and this sermon series mirrors that as a five-week celebration, but we will be focusing on the acts of worship that set this space apart as a sanctuary. Our order of worship can be broken down into five such acts, right in order: praise, prayer, proclamation, participation, and finally, partaking.
Each of these acts is interwoven into multiple parts of our worship service, but each of them come to the forefront at a different moment in our order of worship. We began this series by talking about the act of praise, which is at the forefront with our call to worship and, appropriately enough, our hymn of praise (you can’t accuse us of false advertising!). We then moved into an act of worship that, again, is integrated into the totality of our worship service but is specifically named in our opening prayer or invocation and the pastoral prayer: the act of prayer. Then we covered the act of worship that entails the children’s message and the sermon: proclamation, specifically of God’s Word. Last week, we arrived at the act of participation in the Body of Christ and the building of God’s kingdom here with the voluntary, sacrificial giving of our tithes and offerings—stewardship.
Finally, today, on World Communion Sunday, we arrive at the act of partaking in holy communion. It is a spiritual practice held in the highest regard in our Disciples of Christ tradition, offered every Sunday without fail (at least BC—Before Covid), and often even during special services like Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday, and of course, Maundy Thursday. We also hold that the table upon which Holy Communion is served is an open table, available for all who affirm the lordship of Jesus Christ, as it is fundamentally His table and not ours. He is Lord, we are merely His invited guests.
Paul’s words here in 1 Corinthians actually represent the earliest formulation we have of the Words of Institution that Jesus spoke over this meal—all the Gospels were written after Paul’s execution in 64 CE, and in any case, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all basically concur in backing up Paul’s wording.
That wording provides the Biblical basis for what we observe today, on World Communion Sunday. It is a day to join ourselves far outside our lovely sanctuary’s walls to the church universal, the church around the world, the vast majority of whom do not look exactly like us, speak exactly like us, or worship exactly like us. The Disciples doctrine of the open table become essential in that context, not just because it creates space for that diversity of difference, but because it is Christ’s table. We do not own it, Jesus does. We do not get to choose the preferential seat right next to the host of the feast, He does. The seating chart and all of the unwritten hierarchies that go into one—if you have ever been part of a wedding reception where the seating arrangement was a source of stress, you know exactly what I mean—that is not in our hands at the communion table. The only things in our hands are the bread and cup that signify Christ’s broken body and shed blood.
All of that matters—matters deeply—in the context of a diverse church because a sense of ownership, whether over land, or of the government and the ballot, or of other human beings as property, that sense of ownership is what fuels so many of our prejudices. Los Angeles International Airport is a public facility—at least, before you go through security. Even if I had no business there, I still had every right to be there—as evinced by the people who bring their kids to airports all the time to watch the planes take off and land. Ejecting me from a public place was an expression of ownership—that the agents perceived it as theirs, and not as mine. To them, I had no right to it.
That is something I notice time and again when I am perceived differently—followed by people in their cars, or shouted at, in the neighborhood we lived in back in Washington. Carrie being called something unprintable when we are out walking together on the sidewalk. A passerby looking at the church in Longview I had been ministering for a few years by that point in time and then looking at me and demanding to know if I was changing the church into a mosque. It did not matter to him that I was the minister and had been the minister for quite some time—he felt more a sense of ownership over a church he had never darkened the doorway of than he felt I had as the minister.
And when I share some of these stories privately, you’re generally surprised, saying some version of “I would never see you like that,” and I believe you. But I can also say, without hesitation, that not everyone does. You might, but not everyone sees me as being as entitled to a public space as them, or to the neighborhood in which I live. That is the reality the minister you called lives in—and that so many others live in as well, with far more frequency and severity than I.
So that makes something like the Lord’s Table, that I grew up with every Sunday, week in and week out, as one of my favorite parts of worship as a kid, so lifegiving and sustaining. I can come to this table precisely because I cannot, should not, and must not claim ownership over it, because it is not mine to claim. It is Christ’s, and I know better than to be the proud who dare to take on the Son.
It was emotional whiplash in the extreme to go from summary ejection from an airport to lavish welcome at dinner tables all in the span of less than twelve hours. I could not make sense of it right away, or even days later. I alluded to it in my first sermon after, and I’ve alluded to it since, but until today, I had not recounted what had happened, not publicly, anyways. I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough yet. It took over a year of taking nourishment from this table and this meal that we share, with one another, with the worldwide church, with Christ Himself, for me to find that strength.
For in those twenty-four hours over Los Angeles, I found some of the worst that humanity—or inhumanity—has to offer: mortification, isolation, even damnation.
But also in those twenty-four hours, in the breaking of bread and the saying of prayers around tables that had been purposefully grown to include and welcome me, I found salvation.
And if it has not already, may it come to you as surely as it has come to me.
For what else could I say to it, for it, but thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
World Communion Sunday 2021