Communion Meditation: World Communion Sunday

October 1, 1994

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Today is a great day in the life of the Church. EVERY Sunday, of course is a great day in the life of the Church. Every Sunday is a commemoration of Easter. Each Lord’s Day is a little Easter, a reminder that it was on the first day of the week that God raised Jesus from the dead. It’s why we gather to worship as Christians on the first and not the last day of the week.

But this Sunday is special in another way, too, for a reason that has to do with the breadth and inclusiveness of our faith. It’s World Communion Sunday.

Bishop John Branscomb used to say that on World Communion Sunday not even the smallest church has a small altar. Today, he would say, the altars of every church stretch 26,000 miles, all the way around the world. We are linked with Christian people everywhere in a common act of worship and in a common indebtedness.

In every country on earth, today, I suppose literally....in every country on earth people in one way or another will be receiving Christ through the precious symbols of His passion, in remembrance of Him, and what He did for our redemption.

In parts of Western Europe, people will be kneeling in great stone cathedrals, bathed in the Gothic splendor of the Middle Ages.

In parts of Eastern Europe, people who were not allowed for 40 years to practice the faith openly, will kneel in their churches to receive the elements with the fear of being arrested for doing so removed....Think what it must mean.

In parts of the Philippines, some will kneel in a jungle clearing, and probably use rice wine instead of grape juice.

I suspect my friend Guillermo Martinez will serve communion to his little Baptist flock in Masaya, Nicaragua. I suppose that flimsy shack of a church building is still standing....I don’t know. I remember taking communion in it one night and felt the presence of the Lord in a powerful way as we knelt at a roughhewn wooden altar.

Some who take communion today won’t kneel at all, of course. They’ll stand, or sit, according to their practice....

And some in this world, even in spite of the remarkable changes that have taken place in the past 5 years or so will still have to take communion in secret, and improvise, in order to observe the Sacrament.

We are linked with all of them...we are connected with them....and a whole lot more.

Many different ways, many different methods of serving, many different languages will be employed today in the administration of the Sacrament, but despite all that variety of expression, there will be a common bond among the disciples and followers of the Galilean Carpenter---THAT BOND IS OUR COMMON NEED AS HUMAN BEINGS.

God sent Christ into the world not because of Jewish need, or American need, or Russian need, or Canadian need, or Asian need, or African need...God sent Christ into the world because of human need, and that need basically is the same everywhere.

Jesus came to bring God’s love and redemption, not just to the deserving, or the able, or the better class of people.

He came to bring God’s love and redemption to PEOPLE, to human beings, to “all sorts and conditions of men”, as Thomas Cranmer expressed it in Elizabethan language....ALL OF WHOM, OTHER WISE, COULD NEVER HAVE MADE IT. AND WOULD NEVER BE ABLE TO MAKE IT.

What we’re doing today, at least in part, is recognizing the inclusiveness of Christianity. We’re saying it’s bigger than Methodism, it’s bigger than Protestantism, it’s bigger than this local church, it’s bigger than Winter Park.

It embraces people who in some ways are very different from us, but who are loved by God just as much as we are.

We’re saying we have no monopoly on God, and no right to claim Him as our exclusive property. God, after all, isn’t OURS. We are GOD’S, which implies that nothing precious to Him should be alien to us.

His love, so vast that we can discern only the hem of it----but we see the essence of it in Jesus, and that’s enough---His love takes in everybody, and we’re included, not because we’re better, but because we, too, are needy.

Like all people, we need forgiveness for sin, forgiveness for being so wrapped up in ourselves, in our own activities, in our own cares and concerns that we don’t even see the hurt of people right next to us.....

Like all people, we need forgiveness for being grasping when we were made with the capacity to share....

Like all people, we need forgiveness for knowing what is right, and kind, and honorable, but being either too selfish or too lazy to do it.

Like all people, we need cleansing---for past mistakes, for old, worn out grudges, for resentments we’ve allowed to fester and soil the inner purity of our souls....

Like all people, we need to be scrubbed up and made right again. We need the strength of God to fortify us for daily living. We need the living presence of God to remind us who we are, and what He has already done to reconcile us to our Creator.

We are here because, like everybody else, we need to be. We are here because, like all people, we need what only Jesus Christ is capable of giving.

World Communion Sunday....With Christians all over the globe, we celebrate it today.

To add a special pertinence to our sense of connectedness around the world, we remember this morning that one of our own, Phil Shoemaker, right now is working with a United Methodist Church Mission Team in relief work in Goma, Zaire, among the Rwandan refugees who have come across the border into that country.

It was last Communion Sunday that we announced Phil’s response to a call for help issued by the Board of Global Ministries. He was trained...He could go, he said...so he asked himself why he shouldn’t. HE ANSWERED THE CALL, and you helped make it possible. Now he’s there, Sue has heard from him through a long distance call this week from Africa, so we know the team has arrived and is in place. They started working Thursday. The Board of Global Ministries has said they are going to try to make it possible for the workers on the team to call their home churches one Sunday, and maybe that can be worked out. Wouldn’t it be exciting? Doesn’t it make the reality of our World Wide celebration of Communion more exciting?

It’s a big world out there. But it’s a big God whom we worship and whom we serve, a God who is at work in us and through us for His people.

Come this morning and join the celebration of Christ’s redeeming work in the world. From every corner of the earth we gather...one people, one need, one Gospel, one Faith, one loaf, one cup, one Lord. Thank God we have been invited.