“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”Today we are here to share a joint communion between brothers and sisters of several denominations. We gather together as Disciples of Christ, United Methodists, and Episcopalians. Anyone else out there from a different tradition? We know the sharing of this meal by different names, The Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Eucharist, which is a fancy Greek word for Thanksgiving.
The United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church have officially entered into a time of Interim Shared Communion as we move toward the day of Full Communion. All of our denominations are in one way or another in dialogue as we seek to live out concretely the Prayer of Jesus, “That we all may be one, even as our God is one.”
It is fitting that we gather together on this day, Pentecost, meaning basically 50 days since Easter. Pentecost also coincides with the Jewish Feast of Weeks. It can be tied to Passover and the giving of the Law, 50 days from these events, a part of the salvation history of the Jewish people. But it also relates to the underlying agricultural festivals tied to creation. The Feast of Weeks is also a harvest celebration, a time to give thanks for the fruit of our labor and again 50 days from the festival of First Fruits, all tied to the various grain harvests in the Middle East. Seven as you may know is an important number in Jewish tradition. And seven times seven is 49, add one is 50 and this is a great symbol of completion, of culmination.
We have been working together, many of us for many years in this community. Recently we have been doing lots of stuff together, feeding young people at Mending Wings for example. Some of us have been meeting regularly for bible study and leadership has been meeting monthly in our Ecumenical group. We have been working together on our joint Organizing for Mission project. Together we have raised lots of money for hunger relief both here and internationally. So today is a culmination, a celebration of our work together as we seek to model our unity in Jesus Christ. On this 50th day, this day of culmination.
But today is also a day of new beginning. It was originally the birth of the church, when the promised gift of the Holy Spirit was given and filled all those gathered together on that day. We say happy birthday to the church, and we look forward to another year of our life together and imagine what we might accomplish together in the future.
We do see also how far we have to go to get to the vision of church that was described in that first celebration. Then, it says, all were gathered together in one place. I am not suggesting that we need to go backward and reclaim some lost glory days of the church. Many of us know all too well that the past is gone. But even what we had when our various buildings were filled with people is not the vision put forth by Pentecost. It is a vision of all gathered together in one place. In the early church it was a few disciples who had gathered for the first time together to receive the Holy Spirit. Now in our recent history, the church has waxed and waned in numbers and spread and diversified throughout the world. But it has been for some time many different denominations and faith traditions. Ecumenical movements have come and gone, but that vision of unity remains elusive.
What does a new vision of unity in which we can celebrate our diversity look like? I really don’t know! But today is a celebration of the journey we are on to discover together what it might mean to be a visible sign of the unity we have in Jesus Christ. On this day, at least, we can begin to model a new vision of unity in diversity in which, at least on one day of the year, we can all gather together in one place and be a visible sign of unity. We have a long way to go, we are painfully aware of who is missing from our circle today. Our Circle? What might it mean for us to be a part of circle that is not really ours at all, but one drawn by God to include all of God’s children?
This vision of unity described in this first story was not just one of Christian Unity: the unity of Christian denominations and the Christian church. The people in the crowd that day described everyone who was there: “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
What does this mean indeed? It is a vision of the whole world able for a moment to hear and understand one another. A vision of the world in all its diversity, united. I am not again suggesting that we need to go back, rather this is a call for us to go foward. It was after all, perhaps a fleeting moment, come and gone, a glimpse of something yet to be fully realized. We call it the Kingdom of God. I like to call it the Community of Creation, a vision in which all can share in the blessing of God’s creation, in which there is place at the table for everyone and everything, in which we can truly celebrate all the incredible diversity of God’s creation and know that we are indeed one. But what does it mean to go forward toward this vision. What does it mean indeed! We also right now live in a community full of different languages and cultures and people from many nations, all sharing together this land. We live here also with all the plants and animals, with the river and sky and the valley and mountains. What indeed does it mean for us to live together celebrating our unity in diversity? We have a long way to go.
But this day can be for us a marker of our progress toward that vision as we seek in all we do to embody the unity we share in the Spirit of God.
I often think of our work together as an artist’s work. Monet, the French impressionist, painted a series of paintings of haystacks. He painted them from every angle, at every time of day and every season, with lots of different colors and textures. Imagine the intensity of this kind of play or work, depending on how you look at it. I sometimes say that he was trying to get it right, but there is no right or wrong here, there is only getting to know that haystack in all it possibilities, just getting to know in all its various forms and expressions, one field of haystacks, in all its depth, in all its variety.
That seems to me what our life together is all about. We are called to model a new kind of community in which all can be included. A new vision of unity made possible by God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. God has made us all one, God proclaims us all one, and our task is to live into that reality, to be who we are. One people in filled with the Spirit of God. As God is One so we are all One! Take out your paint brushes brothers and sisters and go to work, playing with that image. Draw for each other a picture of what this unity looks like, find your inspiration from the Holy Spirit, and play with all the colors on your pallet, spend time exploring this vision of unity every day and throughout the year. This is your liturgy, the work of the people, your calling, your mission, your sacred play. To be one as God is one.
On this day, we come together at this table to join together once again in sacred play. We take these symbols of bread and wine and we say that they are the sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and we gather around the table a visible sign of the unity we have in Jesus Christ, we say that we too are the body of Christ a visible sign of unity of all of creation. I want to tell you that whole world is the Body of Christ, these elements of creation, bread and wine, proclaimed by us here to be the Body and Blood of Christ. Do we fully understand what we are doing? Hardly. Are we a full and complete expression of this unity as we look around the room today? Hardly. But nevertheless on this day we have arrived at a culmination. We are here today to celebrate the fruits of our labor and most importantly the fruit of Spirit of God at work in us. But every end is also a new beginning, moving us forward into the future. Every end is a beginning.
One of my favorite quotes from St Francis is, “Brothers let us begin in earnest.” He said this at the beginning of his ministry and he said on his death bed. Sometimes we can get frustrated when we think of how far we have to go to truly model the kind of unity that God would have us be. It always seems like we are always just beginning. But on the other hand if we imagine the infinite task, the eternal play involved in just getting to know a haystack, then we can turn our lives from dreaded task to sacred play. The truth is we are always just beginning to model, unravel, know in all its depth, the mystery of this infinite Spirit of God that unites all of the incredible infinite diversity of creation.
And so brothers and sisters let us begin in earnest. Come share this birthday meal, which is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet which we will share one day with the whole world gathered together all in one place. AMEN
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