Word and Table

A Sermon preached on Easter III 19 April at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Written by Dorothee Dziewas and Chris Easthill

Acts 2:14a,36-41, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35

Full disclosure: I am not Dorothee Dziewas. Dorothee was supposed to be preaching today but Friday afternoon, just as I got back from our pilgrimage, she called (or better coughed) to tell me that she was not able to preach as she was sick in bed with no chance of recovery by Sunday! She had however already written her sermon and – as the second part of my full disclosure – I am using most of what she had already prepared.

You may have noticed that our services are divided into two sections: The Word of God and The Holy Communion. As a Church that holds up both its Catholic and Reformation heritage, both are important. The first part of the services focuses on Scripture and its interpretation in the sermon. As the lectionary will have it, two of today’s readings are about preaching.

The reading from Acts starts with the introductory verse to the first public sermon the apostle Peter held, on the day of Pentecost. Then it leaves out the actual sermon (some of which was in the readings last week, though) and jumps directly to the reaction of the people listening to Peter.

And then there is the gospel reading, of course. It tells the well-known story of those two disciples on their way to Emmaus, who are talking among themselves about the dreadful things that have been going on in Jerusalem. Until a stranger appears and starts to explain to them what happened, and why.

That’s what sermons are supposed to do – they explain, they discuss, they motivate, they teach. But let’s be honest. How many of us could still remember the key message of last week’s sermon? Or any point that was made? How often do we hear words that are well thought out, well spoken, and well presented – and yet still cannot remember them a few days later, let alone put them into practice in everyday life!

Often words don’t really reach us, they don’t stick. More often than not it’s “in one ear and out the other”, because we are so busy with our own things and thoughts that we cannot tune in to God’s word. It needs more than clever thoughts and learned theories to make sense of Scripture. To connect with the Divine. To feel the hope of the resurrection against all odds.

Apparently the two disciples in our gospel reading are no exception. They will have heard Jesus talk about his Passion many times. And now, Jesus himself was teaching them, explaining all about God’s plan of healing and love, and yet they did not understand, not really. It needed the shared meal, the breaking of the bread, the physical experience for them to realize who was walking with them to Emmaus.

So, are all the words useless? Can we skip the words? The readings, the sermon, the preaching, the learning? Can we just move on to communion, to action, to the physical experience of God’s love? I know, it’s a rhetorical question – the rubrics of Book of Common Prayer don’t allow it because Lectern, Pulpit and Table belong together.

But there is also a reason given in our gospel text why words are a necessary part of our God-experience. When the two disciples realize who has been speaking to them, they say: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

Their hearts were moved by the talking, the explaining of scripture. They felt their hearts burn with passion, with faith. The words were the spark that could grow into a flame. (So thankfully preachers are not out of a job after all! And neither are the authors of books, the hymn writers, the Sunday school teachers and everybody else who uses words to convey God’s message!)

God did speak to the two disciples through words. But they only realized that when they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread. When they saw the familiar gesture that they had seen him use during their time with him – not least at the last supper!

Shared words – readings, preaching, creed, and prayer - provide the groundwork for a full experience of God’s love in the Eucharist. We are meant to learn more about God’s love, about our faith, about what it means to believe in the risen Christ. And we are meant to ask questions, even to vent our frustration and admit to our hopelessness. God can work with that.

Those two disciples have their questions answered in an unexpected way. Second-hand accounts of the resurrection (from those who saw the empty tomb) haven’t done the trick, so God finds a more immediate, very hands-on way of meeting his friends. Jesus walks with them, he eats with them! He is a true companion – which comes from the Latin words “cum pane”, “with bread”, someone you share bread with.

And then he is gone. Vanished. As suddenly as he appeared earlier. But something has changed. This time, Jesus not being there anymore does not send his disciples into despair. They may not see him with their eyes anymore, but their hearts are now opened. And they are propelled into action. They walk back the 12 or so miles to Jerusalem and tell the apostles what they have experienced.

If we look at the whole of chapter 24, which is the last chapter in Luke’s gospel, it is interesting to see that today’s story about the Emmaus disciples is wedged in the middle of what would have been a perfectly coherent and logical narrative. The first 12 verses tell us about the women finding the tomb empty and Jesus gone, and about the two shiny figures telling them that their master is risen. Peter runs to the tomb and back, amazed. That’s where verse 36 picks up the story: “While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”

It seems as if our reading (verses 13 to 35) was inserted into that narrative. Why? Maybe Luke wanted to send a message to later Christians that there will always be an opportunity to encounter the risen Christ just like the first Believers did. The Emmaus story shows us that Jesus meets people where they are. On the move. In transition. In despair and doubt. At the table. And it points out that we need to hear Scripture explained as well as to experience Christ in our hearts and in our lives. That a truly living faith is a matter of both head and heart.

This story right at the end of Luke’s gospel is also the perfect link to the second New Testament book written by Luke, namely the Acts of the Apostles – much of which takes place in the cities of Asia Minor that our group was able to visit last week! We heard from chapter 2 where Peter has just passionately spoken to the crowds about the Scriptures, about the risen Christ, and we get to read about their reaction to God’s word being preached.

Again, the words touch the hearts of those listening. “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’” These people just heard the words, the witness, the preaching, and they want to know more. They ask questions. What now? What can we do? Peter tells them to get baptized – to meet God in the water made holy. In the physical experience of God’s love.

This love has two aspects, just as our worship has: God wants us to learn and understand – with the ministry of the word. And God invites us to come and taste and feel how loved we are – in the Eucharist.

And then, equipped with both those experiences, changed by God’s love, we can go and tell others about it. Live a life that’s different from before. A life of hope and trust, of courage and faithfulness. And I’m not telling you anything new when I say that the world needs to see this hope and trust and courage and faithfulness right now, from each of us, wherever we are.

And with the Risen one as our companion, we can go out and “do the work God has given us to do to love and serve God as faithful witnesses of Christ, our Lord.”

Amen.

 

 

Do this!

 

A Sermon preached on Maundy Thursday 2 April at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Isaiah 58:1-9a, 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, Matthew 5:13-20

One of the big arguments of the Reformation era was about the Eucharist, that mystic feast whose institution by Jesus we celebrate tonight. This was not just an argument between the Roman Catholics and Protestants, but also a disagreement within the Reformation movement. And not far from here, in the city of Marburg, German reformer Martin Luther and Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli and others met to try and resolve the dispute at the Marburg Colloquy from 1 – 4 October 1529. The central disagreement revolved around the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Luther maintained that Jesus’s words, as for example recounted by Paul in the 1^st Letter to the Corinthians, “This is My body” (1 Cor 11:24), should be taken quite literally in affirming a real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, even writing the words hoc est corpus meum on the meeting table! Zwingli, on the other hand, taught a symbolic or memorial view, emphasizing the memorial aspect of the sacrament, focusing on 1 Corinthians 11:23-25 and especially on the call “Do this in remembrance of Me” and the charge “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” Emphasizing the word “remembrance,” Zwingli held that the bread and cup served to remind believers of Christ’s once-for-all atoning work, his death, without implying a literal, physical presence in the elements.

I think both Luther and Zwingli showed an astonishing lack of imagination and an unfortunate unwillingness to accept the kind of both/and paradox that is at the heart of much of Christian belief. We believe that Jesus is God and Man, that life comes through death, we trust in the already and not yet of God’s kingdom, that our king comes as a servant, that true freedom is experienced through service and – returning to our passage – that we receive both bread and Christ’s body, both wine and his blood at the Eucharist and that we do this to remember and relive Christ’s sacrifice. To be clear, I’m on the “real presence side” of the argument. I believe that Christ is truly and physically present in the elements. I don’t know how that happens and I don’t really care. There is a lovely poem attributed to Queen Elizabeth I in which she declares her belief in that presence without the need for any complicated explanation:

“Twas God the Word that spake it,
He took the Bread and brake it:
And what that Word did make it,
That I believe and take it.”

And Richard Hooker, the first great Anglican theologian, once wrote: “I should wish that men would spend more time meditating with silence on what we have by the sacrament, and less on disputing about how.”[1]

But we should not neglect the call to remember – it is after all what Jesus asked us to do - and what that means. All the Maundy Thursday readings are about remembering. In the Exodus passage about the Passover (12: 1 – 4, 11 – 14) the Lord tells Moses: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.” And our Jewish siblings celebrate this with the ritual meal known as Passover every year – also the setting for the Last Supper. As already mentioned, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he recalls and remembers what he had received from Jesus, to share bread and wine in remembrance of Him. And while the word “remember” as such is not used explicitly in the foot washing scene from John’s Gospel, it is implicit in the phrase “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (John 13:15)

Remembering is important! That’s why dictators and autocrats try and control, suppress or change memories. In George Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarian regime maintains complete dominance over its population through the control of history and memory, specifically by erasing the past and forging historical facts, as expressed in the doctrine: "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Orwell’s novel was not just fiction; it was based on what the Communist and Fascist regimes of his day were doing. And it is sadly not fiction today. Remembering can be an act of resistance!

The word remember, from the Latin rememorari, means on the one hand “call to mind.” To remember is also not to forget to do something, so to act in accordance with the event that is being remembered. To remember the Exodus event is therefore not just to recall the experience of being a stranger in a strange land, to acknowledge the pain of slavery, and to celebrate God’s act of liberation. To celebrate the Passover means supporting the stranger actively working against any form of slavery and oppression and fulfilling God’s mission to liberate all peoples. To remember the Last Supper is therefore not just to share in the bread and wine made holy in remembrance of Jesus, to rejoice in the forgiveness of sin, and to proclaim the Lord's sacrificial and saving death on the cross. To celebrate the Eucharist is to let ourselves be transformed into the likeness of Christ by sharing in Him, to forgive as we have been forgiven, and to love and serve as Christ loved and served and gave himself for us: “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” To quote theologian Richard Hooker again: “We receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner of our life, and in the Eucharist repeatedly to bring our life by degrees to its completion.”[2]

That is also why we as Anglicans put the Eucharist at the centre of our weekly worship: We need that regular reminder of Christ’s supreme act of love; we need to be refilled and recharged and recommissioned each week. Remembering is not an option: “Do this!” Jesus says. This charge is amplified in the “mandatum” of Maundy Thursday, in Jesus’ command to the disciples: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34) In the Eucharist we receive and share his love within our community and through it we are empowered and equipped to share his love with the whole world.

Amen.

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[1] Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V

[2] ibid