Outdoor Church Sermon

               Meals are central to the Gospels, and especially Luke, from whom today’s Scripture reading comes.   In the Bible, meals are often a symbol for the time when the kingdom of God will come. Theologians – like lawyers and doctors, never entirely happy unless they’re using a big word when a small one would work just as well – call these meals eschatological meals, that is, a meal that is about when God’s kingdom comes. The communion we will celebrate today is a special form of eschatological meal.

 Today’s reading is a parable about a banquet that Luke treats as an eschatological meal.   A parable is a story with a message, but the message isn’t always simple. It’s not like an allegory, where each person or thing stands for one specific thing.   In a parable, the story is open ended. Jesus wanted his listeners to think hard about his parables and reach their own conclusions, even if the conclusion is unexpected or hard to accept.

In this parable, the householder is the focus of the story. He invites people like himself to dinner but they come up with some really incredible excuses for saying “no.” The householder becomes angry, and tells his servant to go out in the streets and lanes of the city and invite the “poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind.” The servant does, but there is still room at the table. So the householder says to his servant, “Go further out, beyond the walls, to the highways and hedges” – that’s where the servant will find the poorest of the poor – people who have no homes, no money, no work, who can’t even get into the city. “Bring those people in too,” he commands.

Then the householder says, “None of the men which were bidden shall taste of my supper.” And with that the parable ends.

Now, some people have trouble with this ending. It seems too harsh.   They say that the householder is punishing the people who rejected his invitation. Others say that the last sentence shows that the householder has invited the poor people to his house to get back at the people who rejected his invitation – as if to say, “Well, if that’s how you feel, then I prefer the company of poor people to you…” And still others say that the householder is entitled to decide whom he can invite to his table. There is, they say, a rigor to God’s mercy as well as a wideness. His love is not indulgence or it would cease to be love.

Well, the householder has every right to be angry; it’s his house and he’s entitled to include some and keep others away. Considering how his so-called friends treated him, he would have been justified in never inviting them again.

That would be fair. But it would not be Christian. The Christian way is to love even those who reject us. The householder has the right to keep people from his table, but he has a Christian duty to give them every chance to accept his invitation. He has a duty to keep a place at his table for everyone, even if they don’t take it, now or even later.

The householder, in the end, is saying “It makes me sad that you have chosen not to attend my banquet because, so long as you refuse my invitation, you won’t be able to taste my banquet like all the others who have accepted my invitation.” The householder loves all of the people he has invited to his banquet. He is regretful – not angry - that some are unwilling or unable to share his supper with him. He has learned that he is to keep a place at his banquet for everyone; but he cannot force his guests to attend.   All that the householder can do is set the table and invite his guests to join him. The rest is up to them.

 

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When Christianity was very young, there were no churches like this church; back then, the early Christians were too poor and too frightened to build churches like this. The early Christians met in houses to pray together and to read the Gospel. Then, afterward, all who had gathered to worship shared a meal together. The meals were simple – not sandwiches, because the Earl of Sandwich hadn’t invented them yet – but they certainly had bread and wine and water. It wasn’t until the second or third century that Christians began to think about this meal as a sacred event: an event at which Christ was in some way present. That’s the source of the word “sacrament.” This sacrament – communion – has always meant at least this: a shared sacred meal.

Like many Congregational churches, this church celebrates communion on the first Sunday of every month. But this church does something special: on communion Sunday, the children of this church make sandwiches for the homeless people of Cambridge. They bring the sandwiches up to the altar during the service so that the sandwiches can be part of the church’s celebration of communion. Then the children give those sandwiches to the Outdoor Church and the Outdoor Church gives them to homeless people on the Cambridge Common, in Harvard Square and in Central Square.

And on this Sunday – and this happens only once a year – something even more special happens: the children, and anyone else who wants to join them, make the sandwiches on the altar. Then the children will give those sandwiches to the Outdoor Church and the Outdoor Church will give them to homeless people on the Common and in Harvard Square and Central Square. 

That’s one form of communion.   We’ll see another form of communion in just a few minutes. It will start with my saying the Words of Institution, which begin: “On the night before he died, Jesus was at table with his friends…” Then some of us will give out the bread and wine, so that all of us receive some bread and some wine, and they will say something like “This is the body of Christ” when they give out the bread and “This is the Blood of Christ” when they give out the wine.

These are two forms of the same thing: a re-creation of our becoming part of Christ and part of this church in Christ’s presence.

 “Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard,” said John Calvin, “wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them". 

In Calvin’s church, communion was a celebration of our participation in God as her faithful and in one another as her church, in her spiritual presence. Calvin believed that sharing God’s Word animated the elements and made them effective. The Words of Institution themselves are a stand-in for the Word that makes communion a sacrament.

Some people believe there is there is a kind of magic in the minister or the priest who administers communion. But the magic really happens when the person offering communion and the person receiving communion look to God to make their shared meal a sacred event, in which Christ is present for them and they are present for him – they become part of Christ’s body, some would say. God uses communion to make herself present to anyone who wishes to be with her.

Now, I haven’t said anything about who can give communion or who can receive it, or what the bread or the wine should look like, or whether the bread is turned in Christ, or whether the bread is Christ and the bread at the same time, or a symbol of the presence of Christ, or anything like that.  

Anyone can be a part of this sacrament. Anyone can be – should be – a part of Christ’s body and a part of the church which is Christ’s body. Anyone can receive, anyone can administer. There are no magic words – although it’s good to repeat the same words each time, so that communion becomes part of the church’s liturgy – and there are no magic elements. It is the gathering of two or three people who wish to celebrate their love for God and for one another that makes communion a meal, and it is Christ’s presence and the animating power of God’s word that makes the meal a sacred meal. 

Has God appointed me to decide who can join the church and who cannot? Has God asked me to judge who may administer communion and who may not? No, she has not. She has not asked me to stand between her and those she seeks to help. She has not asked me to make rules about who may approach her, and when, or how. But she has said this: “Come to me all you that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” I am not a gatekeeper; only one who will give your sandwiches to anyone who wants one.

 

* * *

First we will make sandwiches on the altar and then we will celebrate the traditional form of communion.

But – even before I say the Words of Institution – a wider communion has already begun: those who make the sandwiches have invoked God’s presence in their invitation to everyone to share a sacred meal. That broader communion begins here, on this altar, when we make the sandwiches. It continues when I take the sandwiches out on the street and it is completed every time someone accepts a sandwich as a sacred gift.

The more formal communion – the one that begins here with the Words of Institution – and the wider communion – the one that begins here with the making of sandwiches on the altar – are forms of the same communion. 

Some people on the street are very conservative and want something just like what happens here. If people ask, we use cups that have a little wafer sealed in the top and some grape juice. Then we give people our sandwiches and socks and bags of toiletries. Some take the sandwiches and feel that they are part of something sacred: “Thank you so much,” they say. “I missed lunch today. This sandwich is a blessing.”  

Many accept the invitation, but not all. Like the householder’s friends, some reject our invitation – at least for the moment. They just take the sandwiches and eat them. (Or they don’t – one of our most faithful congregants always takes his sandwich apart and feeds the cheese or whatever else he doesn’t want to the squirrels.) That’s OK. Every sandwich is an invitation to God’s banquet, and we will have more sandwiches next week, and the week after. 

 

* * *

Now for the sake of you, my brothers and sisters, and all of my other brethren to whom I will give your sandwiches this afternoon, I say, Blessings on this house, and all that dwell therein. For this house has many mansions. Some of the mansions have walls, some do not. Some are inside, some are outside. Some are for this generation, some are for the next. But to each of these mansions, to this house, to this banquet, by the sacrament of communion you have invited the rich and the poor, the healthy and the lame, the blind and the clear sighted. And all those who, like the homeless, hesitate to come within these walls, even those – like the householder’s friends – who will only come to this table after many invitations, they – especially they - will be glad that you have said to them, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!” This church is like Jerusalem itself; peace and security are within its walls because you have offered peace and security to those who are outside its walls.

There is only one bread. We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. We are a unity. We are Christ’s body. God welcomes the Jew and the Gentile to join her church. Every communion that you administer at this altar is an assurance of God’s love for all of us. Every sandwich that you make on this altar is a promise that God’s kingdom awaits us all.