There was an interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly this past month that set my mind to thinking about some distinctions that we often need to make in life.  The article spoke about the clash between Islam and Christianity.  The author made an interesting distinction between what he referred to as “Christendom” and Christianity.  Most of Western Civilization finds its self wrapped in Christendom even though we live in a more secularized world than we did a few centuries back.  Christendom still informs us in many ways. Christendom is about cultural response, not just to the Christian faith but to all those other things that get mixed in with it as well.  We notice Christendom in things like Easter Sunday.  When I was a child, part of how you knew of Christendom separate from Christianity was that every kid got a new outfit for Easter to wear to church.  Now that has somewhat subsided because kids go to the store every week to get a new outfit.  Getting new clothes is not such a big deal.  But at a time and a place when clothes were not as frequently bought, getting new Easter clothes was a really neat thing.  We notice Christendom when we see people dying eggs and children hiding them and going to discover them.  Christendom is recognizing that Easter traditions are a cultural aspect of a response not only to Christianity but also to some pre-Christian notions that involve the fertility symbol of eggs in the spring.  It’s important, I think, for people of faith to understand and distinguish between Christianity and Christendom, because there are some things about Christendom that may be helpful, that might be fun, and that may even give us memories.  But there are many other pieces of Christendom that can falsely make us think that they are referring to the Christian faith itself.  These aspects of Christendom can set us on the wrong course ending up with misunderstanding.  One of those things is that Christendom tells us that Easter is a date on the calendar, defined by the spring equinox that comes one day out of the year.  On that day we do a lot of celebrating, then we essentially go back to the rest of our lives, right?  Christianity, as opposed to Christendom, requires us to look back to the First Century Church.  By doing that we discover the power of what the resurrection brought and gave to the early Christians’ lives.  They lived Easter.  They did not just celebrate it one day out of the year.  It’s interesting to know that throughout the history of the Church, tension between Christianity and Christendom has effected a constant battle.  Four hundred years ago Christendom had so over taken Christianity that there were many who saw a need to reform the Church to try to move it back more to that First Century experience.  The Reformation came about in part because Christianity had become a culture and not a lived faith.  In pre-Reformation Christendom about 80% of the land was owned by the Church.  By the way, in an agricultural society that meant that the ordained church officials were the top dogs.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a bishop or even a priest in a local congregation at that time and have that kind of secular power to wield.

  Truly, many times that power was wielded for the good, but many times its purposes were not so good.  There was a dark period in the Church’s history when Christendom reigned and where true Christianity, based on that First Century experience, was waning.  People hardly ever took communion.  Most of what happened regarding prayer was simply there to generate more income for the Church so that it would become wealthier than it was.  Most of the rituals that surrounded the Church were far removed from the experience of the living Lord to a common people.  I often, in a nice way, chastise people about some of the things that we do when we fall back into Christendom.  For example, we like fancy words and want to use them.  This up here is not an altar.  If you ever call it that, I will reprimand you.  It is a communion table.  When those people of 400 years ago were trying to get back to what communion was for that First Century Church, they realized that communion wasn’t about some priestly person at a high alter sacrificing Jesus all over again.  The notion that communion was a sacrifice afresh was the Church’s means to having power and control over people’s lives.  During the First Century, the altar was primarily a communion table.  It was a table where the people of God gathered like they would in their own homes.  Interestingly enough, those reforming people took away the gold and the silver and replaced them with the common everyday things from their own lives.  Pottery for the most part was used.  I often thought that if I did communion correctly in the First Century way, then I would do something really different.  Since Pam is in Phoenix today, she won’t know that I’m telling you this: At our house we save peach jars and we drink out of them.  And there are times that I think that maybe serving communion out one of those peach jars would be much more true to the First Century experience.  The truth is that communion is about taking the common and everyday and being reminded of the real presence of God in that.  Communion itself isn’t some high ritual for the elite clergy to manifest to the people.  Communion is a gift of God to the community, and it was celebrated on every Lord’s Day in the First Century Church.   Communion was not some grand and lofty occasion.  It was a common meal that reminded people of the central belief of the Christian faith: that God can come among us, redeem us, and bring us Easter in life.

 Now as we ponder that, let us go back for just a moment to some things that were pivotal, which occurred around Easter and its celebration in the early Church that we need to be reminded of today.  First of all, another thing I like to correct people about is that often people refer to Sunday as the Sabbath, and that is an incorrect thing to say.  The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week, and that is Saturday.  If you’re interested in Sabbath ritual and Orthodoxy, you can go to the local Synagogue and learn how to practice that.  In the early church the Sabbath was still celebrated because the Christian Church was still tightly knitted in the Jewish community, which gave it birth.  After a few decades in which the Christian church was no longer a part of that community, that Sabbath ritual went away.  But there was something that started with that early church experience that continues and is evident in the fact of your sitting here.  Not only would those early Christians celebrate the Sabbath the 7^th day of the week on Saturday, but they would also get up early on Sunday, which was the first day of the week and a work day like any other.  They would gather together in homes, caves, or wherever they could, and they referred to this day as the Lord’s Day.  They would read Psalms, and they would do what they had been doing in the Jewish community for centuries: reading the scriptures from the Hebrew text.  They had someone among them who had some knowledge of the scriptures, and this person would expound upon them and preach on them. They would offer their prayers, and then they would break the bread and share the cup.  And by the way, if someone was sick and couldn’t make it, a deaconess or other person would carry communion to him or her after the service.  This Lord’s Day ritual became the primary focus for the early church.  And it was celebrated on Sunday, because that was the day that Jesus rose from the dead.  What the early church knew and understood was that Easter was not about Christendom.  Easter was not about some cultural celebration that involved the rituals of a holiday one day out of a year.  It was about a way of life and about a people transformed.  These people lived Easter every day of their lives, and so they didn’t forget Easter’s true meaning.  Once a week they would gather and celebrate Easter all over again.  So, in many ways, every Sunday of the year is an Easter celebration. 

Now I want to go back for a moment to Luke’s gospel.  There is this piece of us human beings that can’t help but to be drawn to knickknacks and wonderfully tacky things.  I remember a trip to California where I saw the dinosaur that Pee Wee Herman actually had filmed with him in the movie with children.  This dinosaur was attached to some restaurant.  And my children were young, and they loved sitting on that dinosaur, which was the tackiest thing I’ve ever saw.  I have to say that it made me stop in the desert and eat somewhere I would never have eaten any other time.  I would have to say that the owner was a pretty good businessman.  The church has not been without its tacky, kitschy side.  We’ve often looked for things that might attract people and bring them in.  Sometimes our curiosity can even lead us to the spiritual support that we need.   It should not be a surprise that up until a couple of centuries ago, there were fabled legends about pieces of Jesus’ cross and pieces of Jesus’ garments.  There were places where bones from the Apostles were allegedly placed so that people could come and see them.  By the way, these relics brought in good business for the Church, and such contact with supposedly holy things made people feel good.  People even could feel that they might have come close to that holy moment 2000 years ago.  But that was about Christendom and not about Christianity.  Back a few years ago there was talk about the Shroud of Turin.   And there was all this investigative evidence.  If people in this scientific age could somehow prove that this shroud was Jesus’ and it was indeed his image imprinted in it, then we could know that the resurrection is true, and we could go on to confirm the new life that God has given.  The latest version of that is, as many of you know, the thing that has shaken the biblical community of scholars to its knees: the discovery of this stone box that could possibly be a box that James, the brother of Jesus, had been placed in.  What I want to say is that we need to be careful that we don’t get locked into Christendom—a cultural aspect—and lose Christianity, which is a faith way of life.  Quite frankly, I’m nosey about it.  It’s interesting to me that it could have truly been James’ true burial box, but what I want to say to you is that for a person of faith, whether or not it was James’ burial box is immaterial.  Our faith is more enriched when we catch the clues regarding Jesus from the early church.  When Jesus rose from the dead, he did not create a museum and a sideshow where the stone of his tomb might be viewed for five bucks.  He did not intend for people to look at such a sideshow and be assured that he rose from the dead.  Jesus did not take the fine white linen robe that we imagine he wore and put it on display somewhere so that people could build a holy temple.  This is not where he intended people to come and worship the risen Lord—around that holy garment.  We look for the clues of the resurrection in what Jesus told us about Christianity versus Christendom.  When we do this, I think we discover something important.  Luke’s gospel tells us that the resurrected Jesus came among his disciples, and they were wondering if it were really Jesus.  And they were wondering whether or not there was a resurrection after life.  What Jesus did was so common and ordinary that we often miss it when we read the text.  We are told that Jesus ate fish with them—something that he probably had done almost every day that he had walked among them.  The evidence of the new life, which he gave, was experienced just as it had been experienced before the resurrection.  Jesus’ living presence came among the disciples in the common, ordinary pieces of their lives.  What the early Church understood and those reformers 400 years ago wanted to remind us of is that when we came and we broke bread and we shared a cup, that we would know the presence of the Living Christ among us.  Jesus has no part of the smoke and mirrors that the church had created out of Christendom in order that the church as an institution might be seen as place of power and might.  He wants us to understand that this communion table that we come to, like Christians have for every generation for 2000 years, is a legacy.  Communion is a common and ordinary element of life in which we discover again the living presence of God among us through Jesus our Christ.  What is it we’ve discovered?  We’ve discovered that we live in a simple age, which tells us not to believe in anything and not to trust anyone.  Our age is pessimistic: many see that life is bad and is going to get worse.  That is the general flow of what we get from our modern culture.  Modern culture discourages belief in God.  Even if we do believe in God, it may not be possible to believe that God is active in this world bringing about hope, renewal, and new life even as we sit here.  If we understand what that early Church understood, what joy we will know once we realize that the living Christ is not to be found in the relics of Christendom, but in faith that has been experienced and shared from one life to another for 2000 years.  Look for me, Jesus says, in the breaking of bread.  Look for me in the common and ordinary pieces of your life. 

Now I will admit to you that as a pastor, one of the challenges that I have is that sometimes I feel like I’m not only a parent at home to my four children, but that sometimes I’m a parent of 700 children here.  Some of us here are a little bit older than I am, and I have to deal with that.  A week doesn’t go by that I find that someone isn’t upset about the air conditioning’s not working right in this brand new building that we have.  Sometimes I hear that someone hasn’t used the right protocol to do this or do that.    By the way, I don’t want this to hamper you from expressing things to me that you may or may not be concerned about, but I want you to put this into perspective.  What I’m often reminded of is, that if we were truly living our lives as Easter people and if we have been so touched by the new life that God has given us, then it would throw such a perspective on life.  If we actually believed that the living Lord was among us and with us as a church, then we would be filled with so much awe and wonder.  We could let go of some of those little petty things that get on our nerves—instead of calling the pastor to complain.  If we truly believed in Easter as something other than a cultural event in life, then we would discover that when we break bread in our homes, that God has gifted us with a new life.  We could appreciate the uniqueness of the people that we share our lives with.  Oh I know, wives and cranky husbands can be boring.  The fact of the matter is that they are wonderful and unique gifts that God has placed in each of our lives.  And if there is no other evidence of the resurrection than the wonder and uniqueness of individuals, then I’m fine.  How often have we discovered as we broke bread in the ordinary parts of our living that the abundance of God’s grace was ever present among us?  I repeat some things because I think that if I repeat them enough, then you will remember them and they will become a part of your life.

  Most surveys show that 90% of Americans say that they believe in God.  By the way, it’s not what we believe or say we believe; it’s how we live our lives that truly matter.  How we live our lives stems from our beliefs.  If we believe that Jesus has risen from the dead and that the living Christ is among us here on earth today, then we must live our lives with a much broader sense of hope, promise, and zeal.  We must do what Luke has demanded that we do: go to the four corners of the earth and live that faith in the world that God has given us.  So after a long-winded sermon, what did we get?  Easter is a way of living, and God is alive among us!  So, let’s break this bread and share this cup together to confirm that real presence among us.  And that means when you sing those songs and come and take communion that I’m going to be listening not only to the words, but whether your hearts believe what is said here today.  Let’s bow our heads to pray.