Extending the Table:  Bread for the World

Today is World Wide Communion Sunday. For me it is one of the most important days we celebrate in the life of the church. There are several reasons for this. One is that it reminds us how extravagant and how inclusive God’s love is. You can sort of hear that awe and wonder of extravagance in this Psalm.

Read Psalm 8:3-9

Who are we that you are mindful of us? And yet you have shown us how significant we are by creating us a little less than God. It is an incredible affirmation of how important each of us is to our God and the esteem God holds us all in. This thought also reminds us how large the family of God is that we have become a part of when we said yes to Jesus. How many brothers and sisters we have in the family of Christ. When Jesus is teaching and healing someone comes to him and says, “Jesus, your mother and brothers are outside to see you.” And how does Jesus answer them? Who is my mother and my brothers and my sisters? All those who believe in God.” World Wide Communion Sunday reminds us that we have brothers and sisters not only here, but around the world.

Seeing this, we can then understand Jesus’ last words to his followers before he leaves them for good and ascends into heaven. Let’s hear these words from Acts.

Read Acts 1:6-8

“Go therefore to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” Today if Jesus was talking directly to us he might say it this way. Go, therefore into Prescott, to Arizona, to the whole U. S. and to Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia.” It is a similar statement, for example Samaria was a hostile place for his followers to go. And when he tells them to go to the ends of the earth, Jesus is asking them to go into gentile territory, meaning, go to people who your faith has taught you are insignificant, unloved by God and undeserving of your attention. Sound familiar.

Now, up until very recently, I have understood this passage from Acts to always be about how I and the church I pastor are the ones who are called to do the good. In the passage we see Jesus sending his disciples into the whole world starting Christianity, introducing people to his thoughts and understandings of life. So my Interpretation of the Acts passage was always about what I or we had to give to an unknowing world, or to the people we met who were unfamiliar with the good news. I now understand Jesus’ words in a slightly different way. I have learned that the church, whether it is our local congregation, or our national denomination, or whether it is the global church, that we are synergistic, meaning that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. We are always more together than we are on our own.

As in Jesus day, being sent as disciples into the world is still bringing a good news message to an unknowing world. Yet it is more. Today, part of going into our community, our nation or our world is about joining with the church already there, joining our brothers and sisters in their ministry so we may expand the influence of the church, to become more together in a richer and fuller way. For example, when we went to Iowa this summer to help with flood cleanup, one of the very first sites we saw was this trailer, and a number like them. (Show picture See WWC Powerpoint also attached) I admit I teared up. It was so exciting for me to realize that my church, this family of God called United Methodist was already in the midst of bringing relief, bringing new life back to a place that had been devastated. And because they had been present, our mission team could come and join with them in their ministry. That this whole idea of world wide communion is not just some wonderful concept or theology, but is truly making a difference. The coordinators of this project have kept track of where work teams have come from to help with rebuilding the lives of people in Cedar Rapids, and they have indeed come from far and wide. We were the first team from Arizona. But my church, our church, our brothers and sisters have been there from the beginning and will remain until the work is done. Our apportionment dollars are helping. Special offerings have provided the means to help. We are more together than we are on our own.

Last year at this time, Nancy and I and a mission team consisting of people from Prescott, from Arizona, and from our nation, had just arrived in Ethiopia. We had brought with us several half-loaves of bread. Many of you may remember that the other halves of the loaves were here, and were used for the World Wide Communion celebration. We literally broke bread together with our brothers and sisters in Ethiopia. We celebrated communion at the Drop-in-Center for street children in Addis Ababa. The center does its best to provide shelter and food for some of the older children living on the streets. But, we also know that sometimes they have no food to share. This moment of communion reminded us of why Jesus used bread as a symbol to remember him by. Bread is the basic sustenance of life for people around the world. (Show Picture) When Nancy was serving this communion, she broke off the biggest pieces she could to give the children who came forward, for that may have indeed been their meal for the day. The bread that came from the same loaf that was symbolic for you as the presence of God’s loving and extravagant hospitality, was literally the love of God as a sustaining meal for some of those children.

After the communion, our friend and founder of the orphanage and Drop-in-Center said to us, “You have been such a blessing to us. You may never fully understand how your being here has made such a difference for the lives of these children. That people would come from the other side of the world to let them know they have not been forgotten and that they are loved is such a gift to them.” My response was entirely different. I felt incredibly blessed to be with such a special part of Jesus’ church, with such a special group of people I could call brother and sister who were there to serve these children. I realized this was the church that I was a part of that was an extension into all the earth. That this part of the family of Jesus Christ lived in the poverty and the deep brokenness of these children’s lives as they were and are there every day for them. That they lived in the midst of the deep need that I was only visiting for several days and which I would leave and come back to the blessings of my life here.

Today, as World Wide Communion Sunday, we are reminded that we are indeed more than we are by ourselves. We are part of the family of God that stretches from Prescott, to Arizona, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Galveston, Texas, to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And we are reminded that God’s love is expressed and received in everyone of those places because we join together as brothers and sisters in the Family of Jesus Christ to care and love for all God’s beloved children.

Today, our table has been extended by breaking bread together with Christians from around the world. But we also recognize that the bread that we break which may be a metaphorical expression of God’s grace for us is also literally the sustenance of life for others. That our call to go into the world is to join with our brothers and sisters to bring the bread of life, metaphorically and literally to those whom God loves, and to whom Jesus calls brother and sister.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Cushman on October 4, 2009.