Isaiah 5:1-7
Saint Matthew 21:33-46
The first celebration of World Communion Sunday took place in 1933 at the beautiful Shadyside Presbyterian Church in an upscale suburb just outside of Pittsburgh where Dr. Hugh Thompson Kerr served as pastor.
Since quarterly communion or, at best weekly communion, was the common practice among Protestant churches at the time the Session at Shadyside put forth the proposal as their “attempt to bring churches together in a service of Christian unity—in which everyone might [be reminded] how important the Church of Jesus Christ is, and how each congregation is interconnected one with another.”
Dr. Kerr’s son, Donald, remembered that “The concept spread very slowly at the start. People did not give it a whole lot of thought. It was during the Second World War that the spirit caught hold, because we were trying to hold the world together. World Wide Communion symbolized the effort to hold things together, in a spiritual sense.”1
In the church I grew up in, where communion was only celebrated once a month, World Communion Sunday was a big deal. Later, when I joined a church where communion was offered every week not much was made of the day. I always thought it was an opportunity missed to see the church as something bigger than the little plot of land we occupied.
I like to think about Christians gathering around the Lord’s table in large cathedrals and small country churches. I like the idea that whether they came forward and knelt at the altar rail, as we used to, or sat quietly in their pews with eyes closed and heads bowed, waiting for the ushers or elders to bring them the elements we were united in our belief that there was something greater than ourselves. It didn’t matter if it was grape juice or wine, a loaf of bread as big as a bowling ball or perfectly formed wafers punched pressed out with uniformity we were submitting ourselves to receive a gift of grace.
In the age of Covid we realized how much we missed these moments.
At Faith here in Bellingham, where this sermon is being taped, they are not back to regular worship or even ready to practice the small group communions that had to satisfy us until we felt comfortable enough to gather.
There is a longing to get back to being in the good vineyard that God gave us but has clearly become a royal mess. Both Isaiah and Jesus speak of such a vineyard.
The first words of our reading from Isaiah speak of a beautiful place, almost bucolic, loving tended by ”the beloved” who has worked hard to make it perfect. Everything that could be done was done to make it a vineyard whose grapes would be exceptional and whose wine would exceed all expectations. It is truly a vineyard fit for its owner who is nothing less than the LORD of hosts.
Yet, when harvest time came, it yielded only wild grapes that were not good for making fine wine but good for nothing. And the LORD gives up. The walls are torn down, the hedges are ripped out, no more attention is given to it and no more rain is allowed to fall upon it.
It soon is allowed to return to its natural state.
At this point we must be very careful in reading Isaiah and listening to Jesus because it would be all too easy to see the vineyard and the vineyard workers are being only those people who lived somewhere off in another land at another time. And it becomes dangerous when we succumb to the temptations to cast the scribes and the Pharisees as the heavies. The warning must come with these texts that they have been used by the unscrupulous as an excuse for such extremist antisemitism that would label our Jewish brothers and sisters as Christ killers.
The frightening thought for today is what if Jesus wasn’t talking about the people he was constantly tangling with but was talking about us? What if we’re the labourers in the vineyard who have come to believe that we own the place.
Bernard Brandon Scott, in Hear Then the Parable, suggests “that the time between planting the vineyard and the first payment was probably about five years.”2
So there they were, for a half-a-decade, working the land, tending the vines, keeping the place in tip-top shape. It is easy to see how they could forget that it wasn’t theirs. In their minds, they were the owners. Then suddenly someone comes, a slave with less status than they had, arrives and wants to take all the fruit just as harvest time is near. When we see it in this light it might be more understandable that they openly rebelled.
Remember the line from theme song to the movie Exodus: “This land is mine, God gave this land to me. This brave and ancient land to me.”
Anytime we forget that the land or anything else we have comes from God and does not really belong to us we get into trouble.
That is why World Communion Sunday in our day, in the year 2020, is a more powerful idea than ever before.
We remember a day when we did not commune in each other’s church. A Roman Catholic would no more take communion in a Protestant church than a Protestant would in their’s. We know that in some Lutheran churches, you as faithful Lutherans and even I as an ordained Lutheran clergy person would not be admitted to the Lord’s supper. Even within denominations, within congregations, there was and is exclusion.
I remember a sermon preached by Calum MacLeod, who is now the Senior Minister of St. Giles Cathedral that bills itself rightly as “the high kirk in Edinburgh,” who told of the tradition of “Fencing the Table.”
Fencing the Table means that those who [wish] to receive Communion are examined, and [only after they are deemed worthy are] they are admitted to a part of the church, so that they can receive Communion. And then there is a fence; it’s often a tablecloth placed along certain pews, and people who are deemed not fit to receive Communion would sit behind and not receive the elements of bread and wine.3
Think of what those poor people seated behind that sheet must have thought of themselves. This table, these gifts of bread and wine are for good people, worthy people, and not a sinner such as me. While the people in front of the fence thought this is our table, these gifts belong to us.
In Jesus’ parable the vineyard workers shot the messengers. If we believe that something God has given us belongs exclusively to us, we do exactly that.
That is why something like World Communion Sunday is so important. If we allow it can remind us that when we gather for worship is is not just us who worship but all of God’s people around the world.
This video underscores that we worship with the people at Faith in Bellingham and the people of Faith worship with their brothers and sisters in Aurora. We may never meet each other but we all confess the same thing: That Christ is the cornerstone of our lives.
Just as almost every church celebrates Holy Communion almost every church has a cornerstone.
Somewhere in the archives of any church there is the picture of the setting of the cornerstone. Sometimes memorabilia is placed inside. The names of the members when the stone was laid, perhaps a bible, a copy of the blueprints, all kinds of stuff. “Its position sets the orientation of the building, the reference point for all the other stones. It signals the beginning of a new project.”4
Never in memory have we needed a cornerstone more than now.
After the events of this past week we need something solid to cling to. As our anxieties mount and fears increase that the foundations of the institutions that we have relied upon for so long look like they are beginning to crumble. As the divisions between people and their parties seem to be becoming wider and deeper. When there doesn’t seem to be anyone who we can find to be trustworthy we have to find something to hold onto.
We need something solid. We need a cornerstone and that cornerstone in Christ.
He comes to us in the smallest of things like the bread and wine of communion to remind us he has given himself for us and if we are of such great worth to God we must treat each other as something that God calls precious.
He comes to us in the most solid of things like a cornerstone of a building laid firm in its foundation to reminds that amid all the adversities of life, the turmoils that seem to beat us down, there is still something we solid.
There can be little doubt that the vineyard we live in is a mess and so holding on these gifts of bread and wine we affirm that in the end the stones of civility, and goodness, and kindness will become our cornerstone once again and heaving a sigh of relief we’ll affirm that it was the LORD’s doing and it was amazing, marvellous, in our eyes.
May God make this so, soon.
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1. “World Communion Sunday: Special Days and Emphases,” Presbyterian Mission Agency, August 18, 2020, https://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/worship/special-days-and-emphases/world-communion-sunday/
2. Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: a Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 249.
3. Calum I. MacLeod, “A Place at the Table” Morning Worship at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. (August 4, 2012).
4. Whitney Bodman, “Matthew 21:33-46. "Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Teaching 3 (Louisville: Westminister | John Knox Press, 2020): pp. 367-369.
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