Messing With Communion

            Thirty years ago, while attending seminary, my wife Irene and I belonged to a church that celebrated communion every Sunday. It was a church with many young families like ours, and full of gifted musicians. During weekly communion, while Taizé music played we stood in a circle and passed the bread and wine around. We all knew each other. Flutes, guitars, and piano played. It is a good memory.

            Communion is harder for me now.

            You see, I’m fine motor challenged—which is a fancy way of saying I’m clumsy.  Always have been. As a kid, when I kicked the soccer ball, it never went where I aimed. If I swung a bat, I whiffed. I tried hockey, one year, in a city league. I scored one goal. The team’s star shot from the point. The puck hit my ankle and bounced over the goal line. I limped off the ice.

            Not much has changed. If you walk through the church I serve and look carefully  you will find coffee stains all over the floor and stains in the carpet. You see, I’ve never learned the art of keeping my wrist steady. Whenever I buy new shirts, it’s usually because the old ones are full of wine stains. Ask Irene. I’m fine-motor challenged.

            My clumsiness also shows up on communion Sundays. When I pour the wine, I spill it. The lady who sets the table got so tired of sending the white communion tablecloth out for cleaning after communion that she bought a Plexiglas cover to put over the communion table. I am all thumbs. When I read the communion liturgy, I can’t figure out how to hold my papers, break the bread, and pour the wine gracefully. I should probably get an acolyte to help me. But the effort to get it all right also sets me on edge, makes me anxious. So I start mixing up lines, or I mix the gluten-free bread with the regular bread and the wine cup with grape juice cup. One Sunday I crumbled a whole loaf of gluten free bread on the floor as I served it.

            But I still look forward to communion Sundays. In spite of my clumsiness and anxiety. Why?

            I think the basic reason is that communion is a deep psychic solution for a problem I have. You see, Jesus seems very distant to me. Almost unreal.

            I know about Jesus, of course, from the Bible. I’ve studied Jesus carefully, using original Greek manuscripts. In seminary I parsed every word of Jesus’ parables. And I’ve read hundreds of books about Christianity, too: commentaries on the gospels, systematic theologies, and lately, lots of philosophical theology. But Jesus still seems very distant to me. So distant, in fact, that if Jesus had been a student in my grade one class, I probably wouldn’t have given him a Valentine’s card, except that my mother always made sure I never left anyone out.

            Part of the problem is that I’ve come to know Jesus mostly through studying him from afar, through books. I’ve never had a phone call from him. I’ve never had a cup of coffee with Jesus. I’ve never heard him speak to me through my heart, like, “take this job,” or “she’s the one.” I’ve never had dreams or visions from Jesus. I don’t have what some Evangelical Christians call a personal relationship with Jesus. How could I? Jesus hasn’t set foot on planet earth for 2000 years! When people say they have a personal relationship with Jesus I think they must be kidding themselves, that they are using the English language in ways that just don’t make everyday plain sense.

            And yet, I’ve shaped my whole life around this stranger. My parents read me stories about Jesus since I was a baby. I prayed to Jesus with my first words. I went to Christian grade school, high school, college and seminary. I’ve made a career out of telling people about Jesus, and to be like Jesus.

            Do you ever have this problem? This ambivalent relationship to Jesus? Where it seems that as long as Jesus is out of sight, he is hard to keep in mind? My kids live far away from Toronto. Sometimes, when I get busy, I forget to call, or write them an email, or send them a What’s App message. But it's a vicious circle right? Because when I don’t write, or call, or text, then they don’t write, or call, or text back. Pretty soon a couple of weeks have passed, and a day or two goes by when I hardly think of them—even though their ancient artwork is still on my office wall, and even though my grandson’s Lego is all over the house. It’s so easy for the living we love to drift apart.

            But if this is true for us and our kids and work colleagues and high school friends, how much more so when it comes to Jesus? I never even knew Jesus in the flesh! He’s like my first cousin, three-generations removed, Pieter Schuil, who died in 1901, but whose diary is on my desk. It’s hard to connect those words to a real person. And its even harder with this more ancient Jesus, to keep him top of mind, to be inspired by him, to really, really want to love like him, more than anything else in the world.

            Which gets me back to communion, and why I love it even though I’m clumsy and often make a mess of it. Communion is the one place, you see, where all this Jesus stuff suddenly seems less academic, less preachy, less distant. Communion—even in the wooden, accident-prone, halting way I lead it—communion somehow mysteriously transports me away from the theology and ethics and academics of Christianity into a strange, but also deeper and lovelier appreciation of Jesus.

           

            I think this is why. On communion Sundays I smell the wine. I taste the bread, feel it crumble in my fingers. The tablecloth is starched and clean, but with use gets spilled on, just like at home. People shuffle up here, real people who I can look in the eye, people I care about—love, even. We smile. And suddenly in my heart of hearts I’m at a real table, a real meal, and realize that Jesus is much more than just this ancient preacher man I study. He’s like me. He sits down with friends. He fries fish over a fire. He slices roast lamb. He says, “I shouldn’t,” but has a second and third glass of wine anyway.

            And he does all this even on his last day alive. With his best friend, John, laying his head on Jesus’ shoulder. He hosts a meal so that they—his prostitute, tax collector, fishermen and farm-laborer friends—he does this so that we will remember him, and continue to love others as they love themselves, even after Jesus is gone. Because he isn’t just for the books. We also share a messy meal and do it in remembrance of him.

            Communion. It’s for people who need more than words preached or written on a page. It’s for people who have a hard time feeling like Jesus is sitting on their shoulder or speaking through their hearts. It is a divine tap on the shoulder for us, a meal from the ancient past, to remember the wonder and reality and inspiration of who Jesus was, for now. Communion comes to us crumbling and tasty, with chairs screeching on the floor and cups dripping red to remind us that all those words about Jesus live, that Jesus’ love isn’t merely an ancient intellectual puzzle, but Jesus’ love is part and parcel of what we strive to do ourselves, everyday.

            

Heaven, Really?

            Two months after beginning my first pastoral charge, I found myself in an ambulance racing towards London’s University hospital. Beside me lay a ten-year-old girl, Janine, kept alive with machinery so that her organs could be transplanted to waiting donors. Janine and her mother had both died in a car accident that morning. I held Janine’s warm yet lifeless hand in mine the whole way. And I remembered wondering what really happens when we die.

Heaven?

            As a minister I’ve sat at the bedside of many people who breathed their last: an old sailor who kept his identity as a gay man secret once he retired; a known child molester; a man with leukemia who allowed his young daughter to visit only on days he had a blood transfusion, so she wouldn’t realize he was dying. And beside each bed, I wondered what happens when we die.

            The traditional answer is often sung as the last verse of Amazing Grace.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first began.” Sound good? This song actually plays up what is still popular culture’s image of life after death—harp and halos, clouds and choirs. Ironically, though I love listening to our choir, I don’t really enjoy singing myself. So this picture of heaven strikes me as pretty boring. What really happens when we die?

Before about 300 BC, Jews generally didn’t hold to a belief in anything we’d recognize as heaven. At best, there is some suggestion, in the Old Testament, that upon death people would go to Sheol, a place of shadows, spirits, and specters—but not real, vital life. Not a very nice place.

However, by Jesus’ day, many Jews had changed their minds. The idea of eternal reward or punishment probably entered Judaism from Zoroastrianism and other Middle Eastern religions that Jews encountered while living in exile, or who remained in the diaspora after. From there those same ideas made their way into Christianity. But what really happens when we die?

Most orthodox Christians now believe that even if we do go to heaven up above, it will only be for a short time. Heaven is a temporary resting place for the soul, until Jesus returns to earth and our bodies are resurrected. After that humans will live on a new earth, to which heaven has come down, as in the passage we read this morning. On this new earth, with mountains and lakes, cities and forests, we’ll pick up the task that Adam and Eve gave up when they sinned and were forced to leave paradise. A new Garden of Eden opportunity.

But in fact, this image of heaven on earth is actually constructed from the New Testament’s many conflicting images of heaven. In the Bible, sometimes heaven looks like choirs of strange creatures singing round God’s throne, as in Revelation 4. In the Gospel of John Jesus says we will receive mansions in heaven, with no mention of a new earth. He adds, in Mark, that there will be no marriage in heaven, but that we will be like angels—what ever that means, though they certainly don’t have bodies anything like ours.

And again, in today's scripture heaven is described as a New Jerusalem where there will be no more tears, no more death, no mourning, and no pain.

Further on in the same passage, beyond what we read this morning, we’re told that New Jerusalem has great, high walls with twelve gates where angels are posted. A river of life flows out of the city, bright as crystal. A tree of life grows there, with twelve kinds of fruit and leaves for the healing of the nations. “And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they—that’s us—will reign forever and ever.” It’s a fantastic picture, completely mythical, like the Garden of Eden is mythical. So I wonder what will really happen when we die.

            One of the most salient realities about heaven is that in popular culture it is mostly thought of as a reward for living a good life. This turns Christianity into a set of requirements or tests that you have to pass in order to be “good enough” to merit heaven. Heaven as reward turns life into a legalistic moral maze that you have to pass through to win. Though most Protestants are supposed to believe we are saved by grace, rather than good works, the truth is most people go through life thinking either, “I’ve lived a good life, so God will invite me to heaven,” or not. Heaven is a problematic belief in this respect, historically, because this picture divides the world into two camps, an “in group” and an “out group,” the saved and the damned, Christian and Muslim, or Christian and unbeliever. And, of course, if you’re not in my camp, you can go to hell. It is not a doctrine that, as popularly understood, has made for good neighbors; it is actually a doctrine that has fueled Christian crusades and pogroms for hundreds of years.

            Finally, a focus on heaven – especially among conservative Christians who think this planet will be destroyed to make way for the New Jerusalem when Jesus returns—a focus on heaven is problematic because these Christians don’t really care about this world, or care for today’s mountains and lakes, for this climate or our Lake Ontario. They think that we can use this world up and throw it away, exploit it mercilessly, because ultimately Jesus is going to make all things new. But I wonder what will really happen when we die.

Besides no more tears, no more death, no more mourning, our scripture reading also promises, in verse one, that there shall be “no more sea.” Why did the Jews and early Christians think that there would be no more sea in heaven? Well, this hope is rooted in the way that ancient Jews feared the sea. Water was hell to the Jews.

            For example, according to Psalm 74, God had to break the heads of the dragons in the waters under the earth—crush the heads of Leviathan—in order to make room on planet earth for the dry land on which we now live. Jews thought of the sea as a place where the monster Tiamat lived, Lord of dark and chaos. No wonder that when King Solomon built a fleet of ships to trade for far-away Ophir's gold, he hired foreign men to sail those boats. Jews feared the sea because it was the realm of evil.

Likewise, when Jonah fled from God, he ended up in the belly of a sea monster—he was swallowed up by hell. When Jesus cast demons out of the Gaderine demoniac, Jesus sent them into a herd of pigs who immediately went home, to hell, in the sea, taking the pigs with them into the dark. Heaven, according to today’s scripture, on the other hand, is a place where there is no more sea—no monsters, no demons, no evil left to fear.

In this context, the words “no more sea,” suggest to me, at the very least, that scripture doesn’t want Christians to fear death. In spite of the many conflicting images concerning what exactly happens when we die, one constant is present in scripture. For Christians death is not a place of chaos monsters and demons. In death, there is no more sea, and no worries of the sort that hell inspires in literalists. The one thing that unifies all of the New Testament’s many differing descriptions of life after death is a sense of hopefulness and promise. Unlike the depths of the sea, which are terrible—hell really—in life after death, there is no more sea.

Now, in such Biblical descriptions of heaven, I strongly resist the implicit idea that heaven is for Christians only and hell is its necessary complement. As I’ve said before, I just can’t buy the notion of hell. It seems ludicrous to me that a God who redeems the universe would not redeem those people who didn’t know about him, didn’t believe the right things about him, or people who messed up in average ways. We all mess up, after all.

I leave it to you to decide whether you agree with me on that. I understand that a complete rejection of hell requires a deeper study of our and other religious traditions. I’ve don that on other Sundays. But in this message, I don’t want to focus on that—I’d rather reflect on the larger picture of hopefulness and promise suggested by “no more sea” and other Biblical passages that describe the afterlife.

Why? Well, in part it is wistful, wishful thinking on my part. I admit it. The idea of heaven is—well—just appealing in a completely subjective way. I also cling to the notion of a life beyond death because I have read many books that describe near death experiences—you know, where people who almost die see tunnels of light, are met by a beautiful and kind figure at the end of the tunnel, and then are told that their time has not yet come. These accounts are very suggestive. Perhaps they fill you with hope too.

I also cling to the hope for some kind of life after death not just because of scripture’s evocative hints, but also on account of the near universal suggestion found in many religions that this life is not all there is.

But finally, the bottom line for me is that I’m not sure about heaven. I doubt that those who wrote scripture, and perhaps especially the book of Revelation, were authorities on the matter. It is the very nature of faith that there are no guarantees.

            Look. I’d love nothing more than to be able to stand here this morning and promise you endless delight in an amazing paradise. But I wouldn’t be honest with you if I did so promise. Personally, I’ve come to terms with the notion that if there is no heaven, at worst, death will add up to the deepest, most peaceful sleep I’ve ever had. On the other hand, I also choose to dream of an amazing surprise when I die. The great Protestant reformer Martin Luther once said of life after death that we can know as little about it as a baby knows of this life as it enters the birth canal. Touché. Who knows what lies beyond—but either way, I refuse to live in fear today. Instead, I choose to seize the gift of life, treasure it, and follow Jesus with it. Whatever may come to pass in the by and by, I choose to give others as much by way of life and love here and now as I can. In fact, I think of that path as a life to die for.

Six Hundred Sermons on the Wall, Six Hundred Sermons . . .

            This week, I’m going to preach a sermon about heaven. I’m not that keen on heaven as a sermon topic anymore. It isn’t that I don’t hope for some sort of wonderful surprise when I close my eyes the last time. It is just that I’m not counting on it. And I’m certainly not living for it or in fear of some other place. It strikes me that I need to live for this life and my current neighbours. If there is more, after, it’s all gravy. I think that's about what I'm going to preach, too.

            Still, I thought I should go back into my collection of old sermons and review my journey with respect to heaven and hell. I did a key-word search, and came up with a dozen good hits. I read what I had preached before, in another life. And I didn’t find anything that grabbed me or convinced me, though I did find a lot that made me shake my head and think, “I said that?”

            But this exercise got me to thinking about all my old sermons—about six hundred of them. I used to have two filing cabinets full of them. They were four-drawer behemoths. I carefully catalogued my sermons by text. Each sermon folder contained all of my false starts, all of the material that I had edited out of the final revision, and all my exegetical notes. Each file contained both the final manuscript, and a copy of the notes I took to the pulpit. On each folder cover I kept track of where I had preached the sermon, the computer file-name of each revision, and thoughts about how the sermon had gone over, as well as how it might be revised in the future.

           

            Early in my career as a preacher, the effort I put into cataloging, preserving, and reflecting on my sermons made a lot of sense. In my first congregation, in Sarnia, Ontario, I had to preach six times a month. I came to that congregation with twenty-five or so sermons “in the barrel” that I had written during seminary. I decided to use one of those sermons each month, so that I only had to write five new sermons each month. This meant there was only one week each month I had to write two.

            With vacations and study leaves, this plan got me through almost three years of ministry. In my fourth year I went back to the new sermons I had preached my first year, tried to improve them, switched out a few memorable stories, and preached them a second time. But I noticed that rewriting those four-year-old sermons was actually a lot of work. Those old sermons didn’t really please me anymore. They were all too long, and too sure, and too full of finger-waving, “thou shalts,” and “thou shalt nots.”

            With all the changes I had to make in those old sermons, it was a lot of work to stay ahead of my writing load that fourth year. It exhausted me. Happily for me and my family, my next congregation, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was a dual-pastor situation, and thus the pressure was off. I made sure to write at least three new sermons each month, and used only the occasional old sermon. By then I had a dozen or so that I was happy to preach again. But it was only a dozen out of 250 or so sermons. I couldn’t help but notice that there were many, many sermons that I wasn’t happy with at all. I found many of them to be too exact, too pointed, and too sure.

            After four years in Ann Arbor I move to Grand Rapids to edit the denominational magazine. My new routine was to preach as a guest pastor twice a month. However, I still only had a dozen sermons that I was really proud of—and not the same dozen I went to Ann Arbor with. Later, when the magazine switched from a weekly to biweekly and later monthly schedule, I had more time to write new sermons. I was probably averaging one a month for the last five years I was editor.

            I stayed out of parish ministry for a further six years, teaching at a seminary in the Philippines and working at a graduate school of philosophy back in Canada. When I returned to parish ministry, I found that hardly any of my old sermons spoke to me any more. My thinking had changed a lot. I experienced a lot of inner conflict about what I could, in good conscience, say. My new sermons reflected that ambivalence. I certainly never preached on heaven or hell, because I knew that there was nothing I could say that would be theologically acceptable and true to my own convictions.

            So now I’m in what I hope will be my last parish, in Toronto. It belongs to a different, much more liberal denomination, the United Church of Canada. I don’t think I’ve used an old sermon here, as is, ever. In fact, I’ve dumped the hard copies of all my old sermons, along with their exegetical notes and my reflections on them. These days, my old sermons survive only, ghost-like, in the cloud. They’re pretty much dead letters.

            So why am I thinking about all this? For a few reasons, I guess. One is that as I reflect on all those old sermons, I’m struck by the fact that I’ve changed my mind. And it has been good—an adventure, really.  I’ve changed my mind for a lot of reasons. I’ve read the Bible with more care, and a more open mind (I think). The world has changed. I’ve studied hard, because I enjoy doing so. I’ve read far more widely in theology and philosophy than the rather narrow canon I was introduced to in seminary. I’ve especially read a lot of secular hermeneutics, and it makes a lot of sense—though I know I’m only one and many others might disagree. I’ve also changed my mind because of my experiences in places like Rwanda and Hiroshima. These experiences have given me something akin to post-traumatic-theological stress. The old certainties I used to have don’t measure up to the new questions that sometimes still keep me awake. I guess I’m also a restless soul by nature.

            When I reflect on how I’ve changed my mind, I’m surprised that more ministers don’t change denominations. Does it mean they never change their minds about important matters? Have they stopped reading “tough” foundational stuff and stuck with nothing but pragmatic “how to grow your church” stuff? But I also know that when I published my last book, Not Sure, I was overwhelmed by the number of ministers—including many in my old denomination—who wrote me to say things like, “I’ve changed my mind too . . . but I just don’t know how to get out of the situation I’m in.” Many ministers are afraid to preach what they really think—or doubt.

            When I reflect on how I’ve changed my mind I’m not suggesting that every minister will become more liberal, like I did. Some might become more conservative, I suppose. But the fact that there is so little theological movement in most minister’s lives, over thirty or forty years, surprises me. I wonder, sometimes, if all of the dire statistics about ministerial burnout, depression, and unhappiness are related to the inability of most pastors to imagine changing course by moving to different denominations. Certainly, parishioners do it all the time. Why not us?

            I’ve changed my mind. But looking at all those old sermons also gets me to thinking about the many people who sat through sermons that I could now never preach again. Where does my change of mind leave them? I sometimes wish I could go back in time and offer a “ya, but!” in place of the sermons I actually preached.

            If nothing else, this suggests to me that parishioners should do more than sit in the pews and nod their heads. They need to wrestle with what they hear, listen with a very critical ear, and work to inform themselves of differing perspectives.

            I am not suggesting that they then go after the pastor who has preached something they disagree with. But if we could come to the preaching moment as if the sanctuary was a never-ending conversation between friends, rather than a “Thus says the Lord” [via the minister] moment, we’d be further ahead. Or, as I’ve said before, if we could think of the sanctuary as a playground rather than a lecture hall, we’d all be working for the day when we grow up a bit, mature to something else and move on, theologically at least. Perhaps then, as ministers, we wouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. In the end, after all, people come to know God more through our love for each other than through a particular (out of many to choose from) orthodoxy.

            I do have twenty hand-written sermons left in my last filing cabinet. They are catechism sermons written by my father over thirty years ago, just before he died. I read them over this week. My dad was always a bit insecure about his English, since it wasn't his native language. On the whole, though, he did pretty well on that score. He had a lot of practice, and worked hard at it.

            What struck me was that I didn’t find anything in his sermons that interested me. It was a different time, a different audience, and he was a different person. I suppose I read them as much for the bits of his self-disclosure as I did for his perspective. But on the whole, they didn’t speak to me.

            Just as my old sermons don’t speak to me, and won’t be heard by anyone, anymore. I’m thinking of erasing my disks, jettisoning all of them. I know my kids won’t read them either—no one will. It’s just hubris to keep them. What matters now is this coming week, this audience, this time. That’s what I have to focus on—as well as the text, whether it's a Biblical one or not—as I write my new sermons. Sure, each new sermon is ultimately going to be a brick in the wall that merely proves the truth of, “vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” On the other hand, for me at least, there is no life like writing a new sermon this week, and trying to get it right, for now.