More Than We Can Explain

When I was in seminary, I participated in a Liberation Theology seminar tour in South India. During those two weeks, we soaked up the beautiful, radical otherness of the culture. We learned from profound teachers who opened our minds and our hearts to new ways of thinking about theology and about Christian witness in a place where only 2% of the population is Christian.

We stayed primarily in Dalit communities, communities made up of those who were previously called “untouchables” in the Indian caste system. One night we stayed in a village of Dalit Christians. After a service filled with music and singing, the community poured out of the small church at the center of the village and began gathering. Imagine any given Sunday here at Foundry after worship, with groups gathered here and there outside the sanctuary. It was kind of like that. At a certain moment, we noticed that some kind of ritual seemed to be happening. People were gathered together, and members of the community were going around distributing something.

We didn’t know what was happening. Then someone came up to us and put some pea pods in our hands. They reminded me of what you might think of as edamame. We tried to ask what this was, but it was tricky since none of us spoke Tamil. One young man simply said, as best he could, “Peas for the people.” Or maybe he was saying “peace for the people.” We weren’t sure. But we wondered whether this was the way that this poor village celebrated communion. Everyone received the same simple food, and it was for all the people. Food and peace for all.

To this day, I don’t know exactly what was happening, and maybe that’s one reason I still remember it so clearly. There are experiences in life that resist being neatly explained. Something happens, and we know there is more going on than we can name. We feel ourselves caught up in something larger than ourselves. Throughout this series, we are exploring those experiences that interrupt our ordinary ways of seeing and remind us that the world is larger, stranger, more beautiful, and more interconnected than we usually remember.

Dr. Keltner writes about the way experiences of awe often lie at the heart of spiritual life. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Across cultures and traditions, people encounter what he calls a kind of fundamental “it,” something larger than ourselves that we may experience as God or mystery, spirit, sacred presence, or connection. We don’t always know how to explain it, but intellectual explanation is not the only way human beings know that something is true.

And I think there are few places where that becomes clearer than at the table we gather around today. Paul asks the church in Corinth, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” The word translated “sharing” is koinonia: communion, participation, fellowship. Paul is saying that this is more than just remembering Jesus. Somehow, in this meal, we participate in Christ. And because we participate in Christ, Paul says, “we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” In what United Methodists call this holy mystery, we take a little piece of bread and we receive from the cup, and somehow this ordinary meal reveals something extraordinary about who we are. We belong to Christ, and therefore we belong to one another.

Jesus speaks of the same mystery in his prayer in John’s Gospel. He prays not only for the disciples who are with him, but also on behalf of “those who will believe in me through their word.” And that means us: all of those who came before us and all of those who will come after. Jesus prays, “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” I in you, you in me, they in us, we in them. Is there a Venn diagram for this? We can try to wrap our minds around this language of eternal, dynamic, life-giving, interdependent, indwelling love, but it’s the language of mystery. It is the attempt to describe a belonging deeper than proximity or agreement, deeper than nationality or culture or language, or even time itself.

On this World Communion Sunday, we are invited to pay attention to the vastness of this belonging. Today, Christians are coming to tables all over the world, in cathedrals and storefront churches, in tiny villages and crowded cities. People are receiving wafers and pieces of bread, wine and juice, or whatever is available. Perhaps somewhere, something as simple as peas. Peace for the people. They pray in languages we don’t understand. They sing songs we’ve never heard. Their lives may look nothing like ours. And yet we make the astonishing claim that there is not a “their” table and an “our” table. There is God’s table: one table, one bread, one body.

And the table stretches not only around the world, but through time. We share this meal with the generations who received it before us, with the saints whose names we know and the ones whose names we don’t. And one day, others will gather around the table when our own names have joined that great communion. There is more happening at this table than we can explain.

But the mystery of the sacrament is not only beautiful or sentimental. If there is one table, if there is truly a sharing in the body and blood of Christ, then here at this table with us is the innocent man suffering in El Salvador’s secret prison, and his mother, still praying to God for him to come home. Here at this table is the four-year-old who has been orphaned by AIDS because funding was cut off. Here is the toddler orphaned because their parents were killed in war. At this table, right here, are all the women around the world carrying the scars of sexual abuse.

To say that we are one body gathered at one table means the suffering of another part of the body is never just someone else’s problem. Paul was writing, after all, to a church divided by status and privilege, a community in which some had more than enough and others went hungry. Paul’s teaching here is not just a pretty mystery. It is a call to responsibility. And not just responsibility, by the way, toward those who call themselves Christian. Because we belong to Christ, we are responsible to attend to the suffering world that Christ loves.

Jesus shows us how to manifest the love of God: through mending the broken places in human lives and communities, through feeding hungry bodies, through restoring the outcast and setting people free. The small communities of Jesus followers in India showed us how their belonging in Christ called them to advocate for and serve any neighbor who was suffering. Their participation in Christ led them to bear witness to a love that breaks down barriers. I in you, and you in me, and they in us, and we in them.

I think about that Dalit village, people whose community had for generations been told that some were pure and others impure, some worthy and others untouchable. And there they were, passing food from hand to hand. Peace for the people. Peace for the people. Something simple for everybody.

This is a holy mystery of God’s love made manifest. We will never fully explain what happens here: how bread and cup join us to Christ, how Christ joins us to one another, how a little table here in Washington somehow becomes part of a table that circles the earth and stretches through generations. It’s more than we can explain. But what if we simply receive it?

The promise of the table is still food for the people, justice for the people, belonging for the people. Peace for all the people. Our invitation today is simply to pay attention to what this table reveals, to be astonished by the love of God that makes us one, and to tell about it not just with our pretty words and our songs, but with our lives.

May it be so. Amen.