Stand By Me: Eucharistic Community
By Charles Rush
February 1, 2009
I Cor. 11: 23-25
[ Audio
(mp3, 8.2Mb) ]
couple months ago,
I was watching a show done by my friend Bill Moyers[1]
who interviewed Mark Johnson on the subject of
“Playing for Change”[2].
I'm watching this very creative piece and it occurred to me that
this was a hymn in the making, a hymn I think that we could profitably
sing this year as a theme.
Mark shot video
of people playing the same song, all around the world. Then he laid the tracks
one over the other. He produced this really beautiful montage of the people
from every continent coming together through music.
Like so many of
our great hymns in the past centuries, they start with the musical tunes that
are happening in the present. These are almost universally eschewed by the
present generation as not ‘spiritual' enough. But the tunes have a resonance,
they get gradually accepted, and a century later,
they get moved surreptitiously into the canon of classical church music.
I'm watching it
and I'm thinking to myself, this is a Eucharist hymn. This is a fundamental
part of what we are doing when we gather for Communion. It is the wonderful
“beach music” tune “Stand by Me”.
Don't you love
that first guy? Ray Charles has nothing on him. The Indian
Chief with wearing the cross on the drums. And, of course, you have to
have the back up girls from South Africa. The Cellist from Moscow. Chaz the
washboard dude from New Orleans… Italian sax man… And Mr. Bekker
from Amsterdam- what pipes that guy has. Rio, Caracas, Mbouta,
Barcelona, Pokei Klas,
Toulouse. It is the same powerful hope that comes at the end of Matthew, “Go
ye, therefore, into all the world, unto the end of the earth, making disciples
of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit… and lo, I am with you, even unto the close of the age”
Matthew 28:19-20.
“This song says,
'No matter who you are,
no matter where you go in your life,
at some point,
you gonna need somebody to stand by you.' ”[3]
The educated
among us already know that the single most important reason for various
denominations in the Christian world revolves around our different
understandings of what is happening during the communion. Part of the dispute
has to do with what happens during the Eucharist. When the priest lifts the
bread and breaks it, does it literally become the body of Christ as the
Orthodox believe or is it merely symbolic? And the other part of it has to do
with authority. Do all priests have authority to re-present the Eucharist or
only those in Communion with the Patriarch or with the Pope? Not all of us
recognize each other's authority as legitimate.
So we stand
divided. It is a scandal. Certainly there is room for debate on these issues,
and there is also plenty of room for us to disagree and create a variety of
traditions that are radically different from each other. But at the table, we
are not expressing our solidarity simply with other people like us, but
especially with people that are not like us. In the Spirit of God, the Table
itself transcends all of us and ought to bring us all together in spite of our
disagreements- Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Protestant, and everyone else to
boot.
Many years ago,
we had a discussion among the Deacons at Christ Church over letting children
come to the table and partake in what we are doing together. It is a good idea
because our children can do it with us, they can be part of it with us, and
this is the best way to learn to do what Christians do.
Invariably the
honest question is raised: ‘But they don't know what it means! They don't know
what they are doing?' The implication being that they aren't old enough, don't
have enough intellectual capability to make this meaningful.
Another adult
asked a simple question, ‘so what are we doing in the Communion? Can you
explain it to me?' After a long silence, someone said, ‘let's let the kids in'…
At some very
subliminal level, it is a basic hospitality. Someone sent me a piece on the
town of North Platte, Nebraska which became a really vital hospitality outreach
60 years ago. North Platte is beyond remote but the cross-country trains
stopped there to refuel during the middle of last century.
The month after
Pearl Harbor was bombed, our country called up loads of National Guard troops
and regular citizens were being recruited to join the Army. There were a small
group of women, probably church ladies, in North Platte that decided to support
the troops by going down to the depot and offering cookies to the Nebraska
National Guard. As you know, these trains kept coming and coming and coming.
And this group of women just decided that this was going to be their mission.
Way led to way,
someone donated an abandoned storefront on the train depot and they opened a
café. The soldiers were often coming all the way from the East Coast, on their way
to boot camp, away from home for the first time in their lives, had no idea
what they were getting into and were nervous. Often, after two days on the
train without a shower, this was the first time they got to get off the train
and they had 10 minutes to go into the café, get something to eat, from their
adopted Mothers and Sisters, get back on the train and go. That was it.
It was a bit of
home for the first time away from home and for too many of them, the last of
home they would know. Tens of thousands turned into hundreds, turned into
millions. As the months turned into years, they had to do it with decreased
rations, often at personal sacrifice.
The effect of
hospitality, of feeding people with love is not forgotten. Apparently, more
than once, when the incoming artillery got pretty heavy, and our soldiers were
in a dire situation, you could hear one of them yell out, ‘sure wish we were
back in North Platte'. Coffee, simple piece of pie, the image of normalcy- the
hospitality of home…
One woman heard
about the story about the women of North Platte and she asked her grandfather
about it, aged 90. He suffered from dementia and had very little short-term
memory at the time, so her grandfather typically couldn't recognize her when
she went to visit. She asks him if ‘North Platte' meant anything to him. “Sure”
he said, and went on to describe for her what that train station was like.
Hospitality, the love like home, gets lodged in the deep regions of memory. We
humans need love, we need to love and be loved in some fundamental, primal
level. Even simple way-stations on the trip of our lives get remembered when
they envelope us in love.
How much more,
when the relationships are more profound… I remember being at the funeral for
my brother's wife. She died suddenly at 40 something,
a teacher on Captiol Hill in Washington, big funeral,
lots of students. I was standing with my brother, greeting their neighbors and
all these elementary kids, receiving condolences. About ¾'s of the way through
that line, my brother looked up, and standing in front of him was one of his
best friends from High School. No words, just two great big guys hugging, a
visceral release of tension, just like rounding a corner… and heading for home.
That is so much
of what is happening when we come together to the table. “no
matter who you are, no matter where you go in your life, at some point, you gonna need somebody to stand by you”. Sometimes when I
listen to the prayer concerns that we bring, I'm overwhelmed at the profound
seriousness of burdens that we come with week in and week out. And I know that
there are even more pressing prayer requests that we are just not comfortable
sharing for obvious reasons of privacy. Whether or not we can even bring
ourselves to actually voice them, even to ourselves, we are bringing them
together.
And when we all
gather together around the table, we no longer come as competitors, despite the
fact that we often battle with one another all week for market share in our
respective fields. We come as people with simple human needs. We come bearing
our petitions, bearing the petitions of our neighbors. We stand, shoulder to
shoulder with each other in spiritual solidarity, the visible hope of the New
Community that God would have us to become.
It is that
wonderful, shared humanity, at least for a moment- the hospitality, the hope of
the promise of love.
Some of you may
know that in the Middle East, the fellowship of the table is a symbol of
reconciliation. Eating together has a ritual symbolism there that is difficult
to describe in a culture that is largely defined by ‘fast-food' and ‘eating on
the run'. We've lost so much of the ritual of traditional society around eating
in the past couple decades.
When I was in
college, a broken down motorcycle necessitated a stay with a Bedouin family in
the Sinai desert south of Gaza. We were invited for the meal, a request that
you cannot actually refuse without insulting your hosts terribly. We washed our
hands and our feet, as is the ritual custom. And as we were headed into the
tent, our hosts left swords, knives, and guns at the front door. Politely, they
asked me if I would had weapons to leave. I probably
left my Swiss Army knife or some lethal nail clippers. The custom is that you
make your guests feel safe before taking food together. The symbolism is
important.
I am told that
during one of the many negotiations sessions between the Palestinians and the
Israeli's, the host country planned an important televised event that would
feature the Palestinian leader and the Israeli leader at the same table
together. The host country had put a bowl of fruit, I believe, in the middle of
the table, probably as an ornamental decoration. They were surprised when the
Palestinians vigorously protested this. But the Palestinians explained that the
perception that they were sharing a meal together would symbolize a level of
mediation and reconciled acceptance that was not true in fact. They didn't want
to confuse the casual observer in the Arab world.
I don't know if
the story is actually true but it sounds right. In the Middle East, you leave
your hostilities and grievances behind as you approach the common meal. And
that probably gives us some good insight as to what Jesus meant by choosing a
meal as the central rite of our fellowship.
Among other
things that we bring to the table when we come, is some stuff that we need to
work through, some stuff we need to leave outside the door. In profound
relationships, the closer we are with our friends, with our families, we are going
to have those seasons when we come here with bitterness, hurtfulness, harmful
words, stuff we need to leave at the door before we can open ourselves fully.
In the Sermon
on the Mount, Jesus taught us this. “If you are offering a gift on the Altar to
God and you remember that someone has a grievance with you, leave your gift at
the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother and then come offer your
gift.” When we come to the Table for this Spiritual Communion, this hope of
reconciliation, regularly we ought to remember things in our life that need to
be healed, amends that need to be made with our spouse or in our families. We
need to be turning again to the profounder way of everything that is involved
in the complex work of being reconciled, of ‘doing the things that make for peace'. We recognize our need to be forgiven, even
as we open ourselves to a deeper spirit of forgiveness around us. We bring to
mind what we need to do to make things right.
It is an
ongoing dialectic in our spiritual life between our call to build one another
up, to be compassionate community for each other and the times when we hurt
each other and we sow discord, hurt, betrayal.
We can't avoid
it. And this is one of the profound realities that we remember in the last week
before Easter, when we remember the Last Supper that Jesus had with the
disciples. At that meal, after they break the break and each of them dips their
bread together into a bowl of wine, Jesus tells them, ‘One of you will betray
me'… At this, the disciples become indignant, as though they were somehow above
betrayal and hurt and duplicity. And they begin to speak at once, “Is it I?”
with an air of incredulity.
Jesus has that
enigmatic answer. He says, ‘the one who dips his hand in the dish with me.' Of
course, that is everyone. Artists always paint that scene in such a way as to
highlight the figure of Judas, who informed the Roman legion of Jesus'
whereabouts for 30 pieces of silver. But the truth is that everyone betrayed
Jesus, each in their own peculiar way, their own version of compromise. We
can't seem to entirely escape this duplicity in our nature. We can't entirely
transcend it.
But, we can
turn again. We can acknowledge ourselves. We can be honest and point ourselves
again in the right direction. We can call upon hope and find the higher way
within ourselves. We can amend course.
So let's come
to the Table this day, with those that know you best, and with some people you
have never met before. Let's turn again to the higher way, the better part of
ourselves. Let's lift each other up in blessing that the future will mature us
all and make us better people…“no matter who you are, no matter where you go in
your life, at some point, you gonna need somebody to
stand by you.” Amen.
[1]
At
Bill Moyers' Journal, Dec 5, 2008,
you will see the "Stand By Me" video followed by Bill's inspiring interview with it's creator, Mark Johnson.
[2]
Visit Mark Johnson's “Playing for Change” website at:
www.playingforchange.com.
Or watch the "Stand By Me" video by clicking the image above, or view a larger version at YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM
[3] Stand By Me,
by various singers/musicians:
Oh yeah, my darling, stand by me
No matter how much money you got, all the friends you got,
You're gonna need somebody, to stand by you
When the night has come. And the land is dark
And that moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't shed one tear
Just as long as you people come and stand by me
And darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
Oh stand, stand, stand by me
Come on stand by me
When the sky that we look upon
When she tumble and fall
Oh the mountains they should crumble into the sea
I won't cry, I won't cry, no I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
So darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
Please stand, stand by me, stand by me
Oh baby baby,
Darlin', darlin', stand by me, oh stand by me
So darlin', darlin', stand, oh stand, oh stand, stand by me,
Come on stand by me
Stand, oh won't you stand, oh stand, stand by me, stand by me,
When the night has come, and the land is dark,
And the moon is the only light we'll see,
I won't be afraid, I won't be afraid,
Not as long, not as long as you stand by me.
© 2009
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
