"The Broken Body"
No room for cynicism at the table of Christ
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 5, 2003
Text: 1 Corinthians 11:17-26
I think it is a fair assessment to say that this day and age often characterizes cynicism as being “cool.” In other words, by looking at the world in a negative light, one maintains a certain degree of detachment, a certain critical faculty. If the 90s were seen as an age of ridiculous optimism, I think that particularly since the turn of this millennium, cynicism is very much in vogue.
Now, by cynicism I don't necessarily mean pessimism. Pessimism is seeing everything in an adverse light, but cynicism is actually suggesting that behind every dark activity there is a deliberateness. And, because of that deliberateness, even good deeds are called into question.
I have a confession to make this morning. The moment I receive a newspaper, I always turn first to the sports pages (probably not a big surprise to many of you). In fact, I'll be up-to-date on all the sports scores and stories well before I know what's happening in the important parts of God's world. I turn to the sports page for some degree of entertainment first thing in the morning, before I confront the problems of the world. And this week I was sorely, sorely disappointed by what I read. There was an underlying cynicism in the reporting of the sports reporters (as if that's a surprise).
I read, for example, that 40 per cent of society believes that the Toronto Raptors won't make the playoffs - and that's before they've even tossed a ball! Most people in Toronto believe that the Maple Leafs will not make it past the first round of the playoffs - and that's before a puck has even been dropped! And all those behind these sports franchises are only interested in money therefore nothing will ever get better. Sure doesn't make you want to go to a Raptors or Leafs game, does it?
Similarly, later on in the week after the election and almost without exception, the newspaper commentators believed that even though there is a new government nothing will change, everything will remain the same, nothing will be improved upon. That seems to be the gist of so many of the comments. I'm not here to say whether things will change for the better or not - I have no more insight than anyone else - but for heaven's sake, 24 hours after an election, you would at least hope that something positive was going to happen in the next four years. Before even a bill is passed or a word is uttered, we cynically seem to think that everything is going to turn dark. And, aren't these the coolest writers around?
Well, my friends, I know that cynicism is very popular, but I think of the words of the Viscount de Chateaubriand: “One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light.” Indeed, many of us see the world in an odious light. Cynicism can wear us down, it can actually even transform the way we look at faith. At the heart of cynicism is a profound challenge to what you and I believe. This challenge is on two accounts.
First of all, cynicism gives you a sense that there is no longer a living God who is active in transforming the world. Cynicism believes that all really is darkness, that there is no good motive behind anything, and therefore God is absent.
The second thing about cynicism, particularly at its deeper level, is that it does not believe that there is any room for hope - that there is any room for transformation.
Because of these two things, cynicism challenges the very core of what we believe as Christians. Now, the cynic will often say, as Lillian Hellman did, that “cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth” - as if somehow the truth must always be laced or tainted with a degree of cynicism.
I'm of the opinion that one can still be truthful, one can still look at the cracks in creation, one can still look at the problems around us with a degree of honesty and sincerity, without being a cynic. In fact, I believe that a true, honest appraisal of the world would suggest that cynicism in and of itself is flawed. I believe this on the basis of our text from First Corinthians, where there are seven ultimate words of hope that confront cynicism at the core of its disbelief: “This is my body, broken for you.”
Now, if you listen to this morning's text, you might understand that the church to which Paul was writing was in pretty bad shape. In fact, he said that their worship does more harm than good. That is a very scary prospect, is it not? But the people were negative themselves. The church in Corinth was divided and people had transformed what should have been a holy remembrance of the life and death of Jesus Christ into nothing more than an orgy. They ran to the Communion table and grabbed the bread and the wine, leaving nothing for others. They turned it into a pagan ritual rather than a celebration of a sacred moment, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
Launching into the midst of this sadly divided and cynical congregation, Paul reminds them that the one thing that unites them, the one thing that holds them together is the sacrament of Communion and the reminder of what Jesus said. Paul ascribed to Jesus the words that he had received, but we all know Paul was not in the upper room at the time that Jesus spoke them. Nevertheless, Paul had heard them from the Jerusalem church and maybe even in his living encounter on the Damascus roads - who knows? These were the words that Jesus had instituted and they had become a fundamental part of the early church's worship. And Paul knew that the sacrament of Communion with its words, “This is my body, broken for you,” was the one thing that could hold the church of Jesus Christ together.
My friends, we know that we, too, live in a world where the church of Jesus Christ is sadly divided. There is disunity and disharmony. There are cracks in the structure of the church, in many ways. Yet, these words of Jesus are a way of bringing us all back to what constitutes the foundation of what we do: “This is my body, broken for you.”
I want to look at these words because not only do they address the cynicism of the age, but they also give a buoyancy to our faith and a foundation to our hope.
For first of all, Jesus said, “This is my body.” By “my body,” Paul understood that Jesus was talking about the fact of His total, complete and absolute, self-giving love. The last thing that Jesus had to offer the disciples when he gathered them in the upper room was His body. The ultimate thing that He could give the world at that time was His body. What He affirmed was His earthliness, His fleshliness, that God had come in the presence of Jesus Christ to be one among us. The one total, absolute thing that Jesus could give was His body.
There are times when I do believe we overly spiritualize the Gospel, and when we overly spiritualize our faith, and even Communion. By spiritualize, I mean we concentrate on the unearthly things to the detriment of understanding the bodily sacrifice that Jesus of Nazareth made. The total, complete, self-giving love, the one thing that was more precious to Him, He gave: His life. His body.
Thoreau once said: “When you give, see that you give yourself.” In other words, when you do something for others, or give something to others, you don't only give it in a detached way, you give yourself, you put yourself into it. Why? Because that is exactly what Jesus did. Therefore, when the world, at the point of its bodily pain, at the point of its fleshly sin, at the point of its very mortality, finds itself confronted with a challenge, the “my body” of Jesus says it's Okay, Jesus has been there.
Unfortunately, over the ages, the celebration of this body of Jesus has often been watered down by our traditionalism. In fact, the body of Christ has often been divided - sadly divided - by how we look at the act of Communion. I love what Luther had to say when he made a distinction between tradition and traditionalism. He said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, but traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
Very often it's our sense of traditionalism and our obsession with minute differences among us that have separated the body of Christ throughout the world, rather than uniting it. The tradition, as Paul would say is, “This is my body, broken for you.” It is that very thing that holds the church together - the embodiment of the sacrifice of the crucified Christ. Now I know that there are at times, when we look at the differing traditions of the church, some degree of humour, and we should sometimes take a light-hearted approach.
One day, a Methodist minister in the United States received a telephone call from the local hospital. There was a crisis with the blood supply and would he be willing to donate blood? He agreed to do so and went to the hospital. This of course, meant that he came home late for supper and so his son asked his mother: “Mommy, is Daddy out visiting the sick?”
She said, “No, dear, he is giving blood.”
The little boy paused and said, “But we really know it's grape juice, don't we, Mom?”
We might indeed make light of the different ways that we celebrate our Communion but my friends, let us be warned, there is only one thing it means and celebrates: It is Christ's body that is at the centre. It is His total and complete self-giving love.
One of the things that I find when I read the stories of Jesus is just how much he met the brokenness of the world at the point of its need. In my devotions this week I came upon a story that I've read many times, but, the sense in which Jesus of Nazareth dealt with the brokenness of the world and showed compassion and love dawned on me afresh.
From the Gospel of Matthew:
Jesus and his disciples were leaving Jericho and a large crowd followed him. Two blind men were sitting by the roadside and when they heard that Jesus was going by, they shouted, 'Lord, son of David, have mercy on us.' The crowd rebuked them and told them to be quiet, but they shouted all the louder, 'Lord, son of David, have mercy on us.' Jesus stopped and called to them. 'What do you want me to do for you?' He said. 'Lord,' they answered, 'we want our sight.' Jesus had compassion on them and touched their eyes and immediately they received their sight and followed him. (Matthew 20:29-34)
You see my friends, throughout all the Gospel stories there are encounters just like this one, where people in their brokenness cry out to Jesus for help and for healing and for restoration. The cynic would say to those blind men, “You are blind, maybe you have done something wrong.” The pessimist would say, “You are blind, there is no chance of healing.” But Jesus of Nazareth has compassion on them and meets them at the point of their brokenness and brings them healing.
When the body of Jesus Christ was broken, when He was nailed to the cross, it was an affirmation of the fact that the Son of God was bearing the brokenness and the sin of the world. Wherever there is darkness, wherever there is sin, wherever there is disharmony, even in its midst is the Son of God, broken for us. That is God's word to us.
There is a powerful moment in Julius Caesar where Marc Anthony is confronted by an angry crowd. To subdue the crowd he turns back the robe that is covering Julius Caesar, shows them the wounds and says:
I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend; and that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him:
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: (Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2)
I believe that these words are similar to what God says to us: “You want to know that I love you, you want to know that I can identify with your brokenness, you want to know that I can forgive your sins, you want to know that I can heal the world? Let me show you. Let me roll back the robe and show you the wounds of my Son, Jesus, broken.”
But this act is not just for us to memorialize today, it is also to remind us that it changes things. When we take the bread and the wine, when we celebrate the body, broken, we are in fact, as P.T. Forsythe says, “changed.” Because lastly, the words that say it all are the words: “For you.”
John Calvin once wrote that, “He is at His height and is lifted up for us, not for Himself.” In other words, when Jesus is lifted up, it is for us, not for Himself. Jesus does not bear the wounds for His own sin or for His own self-aggrandizement, but for you and for me and for the world that is broken. How often I feel in my heart a frustration when people look at the sacraments and the life of the church and see that there is nothing in it for them that it is detached, separate, apart from their life, when in fact the whole message of the Gospel is that the gift of Christ is the gift for us. When we take this meal we remember that it is the body broken for us.
I have come to realize over the years just how powerful memorials can be. I celebrated a couple of weeks ago when the Korean veterans from our country finally received a memorial in their honour. After all that they had given, after all they had sacrificed and the pain that they had endured, how right it was that those who had been in Korea had been remembered. A memorial symbol is a powerful reminder of what they went through.
When I look at memorials I think back many years ago to when I visited Jerusalem and took the walkway leading to the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem and saw all the crosses on the ground of those who had given themselves to save Jewish lives, and when I went inside and thought of all the Jewish lives that had been lost. You can't go to a memorial like that and just turn away and not be changed. You're confronted by the brokenness of the world and it reminds you of the suffering of others.
Likewise, many years ago I visited the Vietnam War Memorial - that great black stone on which the names of all those who died there are engraved - and I remember standing next to the wall and there was a man who evidently went there every day. He talked about what people leave at the foot of the memorial. He talked about a young man who had left his sweatband to remind people of the sweat and the toil of being there. A man who had left his dog tags there as a reminder of his identity, as well as a picture of himself and his best friend Mike who had died there. And he said he could go back to that memorial a thousand times, but never would it ever be able to capture the sacrifice that was made in what seemed like a needless war.
Memorials are powerful things. We remember the sacrifices that have been made, we remember the lives that have been lost and the things that have been given. But when you go to a memorial, you not only remember the sacrifice that have been given, you also go to that memorial bringing yourself, and you are changed by it. We come to this memorial meal knowing that the body and blood of Jesus Christ has been broken and shed for us. That is God's gift for you and for me and a broken world. What we bring to the table is our brokenness and when we come to it, we are changed.
The most powerful words: “My body, broken for you.” No room for cynicism at this table. It is the table that changes us. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.