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Sermon 94

SERMON 94

Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

The Lord's Supper is a very big deal at the Outdoor Church. For us, it is the ongoing realization of the only community in which our people can feel safe and loved. Baptism, on the other hand, is not a big deal at the Outdoor Church. We have never done an infant baptism - thank God! - because that would mean we had encountered an infant who was living on the street. We haven't done any confirmations or marriages either, but we have done many memorial services and funerals. The sacramental life of the Outdoor Church is necessarily skewed by the reality of the street; but the sacraments are no less important - perhaps even more important - for that.

Meals are central to our ministry, not only because we are enjoined by faith to feed the hungry, but also because they are an extension of the Lord's Supper that we celebrate throughout the day. Jesus' ministry centered on meals, especially meals to which the poor, the oppressed, the rejected and the despised were invited. Arguably, he met his death as much for his outrageous hospitality as for his claim that he was the Son of God.

The idea of feeding the hungry as an extension of the Eucharistic meal has found powerful expression in many settings. The food pantry established by Sara Miles at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco is a striking example. After an extraordinary career as war correspondent, cook and writer, communion at St. Gregory's converted her to an understanding of the Eucharist as a meal shared by everyone who approached the church for spiritual nourishment. This conversion found concrete expression in her creation of a food pantry for Protrero Hill, the mixed neighborhood where St. Gregory's is located. Her vision was of "a Table where everyone was welcome. Our neighbors, friends and strangers," she said, "were hungry. The very least a Christian church could do, for starters, was feed them." For Sara, the Eucharist is an expression of Jesus' radical welcome to the very people whom were most despised by conventional Jewish society and whom he went out of his way to redeem.
I'm taking some time with Sara's conversion here, because she is suggesting something that is both very radical and very traditional at the same time: that the Lord's Supper and baptism are "converting ordinances" and not only "professing ordinances." Protestants recognize two sacraments: baptism and the Lord's Supper. In virtually all liberal Protestant churches, baptism celebrates the church's embrace of a new member, whom it will nurture in Christian growth and life and on whose behalf her parents or guardians make representations of faith, commitment and dedication. The Lord's Supper, sometimes offered once a month but more often as little as four times a year or twice a year, is an affirmation of faith and a renewal of membership in the Body of Christ. Protestants have historically treated both the Lord's Supper and baptism as professing ordinances.
Most Protestant churches are not altogether comfortable with the sacraments. Compared to the Episcopal Church or the Roman Catholic Church, which are sacramental denominations, we are churches of the word: Scripture, its preaching and its teaching are at the center of our worship. The Reformation associated the panoply of Roman Catholic sacraments with Popish excess and extravagance, and limited the number of sacraments to those that are expressly described in Scripture. Yet a sneaking suspicion about sacramental practice survives. Even as our Book of Worship acknowledges the Lord's Supper as central to congregational worship, the introduction cites Karl Barth and John Calvin to assure its readers that, really, the sacraments and the sermon are simply alternative expressions of God's word. In this context, the opening of the communion table to ever larger numbers of people is not so much about the sacraments as about ecclesiology: modern churches are increasingly unwilling to allow sacramental practice to exclude or discourage groups of people who were once barred from the church.
In the UCC, sacramental practice was framed by our Puritan forebears. The Puritans understood communion to be a profession and confirmation of faith. As Calvinists, they believed that the church consisted exclusively of the elect - those predestined to experience salvation. The Anglican Church, from which Puritanism emerged in opposition, deemed anyone living within the geographic area served by a parish church to be a church member. This, the Puritans maintained, allowed those of little or no faith to be church members when the church, by definition, consisted only of the elect. In Puritan ecclesiology, only those who led unblemished Christian lives, had a working understanding of Puritan theology and had experienced - and could profess - an experience of saving faith could be church members and participate in the Lord's Supper. For the Puritans in England and during their first few decades in America, admission to the communion table was a mark of election and a privilege of church membership.
As the Massachusetts Bay Colony grew, this doctrine appeared increasingly impractical. More and more children of the original settlers either could not claim a conversion experience or had little interest in doing so. Children of the first generation of church members were presumed to be church members as well, having been baptized into the church at birth, but - unless they were able to give convincing proofs of an experience of saving faith - they could not participate in the Lord's Supper nor in the governance of the church.
But what the next generation, that is, children of church members who were not visible saints? Could they be baptized into the church?
The Puritans concluded that church members who had not had the experience of saving faith but who nonetheless led lives life free of scandal, were knowledgeable in the theology and history of the church and were submissive to God and his church, while not full members of the church, nonetheless "owned the covenant" - the "Halfway Covenant," so-called - and that their children could be baptized into the church.
The Halfway Covenant marked the high water mark of the Puritans' efforts to purify the church and the beginning of a movement toward an increasingly open communion table.
No longer a privilege of church membership, the Lord's Supper for most liberal congregational churches defaulted to Calvin's understanding of the Lord's Supper as a formal remembrance of the Christ event.
Not, however, for Solomon Stoddard, minister at Northampton, "Pope of the Connecticut River Valley" and grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. Stoddard had played a leading role in the conception and adoption of the Halfway Covenant. Fearing that church membership would continue to decline, Stoddard sought to liberalize the doctrine of salvation by making the Lord's Supper one of the means by which God brought the unregenerate to salvation and the visible saints through sanctification: "[T]he design of these holy ordinances," he wrote, "is to be witnesses to us of our redemption and salvation by the blood of Christ." The Lord's Supper, Stoddard argued, was a "converting ordinance." Not surprisingly, church membership at Northampton soared.
Both Sara and Solomon Stoddard understand communion as the church's welcome to one who has been moved by grace to seek membership in the Body of Christ. The Lord's Supper is the church community's invitation to the prospective member to join the church.
The ordinance of the Lord's Supper is "converting" because, by the very act of accepting that invitation, the recipient is brought to an active desire to become a member of the church.
In this account, it is not necessary that a person be baptized in order to share in the Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper is an invitation to be baptized into the church. It does not require a formal commitment from the prospective member. Baptism will be the time and place for that.
That's exactly how St. Gregory's does it. They've even designed the church so that you must reach the communion table before you can find your way to the baptismal font. St. Gregory's was designed to reflect the theological convictions of its two priests, Rick Fabien and Donald Schell. It is famous for its dancing icons. The icons are painted in rows around the rotunda that rises above the communion table at the center of the church. The icons show two circles of saints - some are traditional saints, like St. Augustine, and some are people that the congregation at St. Gregory's consider to be saints, like Anne Frank.
St. Gregory's baptismal font is a waterfall located just beyond the rear glass doors of the church. You enter the church directly in front of the communion table. To reach the baptismal font, you must walk around the table to the rear of the church and then go outdoors again. The ecclesial point is that communion precedes baptism. This underscores the openness of the Lord's Supper to the converted and unconverted alike, offering an invitation to the church and to Christian life that will be confirmed in baptism.
But, now, what about baptism? If the Lord's Supper is both an invitation to become a church member and the acceptance of that invitation, then what is the role of baptism?
The acceptance of the invitation to join the church is conditioned on a person's baptismal vows. Specifically, the person being baptized is converted to covenantal relations of love and respect within the church community and to a witness to Christ's continuing presence in his life and in creation. Baptism, in this account, becomes both the expression of one's commitment to a life of discipleship in a Christian community and also the making of that commitment. It is, like the Lord's Supper, a "converting" ordinance. In making that commitment, you become a member of the church.
No infant, of course, could make such a commitment or experience such a conversion nor can her parents or guardians, who speak for her during her baptism, make such a commitment on her behalf or experience such a conversion vicariously. Baptism is necessarily an ongoing event. The infant, once baptized, grows in Christian life by reflecting on, reconsidering and re-affirming her baptismal vows. Confirmation is one, and the most celebrated, milestone on this road to Christian life. But it is not the only one: the process continues throughout the life of each member of the church.
The two ordinances do not become interchangeable because they are both converting. Communion welcomes the recipient to church membership, an invitation which the recipient, intent on membership in the church, may accept, conditional on baptism. Baptism - the vow of commitment and discipleship - satisfies that condition and confers on the recipient full membership in the church.
Taken together, the Lord's Supper and baptism are part of the same sacramental experience. In the Lord Supper's welcome to all, the sacraments speak to the solace that the church offers to all in spiritual and material need; and in baptism's enactment of covenantal commitments to God and to other members of the church, they speak to the deliberate and conscience commitment to discipleship that stands at the very center of the Christian project.