2nd Sunday after the Epiphany
Texts: John 2:1-11;
Isa 62:1-5; 1 Cor 12:1-11
See also the Sermon Notes
THE SACRAMENTS AS LIVING INTO THE LONG ARC OF GOD’S SALVATION
I remember going to Trinity Lutheran in downtown Detroit as a child. It was my parents’ home church, the place where they had met — in Luther League. My Grandpa Nuechterlein was the organist and choir director. I was proud to watch him play a huge pipe organ, with his hands and feet navigating three keyboards and the foot pedals.
But another thing I strangely remember were the rules for Holy Communion. They only offered it about once a month, and the week before the pastor would announce that everyone who planned to take communion the next week had to report to the pastor after the service that week. It was a Missouri Synod church, and they had to make sure that only confirmed Missouri Synod Lutherans would be taking communion — otherwise, you might be eating and drinking to your own damnation, or so they thought.1 This was especially strange to me, since our suburban Missouri Synod Lutheran church practiced communion open to all confirmed Christians, using no such rules for registering for communion. My home church would end up leaving the Missouri Synod in 1974, primarily because we refused to close communion to other Christians.
Now move ahead in time forty years to my last regular call at a fairly large congregation just outside Kalamazoo, MI (Prince of Peace Lutheran, Portage, MI). The lay leader of our Adult Forum was working to help members understand Islam and the precarious politics of the Middle East. Since Kalamazoo has two fine universities (Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College), there were many resource people for inviting practicing Muslims to visit our education program. One of those Sundays, we hosted a Muslim professor from Western Michigan University for the Forum, and then our lay leader invited him to join us for worship. As distribution of Communion began, I noticed that our Muslim guest was getting in the line to receive Communion. Everyone in the room knew that he wasn’t baptized! I had just a few moments to make a decision. When he reached out his hands, I gave him some bread, “The body of Christ given for you.” I noted that he then bypassed the wine and juice. After the service, he sought me out, hoping that he hadn’t done something wrong. He told me, “Your invitation to join the meal was so warm and genuine, I felt it was right to at least take the bread. I declined the wine, thinking that I shouldn’t fully participate as a Muslim. But I feel good that your ritual expresses hope for people of all faiths to come together.” I was very glad that I had given him the bread.
From tightly closed communion at Trinity Lutheran in my childhood to communing a Muslim when I was pastor, this spans the amazing transformation of practice of our weekly sacrament, Holy Communion. Our practices have become increasingly open — first to other Christians and then to younger ages. I don’t know if you know this but the official stance of the ELCA is that Holy Communion is open to all the baptized, including infants.2 In the last ten years, our denomination has encouraged conversations about opening Communion to the unbaptized (though there is yet no official policy on this). In short, our practices have gone from being quite exclusive to very inclusive. This transformation in practice, I believe, is very much in keeping with a revitalization of the Gospel message. Last week (Epiphany 1C), I think we saw how our practice of baptism may be lagging behind the revitalized Gospel message, since so many people continue to see baptism as a ticket to heaven, instead of an invitation to join God’s project of uniting humankind. This week, I’m glad to say that I think our practice of Holy Communion is maybe out ahead of us a bit, inviting us to live into the greater inclusivity of God’s grace.
What we talked about last week with regards to baptism will also be helpful this week with regards to Holy Communion. Our practice of the sacraments should help us to see the big picture of salvation instead of shrinking it down to the moment after we die, when God supposedly sorts us into those saved for heaven and those damned to hell. We named this shrinkage of salvation as anti-Gospel, because the biblical picture of God’s salvation embraces all of time and all of creation, not just what happens to individuals when they die. Such a shrinkage thus goes against the big picture of salvation, over time, in a way that distorts it into its opposite. The big picture of salvation shows us a God who is working to heal humanity from its tendency to sort everyone into groups, into friends and enemies, good and bad, saved and damned. The shrunken down picture of salvation shows us a false god who himself is doing the sorting into friends and enemies, saved and damned. Do you see how these are two opposite pictures of God’s salvation? A God who heals human beings from sorting into friends and enemies vs. a God who supposedly finishes that of sorting for all of eternity.
What we’re talking about here is learning to see the world differently through our practices of the sacraments. We learn to see the world not as it currently is but as God is saving it to be. For that Muslim professor who took Communion with us, for example, our invitation to share the Lord’s Supper helped him, and us, to see a world where Christians and Muslims are friends rather than enemies. Consider the Civil Rights Movement as another example. For those who have lived their whole lives for the cause of greater racial justice, it can be very discouraging to look around and still see so much racism still in the world. So Martin Luther King, Jr. made famous the saying that “the long moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Do you see how it’s necessary to see the universe in this seemingly counter-factual way? To be able to continue to work towards justice, despite the so much continuing injustice in the world, takes this kind of living into the bigger picture of the universe.
Similarly, with the biblical picture of God’s salvation. We might say, “The long arc of God saving the universe bends toward peace.” It bends towards ceasing to sort one another into friends and enemies because we have faith that one day we will all be friends. In the meantime, we begin living into that. Baptism is about accepting God’s invitation to become God’s children by joining the Spirit’s work creating one new humanity — ‘no longer,’ as Paul says, ‘Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, because all of us are one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3:28). And Holy Communion is about welcoming all people to the Lord’s meal of peace. Every person who comes to this table is invited to see themselves as children in God’s family, in which we are all brothers and sisters — friends, not enemies.
It is like the Palestinian farm near Bethlehem that I talked about two weeks ago (Epiphany 2025), where their motto is, “We refuse to be enemies.”3 In this world where the pull is to sort ourselves constantly into friends and enemies, we choose to live in a way where we see only friends and not enemies but potential friends. In our country right now, under the pressure of nationalistic thinking, we are urged to see those who don’t vote like us as enemies. In our practice of this Holy Communion, we are being taught to say, “We refuse to be enemies,” and to live that way.
As we are learning together in revitalizing the Gospel message, our faith through Jesus is teaching us to see the world not as it currently is but as God’s Spirit is bending it to be. In the New Creation begun on Easter, the world is bending toward a number of things. Toward justice and peace. It is also bending toward abundance and life.
John’s Gospel is very much oriented toward this different way of seeing the world, by talking throughout about “signs” from Jesus that point beyond themselves. Signs, beginning with the one this morning where Jesus turns water into wine. John doesn’t narrate the Last Supper around the bread and cup like the other three Gospels. Instead, he features Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. (What we read on Maundy Thursday.) He is thus guiding his disciples to see the world in terms of true justice, in which equals mutually serve one another, instead of the world we live in, where the weak are forced to serve the rich and powerful. But John does also feature the bread and wine in completely different stories about Jesus. In John 6, when the large crowd faces what looks like a severe scarcity of food, Jesus helps them to see that there is actually an abundance of bread for everyone. Similarly, our Gospel Reading this morning from John 2. In the face of a scarcity of wine at the wedding of Cana, Jesus shows them a world with an abundance of wine for celebrating life. Turning water into wine becomes the beginning of these signposts Jesus provides that we might begin to see the world in a different way. The arc of God’s salvation bends toward abundance not scarcity. We should learn to live toward abundance, toward a festive celebration of life.
And speaking of life, the long arc of the universe also bends toward life, not death. The climax of signs in John’s Gospel will be the cross and resurrection. That horrific instrument of death, the cross, will be transformed into the ultimate promise of new life. New creation. On the first day of the New Creation, Mary Magdalene will go to the tomb and find it empty. Through her tears of grief she will learn to see the risen Jesus. She, and the other disciples, will learn to see new life even in this world where there’s still so much death. The long arc of God’s salvation bends toward life, not death.
So let me end with another of the ways in which our practice of Holy Communion has begun to live into that long arc of God’s salvation. We’ve talked about how increasing inclusivity anticipates the day when all of humanity will live as one family around a table. The other thing new to our liturgies of the past forty years has given us (beginning with the Green Hymnal4) are hymns of praise based on the picture of New Creation found in the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation — which is structured precisely as a way to begin picturing the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven in the midst of our monstrous empires and nationalisms. Reigning in the new Jerusalem is the lamb slain. So let me end by repeating some of the words from today’s Gathering Hymn, “Now the Feast and Celebration.”5 It is written by Marty Haugen, composer of the beloved Holden Evening Prayer, as the Hymn of Praise in an updated Communion liturgy. It is very much a song that teaches us to see the long arc of God’s salvation as bending toward what we see in Jesus, not what we currently see in the world. We sang,
Now is the feast of the Lamb once slain,
whose blood has freed and united us,
to be one great people of God.
Now the feast and celebration,
all of creation sings for joy
to the God of life and love and freedom,
praise and glory forever more.
That’s not what we encounter very often as live our lives in this world, but it’s what we are living into as we come to worship each Sunday. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, January 19, 2025
Notes
1. Only a few verses before today’s Second Reading we read, “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Cor 11:29). The first thing we might say about this verse is that its reference to ‘discerning the body’ provides context for today’s reading, where Paul begins to elaborate on the body of Christ. But more important to the context of today’s message on Holy Communion is to counter its use out of context to justify exclusivism for the Eucharist, in the fashion of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. The wider context of this passage (1 Cor 11:17-34) is Paul scolding the Corinthians for practicing the Lord’s Supper in ways that exclude the poor. When Paul exhorts us to “discern the body,” he is calling us to do so towards the end of inclusion, not exclusion. I have written about this elsewhere; e.g., “Mimetic Servanthood as Remedy for Mimetic Rivalry.”
2. See this ELCA news clipping from August 20, 1997: “Lutheran Statement on Baptism and Holy Communion Passes Overwhelmingly.” For the specific practice of communing infants see “The Use of the Means of Grace: A Statement on the Practice of Word and Sacrament” (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1997), pp. 41-42, specifically “Application 37D,” under “Principle 37”: “Infants and children may be communed for the first time during the service in which they are baptized. . . .”
3. See the website for the “Tent of Nations”: https://tentofnations.com/
4. Lutheran Book of Worship, Augsburg Fortress, 1978. This was the hymnal that introduced as a regular feature Hymns of Praise based on the Book of Revelation. For example, “This Is the Feast of Victory,” pp. 60-61.
5. Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Augsburg Fortress, 2006), Hymn #167, “Now the Feast and Celebration,” text and music by Marty Haugen.
