PENTECOST 20: WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY: OCTOBER 2, 2016

Readings: Galatians 3:26-29; John 17: 20-26

Devotion: One God, One People
Gods perspective: One people
It is quite something to think about the fact that tens of millions Christians
around the world are coming to the Lord's Table to remember our Lord and to
proclaim his final victory to the world. It doesn't matter what part of the
world we're hailing from, because from God's perspective there are no
political, ethnic, cultural or national boundaries. From God's perspective we
are One people, the People of God!
Christs church stands for a radical inclusion of all of God's children:
All are welcome here everyone!
One of the most important things about church history is that the firstcentury church believed that Christs church stands for a radical inclusion of
all of God's children. They believed that all those barriers we as humans
work so hard to build, God in Christ broke down. In an anonymous letter that
survived from the early 2nd century addressed to Diogeness, a Roman
official, the author actually speaks about Christianity as a "new race":
To His Excellency, Diognetus: I understand, sir, that you are really interested
in learning about the religion of the Christians, and that you are making an
accurate and careful investigation of the subject....
... You would also like to know the source of the loving affection that they
have for each other. You wonder, too, why this new race or way of life has
appeared on earth now and not earlier. These three questions are dealt with
in the text, more or less in order, but with some overlapping. The reference
to the "New [third] Race" calls attention to an issue of great importance for
the life of the Early Church, which concerned such varied questions as the
Church's understanding of its vocation in history and the Roman world's
attitude toward the Church.
This is the message of the church worldwide You are welcome here
every single one of you! For God's grace is enough for all! God's love is
poured out to all, and whosoever believes shall be saved (John 3:16).
Whosoever!

With the arrival of the church of Jesus Christ a new age has dawned
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With the arrival of the church of Jesus Christ a new age has dawned.
Nobody ever needs to feel excluded again. Paul wrote: All of you who were
baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew
nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are
all one in Christ Jesus.
Paul clearly declares to us that there are no second-class Christians.
Everyone is welcome and everyone is equal in Gods eyes. We are all
children of God. We are to be one in Christ; we are to be the new race made
up of a multitude of diverse people.
Our oneness lies our strength
We are one and in our oneness lies our strength; in our oneness will the
world see the difference - through our love with the world see the love and
grace of Jesus Christ. This is World Communion Sunday!
The World Communion Sunday Table: The Table of the Lord's Supper:
The Table of Connectedness
Nothing presents more dramatically Jesus' extravagant giving for each one
of us and for the world, his call to us to give ourselves to others.
A minister tells of a church he served in rural Kentucky. The area was full
of different Baptists: Primitive Baptist, Hard Shell Baptist, and Missionary
Baptist - all of them very narrow in interpreting the meaning of the Church,
the local congregation. They were not willing for any to take communion in
their church unless they were members of the church (The Connect Church
in Cranbrook: Relaxed Refreshed Rejuvenated: Nothing of God, Jesus, Holy
Spirit)
One Sunday right after lunch a woman came to the minister to tell him that
she needed to share with him a story, an experience she'd had that morning
before he heard it from someone else. A neighbor had been asking her to
go with her to her Baptist church to worship on Sunday morning. She knew
that they had worship in the little Methodist church only twice a month and
so she wanted her friend to go with her on an off Sunday. She was not too
enthusiastic about going, and when she got there, she knew she'd made a
mistake. It was Communion Sunday and she had a notion as to the position
of that congregation about her taking The Sacrament with them.
She moved nervously through the service, getting more uptight all the
time as the minister finished the sermon and came to the offering of the Holy
Communion.
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It was the tradition in that church to serve the Communion in the pew
trays of little cups and pieces of bread and everybody in that congregation there wasn't more than forty or fifty - knew her, knew that she didn't belong
to that church but was a Methodist. So she knew that they were looking to
see what she was going to do.
And she didn't know what really she should do. The young deacon who
served her section of pews was a young man that she knew very well.
Would he just go around her or how would he do it? Well, the time came
and when he got to her he just simply pushed it past her to get it to the
person next to her.
Much to the disappointment of the people around her who were looking
she grabbed his arm. Telling the story to the minister she said, "I don't
know why I did it. I certainly had not planned to do it. It just happened. I
grabbed his arm and I looked him in the eye and I said, John, if this is your
supper, then I don't want any, but if this is the Lord's Supper then I'm going
to eat it and she took the bread and the wine."
That is what World Wide Communion is all about. The church need to
break out of its shell of exclusivity all are welcome at the Table we are one
body and we meet at one Table a Table prepared by Jesus (My experience in
Ladysmith).
The need to share in the Lords Supper
This is the Lord's Supper and we need to eat it - the whole world needs it.
We all need it eat it because we unlike anything else we do in worship it's
the dramatic acting out of our receiving Christ's greatest gift to us - His body,
His blood.
We need it because in the context of Communion the prayer of Jesus and
the writing of Paul in Galatians make sense:
That they may be one as we are one
There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor
female; for you are all one in Christ

Solidarity of our humanness

This is communion; this is World Communion Sunday. All become one in
Christ. Herein lies the solidarity of the human race. There are two
common ground themes:
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1. Common ground theme song of the World-wide Table: In Christ

we are all one
Paul emphasise this theme over and over again. He actually says that
God loves life; God invented it. Yet the world has its own way of denying
this oneness in which we all share. World Communion Sunday reminds us
that we have this common ground to work from In Christ we are all one.
Therefore in Christ there are no Nobodies. We recognize each other as
equals, brothers and sisters in Christ. We are taught at this World-wide
Table today that it is by the grace of God we would resist temptation to
despise one another, for we know ourselves to be all one in Christ.
2. Common ground theme song of the World-wide Table: Identity
Leslie Weatherhead was an air raid warden during the awful days of the
London blitz back in the early 1940s. When the all-clear sounded, it was his
job to go and to survey the damage. One night there had been a
particularly heavy bombing. When he went back to the surface, all he could
see was smoldering ruins. As he walked, he suddenly heard the sound of a
child's voice crying. He went around some ruins and there, to his
amazement, he saw an eight-year-old boy sitting and sobbing on what had
been a building. Somehow the child had gotten lost trying to get to the air
raid shelter and had managed to survive by staying on the surface.
Weatherhead went up to the little lad and said, "Where do you live, son?
Where is home?"
The child pointed to a street where there was nothing left but rubble.
He said, "Where are your parents, your mother and father?" The little boy
said, "My father is in the navy. He is overseas. My mother was killed two
nights ago.
Weatherhead asked, "Where is the rest of your family, uncles, aunts,
brothers and sisters?" The child shook his head and said, "They are all gone.
They have all been killed."
At that point, Leslie Weatherhead stooped over, held him tight in his arms
and said, "Tell me, son, tell me, who are you?" With that the little boy
began to cry even more compulsively and then he said through his tears,
"Mister, I ain't nobody's nothin'. I ain't nobody's nothin'."
Leslie Weatherhead said that if he lived to be a hundred, he didn't think he
would ever forget the poignancy of that sight - a little boy sitting in the midst
of chaos, feeling he was unconnected, unimportant to anybody else in the
world no identity.
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Thats not what God wants. That little boy is also his child. Paul tells us
that in Christ God adopted each one of us as his child. The Table is the table
of the restoration of identity. Commenting on this story, Dr. John Claypool
writes, The story describes one of the constituent needs of our human
nature. We need to be loved; we need to be cared for; we need to know that
what happens to us makes a difference to someone else we need identity.
At the Table of Connectedness the love of Jesus restores identity
and indeed the identity of the world.