We are a divided people. Children turn against parents, parents turn against children, politicians turn against politicians, and we turn against those who rule over us. From within, we have been working steadily to undo Paul’s great theme in his writings: the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in Christ Jesus. Our oneness is challenged daily as we hear of reports of brothers and sisters tearing one another, gossiping, cursing one another. Authority figures are being killed and authority figures are unjustly killing. If you try to find a consistent trend there is none. We destroy our unity because we have sabotaged the image-bearing status of humanity, as Al Stout noted here.
But our solution is near us. It seems too simple; too safe and yet too dangerous.
When we taste the Eucharist we taste physical elements offered to God’s people for edification, wisdom, and nurture. Yet when tragedy strikes we run away from the meal that brings together male and female, slave and free. What would the world be like if police officers and their black neighbors were to eat and drink at the table together? What would it look like for the one in authority to partake of bread and wine with the tattooed Hispanic convert? What would it look like to be formed by something given to us, something served each week by a minister of the Gospel? What would it take to get estranged brothers to embrace each other at the culmination of worship, and then say, “Peace be with you,” as they look into each others’ eyes and drink the blood of Christ and eat his body?
The Gospel of the sacraments ought to do that for us. The Apostle Paul understood this when he wrote: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” a Baptism unites us into the oneness formed by the Spirit. God takes us from our diversity and unites us into his Threeness and Oneness.
Why have conversations about unity abandoned conversations about the table?
If the Church wishes to see unity, let’s encourage the weak and strong, young and old to build ecclesiastical patterns of weekly eating, weekly partaking, weekly loving, weekly embracing, and weekly serving one another—in and through our diversity—that we may find union with Messiah Jesus: the source of all true reconciliation. So this Sunday b come and serve your brother and sister with intentionality as you eat and drink in the name of One Lord, one faith, and one baptism.
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“What would it look like for the one in authority to partake of bread and wine with the tattooed Hispanic convert? ” What a joy for us to have had the opportunity to worship in an all Hispanic Church of God, where most of the congregants were tattooed, battered, recovering alcoholics and drug dealers. We have our churches on every corner, but most are “White” , “Black”, or “Brown”, or “Yellow”. It must break the very heart of God, that the most segregation in our country is in fact “The Church”. This fact distresses us greatly.