Matthew
21:33-46
Usually, World Communion Sunday
means a celebration of the way that faith in Christ is found in all parts of
the world. We have included part of that
aspect today. We have music drawn from
different nations. We have cloths on the
altar that represent different parts of the world. The bread we will use at communion is made up
of many types that people around the world see on their table and think of when
they pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
I hope that on the first Sunday of October, 2015 I will be standing
right here saying something that simply highlights the variety of ways that the
Lord is honored around the globe. Today,
however, because the Body of Christ is one in all the earth, I just will say a
brief word about one part of the Body.
In our day we are seeing, under
tragic circumstances, a cataclysmic change in the Middle East. We are seeing the suffering that is forcing
the change and the suffering that the change produces. Paul said that
“If one member suffers, all suffer
together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”
[I Corinthians 12:26]
That is part of what
it means for us to be one.
Christianity is evaporating in the
Middle East. I hesitate to say anything
about that area of the world because almost everything anyone says gets drawn
into the vortex of issues that surround the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and
the Iraqi Wars, and the role of the oil companies, and the disputes between the
Kurds and Turks, and the arguments between Hamas and Fatah, and the shifting
alliances among the Syrians and Egyptians and Lebanese and Saudis and Yemenis
and the United Arab Emirates. It’s the
sort of mess where even simple facts are hard to determine because it’s all
tainted with bias of one sort or another.
I do think that the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation is a
reliable source. In 2010, one of their
reporters wrote, “A century
ago, 20% of the population in the region was Christian. Today Christians
account for only about 5% and their numbers are still dwindling.”[1] Since the current terrorism has broken out in
Syria and Iraq, thousands upon thousands of people have died or fled. Not all of them are Christian, but many are,
and the exodus of Christians from places where the faith flourished in its
earliest days has left the area with a far lower proportion of Christians than
at any time since the days of the Roman Empire.
Let me, however, look back to those
days and even earlier. The Church began
on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, and flourished there. It began to spread quickly. The apostle Phillip shared the faith with a
high official from Ethiopia, who carried it to Africa. There were at least some disciples in Damascus
by the time of Paul’s conversion, somewhere around 40 A.D., give or take a
couple of years. Nevertheless, the bulk
of the community remained centered on Jerusalem. And then, the book of Acts [8:1] tells us,
“a severe persecution began against the
church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the
countryside of Judea and Samaria.”
Later
on it says that people traveled even further afield.
“Now those who were scattered because of
the persecution that took place over Stephen travelled
as far as Phoenicia,
[that means modern Lebanon] Cyprus, and
Antioch, [which could refer to a
city in Syria or one in Turkey] and they
spoke the word to no one except Jews.” [Acts 11:19]
Even
with those limitations, precisely because of the persecution, Christianity was
on its way to becoming a world religion, no longer connected to a specific
place or geography, the way that Judaism still focuses on Jerusalem and the
Muslims focus on Mecca. So, as terrible
as it was, God used that time of trouble for good. What Jesus had spoken of was coming to pass,
when he had foreseen the kingdom of God becoming the common citizenship of many
nations.
“‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who
planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a
watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he
sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and
beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again
he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same
way. Finally he sent his son to
them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But
when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come,
let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So
they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard
comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They
said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the
vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’” [Matthew 21:33-41]
That didn’t go over
well. It never goes over well when
anybody says that your most cherished and deeply-rooted customs are not always
going to be “all that and a bag of chips”.
The story of the world, what we call
history, isn’t about any one culture or any one people. It isn’t even entirely about people at
all. It’s about how God’s grace works
itself out in the world, among people and among nations and cultures and
languages.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote
a poem with the scary title “That Nature Is a Heracletian Fire and of the
Comfort of the Resurrection”. The first
part of it is about how everything decays and falls apart and the sense of
despair makes him think of himself as a ship in a storm, then at the last
moment he draws up short and says,
“…Enough!
the Resurrection,
A
heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping,
‘joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering
deck shone
A beacon,
and eternal beam.’ Flesh fade, and
mortal trash
Fall to
the residuary worm: ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet
crash,
I am all
at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This
Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.”
Tragic events are part of history and part of our lives:
tragic events, but not tragedy, because the end of it all lies in God’s hands,
not ours, and God has this habit of turning things in directions we little
suspect, and always – always – for the good.
[1]
David Willey, “Rome ‘Crisis’ Talks on Middle East Christians” October 10,
2010. Found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11509256
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