Commonalities
Communion Meditation for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost – October 4, 2009
First Congregational Church, Wauwatosa, WI
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Job1:1, 2:1-10/Hebrews 1: 1-4, 2: 5-12/Mark 10:2-16]

These readings are rather serious, so let me do something that I normally don’t do: tell a joke to start us out on our meditation. On their way to a justice of the peace to get married, a couple has a fatal car accident. The couple is sitting outside heaven’s gate waiting for St. Peter to do the paperwork so they can enter. While waiting, they wonder if they could possibly get married in heaven. St. Peter finally shows up and they ask him. St. Peter says, “I don’t know, this is the first time anyone has ever asked. Let me go find out,” and he leaves.

The couple sits for a couple of months and begin to wonder if they really should get married in heaven, what with the eternal aspect of it and all. “What if it doesn’t work out?” they wonder. “Are we stuck together forever?” St. Peter returns after yet another month, looking somewhat bedraggled. “Yes,” he informs the couple, “you can get married in heaven.” “Great,” says the couple, “but what if things don’t work out? Could we also get a divorce in heaven?”

St. Peter, red-faced, slams his clipboard onto the ground. “What’s wrong?” exclaims the frightened couple. “Please!” St. Peter exclaims, “It took me three months to find a minister up here! Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take for me to find a lawyer?”

Our Christian faith holds up an ideal of what it means to be “Kingdom People,” living as God calls us and intends for us to live, not in the here-after of the humor, but in the here-now. Marriage and childhood are given, quite often, are given as examples in the Scripture of how we are to live as kingdom people. Children, not because of childishness, Jesus tells us that we must become like little children if we are to enter the Kingdom. In childlikeness: the ability to wonder, to trust, to be open as a child is open, and we, as Jesus says, because of our “hardness of heart” fail to be. The other example is marriage, because it is a place of commonalities, where two individuals begin to share common properties. This is the point that Jesus makes when he quotes Genesis about “two becoming one flesh.” Marriage initiates a community. In the mind of the Christian Church, marriage is a microcosm of what the Church is supposed to be. The language used for centuries describes the married couple as an ecclesiola, a little Church.

A wonderful theologian of the last century, Karl Rahner, described marriage in this way; “It is a genuine community of the redeemed and sanctified—the smallest of local churches, but a true one; the Church in miniature.” The reason for this is what Jesus says in Matthew, that wherever two or three are gathered in his name, there he is – it’s the smallest of local churches. At the core of that teaching is that we are to love each other – husband, wife, child, and, yes even Church members – even when the one we’re trying to love is being distinctly unloveable. Maybe part of our learning process, something I think Job discovered as he protested his righteousness, is that all of us have room to grow and all of us need God’s grace to pull this off.

The reality, however, is that in our broken world these commonalities break down and the promise to love each other – no matter what – breaks down. Jesus didn’t go down the slippery slope of trying to say when divorce is ok and when it isn’t and what the arrangements need to be and how you’re supposed to do it. However, Moses did, but he did it for the protection of women. Excuse the historian coming in for a moment, but that’s also why the Church got involved in marriage law – to protect women and their property. He went for the deeper issue, as theologian and storyteller John Shea observes, when he points to it as a breaking down of communion, an engagement of separation consciousness. This separation consciousness, this break-down of communion, stands over against what God intended for us. God made us for oneness – what some writers refer to as the unitive – and we are to live into oneness, into communion with God and with one another.

So, what do we do when it breaks down? How do we go about restoring something that is so important and so essential to our experience of life, both now and eternally? Well, Job struggled with it and the writer to the Hebrews, I believe, points us to the one who will restore that oneness at both a cosmic and a personal level: Jesus the Christ. As the writer says: “As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, 9but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. 10It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. 11For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, 12saying, ‘I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.’” Jesus models identification with us, even in suffering, even to the point of death. That is so we know that we are to identify with others – even in the face of suffering.

One who had experienced suffering herself, Julian of Norwich sees the opportunity for being “oned” or united with God through it. In her Showings or Revelations of Divine Love the suffering Christ is the means by which God identifies with all suffering, human or otherwise. She records: “Here I saw a great unity [oneing]between Christ and us, as I understand it, for when he was in pain we were in pain, and all creatures able to suffer pain suffered with him. That is to say, all creatures which God has created for our service, the firmament and the earth, failed in their natural functions at the time of Christ’s death, for it is their natural characteristic to recognize him as their Lord, in whom all their powers exist. And when he failed, their nature constrained them to fail with him, insofar as the could because of the sorrow of his sufferings. And so those who were his friends suffered pain because of love and all creation suffered in general; that is to say, those who did not recognize him suffered because the comfort of all creation failed them, except for God’s powerful, secret preservation of them. [p. 210-11]

As Julian scholar Kerrie Hide points out, “Furthermore, creation in Christ unites humanity to all creation. This bond is such a great oneing that as Christ experiences the pain of the Passion it reverberates over the entire cosmos.” Gifted Origins to Graced Fulfillment: The Soteriology of Julian of Norwich, p. 100]

God knows what we go through. God understands what we go through. So we learn that way of commonality, of oneness, of unity, which allows us to love, even the unlovely and unloveable – including ourselves – through this second Adam, who opens the door for us to union with God and with one another. Jesus reminded the disciples, and he reminds us, that we have to become open to the essence of who we are – children of God – if we are to really live out the kingdom.

Opening ourselves to the essence of who we are also opens us to those around us. We recognize the people we encounter – intimately in the home or casually in day-to-day activity – are also children of God. Martin Buber, he great Jewish philosopher of the late 20th century, described this as coming to an I-Thou relationship, seeing people as subjects – i.e. people – as opposed to treating them as objects (I-it). The contemporary spiritual writer Beatrice Bruteau takes this a step further when she talks about I-I. She describes this way of relating as “the activities of the two subjectivities are confluent and simultaneous, instead of being responsive, alternating, as in dialogue. Each of them knows the other from the inside, from the subject side, in terms of the experience of actually doing what that subject does. And each totally loves the other by uniting with the other in this complete way.” [The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New Creation, p. 75] We seek to identify, rather than harden our hearts, focusing only on self, and live toward the other.

Being human means understanding that we are, all of us, children of God. There is the great commonality, which should draws us more and more into the unitive way. I like what John Shea writes: “Childhood and marriage can be understood from social, physical, and mental perspectives. But spiritual wisdom interprets them as symbols of distinctive aspects of spiritual consciousness. We are transcendent beings capable of freely entering into each other’s interiority in knowledge and love. Once we grasp these spiritual dynamics, we return with vitality and zest to the physical, social, and mental dimensions of childhood and marriage. Jesus, the bridegroom, and the child, left us instructions.” [Eating With the Bridegroom, p. 244]

One of the instructions Jesus left us called us to do what Christians around the world do today – and many do, as did the early Church, weekly. Jesus said: take, eat, take, drink, and in doing remember. Ultimately, those simple actions are to remind us of who we are and how we are to live and how are drawn into that intimacy of the Body. One of the most intimate things we do is to share nourishment around a table; it’s one of the commonalities of human life. Today, take these simple gifts, these reminders of who you are and how we are to live and go out renewed in the great commonality: you, me, we are children of God and ultimately we are to be oned with God.