We’re pleased to have Joseph Kazadi assisting with the sermon this morning. Joseph and
his family (Martine, Maryam, Drysile, and Joe) emigrated from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2016, and have been living in Old Lyme since 2018. Their story is featured in the exhibit “Nothing More American,”“
currently on display at the Florence Griswold Museum.
Texts: Luke 14: 7-14; I Corinthians 11: 17-28
Connections Lost, and Found
The place to start is with the text we heard earlier about the Sacrament of Holy Communion, which we’ll shortly celebrate as a part of World Communion Sunday. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul warns about an improper observance of Holy Communion. “Whoever…eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves,” Paul advises, “and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment on themselves.”
It’s a hard place to begin because it represents the kind of thinking we tend to avoid around here. For starters, it’s hard for many of us to understand what this ritual is even about, let alone why we insist on doing it five times a year. That’s far too little for a few of you, I know, but I’ve also heard from several among us that the whole thing can feel altogether too somber, tedious even. But then to make it exclusive in some way, dependent upon a form of worthiness or purity risks alienating even those for whom the Sacrament is meaningful. I’ve known people throughout my life who have refused to take communion because they have felt unworthy, or because of a perception that others found them unworthy. That always struck me as tragic, because one of the deep truths of our faith, and of this ritual called communion, is that in many ways, we’re all unworthy. This is a ritual for imperfect people, who recognize themselves as such. We are each of us in our own way the blind, the lame, the deaf, and the poor, if not in body then in spirit. But those are precisely the kind of people that Jesus seems to enjoy throughout his ministry. It’s the imperfect and unworthy that Jesus invites to the banquet. So personal righteousness was not, and is not, the issue.
What does Paul mean when he writes about eating and drinking the cup in an unworthy manner? I’d like to help you to understand that phrase this morning, because it has implications that extend far beyond the ritual we’ll shortly enact. It has to do with how you understand the world, and how you conduct yourselves, not here, but in the rest of your day to day existence. This – here – is but a rehearsal for the real event, which will arrive tomorrow, and the day after that, and the one after that. So much is contained in this ceremony, and it all hinges, I would argue, on the final line in our Scripture passage: all who eat and drink without discerning the body heap judgment upon themselves. Without discerning the body…
I’ll return to that phrase shortly, but before I do, I want to share a story with you. It will seem unrelated at first, but I hope that when I’m through, you’ll see that it has everything to do with communion, and with the question of what it means to eat and drink in an unworthy manner.
Here’s the story. It’s about something that took place a few years ago in the city of Berlin – not Berlin, Connecticut, but Berlin, Germany. Most of you know about my abiding love for the city of New Orleans, but what I haven’t shared as often is my equally deep fascination with Berlin as a space of cultural creativity. Rachael and I were privileged to spend two separate summers there, and we fell passionately in love with the place – the architecture, the music, the clubs, the history, the graffiti, the art, the pluralism, the open spaces – the sheer vivaciousness of the place delighted us. Human and life possibilities are practiced in Berlin that feel surprising, challenging, instructive, and ultimately, freeing.
Which is why my interest was piqued when I recently heard an author named Johann Hari describe an episode that took place in Berlin. It took place in a neighborhood called Kotti, located on the edge of the city, which attracts a wide array of Turkish immigrants, older pensioners, anarchists, squatters, the poor, and LGBTQ folk, an uneasy and often tense mixture of populations. That began to change in the summer of 2011 when Nuriye Cengiz, a sixty three year old woman, forced herself out of her wheelchair and posted a note in her window announcing that in one week’s time, she intended to commit suicide. It explained that she was behind on her rent and was due to be evicted. Before the eviction took place, however, she was determined to enact her own exit strategy. Nuriye didn’t know her neighbors, and they didn’t know her. She posted her sign not because she expected help, but simply because she didn’t want the reasons for her death to be a mystery.
It wasn’t long before residents began knocking on Nuriye’s door, asking if she was ok, or if she needed help. After that, people who had been passing anonymously on the street began speaking to one another, and they began identifying with Nuriye’s plight. Rents had been rising throughout Kotti, and it was crushing everybody. Evictions had been happening all around, but no one had been talking about it. Galvanized by Nuriye’s sign, several residents proposed an idea. A wide thoroughfare ran outside of her apartment. What if they set up a blockade that would close down the street, one made of chairs and wood, and what if all the residents that were being pushed out of the neighborhood went there? And what if it wasn’t lifted until Nuriye, along with everyone else facing eviction, was allowed to stay in the neighborhood?
And so the people of Kotti enacted just that. It was a little like our sanctuary effort – what at first was going to be a day or two of concerted effort stretched into a week, and then two, and then more, lasting for a full year. Residents took turns standing watch at the barricade in organized shifts. Nuriye, a Muslim from Turkey in an electric wheelchair, was paired with Taina, a 46 year old single mom covered in tattoos. Mehmet, a Turkish kid with a taste for hip hop and street life was paired with a retired teacher who identified as an old-fashioned Communist. A gay nightclub across the street opened its doors for community meetings, and all of a sudden, very traditional Muslims were sharing space with some of Berlin’s most flamboyant sexual provocateurs. Miraculously, strangers began to trust one another.
It began tentatively enough, but as the blockade stretched from weeks into long months, a remarkable sense of connection began to occur. And it gave the residents a profound sense of well being that went a long way toward addressing the emotional and physical ailments that many experienced. After a year of maintaining the blockade, Nuriye was allowed to stay in her apartment, and rents were frozen in Kotti. But the true achievement was in the relationships that formed across that year. One woman put it this way: “it’s weird – the idea that we should all sit apart from one another, pursuing our own little story, watching our own little TV, and ignoring everyone around us. (That should be abnormal.) It’s normal,” she said, “that you care.”[1]
Johann Hari has a great deal to say about that episode, and what it can teach us about the root causes of depression, anxiety, alienation, and addiction. He believes the way of life we’ve cultivated in Western modernity is making us mentally, spiritually, and physically sick, and that it might be time to ask some hard questions about what we value, and how we might best live. I’d love to share his insights with all of you, and I hope to do so one day soon. But for now, I simply wish to put forth that what happened in the Kotti neighborhood of Berlin has everything to do with the ritual of communion we’re observing today. And it has everything to do with that short phrase about eating and drinking without discerning the body.
You see, what was happening in the Corinthian church was that feasts were being set out for the community. And the wealthier members, those with the greatest amount of leisure, were arriving prior to the laborers, who needed to finish their work before joining the feast. And arriving early, the privileged helped themselves to the choicest food and drink, gorging themselves and drinking to the point of intoxication. They left the remainders for those who were less privileged, which, you can imagine, created tension within the whole community.
It’s a timeless parable, really, for the ways that wealth and privilege can blind us all to the needs of those around us. Transposed into a different key, the story could be read as a reflection of many instances where such practices take place – energy consumption in North America in contrast to other parts of the world, material consumption that depends upon an unseen army of laborers to produce goods and services, or, as often happens, white attitudes toward people of color. It’s not always malicious, thought it certainly can be. More often than not, it’s like the Corinthians Paul is upset about – it’s oblivious.
The test for the proper observance of communion, then, isn’t personal righteousness. It isn’t whether the minister gets the words right, or whether we pass the trays in the way we always have. The proper observance of communion has to do with discerning the body. Understanding, in other words, that we are part of a community – inside these doors and outside of it. Being mindful of the sorrows and joys of others. Making sure there is room for all. Watching out for any who may be strangers. Being concerned for any who may have greater needs, whether because of age or illness, disability or grief, joblessness or discrimination or anything else by which people are marginalized. We care about one another not because we are nice people, and not because we are politically correct. We do so because we understand that the world itself is Christ’s body, and we are a part of it. Which means we don’t limit our concern to ourselves alone. Proper discernment of the body means being conscious that we are all of us brothers and sisters, whatever we believe, whatever our age, whatever our sexual orientation, whatever our country of origin, whatever our politics. To partake of this sacrament is to insist on the beautiful possibility of discovering that we share far more in common than not.
That’s what all those residents discovered in the Kotti neighborhood of Berlin. It’s what we’ve discovered here through our immigration and refugee work – and I hope you’ll soon visit the Florence Griswold Museum to see that work reflected through photography and film. But it’s also something I heard when I was visiting with Joseph Kazadi recently, whose family is featured throughout the museum exhibit. It was an experience I wanted you to hear about, because it serves as a powerful reminder of the sort of world we’re working toward.
(Joseph Kazadi)……..
Joseph’s narrative is an entry for all of us as we work together to discern the body. But so is this table. Paul was peeved that members of the Corinthian church were behaving as if the world were made for them alone. He believed, and so do I, that to be shaped by this sacrament restores lost connections, helping us to find one another again.
[1] Hari, Johann, Lost Connections (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2018), pgs. 164-178.
