Dear Friends,
Get a group of thoughtful adults together to discuss a thoughtful and challenging book, and you never know what might happen.
The group of thoughtful adults, in this case, is the adult Sunday School class. And the thoughtful and challenging book is Rachel Held Evans's Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church. Evans grew up in an evangelical home in Dayton, Tennessee, a town you may or may not remember as the site of the famous Scopes Trial in 1925. We could argue that in some ways Dayton is the symbolic home of the evangelical movement of the early 20th century.
As Evans grew into her young adulthood, she began to question some of the ideas that she had learned while growing up. [As an aside, Evans barely got beyond her young adulthood, dying at the age of 37, as a result of an allergic reaction to a medication she had taken. Her passing in 2019 was a great loss to many.] She began to deal with her questions openly in her blog and found that many people shared her concerns.
Her questions led Evans away from the church of her youth and, eventually, to the Episcopal Church. The path that led her back to the Church was the path of the sacraments. The Episcopal Church recognizes seven sacraments. They are baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, anointing of the sick, and marriage. In the United Church of Christ, we practice two sacraments: baptism/confirmation and communion.
Historically, the sacraments were the means by which God imparted grace to followers of Jesus, at least in the polity and practice of the Church. Members of the church had to participate in six of the sacraments (usually, one could take holy orders or get married, not both) in order to receive grace. For the United Church of Christ, the sacraments are not so much the means of imparting grace as they are moments of recognition and celebration that God has already given us grace.
For us, the sacrament we practice most frequently is communion. As the adult class read about Evans's reflections on communion, the idea emerged that the class would like to explore the sacrament more fully. As the class thought about it, someone asked if we could take a Sunday and devote the service to the exploration. To many in the class, one logical possibility was to take a "fifth Sunday" in some month (there are four or five such months each year), and try something different from our usual Sunday schedule.
Here is what the adult class came up with and took to the Elders, who agreed to give it a try. On the fifth Sunday in October (30 October), there will be a single worship service, at 9:00 a.m. in the Salem dining room. Worshipers will sit at tables, as if for a meal. There will be hymns and singing and prayers, as usual, and when we come to the sermon time, I will present some thoughts about communion, based on Paul's description in I Corinthians 11 and Luke's telling of the Last Supper in Luke 22. Then we will open the service to questions and comments from the worshipers. In effect, we will preach the sermon all together. The service will be on Facebook Live, as usual, and there will even be opportunity for our online participants to share their questions and comments.
I have served congregations in which questions from the congregation during a sermon were not unheard of. I would not say they were common, but they did come up on occasion. Some people find this upsetting; I do not. I have said before that I consider a sermon as a single moment in an ongoing congregational dialogue. Asking a question during a sermon simply makes that dialogue apparent in a way that such dialogues usually are not. I have also said that the times when any person listens to everything a preacher says in a twenty-minute sermon are rare. Most of us hear something that triggers another thought and we follow that thought wherever it leads while the preacher carries on with wherever they were going. I accept that and even believe that such meanderings are often the work of the Holy Spirit.
On 30 October we will experience something new, something different. No one knows how it will turn out. It will be a time for us to consider what the sacrament of communion means to us, both as individuals and as a congregation. It will be a time for us to step out of our comfortable place and see whether the Holy Spirit will still speak to us.
Mark the date and time on your calendars, and let us see what happens when we celebrate communion in a different way.
Grace and Peace
Tommy
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