Song of Solomon 2:8-13, James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Listen to the words and messages of this week’s scripture texts. In the Song of Solomon we heard, “Arise My love”; in the letter of James we are referred to as “my beloved” and in the Gospel of Mark Jesus reaches to the very center of God’s beloved, our hearts. These words describe a very special communion between God and all creation of which each of us are members.
Our capacity to respond to the way we are being addressed by God as “beloved” will be directly related to the way we have heard the bread texts in John’s Gospel over the last few weeks.
Christ loves us through Eucharist but there is a way we leave ourselves out of Holy Communion. Our lives can become so consumed in searching for Jesus that we miss the Christ before us. Due to our well-defined search we risk missing Jesus’ intimate relation to us when we are called by our name – “beloved”. Holy Communion is not only Divine presence. Holy Communion might be better described as radical communion.
The point of all the bread texts these last few weeks was far less about worshipping the most precious Body and Blood of Jesus and more about the way we are transformed by placing ourselves in intimate proximity to Christ through a communal Eucharistic feast. We become precious through Baptism and Eucharist.
The focus is not a temporary receiving of less than seconds each week, but rather, the way Eucharist opens us up. By frequently receiving the Body and Blood of Christ we radically open our lives to Christ. But this opening is not merely between each of us and God, but radically opens us up as a church. This radical opening is due to the way our hearts become commingled with God’s heart through the Eucharist.
Words such as “love” and “beloved” suggest an intimate communion between two lovers. Yet when the two lovers are God and ourselves we can be misled by the terms. The communion between two lovers is usually understood as an exclusive love. If we overlay this normative expectation on our communion with God then we justify a personal spirituality that sees all outsiders as intruders to our most sacred bond.
As a child I loved visiting the Blessed Sacrament in my parish church, but I always had an unspeakable question. I would name that childlike question this way - if we receive Jesus then how can Jesus be outside of ourselves?
As a theologian my concern has shifted to cautioning churches that reception of the bread and wine does not mean that we become the Body of Christ in a literal way that displaces or replaces the centrality of the Trinitarian reality for our lives. You see there is a very thin space between self-abandonment in a privatized relation to God and Divine inundation where we confuse and conflate ourselves for and with God creating our own false idols. Idols we then worship and protect from intrusion by others.
The call to the beloved is a public call to all creation. When we hear the words “my love” and “beloved” do we recognize ourselves, identify with, and feel called to respond? The scripture throws us a curve ball for God talks to us in today’s texts the way we often talk about God. God addresses us with awe and humility by naming us God’s “beloved”. Let’s just take a moment to savor our participation in this radical communion as God’s beloved.
If we can embrace and cherish our beloved nature then we will be freed from a fragmented and false humility where God is great and we are inferior missing the possibility of radical communion. That is the point of today’s texts and the tension between the law of the Pharisees and Jesus’ law. The Pharisees kept their distance as they scrupulously kept the law. Whereas, God’s law, the perfect law within us nurtured by the Eucharist frees us to live into God through each other in radical communion.
Arise my love is God’s call to all creation as “beloved”. As Trinity Church prepares to begin a new program year such recognition of being beloved frees us up from the necessity of tentatively seeking an overly defined passageway to God for ourselves or for others.
Our mission is to avoid building barriers that falsely seek to protect God’s communion from those we may see as intruders. With God there are no intruders. Therefore I want to preach beyond our Episcopalian notion of inclusion of strangers as inclusion is still about what we do and thus risks still seeing some people as intruders.
To free ourselves from this bind we have to redefine our communion with God. Holy Communion leads often to distancing the holy from the least worthy whereas radical communion abandons our inclusive responsibilities to God. The community of the “beloved” lives with a radical openness always pointing to God as the host to all. We practice this as a church when the presider says, “This is God’s table and all are welcome.”
Holy Communion may take place at this church’s table, but radical communion must be practiced at all tables. Nor does radical communion stop with an inclusive church community such as Trinity Church but goes beyond the gates of the church into the streets of downtown Reno and throughout our nation and the entire world.
Communion without intruders means each of us has the privilege to own our dignity as “beloved” and to serve with a deep sense that we are privileged to minister. The beloved is authorized in a very special way through the ministry of the baptized to care for the lover’s loved savoring the beloved in each person. Communities of beloved arise to their vocation in open communion with boundaryless space for all God’s beloved.
The time has come for us to arise out of our slumber and to celebrate God’s radical communion with all God’s beloved creation.
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