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These Holy Mysteries: World Communion Sunday
Luke 24: 13-31
Jake Joseph, Acting Associate Minister
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock, our refuge, and our redeemer. Amen.
Of all the choices for seminary, I certainly didn’t pick the easiest one for a liberal, French speaking, gay Congregationalist from Colorado. This combination was something my peers down in Georgia were never fully able to grasp mentally or ethically for that matter. Emory’s tony (polo shirts and golf visors were the dress code) Southern Methodist divinity school, Candler, was a generally odd fit for a Keens and Northface wearing Colorado Congregationalist.
What drew me to Emory’s M.Div. program, among other things, was the two years of what was called “Contextual Education.” While most divinity programs require a single year of a field education placement (or as we called it at Emory “Con Ed”) embedded as a full-time intern in a local church of your choosing, Candler required this for two full years out of the three years of seminaryat two distinctly different internship sites.
While the second year was a typical local congregation (parish) placement, the first year of Contextual Education was with a small group of five to eight other first year M.Div. students.This cohortalso served as a first year reflection and orientation group. Our orientation to the ideas and lives of ministry was done in community, in common purpose, and with a group of both conflict and support for conversation and growth.
In the first year of Contextual Education, M.Div. students at Candler enrolled in a social service or clinical setting. This is unique. It is only after a successful year of internship in a social service of clinical setting that one was even permitted to complete the second mandatory year of Contextual Education in a normal church setting. This is to underscore the idea that Church is bigger than what happens in the pew, but for me it would also transform how I understood the meaning of Communion and the power of the pew itself.
My first day of seminary, before even entering a classroom, I found myself at Holy Comforter Episcopal Parish and Mission of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta ( with a small group of random and eclectic Methodists, Baptists, a Catholic, and a very lost Presbyterian from all across the Southeast. Candler had assigned me to this small Episcopal mission tucked down on the East side of Atlanta. I didn’t know anything about Episcopal Churches. What was I doing there? Why couldn’t I have been assigned to the food bank for the year or to work with refugees or teach theology to prisoners like some my other new classmates? After all, my understanding of liturgy, at that point, was that it was just functional thing without deep meaning for theology. Theology and ritual were still in different camps for me.
Holy Comforter, however, is not a normal church. It was a normal church until the 1970’s when with White flight from the City of Atlanta (Atlanta for this reason has some of the worst density and sprawl) and the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals and mental health in Georgia, this small neighborhood church suddenly found that most of its neighborhood had gone from working class to filled with group homes for those living with severe mental illness and the homeless in need. What does it mean to be a neighborhood church in a changing neighborhood?
Instead of closing down or moving to the suburbs, like so many countless others did in those days, the ten or so remaining members (as the legend goes) decided to walk down the street knocking on doors and inviting people to church: everyone they met. Suddenly (almost overnight), Holy Comforter was full again. Today over 75% of its members (not clients or patients…or cases… or charity outreach… but its members… parishioners…friends) live with severe mental illness and disability on streets or in deplorable group homes with absentee landlords in the worst zip codes in Atlanta.
I promise most of us have never even imagined the sort of living conditions in the United States and dangers of daily trauma (gun violence and rape were reported to us) faced by these parishioners. Even as this East Atlanta neighborhood has recently, and in some ways regrettably gentrified, Holy Comforter now shuttles its members and those with severe mental illness from the worst zip codes in Georgia—all now in West and South Atlanta to community and to worship—to Communion/ to the Eucharist. The group home system that was supposed to replace institutions by integrating people into community (a noble and good idea if funded) has failed in Atlanta as in other places. Most are now on the streets, and those in the group homes are stuffed many in a room in the cheapest places landlords can find. Most of these landlords are “friends of the governa,” as we used to joke all too truthfully.
Over the years, Holy Comforter became a Mission of the Diocese, which is a local church that is financially supported by the wider region. It developed day programs, a community garden, an outreach center, and a Wednesday all day group that is a place for people to come and be in fellowship. Most of all, it found ways that the liturgy itself (worship without reservation) is healing for its members. It was the Wednesday programming, clinics, and vespers worship that us Candler first year seminary students were charged with facilitating for a year. In addition to worship, I helped run the weekly hand clinic. As a response to need, I would cut nails and clean hands. I would even paint fingernails, although this is not something I am volunteering to do at Plymouth. It was difficult and touching.
The first thing I remember, even more than the towering Magnolia Trees, was the smell. We all arrived for the first time just in time for worship. We sit down next to people in various forms of dress, drool, and severe body odder. Some make eye contact. Some do not. We all start to think that we are here to save someone or change him or her somehow. Even I feel seven feet tall, which is a difficult concept. We are here to make a difference. Looking around me is every form of God’s humanity: age, country of origin, race, and gender.
The rector (a fancy Episcopal word for a senior minister), Father Mike, gets up and starts the service: “Greetings in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” He administers the sign of the cross and nearly everyone follows. “Hello everyone,” he says in a deep Southern drawl, “please turn and greet the new Candler seminary students here this year. They are here to learn from you. They are your students. You are their professors. Teach them wisely.” Uhh oh!
Then began the first lesson of this true seminary education: the vespers service itself. As would become familiar, this community of misfits and rejects/ “others” (some capable of speech, others of singing, others of only of loud noises, others of dancing, others of only listening) followed the liturgy precisely—each in her or his own way and capacity for expression.
Later, it is time for Communion:
Father Mike says: The Lord be with you.
The people (all of them)… no matter how well they could speak respond in various levels of clarity, volume, and language: And also with you.This affirmation shakes the room.
Mike: Lift up your hearts.
The people: We lift them to the Lord.
Mike: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is right to give God thanks and Praise. Many yelling “Amen Amen Amen” follows this. One man begins to dance for joy right there in the middle of the Communion liturgy.
And it went on—with these the rejects—those who are told that they are not part of community, unable to speak, unable to sing, unable to work, unable (by human society) to be truly or fully human… the congregation chanted, sang, and even screamed the words: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Amen amen amen praise the lord.”
The liturgy, the repetition, the Communion transformed life for this congregation of every race and every theological background brought together because of what was seen as illness by society.Every Sunday and Wednesday night at Holy Comforter was a World Communion Sunday! Some yelled alleluia and danced while Mike continued with the Eucharistic Prayer (Epiclesis), which is the sending of the spirit: how appropriate. Others kneeled. Others sang. If someone could not speak and was mute, she or he could still stand and kneel with the community—brought into life, into community, into the ritual through the engagement of the body.
Others who cannot read or cannot see in that community are part of the community in the liturgy of Communion because of the repetition of the Episcopal tradition. Liturgy is not conservative and boring when done well—it is life giving and community enabling. It enables their life and participation in the voices united together. Everyone has an expression of participation and wholeness in that service of Eucharist—word and table.
In the UCC, we don’t use the word Eucharist very much. The Eucharist is a word for Communion that means “gratitude” and “thanksgiving.” When we refer to Communion as Eucharist it has the power of gratitude for life and the transformation of that liturgy. Every Sunday is a Gratitude Sunday or a Thanksgiving Celebration with the Eucharist present. It is also a prayer for Christ’s presence with us in our lives. Communion refers to the community and comes from an old French word for “the village”—but often it makes us think of only this community or our village. Eucharist reminds us to give thanks for the story and the whole communion of God’s love beyond ourselves and to remember the Ecumenical Church.
I was invited that first day to be the chalice bearer. (chalice and purificator). Taking Communion last after all of those people who drank from the cup so intently and with such hope for transformation… not hope to be different—but hope in the acceptance the cup represented was humbling. As a trained germophobic Protestant, it was transformative to drink from the cup last.
10 months at Holy Comforter transformed how I understand Communion, the meaning, and the importance of the ritual as transformative in itself and enabling community. Communion is more than just a symbol of Community that already exists elsewhere—the action of Communion is the enacting of community in the first place. One part of both the Methodist and the Episcopal Communion ritual is to refer to the Eucharist as the “Holy Mystery of God.”
This is the crux of the Eucharist for me. Not even everyone (or maybe not even two people) in this room today would agree about exactly what the purpose and meaning of Communion is…exactly. For me, it is the presence of Christ and a sign of Grace. For others, it is an historical enactment to show our connection as Christians to the ancient church. For others it means real presence or even consubstantial presence of God. Some think it is a way to show the priesthood of all believers at work, like our friends in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). No matter what you believe isor might be happening at Communion, it is a Holy Mystery and a deeply powerful act of community-making and building, of fellowship and of faith! It is after all a Sacrament.
According to the UCC we claim as a denomination that,“Sacraments are ritual actions in worship which, according to Scripture, were instituted by Jesus. In the sacraments of baptism and communion we ask the Holy Spirit to use water, bread, and wine to make visible the grace, forgiveness, and presence of God in Christ.”
Our text today from Luke 24: 13-31 is great because Jesus shares in Communion with the Disciples. It is wholly/ Holy mysterious and also completely powerful. Jesus is a stranger in their midst who is rightly shown hospitality and welcome, and so the ritual is enacted—and through the ritual the Disciples see Christ in their midst embodied in the other! It is the Holy Mystery of God for the journey.
One of my favorite things about this text is that Emmaus (the destination) is an unknown town historically. It is a narrative place rather than a well know historical fact. Nobody knows where this town was or if it actually existed. That is wonderful in the narrative because it opens up the possibility that when we come together and perform the Sacrament of Communion it is not for any set goal or destination (we don’t know where we are going), but we know that this act of Communion is what connects us to God and to Christians in fellowship and Ecumenical Unity around the word: from Istanbul to Rome… to Ethiopia and Plymouth, Massachusetts…
It is not about knowing exactly what the mechanism is or how it works, for this is the Holy Mystery of the power of God in our lives to manifest in unexpected places and in unexpected people and make us whole. In coming to the table, as billions have over 20 centuries, we come forward in the mystery of faith and in a trust in God’s Providence.
As the people of Holy Comforter Episcopal showed me, World Communion is a great Thanksgiving for life, for wholeness in Communion or Village of God.Moreover, we should not take this lightly, for the power of the liturgy of church community is to transform lives and enable the presence of Christ in our midst. The Eucharist (thanksgiving) or Communion (Community) is a sign of our fellowship and inclusion in the promise of God. Unlike San Jose, nobody knows the way to Emmaus. Do you know the way to San Jose?…
Nobody knows the way to Emmaus! This is because the road to Emmaus is enacted or paved every time we join together as the Communion (village) table and says the words of institution and epiclesis of the Spirit. This is coming into the presence of God, and all are welcome… no more than welcome… the whole world… all of God’s people (the other as Jesus is in this story) are required/ imperative to make that a reality.