The first Sunday in October is World Communion Sunday. Today Christians around the world link with brothers and sisters – in open fields, straw or mud huts, cinder block schools, tin shacks, wood and brick buildings, grand and not so grand stone church building and cathedrals to envision ourselves – in a world often divided by disagreeable disputes and warring camps – to envision ourselves together at the Lord’s Table.

I was taken with an article a friend sent me: Elbow Bending with the Enemy. The title made me wonder whether this is suitable material for a sermon. But it is a powerful parable of World Communion Sunday.

During World War II, more than 400 ships were sunk in the Baltic Sea, killing thousands. Many were Soviet merchant or refugees ships that had been bombed by Nazi planes or destroyed by mines littering the heavily traveled trading routes between Russia, Finland, the Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia and my mother’s homeland, Lithuania.

On a September evening, almost 60 years after the war, I found myself traveling these same waters aboard the Lisco Gloria, floating above the shipwrecks…. I had traveled from America with my mother to visit the homeland she fled… a refugee of World War II.

Despite the starry night splendor over the blackened Baltic Sea, the chilly evening coaxed passengers indoors to the ship’s lounge. Whole families, seniors and children, couples and singles, had packed the place. Among them were Germans, Russians, Lithuanians Brits, Poles, Canadians, and Americans.

Each high-backed wooden stool that lined the compact bar was occupied. People congregated at round tables of varying sizes that filled the lounge…

Above the singer’s amplified voice and accordion’s ohm-pah-pah, beyond the din of clanking beer mugs and the tapping feet, was a more prominent sound: laughter…Some belly-laughed as they wiped tears… others smiled happily as they clapped or sang along to the music…Little children squealed and ran around the tables… There was plenty of elbow-bending, too.

I finagled a seat at a freshly vacated table but did not have the chance to get too comfortable before a Russian accented baritone voice beckoned me, “Come, you vill dance.”

I looked up at a  muscular, mustached truck driver I had seen earlier in the day loading his rig onto the ship…I  stole a quick peek at my wedding ring and replied, “No thank you.”

He was persistent. My English excuses were met by shoulder shrugs, and a gentle tug of my arm towards the dance floor, “You vill dance. Come, you vill dance.”

Still I refused. So, the shunned dancer acquired another partner, and was back on the dance floor before I had taken a sip of my beer. When the songs changed, I noticed that interesting partner changes had occurred across the dance floor… people just danced with each other. Husbands danced with other women, wives danced with other men. Seniors danced with the young, and children danced with everyone. Soon I danced too.

This was a boisterous crowd, not the after dinner, sherry-sipping, tie and coat wearing, slow-dancing sort.  We stomped and hooted, pranced and cheered, twirled and clapped,  twisted and toasted. We danced ourselves sweaty and breathless …

As the band played its third Russian rendition of “Those Were the Days,” people whooped “Hurrah” and rushed to dance again. Voices joined in hearty chorus, sang in German, Russian, French, Polish, English. In any language, this was a tune everyone understood…a toast of friendship and bittersweet passage of time.

The overflowing dance floor, the language barriers broken, the clamor of beating drums and hearts drowned out the memory of the battles that had polluted the waters… healing war wounds and combat scars that WWII had inflicted. Those who had fought and survived the horrors of war ugly legacy danced.

The next day in the morning sunlight, I peered into the rim of my coffee cup and surveyed fellow passengers once again from my table… As the Lisco Gloria slipped past the silent wrecks below, I realized that the things that make us enemies don’t have to last forever.

Elbow Bending with the Enemy reminds me that coming to the Lord’s Table is more than a show of individual religion or the spirituality of me and God and God and me. Holy Communion is a vision and hope for the day of God’s kingdom of peace and justice pictured as joyous banquet for all. One of the things that makes communion “Holy” is how all are invited to a feast where the gaps are bridged, enemies become friends, the hungry are fed, the homeless and refugees find homes, the sick are healed and outcasts are welcome as anyone else.

Holy Communion holds this vision before us so that we won’t forget this is who and what Jesus is all about – people finding their way to God’s great banquet. Right now we may only get this in glimpses, but every time we come to the Lord’s Table there is an appetizer to make our palates long for the great feast. “Come you vill dance.” Finally, God help us, taking in the joyous, contagious festivity, “Soon we dance too.”

Did you ever notice we end the Eucharistic Prayer each Sunday: “By your Spirit, make us one with Christ, one with each other and one in ministry and service to all the world UNTIL Christ comes in final victory and WE feast at the heavenly banquet.”

Hold the Elbow Bending With the Enemy story against the one we heard in the gospel reading today. That one takes place in a vineyard. The owner leases his well kept farm to some tenants. It’s time to pay the rent. He sends a series of servants to do this for him. But each time they go something worse happens to them. Finally, the vineyard owner sends own his flesh and blood. Surely this personal touch will straighten things out. But no, worse than before, they kill the heir and take his inheritance.

Usually we see the vineyard owner representing God. The ones sent do the collection are the prophets, always in trouble for speaking-up for God. We figure the owner’s murdered flesh and blood to be Jesus. Does that make the tenant’s left in charge of the vineyard, the religious establishment or status quo? Something to think about. But what does this parable possibly have to do with Holy Communion or the Great Banquet?

Well, what if the vineyard were the Lord’s Table? What if the vineyard and its produce is the stuff of the Great Banquet God has leaves us to tend? When God first gave it to us it  lush and beautiful. What have we done with it? Have we been good tenants of the bread and wine? Have we been good keepers of the vision?

Through the years since Jesus walked the earth, many battles have been fought about who can come to the table and partake and who cannot. On this World Communion Sunday, Protestants and Catholics still cannot come to the Lord’s Table together because of squabbles about how Jesus is present in Holy Communion. And so, despite agreeing on most other things about Christian faith, we will feast at separate tables today. Go figure. (By the way, wasn’t last week wonderful, extending the table with Episcopal brothers and sisters?)

The church continues to be divided about what place at the table for gays and lesbian Christians who are faithful people. The unashamed “Come, you vill dance!” is muted by conditions. Jim Wallis, in his book God’s Politics reminds us many of the world’s poor and marginalized don’t have the same place at the table as the rest of us. In a gesture as prophetic as Isaiah or Jeremiah, he once literally cut out of a Bible all the passages dealing with the poor and marginalized, including the mandates that God’s people serve them (literally hundreds of verses). Then he held up the clipped, shrunk-in-size Bible and said, “This is the American Bible.” There are many congregations where the poor or the marginalized just don’t fit in.

I read this week that Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden has been admonished by his church to keep his distance from Holy Communion, from the Lord’s Table until he complies with the church’s position on abortion.

How is World Communion being celebrated among the 10-20% of the population of Iraq whose foremothers and fathers have been Christian since the first century? Not to mention the witness our divisive setting of he Lord’s Table offers to so many others who are not Christian at all? Seeing what they see from us would they want to come at all? I’m just asking.

We United Methodists believe in an “Open Table” because John Wesley believed that coming to the Lord’s Table, hearing about and receiving the love of God so poured out and broken could not help but draw someone into God.

The world around us is asking these questions. Have we been good tenants of the bread and wine? Have we been good keepers of the vision of the great banquet?  

Another parable Jesus told (Luke 14:15-24) imagines the head of a house sending a servant with an instruction: “Go at once into highways and byways. Bring in the poor, the crippled, the lame.” When this is accomplished, there is still room. So the head of the house further commands “Go again into streets and lanes and bring people in so that my house may be filled. 

The heavenly banquet hall is vast and God desires urgently that it be filled.

Can’t you just hear God. “Come you vill dance. You vill dance!” We’ll be reluctant at first, shy, afraid that we’ll do something wrong, or violate some rule or that we’ll have two left feet. But the joy of the banquet and the dance finally woos us: “Soon I danced to.” Soon we’ll dance too. God’s banquet has a way of overcoming barriers, drowning out divisions and leaving ugly legacies behind.

The world is watching the way we steward the Lord’s Table. The way we serve God’s banquet determines the kind of tenants we are. We still have much work to do. The table is not ours. We just work here.

It didn’t hit me until last night what a blessed and serendipitous grace that World Communion and annual animal blessings come at almost the same time. Yesterday, in the church yard was Worldwide Communion for dogs, cats and all creatures great and small. The best moment of the day was the Great Dane standing next to the teeny, tiny Yorkshire Terrier. And the American Bull Dog who barked so loud that the Yorkie almost had a heart attack, and then licked him/her. There was a pygmy cat with eyes that saw right through you. The pets mixed. We mixed with neighbors we hardly know. A woman said to me. My dogs unconditional love and faithfulness has helped me believe in God again. Being with all kinds of other people today and their pets gives me hope.”

There’s such power in just a simple invitation. God only knows what can flow from there. “Come you vill dance. You vill dance!”

Soon, may we dance, too.       

Amen.

Rev. Alfred T. Day, III
Historic St. George's United Methodist Church
October 5, 2008