A Motley Crew Made One Body

A Motley Crew Made One Body

by Al Durrance

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Father, we thank You for the gift of life in Jesus, that You have come to us in the midst of death, to bring us through death and into life in Your kingdom. Grant we might see in our worship that pilgrimage to which You call us, out of sin into righteousness, out of darkness into light, out of death into life. In Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

And I’d like to say one thing about my face. I have no color on my face. And one of the things that struck me was the white-faced clown appears in every religion in the country, in the world, as the dead man. There’s always one. And I didn’t realize that. I don’t know whether you all did or not. But I think before we come to God in Christ, we are in a dead man. We may not know it. We’re walking around. We’re talking. We’re feeling like we’re in the world. But we’re truly not living. Someone once said, “No one can see God and live. But no one can live until he has seen God.” And until we die with Christ, and are raised up with Christ, we have never known God. And that’s part of our life. John Donne said it a different way. He says, “I shall never live until I see God, and then I shall never die.”

But I think we walk in death so often in the world thinking we’re walking in life. This is the trouble with the Jews. He says, you’re in… Excuse me. I’ve got to go back with that. You’re blind. You’re blind because you think you can see. This is at the tail end of John 9, where He’s dealing with a blind man who received his sight. He says, “You’re blind because you think you can see.” And when we think we have life and don’t have it, we live in death and we walk in death. And our pilgrimage in this life is very similar. As a matter of fact, we can parallel, if you want to go back to the Old Testament, and parallel the life of the Jews with the life of the Christians. Now, one of the things that the Jews knew that we don’t know is that God calls us to be a corporate body. He doesn’t call us to be just simply individuals. He adds us to the body as individuals. But when He gets us in the body, we are a body. And there’s no way you can put me out of that body.

There’s no way that you can cut me off of being your brother. If we’re going to choose the Lord as our brother, He has chosen everyone else that we have. And there’s no way I can put a barrier of separation between you and me.

And when we are called to the altar of God, we come there through baptism. And when Paul writes to the Corinthians, and he starts talking about what happened to Israel in the wilderness, he is talking about the prototype of sacramental worship. And he says, “We’re baptized into that rock.”

Where is it? Oh, “they were all baptized into Moses, in the cloud, and in the sea. And they ate the same supernatural food, and all drank of the same supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural rock which followed them, which was… the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.” And his continuation of writing about what happened to the people in the wilderness was a result of idolatry. They worshipped the calf. They murmured. They turned against God. They didn’t trust Him. And at each case, they lost something of their relationship to God on that journey. And there were thousands killed, as Paul points out. But he continues with this. And coming to the last part of the tenth chapter of John, he talks about… If we go to the fourteenth verse… “Therefore, my beloved, shun the worship of idols. I speak as to sensible men. Judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?” The Greek word koinonia, a mutual sharing of the blood of Christ. “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?” And you all know that blood is the seat of life. That’s what life travels in the Jewish mind.

As we receive the blood of Christ, we receive the life of Christ. And he doesn’t stop there. “The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread.” And it is in the Eucharist, the act of offering to God our self, body and soul, receiving the risen Christ in His body and blood, that we are made alive and substantially established in the kingdom of God. That the resurrection life of Jesus, which He prepared for us, is that which He gives us. If we go back and read the Synoptic Gospels, that’s Matthew, Mark and Luke, we find that at the end, at the Last Supper, when He was there with the disciples, He did not, that’s the last hour He spent with them, remember, He did not preach the Sermon on the Mount. He didn’t give them the parables of the kingdom again. He didn’t teach them anything. He took bread and He blessed it and He broke it and He gave it. And He said, “This is my body.” And He took the cup and He blessed it. He said, “This is my blood, which was shed for you and for many for the remission of sins.”

“Do this for the remembrance of me.” He made an appointment with His disciples as they came apart and gathered together in His body to say, “I will meet with you. And when you come together, I will give myself to you, that you might be one with me.” If we get back over to understand it’s over in the 17th chapter of John, that we might be one, even as He is one with the Father. That when we become one in Him, we become one with each other. Now, I think it’s very unfortunate that the sacrament of unity in the body of Christ has so often been the point of division within the body.

You know, I don’t want to believe that or I do want to believe that. I think what we need to say when we come to dealing with communion is that it is, it’s at least as much as all of us say it is. And we may say different things about it. So, somebody says, well, it’s just a memorial. Well, it may be just a memorial for some people, but it’s more than that. Jesus said it was more than that. He said, “I’m going to give you my body. This is the way I’m going to do it.” We go over to John in the sixth chapter.

We find an explanation after we’ve been born again that we must eat. And if we go down about the 50th verse, “This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eats of this bread, he shall live forever. And the bread that I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Now, when we attend worship, Jesus comes to us. Let’s go back where we were talking last night. Jesus comes to us in incarnate ways. He first appeared to us incarnate in the flesh of Mary. He put on His mother’s flesh so He could walk, so we could know Him. We could see Him, we could hear Him, we could touch Him. We knew He was there. He comes to us incarnate in the words of Holy Scripture, the Word of God incarnate in the words of men. And if that’s not true, at least in the spoken words of men, the Word of God is communicated. He is alive that way.

All of the words which I speak to you are not all the Word of God, but the Word of God speaks through those words. He comes to us incarnate in bread and wine in the Eucharist. That does not mean this is no longer bread and wine, but it means that incarnate in that bread and wine, there is Christ Jesus. This is why it’s over and over repeated in Scripture. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a remembrance of Christ, and it doesn’t mean that it’s a magical thing. It simply says, our Lord and Savior comes to us incarnate in every way. He comes to me incarnate in you. Whenever you reach out to me in love, He is incarnate in you. And His reality of His presence is there. Whatever you say, He’s there.

And whatever you say, He’s not there, that doesn’t make any difference to God. I think He would rather you believe that He’s there when He’s there. But there’s a story told in all three of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke about a lady who had an issue of blood. And when Jesus was going to Jairus’s house to raise His daughter from the dead, the crowd was going with Him and they were jostling Him all around. And she saw Him come and she says, “Boy, if I can just get in and touch the hem of His garment, I will be healed.” And she worked her way in through the crowd and she touched the hem of His garment and she was healed at that moment.

Because she knew what she was doing. She knew what she was going to receive. And the power was there for everyone else in that crowd. And they didn’t know. They touched Him. Oh, they touched Him. He wasn’t any less than that. But not knowing that, they did not receive what He was there to give to every person on earth.

And so as we come to an altar to receive the body and blood of Jesus, as we come to an altar to participate in communion, we participate in that kind of communion. What do we bring? If we’re dealing with a continuation of our baptism, we were baptized into Christ’s death and we’re raised up with Him in His resurrection, then we bring Him our death. Then we receive His resurrection. We bring Him our death and receive His life. We bring Him our sin and receive His righteousness. We offer to Him our inadequacy to receive His grace to fill our hearts. We offer to Him our brokenness and separation that He might unite us in one in the bond of His love in the body and blood of Christ. And it is in that body that we’re called to participate.

I’ve always been up front, usually, for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. I’ve never noticed too much. But I went back to an old parish one time to preach a sermon for the ordination of one of my friends. And in the process of preaching the sermon, I preached first and then the service went on. I sat in the front row. And as communion time came, I watched the people coming up. And I watched some dyed-in-the-wool 1928 prayer book traditionalists. I watched some very nominal Christians. I watched some raving charismaniacs. I watched some run-of-the-mill social actionists. I watched the whole thing. And I looked at the people and I said, “God, there isn’t but one person in all creation who could make a body out of this motley crew of human flesh.” But that’s what occurs. And if you do not want to live in the body of Christ, if you do not want to be welded in by the blood of Christ, then don’t ever go to communion. Because that’s part of the preparation. That’s what… I want to read… I want to read chapter 10 before I got to chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians. Because everybody reads chapter 11. And I think chapter 10 throws some light on it. Over in 11 it says, “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

“Let a man examine himself and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For if anyone eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” And we say, well, what is the body? Well, a lot of people say, that means that the bread is the body of Christ. Well, that’s true. But that’s not what it means also. What he also said in chapter 10 is, “Because there is one loaf, we are one body.” And as we participate in that sacramental giving of Himself by Jesus Christ, we are made one.

Now, if we’re not made one, if we live out in an isolated situation, then we are in hell, folks. Whether we like that or not, that’s sort of a definition of it. The isolation from the body, the excommunication, the moving away from that reality of the body. If you were to go back into Old Testament understanding, anyone cut off from Judaism was dead.

It was only when they were brought into the body, brought into the community, brought into the community of God’s people, that they were alive. And so it is with the new Israel. Now, the Jews had their sacraments. They had circumcision, which corresponds to our baptism. That’s the way they were incorporated into the community. And it was an external sign, and it was an internal sign. It began with the external, and no male Jew was considered part of the community if he was not circumcised on the eighth day. But that was not the end of the matter, because over in about the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy, it says, and God said, “I will circumcise your hearts. I will give you a heart.” And over in Ezekiel, it says, “I’ll take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” And Jeremiah says, and I will, “I’ll go one step further. I will write my law in your heart, so that no longer will every man have to say to his neighbor, thus saith the Lord.” The heart has to be changed, and that’s God’s business. We have got to deal with the externals. That’s our business.

Judaism also had a sacrament of the Passover. What did it mean? It meant that God had taken His people out of Egypt, out of bondage, and moved them into the promised land. And it was that feeding through the wilderness.

They participated in the blood marked by the blood of the lamb, fed by the flesh of the lamb. Early Christian communities saw this as the last rites. That was before they found out that unction was not working for them, and they relegated it to a last rite. But if anyone was dying, what they did is that they called someone, and they received communion. The ephodium, they called it. That means the one for the road. That was the thing that they took in that absack when they were making a journey. That’s what they received because that’s what carried them from this world to the next, from this life to the next. That is our Passover.

So we can say with Paul, “Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast.” The feast which feeds us for the journey. The feast in which we are marked for the blood of the Lamb. That the angel of death might not strike, but might pass over.

And our parallels are very close. And so as we come to communion, and as we come to our participation in it, that’s what we come to. We see this as an act of worship. We see it with all of the warnings given to Israel against idolatry. We see it as we come to say, if we are going to participate in the cup of blessing, we cannot participate in the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. It’s the cup of the Lord. And it continues through 11. The first part of 11 is about women. They shouldn’t stand up and prophesy without their head covered. I find it very strange that people say, Paul said women shouldn’t have any part in church services. He just said they need to have their head covered when they stand to prophesy.

If he said that, then it means they must be able to stand and prophesy. I can’t think of any other reason to say that. I liked what Anna Mow said about chapter 14 where he says, “Let the wives keep silent,” because they were over there gossiping about the other people in church. And they wouldn’t shut up when somebody was prophesying. That’s her speculation. I like that much better than saying Paul didn’t want women to speak.

But he continues and says, now when the body is welded together, then God furnishes. This chapter 12 is part of the worship section of Paul’s epistle. When the body is brought together in the Eucharist, then it’s to have the power tools, the gifts. Because it is one body. And God has taken the gifts and put them in the body. The Spirit has taken the gifts and put them in the body as He will, so the body will function right. So you can breathe, work, do what needs to be done to be Jesus Christ in the world. That which we’ve received, the incarnation of Jesus Christ in this body. He also enables in power to go forth. And then he says, in worship, that which is extraordinarily central is love.

And the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians deals with that. And then he finally finishes up with 14. But the worship begins with the prototype of the sacrament in Israel and it continues in what we’re doing and how we live with one another. If we don’t live it out with one another, it matters not what we do or what we say or what we believe.

If we go to John’s Gospel for the Last Supper, we find an entirely different story. Because we find no words of institution. We find that theology over in the 6th chapter of John where He says, He says, “The bread of heaven which comes down is me, my flesh which I will give for the life of the world.” He says, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” And when He says eat, the Greek word is trogon which means to crunch. And then He goes on and He says, “Now the outward sign, the flesh gives no life. The word is the spirit, the interior. The spirit gives life.” And so we have the external and the internal in everything that we do. You as a human being cannot give me life. But you as the incarnation of Jesus Christ can give me abundant life. Through you He can touch me, heal me, establish me. Through the body He can establish the world and reconcile it unto Himself. This is our purpose. For as God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, so also did He give this ministry of reconciliation to us.

But as John gets to the 13th chapter and we talk about the Last Supper, maybe I’ll read that. That’s a nice chapter to read. So in the 13th chapter of John, if anybody wants to look through there. I can’t see whether I’m there or not.

It says, Jesus, in the third verse, “Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside His garments and girded Himself with a towel. And then He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded. And He came to Simon Peter, and Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, do you wash my feet?’ And Jesus answered him, ‘What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.’ And Peter said to Him, ‘You shall never wash my feet.’

“And Jesus answered him, ‘If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.’” That’s kind of the way we treat Jesus. You know, Jesus, that’s not… I don’t want you to do that because that’s too demeaning to You. I’ll wash Your feet, Jesus, but You can’t wash mine.

And Jesus says to us, “Except I wash your feet, you have no part in me.” And so then we also act like Peter when he says, “Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head, everything.” Let me tell you how to do it, God. And that’s exactly what He did. And we do that to Him. We don’t come and say, Lord, here we are. We’re a living sacrifice. And we offer ourselves to You to be available to You.

We say, Lord, let me tell you what we need now. And as soon as we finish, You can do it for us. And then we’ll give You all the glory. That’s fine. And He said, “He who has bathed need not wash except for his feet, for he is clean all over, and you are all clean, but not every one of you.” For He knew who was to betray Him. And this is why He said, “You are not all clean.”

What we find in John’s Gospel in the 13th chapter is the meaning of communion in terms of allowing Jesus to wash us, to cleanse us, and to be a part of us. All the way through John’s Gospel, the word is, “I will abide in you. I will live in you. I will be in you. You will live in me.”

And then when He finally decides that it’s time to go, in the 17th chapter, “Father, I want to be with You, that You might live in me, and I with You, and that they might live in us.” We go in the 14th chapter of John, the Holy Spirit will come, and Father will love you because you’ve loved me, and we will come and make our dwelling in you. We get over to Ephesians, you might be filled with all the fullness of God. Nothing less than this is what God intends for us. It’s not simply a memory, it’s bringing into the reality of the past into the present. We’re bringing the resurrection of Jesus Christ into the lives of His people today. And so we do remember the body of Christ as we come together, and He takes you and you and you and you, and brings us together in the unity and bond of His love to remember the body of Christ, as we’re all members of that body.

We bring Him into the present because He is in the present. And we receive Him because He does give Himself to us. And over and over in the life of the church, this has been the central thing that we do. We come together in our life of offering as a life of praise. We sing praise to God. We give praise in word. We give praise in offering ourselves. We receive from Him the life that He wants to give to us.

And Jesus concludes this particular part in John’s Gospel over in 34 and 35, where He says, “There’s a new commandment I give to you, that ye love one another even as I have loved you, that ye love one another. And by this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that ye have love one for another.”

And so as we prepare ourselves for communion, which will be in a form that I’m not used to, and I’m certain that most of you have never been involved in a service conducted by clowns, I think we need to say and know that a clown is not someone who makes fun of anything, but rather someone who breaks us out of the commonplace to make unique that which we’re doing, to bring our attention back to the reality that we come to die with Christ. At every communion service, we come to die with Christ, and to be raised up with Him in His resurrection. And for that reason, the other clowns will have some mark of red, the color of resurrection. The color that started on the white-faced clown broke the death mask. And so there’s something more. There is a reality of resurrection that we must point to. And the color is this.

As we prepare, we prepare by saying, “I’m willing, I’m willing, Lord, to forgive everyone against whom I have anything.” I don’t know about you here, but I’ve found that I’m not always able. There are some people, as a matter of fact, I have one guy in my congregation, down in Ocala, Florida, it took me three years, to learn to love him. He had committed his life to saying, “I’m going to block your ministry if I don’t do anything else.” Now, he did it in the name of Jesus, because he thought I was of Satan.

I used to teach Bible, and he’d stand up and refute everything I said right after. I said, “Is there anybody who’s got any questions or comments?” And he’d stand up and give a five-minute lecture on where it was wrong. Now, I don’t see how you can do that when we’re all you both using the same text saying the same thing. But he did. Because he was bent into this. And I asked the Lord, I said, “Lord, can I throw him out?” And He said, “No.” I said, “Well, can I make him sit down and shut up?” He said, “No.” I said, “What can I do with him?” He said, “You can love him.” I said, “I can’t love him.” He said, “Well, I’ll show you how. That’s what he’s here for, to teach you something about loving people like him.”

And it took him three years. I found that in that place I was condemned. I caught it from the traditionalist on one side and the charismatic on the other side. I wasn’t charismatic enough on one end and I was too charismatic on the other end. And I had some people accuse me and condemn me for things that I wasn’t guilty of. And I promptly retaliated by condemning them. And the Lord says, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “You watch me. That’s what I can do. I can do that good.” He said, “But you won’t like it.” And He was right. And I came back humbly saying, “Father, You’re right. Will You teach me to love them?” And He says, “Okay.” And this guy was the one that He used.

And after three years, I did learn to love him. But it was three years of continually offering to God my inadequacy, my emptiness, my inability to love him on my own. And God gave me the love for him. And it was in a Eucharistic participation of offering and receiving, of dying and being raised up. And the strange thing was, when I got to where I loved him, he left the church.

And he went to about five or six different fellowships who kept throwing him out because they didn’t mind. We can’t do that, brethren. If we live in a Eucharistic communion fellowship with Jesus Christ, we cannot unchurch anyone else. He does not give us that authority. He gives us the authority to reconcile and to live and to love and to share.

So as we prepare, we have to be willing, not able. And being willing, we come for the ability to receive the ability that we don’t have. We’ve come recognizing that it’s not simply one of these things where me and Jesus have a good thing going. It is a situation where we, as the body, are brought together and established in His love.

Whereas we break bread together in the presence of Jesus Christ and we are united with Him. We’re united one to another. And so I think we need to be discerning of the body. And I think this is what Paul is saying to us. That we discern, one, that Jesus Christ comes to us in this life. Two, that in the context of His body, He means for us to be one. And there’s nothing more serious in all of our faith than that. In the context of His body, He means for us to be one.

And it is that to which we’re called to know. Perhaps that is not commonplace to you. Perhaps it is. I don’t know how you approach the altar. But I think for all of us, it is a time to look, to see, and to offer to God our will, our resentments, our inadequacies, our weakness. That we might receive from Him, His life, His strength, His love. And the unity, and the manifestation of that unity in His body.

For this, He died and was raised up. And as we go, perhaps I too can put a little grease on my face. And become one of the resurrected. And as we participate, as the risen people of God, living in Him, and allowing Him to live in us. The reality of the presence of the risen Christ in you. The hope of glory.

And to that table, I invite you, for His servants, who may not appear the way you want them to appear, in the solemnity of holiness as we perceive it in the church. But rather, in the reality of life, as we’re called, yield our bodies to living sacrifice. And to know, to reach out, to touch the hem of His garment. To know the power of God and His Christ. And the unity and bond of His love. There is a memory. There is a memorial. And we need to recall, Christ died for you.

And He poured out His blood that we might receive His life. He gave His body that we might receive and be made one in Him, that He might dwell in us. Up until I came to this camp, I talked to Sister Mary Bernard and… Her experience, she says, “I’ve known Jesus ever since I was seven.” I’ve heard one other person say that. Barbara Ann Chase, who’s also a CFO speaker. When she was seven, she made her first communion in the Roman Catholic Church. And the sisters told her, “Now, when you receive the host, you are receiving Jesus. And He will be in you.” And then they forgot to tell them that when they finished adjusting the host and it was gone, then He was gone. And so they didn’t know that. And so they would go around and say, “Jesus, are you still there?” And He’d say, “Yes.”

And so we receive and renew that relationship. As we come to the altar of God. To give. To know. To receive. To be made one. And our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let us pray. Jesus, we do thank You.

That You died for us. And that You were raised up for us. And we thank You that what we have to be as we come to the altar to be worthy is to know that we’re not. But to be willing to have You have Your way in us.

And so we come accepting that reality. Which You bring to us from Your resurrection power. That we might receive You and one another. And the unity and bond of that love that we may truly be one. That You and the Father are one. And we become one with You. We may become also one with each other. And that we might show forth to the world the glory of that unity. And the diversity of the people that You’ve called together to be Your body. In Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.