Received & Handed On - Sermon Transcript

Well, good morning again.

My name is Monica.

I'm one of the associate ministers here for one more day.

And I am really excited to be with you all this morning, as it is my last Sunday on our staff here.

And on Tuesday night, I was officially ordained as an elder in the United Methodist Church, which...

 Thank you.

Thanks.

Thank you.

So it means the church has stuck with me forever.

And it's been a long road.

Thank you.

But I want to say something to anybody in the room or watching online who is feeling a nudge toward ministry right now.

You can think of a million reasons why

 it won't work, why it can't be you, why the timing is wrong or the path is too complicated or the cost is too high, but I am living, breathing proof that the Spirit has a way of making a way where there was no way, right?

 The first time that I felt that nudge towards ordination, towards ministry in this way, I was actually in grad school at Notre Dame.

I was raised Catholic, so Notre Dame was Catholic Disneyland, right?

It was an amazing place to learn and grow, and as I sensed God calling me toward ordained ministry,

 And realizing I was in a tradition where that door was really closed to me, I set it aside.

And at that time, I actually set church altogether aside.

And my first job out of grad school, out of seminary, I was directing a faith-based AmeriCorps program.

 And that's where I landed.

But God really never quite left me alone.

One afternoon while I was leading a retreat for these young adults who were passionate about justice and really working on changing the world, I found myself sitting in an empty old antebellum church in a town called Grand Coteaux, Louisiana.

 And I was sitting up in the balcony and kind of feeling really far away from the table where the action is, right?

And recognizing that the seats that I was sitting in, that balcony, was built for our enslaved people to sit sort of furthest away.

 from Christ's table.

And something happened to me in that silence, in that moment, that I really don't still quite have adequate words to explain, but what I know is that I was really overwhelmed with a sense of God's peace and presence in a way that I had never really experienced before.

And what came to me was not words exactly, but just a sense of something like this, that God said, this is my table,

 and you are welcome here.

You may not be able to host the meal right now, but you can go and wash people's feet.

So go and do that, and the rest will come.

The rest will come.

 I didn't know then what that would entail.

I didn't know what that would cost.

I didn't know what ordination would require or how long that road would be.

Turned out it was nine years before the church got it together.

Mitchell's dad actually in 2017 came up to me and he said, you clearly have a call to ministry.

Let's get you ready.

And I said, well, the church isn't ready for me to do that.

And he said, well, let's get you ready so that when the church is ready, we can just go.

 But I just knew in that moment in Louisiana, something had been placed in me in that moment, something I didn't generate and couldn't explain, something that has been working in me ever since.

And that's how this tradition works.

 It finds you in an empty room.

It hands you something that you didn't ask for, and then it sends you out to hand it on to others.

Which brings me to what Paul writes to the church in Corinth.

I invite you to listen to how Paul describes it.

This is on page 173 in your pew Bibles, or the words will be on your screen.

This is 1 Corinthians chapter 11, and we'll start in verse 23.

 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body that is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

 In the same way, he took the cup also after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

I invite you to pray with me.

 May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer, the one who has handed on something to us and invites us to hand it on to others.

Amen.

 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you.

That word, handed on, is sort of a technical Greek term.

That word is sort of transmission of a living tradition passed from hand to hand, table to table, generation to generation.

Paul didn't originate it when he handed it on to the Corinthians.

 He received it first himself.

And that's one of the things where I think things get interesting.

The same Greek word that Paul uses for handed on is also the word in the Gospels for what's used where Judas did to Jesus in terms of being handed over.

Betrayal and transmission share the same word.

 On the very night that the body of Christ was being handed over to its enemies, Jesus was handing it on to his friends.

The story survived its own undoing, and it's been surviving ever since through empire and division and centuries of ordinary people who received something they didn't originate and couldn't stop passing on.

 And here's what I want you to understand about that chain, that handing on.

This isn't a game of telephone, right?

You remember how telephone works, that someone whispers something at one end, and by the time it reaches the other end, it's barely recognizable to what it started as, right?

Each transmission a little distorted, a little more diluted, a little further from the original.

That's not how this handing on works.

This is Levin.

 Yeast hidden in dough that doesn't weaken as it passes on.

How many of you have inherited a sourdough starter from somebody else, right?

It multiplies.

It activates.

What you receive doesn't diminish with the handing on.

It becomes alive in a new place, in new hands, at a new table.

This tradition doesn't degrade.

It rises like yeast.

 That's the chain that you and I are a part of, not because we were extraordinary, but because we showed up.

You showed up on a Sunday in summer, gold stars, because something found us in an empty room or at a table or in a moment we didn't plan and handed us something that we've been carrying with us ever since.

 Paul quotes Jesus as saying, do this in remembrance of me.

How many of us have seen that carved into a communion table, right?

In remembrance of me.

And we hear that oftentimes, I think, as don't forget or keep the memory alive, right?

That's mostly how we interpret it.

The way you

 You might save a voicemail from someone who's died because you can't bear to delete the sound of their voice, or the way you make your grandmother's cornbread dressing over Thanksgiving even though yours will never taste as good as hers.

That idea of keeping memory alive, that's not exactly what this is.

 The Greek word anamnesis for memory there, to do this in memory is something much more active than that.

It's not just remembering.

The best parallel we have is actually the Passover table, the Seder.

Every year, as Jewish families gather around the table at Passover, the Haggadah doesn't say your ancestors were slaves in Egypt.

It says you were slaves in Egypt.

In every generation,

 Each person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally came out of Egypt.

Not their great, great, great grandparents, but them.

And Paul is drawing on that exact same tradition.

When we come to this table here, we're not standing outside of a 2,000-year-old story as observers.

We are inside it.

 The upper room is not behind us.

In the past, it surrounds us and dwells within us, and the people who would gather at this table 2,000 years from now are connected to us the same way that we are connected to that first night where Jesus broke bread and poured cup.

This is not a memorial.

It is a participation, which I think changes everything about how we come here.

You are not an audience.

 at something being performed at the front of the room, like I thought all those years ago in Grand Coteau, you are a link in a living chain.

Something is being handed to you today, and that same something has been passed through every broken and faithful and ordinary community that kept showing up and kept breaking bread across 20 centuries.

 And here's what I want you to feel in that.

Not the weight of it, like the stakes are so high, what if we drop the ball?

Not the weight of it, but the relief of it.

You didn't start this, right?

You don't have to finish it.

You just have to receive it faithfully and let it work in you.

That's what Levin does.

It doesn't announce itself.

It just works its way into everything.

 And here's where I want to slow down and sort of be honest, because I think the text presents us with a problem.

And the problem is this.

I think we have in some ways taken the most dangerous meal in human history and turned it into the most respectable ritual in Western culture.

 Paul isn't writing to the Corinthians because they forgot the words of institution.

He's not sending a letter across the Mediterranean because their liturgy was sloppy or their theology was imprecise.

He's writing because of what was happening before the bread was broken.

 The wealthier members of the community were arriving early, having a full meal, the good food, the good wine, the good company with people like themselves.

And by the time the day laborer showed up, the working poor, the people who couldn't leave until their work was done, the food was gone, and some of the hosts were already drunk.

 And then they broke bread together and called it the Lord's Supper.

Paul is furious.

He's saying, that is not the Lord's Supper you're eating.

That is just a dinner party with a prayer at the end.

Because the table of Jesus was never a dinner party with a prayer at the end.

There's a New Testament scholar, Robert Karras, who puts it like this.

He says, Jesus basically died because of how he ate and who he ate with.

 In a world sorted, in Roman world sorted rigidly by ethnicity and class and gender, where you only sit and eat with people like you, where the table was one of the primary ways that Roman society maintained its hierarchy, Jesus kept setting a table

 where the wrong people showed up and were welcomed, where there were always more and more chairs pulled up.

That's not a minor theological footnote.

That's the reason Rome broke his body.

And when Jesus says, this is my body for you, that word for is critical.

His whole life was a body for others, for the ones nobody else was showing up for, for the ones that empire had decided didn't count.

 That's what he handed on, not just a ritual, a practice, a way of setting a table that kept refusing to sort people by worth.

The world is still sorting people by worth.

This table says otherwise.

 And here's where I think there's a tension for us to name, and I own this too.

I think we come to this table on Sunday, and we receive something that proclaims, here in this room, the world's sorting systems do not apply.

And then we walk out these doors, and we spend Monday through Saturday participating in exactly those systems without noticing.

We decide who's called to return, whose neighborhood to invest in,

 whose crisis is urgent enough to interrupt our day, in a thousand small, ordinary decisions, we determine who counts and who doesn't.

And most of the time, I think we don't even notice we're doing it.

That's the problem with receiving something this radical and only letting it be active on Sunday morning.

We haven't received the leaven, we've just admired the bread.

 So what does carrying the table into the week actually look like?

It looks like noticing who's missing from the tables you sit at during the week, your work meetings, your neighborhood gatherings, your dinner parties, and asking why.

 and then doing something about it, right?

It looks like calling the person that everyone else has quietly stopped calling because their situation is too hard or the call gets too long or too complicated to fix.

It looks like how you spend your money, whether you let this table's spirit of abundance and generosity interrupt the anxiety and scarcity that the market tries to convince you is just good, responsible business practice, money practice.

 It looks like showing up for the ones in the world that the world has decided don't count with the same quality of presence you would offer someone that the world decides matters most.

 And none of that's dramatic, right?

All of it is just the table being carried out these doors.

The leaven is not safe.

It was never meant to be.

It wasn't then for Jesus, and it isn't now.

This is what you have been entrusted with, and that is what gets handed on.

 So one of the things I want to say before I finish out my last day here at First United Methodist Church of Dallas is I came to this church two years ago, not really feeling like I had it all together, but thinking I at least had something to offer.

And I did, I hope.

But what I didn't fully anticipate was how much you were going to hand on to me.

That's how Levin works.

I think you don't always know it's working until you look back and realize something in you has changed.

 Something has risen that wasn't there before.

That's why you draw a line on the jar of your sourdough, right?

So you can see what's working.

You have changed me by taking a genuine interest in my life, asking how my mom's doing or how Lolly's doing, seeing me as a person, not just as a pastor.

And when I started walking alongside y'all two years ago, I didn't feel ready to lead a church, to be a senior pastor.

Year 11,

 has enlivened me with clarity of purpose, and I carry that with me as I step more fully into my calling.

I've also watched you carry what happens at this table back into the world in ways that had nothing to do with me.

I've seen you show up for one another in hard times, the diagnosis, the quiet crisis that nobody else knew about, the grief.

You've sat with people

 I've watched you pull up a chair at the messiest of tables and assured folks across from you that we belong to one another, no matter what.

All of that with a quality of being present to one another that's unmistakably shaped by what happens here at this table.

 As you leavened the world, you have leavened me, and I want you to know that, that I'm leaving this place with more than I brought, way more than I brought, more honesty about my limitations, more conviction that God works through communities like this one, imperfect but faithful, still showing up.

 And I want you to hear this.

The leaven also doesn't leave with me.

It never belonged to me.

It was here before I arrived and it will be here long after I'm gone because it doesn't depend on any one person keeping it going.

It depends on communities like this one continuing to show up and let whatever happens here at this table work in them as they leaven the world out there.

 Paul ends with this phrase that I don't want us to rush past.

He says, until he comes.

Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

That's not a footnote.

That is the whole story.

 We're a people who live in the in-between, between the first breaking of bread in an upper room under threat of empire and that feast that Isaiah describes of the heavenly banquet where God will wipe away every tear and swallow up death forever, and the table will finally have room for everyone that was ever turned away from every table that came before it.

We stand in that in-between.

 That is what this church is for.

Not to have arrived, not to have figured it all out, but to keep setting the table in the gap between what is and what is coming.

In a few minutes, we're going to do what the church has always done.

 We'll take bread, we'll take cup, we'll remember in the way that makes us participants rather than spectators, proclaim the Lord's death, embody, however imperfectly, a table that refuses to sort people by worth.

 and then go back out into the world as Levin, not because we're ready, not because we have it all together, not because the road ahead is clear or the work is easy or the cost is small, but because something was handed on to us that we did not originate and we do not own,

 something that has survived empire and betrayal and 2,000 years of ordinary people who couldn't stop passing it on, something that found me in an empty church in Louisiana and said, this is my table, and you are welcome here.

Go wash feet.

The rest will come.

It came, and now I hand it on to you.

Go and do likewise.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.