Scripture: Luke 11:9-13
In the book Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt tells the story of his first communion as a boy in the town in Ireland where he grew up. His family attended a Catholic church that attached great significance to this milestone in a child’s spiritual development. Alas, to say the least, little Frank’s first communion did not go well.
He almost slept through it. He had to rush his morning bath and emerged from it looking like he had a mop on his head, prompting his grandmother to spit repeatedly on his hair to try to pat it down. They barely made it to the church on time, earning a nasty glare from the grumpy priest. And the communion wafer got stuck to the roof of Frank’s mouth.
When Frank finally managed to swallow the wafer, elation followed. God had been good to him. The ceremony was complete. “At last,” McCourt writes, “I was a member of the True Church, an official sinner.”
I don’t remember my first communion, and if it was anything like Frank McCourt’s then maybe that’s for the best. I suppose it’s unsurprising that the event escapes my memory. It probably took place over sixty years ago and there have been lots and lots of communions since them.
I’ve lost count of my communions, as I suspect most of you have. In my case, the number is magnified by the fact that (although I was baptized in the Congregational church) for a long time I attended a Methodist church that offered communion at its early service every week.
The practice returned that church to its Methodist roots. You see, way back in eighteenth-century England, John and Charles Wesley and their followers at Oxford got a reputation for taking a disciplined and highly methodical approach to their faith. This included frequent celebrations of communion. The other students started calling them “Methodists” as an insult, but the Wesley brothers rather liked the label and it stuck.
Communion has always held a special place in my spiritual heart. I find it centering and calming, meditative and moving. And, every time we do it, I’m struck anew by the fact that we are reenacting the words and actions of Jesus himself.
There is a direct line that goes straight from the starting point—the ancient night when he and the disciples met in the Upper Room in Jerusalem—to this end point here in our little meeting house in Suttons Bay, Michigan. And I’m humbled to think of the great cloud of saints and sages, of kings and commonfolk, who over the centuries have engaged in the same rite that we will celebrate together this morning. It’s a stunning idea.
But here is what I want you to know: The communion that will be most important to me in the course of my entire life may very well be the communion that I will share with you this morning. And, to understand why, I’m going to need to go back to our scripture for today, the eleventh chapter of Luke, verses nine through thirteen.
It’s a familiar passage to all of you, I’m sure, especially those lines: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” And I hope you will all indulge me for a moment if I testify about some of the knocking at doors that I’ve done in my own life, doors that I thought were closed.
Now, a cardinal rule of preaching is that you shouldn’t make yourself the center of a sermon, but like most rules exceptions sometimes apply. And I’m not even sure I’m making an exception in this case. Because, as I hope you’ll see, this sermon actually has something other than me at the center of it. Indeed, it has many somethings there. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.
There’s a long version of this story, but the short one goes like this. For roughly the past half century, I’ve wrestled with the idea of going to seminary and studying theology and ministry. Jacob, who became famous for wrestling with God for just one night, has got absolutely nothing on me. I’ve got Jacob good and whupped by fifty years. That path has appeared on the horizon before me repeatedly throughout my life. But it has always arrived at something that looked, for all the world, like a dead end.
I’ll give you just one example. After Lisa and I were still relatively newly married, I told her that I had some unfinished business in matters of faith and that I wanted to enroll in a Master of Divinity degree program at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit. That unfinished business started years before, when I was in college and law school and I had the chance to study with David Noel Freedman and Hans Kung, two giants of twentieth-century biblical scholarship and theology. Those studies left me with an itch that badly needed scratching.
Lisa, who indulges my every insane idea with a preternatural patience, threw her full support behind the project. I enrolled at the seminary, took classes in theology, the Bible, and preaching (although you may think there’s scant evidence that I received any training at all in that last discipline), and I was well on my way.
But, then, tragedy struck our family and a beloved nephew of mine passed away unexpectedly. Children were stranded. They needed parents. And Lisa and I decided to become two of them. This new and ambitious project obviously left no time for seminary. I left the seminary to be a parent, although as I remarked at the time I suspect that parenting is probably just seminary by another name.
The day I left that seminary in Detroit was a sad one for me. It seemed clear that my aspirations toward a degree and ordination had come to an abrupt and irreversible halt. I went to lunch with a faculty member with whom I had become close and talked to him about my excitement over becoming a parent, but also my keen disappointment over having to leave the program.
He smiled and said: “Well, Len, I think you’ll be okay. Do you know who else didn’t have a degree and formal ordination? Try Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, and Paul. Try John the Baptist. Try Jesus himself. You’re in very distinguished company.” It made me smile, but I certainly knew that I wasn’t any of those heroes of the faith, and I suspected that this door had permanently closed in front of me.
Then, all sorts of remarkable things happened. The Rev. Joy Barrett, the senior pastor at our church in Chelsea, asked me to preach there—once a month, no less—my lack of a degree and ordination notwithstanding. The law school accepted my proposal to teach a course in law and theology, giving me a wonderful excuse to take a deep dive not just into the Bible but into religion generally. Kind people started asking me to officiate at their weddings, to speak at memorial services for their family members—in short, to do many of the things that ordained people with divinity degrees do.
I will be honest with you. I sometimes felt unqualified to do what I was doing. I felt like the guy in the Monty Python skit who claims to be qualified to work as a lion tamer because he owns the appropriate hat.
But I also felt strongly called to do it. I figured that God either knew what He was doing or had a spectacular sense of humor. I wanted to find out which it was.
When Lisa and I shifted the center of our life to Leelanau, we started looking for a church up here. It seemed to me very likely that I was leaving behind much or all of what I’d had at that church in Chelsea. The door seemed to have closed again.
But then one weekend we wandered into the Suttons Bay Congregational Church and we heard a sermon preached by this warm, funny, brilliant, and immensely gifted pastor named Robin Carden. We invited her over to visit on the front porch of our farmhouse so we could get to know each other better. In passing, I told Robin about the things I’d done with our church in Chelsea and the next thing I knew I was standing where I am standing this morning. That Robin would trust me with something she treasures so greatly—her beloved and loveable congregation—never ceases to amaze me.
After I’d been at it for a while, and none of you had fled the building screaming or had charged me with heresy, an even more remarkable thing happened: You made me your Lay Minister for Worship. And, in the process, you gave me a remarkably broad job description. I don’t need anyone to tell me about amazing grace. In your hands, I’ve had quite a lot of personal experience with it.
Now, I’m telling you all of this because there is one part of that job description that I frankly never thought it would fall to me to do. As you can perhaps guess, that part involves leading this congregation in the sharing of communion. Granted, my charge here approves my doing it in Robin’s absence. But most years Robin is only gone on one or two communion Sundays during the entire year and, in the past, other ordained clergy have stepped in to fill the gap.
Well, that brings us to today. A few months ago, Robin and I settled on the dates during her sabbatical when I would preach. Today was one of the dates we chose. And it was only later that the light went on in both of our heads that this meant I would need to lead communion today.
Again, I will be honest with you. I assumed that this was one of those doors that was shut and would stay that way. I have lived long enough, and with enough disappointment, to understand that some doors do. But then, as we like to say in this church, God winked.
Now, I suppose that in a sense the story I’ve just told you is a story “about me.” But let me hasten to emphasize two points.
First, absolutely nothing I’ve said is intended to suggest that I am in any way special. Quite the contrary. Like Frank McCourt, I view myself as just another “official sinner.” As your Lay Minister for Worship, I’m an official sinner with a title.
Second, and more importantly, for the purpose for which I am telling it this isn’t a story about me at all. Not at all. I’m telling this story because it’s a story about you. About all of you. About every last one of you.
About your generosity. About your trust. About your faith. About your open hearts and your open minds. About your willingness to create space for the Holy Spirit to do its work. About your dedication to ensuring that as the Spirit moves around, as it is inclined to do, it doesn’t run head-on into any closed doors.
But let me return us to that scripture in Luke. During one of her sermons this summer, Robin introduced me to a book called First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. It is a lovely, lyrical, potent, and powerful retelling of the New Testament in the language and through the eyes of Native American spirituality. If you don’t know it, I commend it to your attention.
Here’s how the First Nations Version (or FNV) translates our passage from Luke:
“So, keep dancing your prayers, and the way will open before you. Search for the ancient pathways, and you will find them. Keep sending up your prayers, and they will be heard. Answers will come to the ones who ask, good things will be found by the ones who search for them, and the way will open before the ones who keep dancing their prayers.”
As we walk together this morning down the ancient pathway of communion, I invite you to think on all the ways in which this church has helped you to keep dancing your prayers.
Your prayers of community. Your prayers of understanding. Your prayers of love and service. Your prayers of music and worship. Your prayers of comfort and consolation. Your prayers of laughter and joy. Your prayers of everything from Christmas pageants to Halloween Hootenannies to donkey showers. And it gets done because here, in this little meeting house, your prayers are our prayers—and we all dance them together.
God bless this place. God bless this congregation. Where all are welcome. Where all are wanted. Where all doors are open. Where all things that matter can be sought and found.
And the people said: Amen.
