“Death Threat” (1 Corinthians 11:17-34a)

Sermon Preached by the Reverend Dr. Luke A. Powery

PTS Opening Communion Service

January 28, 2008

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”  Paul can’t be serious that this is what we are to proclaim on the very first day of the spring semester when it’s supposed to be about a new beginning with new classes, new ideas, new projects, new professors, new grades, maybe even new attitudes?  Proclaim death when we’ve been killed already by taking and grading final exams and papers? You gotta be kidding me.  We don’t want to hear this bad news Paul. Advent just finished. We just sang “Jesus What a Wonderful Child.”   Santa Claus just came to town. Lent hasn’t even started yet and you, Paul, want us to proclaim a disturbing death?!  We already hear and live enough bad news in our world. We want to hear some good news for a change! We want to clap and shout or declare hallelujah and praise the Lord or pass the peace and sit in silence and live in another world even for a little while so we can forget our reality . . . of death! But, Paul doesn’t allow us to do that. Every time you eat this bread and drink the cup, whenever we have communion, we declare death. You can’t run from it. You can’t hide from it.  Death is at the heart of the Christian faith and at the heart of Christian hope and at the heart of Christian worship. 

If you don’t believe me, just ask the peaceful founder of the Taize community in France, Bro. Roger, who was fatally stabbed to death by a mentally ill woman during a prayer service.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had just finished his homily and was about to begin the liturgy of the eucharist in El Salvador, when he was fatally shot in the chest, bleeding to death.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Alberta King, the mother of Dr. Martin Luther King, who while playing some smooth harmonies on the organ at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, had her life stolen by a sniper’s bullet.  Worship is a dangerous act because we are threatened by death every time we enter those Miller Chapel doors and I’m not talking about being bored to death.  The table of death is staring right at us this morning. 

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”  Death is not only at the table but it’s all around us. We’re slowly dying even now. Every tick of the clock, we’re in funeral preparation mode. In fact, we’re in a funeral procession.  Death is threatening us everywhere we turn. Death has even set up a website—deathclock.com. All you have to do is put in the necessary information and Death will be so kind to predict how much longer you have to live.  I have about 40 more years!

But we know friends, loved ones, strangers, enemies, the known, and unknown who didn’t have that long to live. Death has snatched them from this life.  Death is no respecter of persons.  Death is all around us. Death threatens us. He’s unavoidable and it seems like he’s winning, whether by murder or mistake.  Death is snooping around looking for his next victim. But don’t be fooled, death is not just physical due to a man in Omaha, Nebraska randomly shooting people at a shopping mall or a man hearing voices in his head telling him to shoot people in a Colorado church or suicide bombs going off in Algeria or Pakistan or an Iraqi solider tortured to death because of cruel war or a former prime minister being assassinated or senseless killings, machete-style, in Jamaica or Kenya due to raw politics or an orphan dying of AIDS in Trenton or a plastic surgery gone wrong with Kanye West’s mother or losing a loved one to cancer. No.  Death is not just physical. Death is also relational.

All of this right in the private confines of someone’s home because the Lord’s supper was a meal eaten by a community in a private home as part of the common meal. So in someone’s home, at the table, there are those who don’t wait for the others to start eating and those who disregard individuals who have nothing to eat.  Talk about bad table manners! Paul is not dealing with wrong sacramental theology but wrong social relations in the community. He’s dealing with “practical ecclesiology” as one scholar calls it.  Ignoring a need and selfishly only worrying about “me, myself, and I.”  This sacrament of unity is one of disunity for this congregation. They’re not being one and they don’t care. There’s no sense of the common good.  It’s one big mess.  They’ve forgotten how to love God and each other.  They forget what it means to be Christian and “demonstrate an odd amnesia about Jesus’ death.” They smell like death. . . . and it stinks.

Don’t be fooled. Many times we smell like death too because of the way we treat each other.  It’s not just that church in Corinth but it’s us.  We are dead men and women walking. The living dead.  Rose and I were sitting in a restaurant sharing a meal together one afternoon. She began telling me about her relationship with her husband over the years and how he had abused her and her daughter and yet she remained married to him. At one point in the conversation, after hearing the horrific stories and seeing the tears of pain drop from her face, I said to her, “that’s not living.” Rose replied, “Luke, I died a long time ago.”

You see you don’t need a gun to kill someone.  Many of us are dead because someone told us we would amount to nothing and had no gifts and we still struggle with this even in pristine Princeton. We’re dead because someone killed us with hateful words, linguistic bombs, seminary terrorism.  Many of us are dead because we’ve had an abusive past and see no reason for living in the present.  This hurtful past does not seem to go away as others walk past you everyday on this campus, without even looking at you to acknowledge your humanity.  If we had it all together, if we weren’t dead, President Torrance would not have to send out an email to us entitled “courtesy.”

If killing someone else isn’t enough, sometimes we cause our own death by comparing ourselves with others, competing and striving to be better than another in order to climb the ladder of academic and ecclesiastical success—to write more books, get more A’s, trying to stand out, marketing one’s uniqueness, not waiting for another at the theological table because that would mean not thinking of oneself first.  We cause our own death sometimes when we demonize and disregard those who are different from us.  Those who don’t look like us, act like us, think like us, worship like us, sing like us, dance like us, talk like us . . . We die because we destroy our relationships with other people just because they are not us!  We kill each other by our actions toward one another and by doing so we kill ourselves, committing relational homicide and suicide.  We forget what Desmond Tutu says—“We are all parts of each other.”  That’s why the Corinthians were dying---relational homicide and suicide. But I smell death here.  Even the death of Christ.

There’s blood all over this passage.  “Every time you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s [bloody] death until he comes.” Why would Paul place the words of institution, calling us to remember Christ’s broken body and poured out blood, in the midst of talking about this community’s division? Why? At first, it made no sense to me and I wanted to recommend Paul to the PTS writing center because it seemed like he needed a writing tutor.  The flow and structure of his argument appeared to be interrupted abruptly by this Christocentric inclusion. It seemed out of place.  But then I realized that Paul knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted us to remember that Christ too suffered death, not just this congregation.  Christ was a “lynched word,” as theologian James Cone says. He was terribly tortured. He was pierced in his side. Nailed in the hands. Had a crown of thorns crushed on his head. Bruised and broken. Hung out to dry and die on an old-rugged cross on a hill far away.  He died a bloody death so our worship has drops of blood all over it. 

My daughter, Moriah, wanted to know about Good Friday and Easter. And of course, my wife waited for me to get home to give her a deep theological answer. Moriah was very excited to hear about it as she sat at the dinner table with a smile of anticipation. I sat down and began with Good Friday. When I told her that Good Friday is the day we remember the death of Jesus. She immediately said “that’s no fun.”  She didn’t even want to hear about Easter after that. She’s right.  Death is no fun and it’s not funny to lynch an innocent man on the cross or in an electric chair or in a dungeon of torture in Iraq.  We can’t clean up the bloody Christ with spiritual bleach. Leave the blood of death because death keeps Christianity real and connected to the way life really is. We can’t praise and worship without acknowledging pain. You can’t have resurrections without crucifixions. You can’t truly celebrate until you learn how to lament.  There’s shed blood all over our worship when the only thing we can shed (and hardly shed) is a tear.  There’s blood on the organ, blood on the choir, blood on the pews, blood on the pulpit, and blood on the table.  We proclaim the Lord’s death. The crucified Christ. Not just Christ but a crucified One. A Messiah, a king who dies like a criminal. A Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered (Rev. 5).

A bloody crucifixion that ultimately puts an end to the way we kill each other, our death.  That’s why Paul highlights the death of Christ here in the midst of the deathly actions of the Corinthians—Christ’s death is supposed to put an end to all death.  Recalling his death is a reminder to this community that Christ died to destroy our death-breeding divisions.  Wake up Corinthians! It’s no coincidence that right in the middle of his chastisement of this church for their social division, he proclaims the death of the Lord.  Death right in the middle of division and discrimination and death. More death in the midst of death.  But Paul is saying Christ’s death destroys death.  His death negates death. His death denies death. His is a death threat to death for the life of the world. 

His death means life for the community of faith. The phrase “until he comes” implies that he went somewhere and that death did not defeat him.  As the Apostle’s Creed notes, he “descended into hell” and eventually “he ascended into heaven.”  Christ defeated death so that the Corinthians would not have to kill each other anymore.  Death to divisions and social discrimination and stratification. Death to selfish behavior and hoarding of food and drink. Death to disrespecting another human being. Death to the split between haves and have-nots.  That’s why Paul, after reciting the words of institution, proclaiming the Lord’s death, he tells them to “examine” themselves, to “discern the body” and “when you come together to eat, wait for another” for Christ is already there waiting for them at the table.  The death of Christ alters how they should relate to each other.  “Examine yourselves” in light of the selfless death of Christ. Paul doesn’t call for examination until he declares the death of Christ. The cross which inaugurates the turn of the ages calls the Corinthians to turn towards God’s way of being in the world, God’s way of being in community where the worldly status of wealth and power does not privilege the rich over the poor and weak. Rather there is mutual respect and love for one another as the future new creation of God manifests in the present. It’s a call to probe and match their present with the eschatological promise. The death and blood of Christ pours life into the church community because an eschatological blood transfusion from Jesus Christ restores life.  

By no means is this a celebration of death and violence but it is the acknowledgement of the ultimate destruction of death and all means of violence.  It is a call for the end of death and violence in any shape or form. Christ died to put an end to death and he kills it with his life and love.  That means that the way we kill each other, death, does not have the final word, is not the way it ought to be or will be, is not God’s vision for God’s people.  For death did not ultimately defeat Christ so we can say with Paul “Death has been swallowed up in victory” and ask “death where is your sting? Grave where is your victory?”(1 Cor.15-KJV)  Resurrection life steals death’s sting.  Because of Christ’s death, we can have life even now in this PTS community.  That’s what the Lord’s Supper is about—being the one body of Christ, life in community.  Christ dies that we might come together, being broken for each other, poured out for each other, waiting for each other. That we might really have communion. When we remember the body and blood of the Lord—do this in remembrance of me—we literally re-member, put back together, the broken body of Christ.  This is our hope and we get a glimpse of our future together every time we take the Lord’s Supper because we “discern the body” in this action. We get a “glimpse of glory,” a vision of God’s kingdom on earth, because everyone at that moment, has something to eat and drink. No one going hungry. No one going thirsty. The way it ought to be.  Every time we eat the bread and drink the cup we proclaim death to the way it is even to the way we live.  The Lord’s table is a death threat.

Death to the division between Republicans and Democrats. Death to the divisions between black, brown, and white. Death to the divisions between rich and poor. Death to the divisions between those imprisoned and those who benefit from the prison system. Death to the divisions between American citizens and illegal aliens. Death to our theological tribes. Death to war. Death to violence. Death to drugs. Death to racism. Death to classism. Death to sexism. Death to any other ‘ism.’  Death to hatred of any kind. I’m sending out a death threat to death this morning.  Death to the way things are and Life to the way things ought to be.

Life to the way God wants it to be. Life when the lion lies down with the lamb.  Life to God’s new beautiful creation. “Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” No more denominational divides. No more religious divides. No more conservative or liberal labels. No more “I’m an Obama kind of Christian” or “I’m a Holy Huckabee kind of Christian.”  No more divisions. No more death. Just more Life. Life, everlasting, eternal, now.  In our proclamation of the Lord’s death, we discover what life is really about, even if it’s just for a moment.  In proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes by eating and drinking, we proclaim our own death for the life of the community. Christ was broken apart that we might be put back together.  At the table, Christ kills us with love, even love unto death for our life.

And his death of love keeps us singing. His death of love keeps a song in our hearts every time we gather for worship. Every time we come to the table, we’re singing. We’re singing at Death’s funeral.  Singing because of life. Singing despite of life. Singing into life. Singing against death. Singing despite death. Singing over death.

In Dec. 2005, my 10 year old niece Christiana died from a disease with a long name that shortened her life—juvenile dermatomyositis.  As her casket was lowered into the ground, seemingly death said the benediction, the last word. But in the silence and lament of tears, there was a sign of hope and life that death did not have the final word and victory. My brother Dwight, the father of Christiana, as he stood with his family, looking over the grave into the hole, began singing “Here I am to worship . . .” What would make a father who’d just lost his youngest child to death sing a song of worship over death?  I’ll tell what--Life! Life was saying the benediction through his song.  Death did not have the final word, will not have the final say, will not win, Life will win. God will win so we can keep on singing into life until he comes.

There is just one problem. Death does not believe me. So I told him to turn in his NRSV bible and read where Paul writes, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor.15:26). But guess what? Death still didn’t believe me. Proof-texting wasn’t enough. So I told Death to go ahead and log into his own website deathclock.com to see if I was telling the truth. If he didn’t believe my word, maybe he’ll believe his own.  Death went down into his dreary office in the basement of Tennant Hall and logged into his site to get a prediction of his end.  Death put in all the necessary information.  What he saw next bewildered him. The length of his life was predicted to be “until he comes.” Until he comes? He had no idea what that meant because dead people did not usually live again so he rebooted his computer to receive another prediction. He needed an answer that made sense. Death input the same information again and result was the same—the length of Death’s life was “until he comes.”  This made no sense to Death but it makes absolute sense to us because we know that not all dead people stay in the grave.

Christ is here at the table. He has come, with death-defying power and death dies every time we eat this bread and drink the cup. The Lord’s supper is a death threat to death’s empire and this is a threat that only God can fulfill.  “Every time you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Paul can’t be serious. Oh yes he is. He’s as serious as death . . . and life.  For as we eat and drink the elements, we carry “in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies”(2 Cor. 4:10).  As you come to the table, know that Bonhoeffer was right—Christ calls us to come and die or should I say, come and live.

  Margaret Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 300.

  Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), 199.

  See Desmond Tutu’s prayer “Reflections on Wholeness” in his African Prayer Book (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

  See James Cone, “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Geddes W. Hanson Lecture, Princeton Theological Seminary, November 16, 2006.

  See the hymn text for “View the Present through the Promise” written by Thomas Troeger (Oxford University Press, 1994).