Psalm 34:1-7
Ephesians 4:1-16
(World Communion Sunday)

 The universe is expanding and shrinking at the same time!  No wonder we feel tense about life.  With this pulling and tugging, expanding and shrinking, the universe might be torn apart.  That's scary. 
Physically, the universe is expanding, but emotionally, it feels like the universe is shrinking.  Jet planes, communication satellites, computers, and internet cafés make the universe more accessible every day.  To say we live in a global village captures the idea that our world is getting smaller.  It is smaller from the perspective we are able to know what is happening anywhere in the world within a matter of minutes, sometimes even seconds, following an event. 

However, smaller does not mean simpler.  Perhaps there was a time when small and simple were synonyms.  But now for something to be small often means it is complex.  Consider all the information that can be stored on a computer disk, a memory stick, or a flash drive.  Compare in your mind the size of an I-Pod with the size of one of the first radios invented.  The I-Pod is many times smaller and many times more complex providing better sound quality and receiving sound waves from greater distances than those early radios.  What about a telephone you can fold and put in your pocket! 
The world as we experience it is smaller and more complex than ever.  We easily become overwhelmed and numbed by what happens in the world.  Because we are able to know almost instantly what is happening around the world, our emotional receptors become overloaded and shut down.  We refuse to receive any more data.  We cannot process any more information.  Our lives glaze over.  We hear of a tragedy.  We shrug our shoulders as if to say, "So what?  That's life!"  We want to protect ourselves from feeling pain.   
           
I appreciate the perspective of some of the early Cosmonauts and Astronauts who had the opportunity to get out of the world, at least out of the earth's atmosphere and gravitational pull.  As a result of their experiences, several of them have commented about the unity of the earth, how insignificant political and economic differences become.  They gained an overview of the world that caused them to realize how vital it is for us to work more diligently for healing and reconciliation in a broken and divided world. 

We are challenged to think God's thoughts after God in order to catch a glimpse of God's world view.  Our world view is too restricted, too regional, too much the captive of our absolutizing and projecting onto the rest of the world the life as lived and viewed from our culture.  We tend to view the world much like our earliest views of family.  I don't recall ever thinking about family relationships being any different than the one I knew growing up until I began hearing people talk about things they did with their families, how decisions were made, and how family members interacted and related to each other.  Then I began to realize there were a menagerie of family constellations and relationships.  Likewise, there is a menagerie of ways to go about being a disciple of Christ.  Some of them are identical to our approach and some are so different that at first we might think we weren't talking about the same thing.

Reading the Bible often reveals something of the world view that a particular writer had.  Some of the writings indicate a narrow, restricted view of the world and of God's people in the world.  Ezra and Nehemiah are two examples.  Jeremiah on the other hand understood the people of God were to be a catalyst in Babylon where they had been taken in exile.  Early in his ministry Peter saw the Gospel as narrow, exclusive; there were certain people for whom it was not intended or who were unacceptable.  But later Peter's world view enlarged as his understanding of God expanded.  He concluded that nothing and no one whom God had made was unclean or out of the realm of acceptability. 

Of course Jesus made that point repeatedly through the way he related to people as he interacted with them throughout his life.  He befriended tax collectors, prostitutes, people who were deranged, and people who were known to be ritually unclean.  He did so at great personal popular expense.  Always Jesus was calling people to be citizens of the realm and reign of God.  He was demonstrating that as people of God and followers of his, people held passports from two realms.  First and foremost we are to be citizens of the realm and reign of God.  Which citizenship holds the most importance in our lives will affect our view of the rest of life.  There are people who see their clan as the most important relationship in the world and every other view they have is filtered through that lens.  Jesus was continually inviting people to shed their old filters and lenses and look at life from a new and different perspective, to see life from the view of being a citizen of the kingdom of God.  When life is viewed from this perspective, then we discover that we worship one God and that this is one world in which we live. 
           
Jesus' invitation to become disciples emphasized the unity of the world God made and the unity that all people of God have in common.  Once we begin to catch a glimpse of God's world view, we then begin to see our role differently.  We suffer from similar weaknesses and failures as those first disciples.  We want to know what our turf is, and we want our turf defined and outlined with assurance that no one will step on our space.  We want the assurance that if we manage our turf well we will be rewarded properly and we want to know what the reward system is so that we will get all that is coming to us.  At the very last meal that Jesus shared with his disciples, this issue arose as they debated and argued about what would be the seating arrangement in the banquet hall in God's kingdom.  The seating arrangements at a Jewish festival were definite.  The person on the right of the host was the guest of honor.  The person on the host's left was the second guest of honor.  The rank of honor then altered from right to left moving away from the host.  It seems trivial to us that the disciples would be so concerned about where they were going to sit when Jesus was talking about not being around any longer.  Jesus’ whole approach turned the normal patterns of society upside down. 
           
Jesus took the common, normal, everyday elements of any meal, every meal, bread and wine, and turned them into something extraordinary for his followers.  They became sacramental.  A sacrament is something, usually a very ordinary thing, that has acquired a meaning far beyond itself for the person who has eyes to see and ears to hear.  A sacrament is an outward, visible sign of the inward, invisible grace and presence of God in a person's life. 
           
I suspect that everyone of us has a junk drawer.  What if someone emptied your junk drawer into the trash?  After all, it's just junk.  Although the things in it are common, ordinary, everyday things, they have special meaning to us.  Ah, there's the rub.  They have taken on a meaning and value far beyond themselves and convey meaning and value about someone or situation that is more than just the objects themselves.  So it is with the elements on this table.  They have meaning and value beyond themselves.  They are such small portions that they don't even suffice as a meal and yet they point to a fulfilling relationship that suffices more than any food or drink ever could. 
           
In the arguing that those first disciples did about greatness, Jesus turned the concept of greatness on its ear and inverted the image of greatness by saying that greatness comes by way of service rather than by being served.  Jesus offered an inverted pyramid as the sign and symbol of greatness.  He said that the one who aspired to be greatest needed to become the youngest.  Surely he was not suggesting that a person cut years off his life.  How could that be?  The youngest person in the family was considered the least important, had to do the most menial tasks, and could expect the smallest reward.  Jesus said that his disciples were to take on the role of the youngest, the servant role, be willing to be considered to be the least important and to do the menial tasks.  That is what the world needs and the road to greatness is paved with service. 
           
When we share communion we seek to act out this service.  I urge you to hold the tray for the person next to you as a way of acting out what is to take place on a much deeper level, our serving one another.  As Goethe so aptly stated, "The greatest cannot be spoken.  It can only be acted."  We are invited to be disciples, disciples of service as Jesus modeled for all who will learn from him.
Several years ago I was meeting with a group of international students.  We were introducing ourselves to each other.  A young woman gave her name and said, "I am from Singapore, just on the other side of the world from here."  She spoke of her native city as if it were just around the corner and in many ways it was.  What had brought us together was our common commitment to be Disciples of Christ. 

In the small amount of transcultural and transworld travel I have done, I have experienced a unity, an at-oneness with people whose language I could not speak and whose culture I did not know.  In worship services I have attended in Georgetown, Kentucky and Georgetown, Guyana, in Washington and Moscow, at churches with unusual names like Stony Point   and Stonelick bread and wine have been served, and uniquely we have been one in the bond of love.  Sharing Communion has said we hold in common our need for and experience of forgiveness demonstrated and expressed in the life of Jesus Christ.  The love of God for us, regardless of the culture, the nation, or the denomination from which we come, unites us because there is one body, one Spirit, one hope, one faith, one baptism, and one God. 

God's world view is one that sees a broken world, broken by fears.  It is a world that needs to be delivered from fear.  God has called on any and all who will respond to the invitation to be partners with God as Disciples of Christ to stretch out our lives, broken as we are, to reach our arms around the world and hug it back into oneness and wholeness.  That is God's world view.  It can be ours, and it can begin here, today, now around this table.