About 35 clergy, including me, participated as servers. It was a wonderful celebration to participate in, seeing people of varied denominations come together to unite as the body of Christ.
But later that day, I was reminded of how broken that body of Christ still is. We ran into someone we know who stated with heaviness that some people left during the sermon, prior to communion. The likely reason was that Dr. Lundblad mentioned gay marriage becoming legal in the state of New York, although it was not central to the point of the sermon. Her message was that with difficult current issues, our response as Christians should be to try to bring something old (tradition, scripture) and something new (scientific discovery, experience) to the conversation as we discern the correct path to take. We cannot and should not ignore tradition and scripture, but we also cannot be imprisoned by it. Dr. Lundblad merely used gay marriage and the U.S. debt ceiling as examples of tough issues which we face, but for those who left as soon as they heard the words "gay marriage," they missed the real point of the sermon, which was pretty non-controversial even though her illustrations were.
And so this is the body of Christ. We are united by Christ, but we are not yet a perfectly whole body. We still hurt each other, intentionally or not. We still get offended, rightfully or not. However, an ecumenical communion service at Chautauqua would have been unheard of not too long ago. That Sunday reminded me of how far we've come in uniting as Christ's body, and yet how far we still have to go. We are a body, but we are still broken. I pray that one day we may be made whole again.
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