We have been thinking about peace over the last 6 weeks. We have studied it mainly from the perspective of the biblical witness, both Old and New Testaments. Of course Christian takes on peace are not the only ones around. Many other groups and individuals are just as concerned as we with the questions of peace and violence in the world. And praise be to God for that. But we have to start somewhere. This is our place, so starting here is what we can do. Yes, it’s a modest endeavour. But it’s important.

We’ve covered a lot of ground. Our understanding of God as a God of peace has been rekindled. We have heard the biblical call to be peacemakers as imitators of God. We have tried to look honestly at some of the biblical texts that advocate violence in certain circumstances, and see how that sits with the revelation of God in the life of Jesus. And so on.

I want to finish this peace series at this table. The reason is simple. This table of the Lord fronts us with the absolute centre of our faith: the story of Jesus. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are, for Christian faith, the definitive self-giving of God to the world. In Jesus’ life, God says to us, as nowhere else, ‘this is me; and this is what I am on about in my world.’ We acknowledge this definitive quality, because we believe that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ as Paul put it. (2 Cor 5:19). For all our ranging over the various texts of scripture, and rummaging through our own ideas in relation to them, here is the bed rock of Christian truth. God’s word and God’s presence here, is summed up as reconciliation. And reconciliation is essentially the creating of peace in a situation of hostility. God comes in peace, forgiveness, and love to a world which is and has been at odds with God and God’s intentions. To aliens, God offers hospitality here; to enemies, God offers friendship here; to the suspicious, God offers reassurance here; to the despairing, God offers hope here; to the rejected, God offers acceptance here. To celebrate the Lord’s supper is to celebrate the God of peace and the peace of God.

I am acutely aware that in saying this I am evoking a disturbing irony. For we know full well that this table of Christ’s has, in the history of the church, been a site of massive dispute and even violence. That shocking truth has not been lost on a skeptical world. We preach the divine reconciling love which goes to the far country, even to death on a cross, in search of God’s alienated creatures; and we proclaim it as central at this table. And yet we Christians have fought each other up hill and down dale over the significance and, God help us, the ownership of this table. We have fought each other over what is supposed to happen at this table. Does the bread and wine transform into the actual body and blood of Christ at the utterance of the correct liturgical formula? Or is that mere magic, and the true function of the table is rather stimulation of the memory of the passion of Jesus? Christians have killed each other over that in the past. And who has the right to officiate at this feast? Does that right belong to a special class of believers, the ordained amongst us? Or does baptism, the call of Christ to any and every believer confer the right to present this table and its meaning? Christians have killed each other over that as well. Perhaps we are less violent these days. But it remains a sad truth that Christians, in a divided church, still exclude each other from this table of peace that we variously set. Not here at Kingston I am glad to know. But it happens. As an aside, let me express a hauerwasian modest proposal for peace: ‘that the Christians of the world stop excluding each other from the Lord’s table’. Yes, it’s modest. But it would give weight to the claim that here God’s reconciliation is announced as nowhere else in our life.

But I need to move to a more serious issue. This table has been a table of peace in the midst of conflict right from the outset. At the last supper itself, when Jesus first spoke the words, ‘this is my body, this is my blood’, there was deep division. Judas was about to betray him. Peter was about to deny him. The rest were about to abandon him to his fate. A table of peace in the middle of strife. And the passage we read from Paul in I Corinthians 11, reveals the table again as a site of contention. The famous words of institution of the supper, ‘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 bread …’ and so on, were written by Paul to a congregation in conflict at this very feast.

Paul goes so far as to say that the community, gathering to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, is not really engaged in the supper at all. It looks as if they are. The trappings of bread and wine and holy words are there. But the reality of their lives is such it invalidates the whole thing. ‘When you come together,’ he says to them, ‘it is not really to eat the Lord ’s Supper.’ (I Cor 11:20). It looks like the supper. But in fact it is something else.

What’s the problem? Well, division and factionalism: ‘I hear there are divisions amongst you’, Paul writes. (v 18). But not a matter of theological dispute over transubstantiation versus memorialism, or the like. It’s practical behavior. There is division between rich and poor, between the well off and the strugglers in the community. The well off don’t wait for the labourers to get off work and ready themselves for the worship at the table. They set to and indulge themselves. In their context, this meant eating not just a little piece of bread and a sip of wine, but a major meal intended to sustain daily life. It was unfair, and doubly so, since not only did some miss out on what they need to live, but those who missed out were the one’s least able to cope, the poor. This injustice in the community invalidates worship at the table. That is what Paul means with his somber words about eating the supper of the Lord in an unworthy manner.

This is really challenging. It goes to the heart of what this is all about. It goes to Jesus’ own words: ‘This is my body; this is my blood.’ These words are startlingly material. Body and blood. The stuff bodies are made of. The material of this world. This is what is handled at the table. Yes, it is spiritual, of course. But it is a particular kind of spirituality. It is the spirituality of the incarnate Lord. Yes, it has to do with the word, of course. But it is a particular word we meet here, the word made flesh.

That is what makes this a fitting place to conclude our series on peace. This is the table of reconciliation, God’s peacemaking table. To share rightly at this table is to proclaim that divine peacemaking until Christ comes, according to Paul. But for this to be the case, for this to be the table of the incarnate Lord, we who gather around it are called to incarnate in our lives the gift that we here receive. In body and blood, we are to be reconcilers in the world, as God has reconciled us.

Please, please do not misunderstand me here. I am not moralising this supper, as if what we do or don’t do affects God’s gift of grace. Of course it doesn’t. We don’t somehow earn the right to come here by our moral uprightness. This table is the loving and forgiving presence of God that comes to us before we ever think of responding. God always has the initiative. And that initiative it is always grace. So please don’t think I am saying only if we are morally worthy can we come. Just the opposite. We come because we are invited by Christ in whatever state we are in.

But, if we come, we come to receive a particular gift: reconciliation with God, and through God, with the world. And that is a relational gift. Let me give an example. Suppose you were to give me a tie. And, given the array of ties I seem to wear, you may well think such a gift badly needed! But if you were to give me a tie, it would be lovely. But it wouldn’t necessarily make a big difference to who I am and how I act. I would be the same old me. Just now in a better tie. But if the gift you were to offer me was your friendship, that would be different. If I accept that gift it necessarily changes me. For friendship is a mutual relationship. I can’t become your friend and not change my behaviour, because friendship means precisely to behave in certain ways towards the friend. I can’t say, ‘yes I’ll accept your friendship’, but then never bother to meet you, or talk with you, or take notice of your concerns. If I did that I would simply demonstrate in action that I had in fact not accepted your gift. It is the same thing here. God’s gift is reconciling peace. Peace with God and peace with God’s world. If we come, that is the gift we take in our hands. And that necessarily changes us, because to accept peace from God is to engage in God’s peace in all our being and doing. That is what being here means.

I hope that we carry away from this series on peace some really concrete things we intend to try; that we find things that we can personally do in our sphere of operation, at home, with friends, in the office, which deliberately strengthen and encourage peaceable relations. I hope as a church, we continue to focus attention on being a peaceable community. This church has had some specific projects of this kind. I am thinking of Irene’s place and of the long association of the community with indigenous issues of justice and reconciliation. Let’s keep these things, or something like them, alive and operational in our midst.

Of course such things do not transform the world into a place of peace and justice as envisaged by some of the eschatological texts that we have considered, when people will beat their swords into ploughshares, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. Such visions prefigure the final kingdom of God. But we live in the world between the first and second coming of Christ. And that is where this table is set. A table of peace in the midst of a world of strife. Around this table we become a bit more aware of the need to share as we can in the peacemaking of God. That the Christians of the world stop killing each other, and excluding each other from this table, may be a modest proposal for peace. But it is a real one. God give us grace to play our part in it as best we can.