"WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY"

 “WORLD COMMUNION SUNDAY”

Yesterday was World Communion Sunday, and I have been celebrating it ever since I first took communion in 1958.  It previously was called “Worldwide Communion Sunday,” the name by which I knew it in the 50’s and 60’s.  I’m not sure when or why the name changed, but perhaps “Worldwide Communion Sunday” seemed a bit pretentious and was actually inaccurate – neither Roman Catholics nor Southern Baptist churches recognize it.

In some ways, World Communion Sunday (WCS) seems outdated, a superficial time where for a short moment, we are asked to feel unity in Christ around the Lord’s Table.  It is a unity that is always elusive and usually unrealistic, but still we observe WCS to remember that in Jesus Christ, the dividing walls of hostility have been broken down.  World Communion Sunday is observed on the first Sunday in October, and it emphasizes that we all have dignity and equality because of God’s revelation to us in Jesus Christ.  It officially began in the fall of 1933, started by the Rev. Hugh Thomson Kerr at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.  

Its emphasis on Christian unity and on the power of Christ to unite us was a theme that caught on quickly.  In 1936, the Presbyterian denomination adopted it as one of our recognized holy days.  In 1940 the Federal Council of Churches (predecessor to the National Council of Churches) adopted it for all its member churches, and it has been on the Protestant church calendar ever since.

In my younger years as a minister, I celebrated World Communion Sunday, but I was always skeptical of it.  Although I loved the ideal of unity and sibling-hood that it symbolized, I understood that while we might love the symbolism, we rarely ever lived it.  In my home church in Arkansas, people classified as Black were not allowed to worship or even to enter the building except to cook and clean.  So, there was no possibility of experiencing that unity that World Communion Sunday seeks to express.  For me, WCS had turned into a sentimental symbol with no teeth or bite to it.  We were all one in Christ – so what?

Two things changed my mind, however. First, I learned the history of the development of WCS.  It began in the fall of 1933.  Anyone remember the events of 1933?  Yes, the Great Depression was ravaging the USA and the world, shrinking our spirits and crunching our lives.  Even more ominous was the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany.  He wasted no time in creating a monster state in 1933.  He was appointed chancellor in January, 1933, and by the end of February, the Reichstag Parliament Building had been burned.  This led to the Reichstag Decree, passed by the German Parliament in February – it denied the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of public assembly.  Dachau was opened in March, and in July the Nazi Party became the only legal political party in Germany.  World Communion Sunday was born in this atmosphere, and it served as a strong opposition voice to the racism of the Nazi regime.  World Communion Sunday grew in this atmosphere of racism, oppression and war, and it still stands as a powerful symbol of a different world, a different point of view.

Second, my experience of communion at Oakhurst Presbyterian radically changed my view of WCS.  Through God’s Spirit, we developed a multicultural congregation there, and for a white boy raised on the robbery and racism of neo-slavery, it was a powerful moment to remember and experience the unity of Black and white people sharing in World Communion Sunday.  It was no longer a symbol – it was a visible, lived presence.  By the time that we retired from Oakhurst, there were people from 15 countries worshipping at Oakhurst, and because of this, World Communion Sunday took on a whole different meaning.

Though Trump is not Hitler (I sometimes think that he would like to be), we live in a deeply divided country and in a time of great meanness and resentment.  Perhaps it is time now to recover World Communion Sunday and its original meaning – we are siblings after all, no matter what the world tells us or what we tell ourselves.