The Park Road Pulpit

Sid Hayes’ shop is a feast for a woodworker’s senses. It always smells of sweet, freshly sawn hardwood. You can almost taste a hint of shellac in the air. When he works, there is the philharmonic music of saws, joiners, sanders, planers, table- and hand-tools of every pitch, all playing in perfect harmony for all who can hear. The sight of countless homemade “jigs,” hanging from odd, random nails tapped into the rafters speaks of thousands of hours of utility and creativity and of countless heirlooms of Americana which Sid has created for the generations to come. Wandering the shop, you can touch rough-cut widths of Ash and Maple, Walnut, Mahogany, Oak and Basswood, and the exotic grains of African Purple Heart, Tigerwood, and Padouk.

And there is a sixth sense present in that shop, too. Standing there one day with Dr. Hayes, the former Chair of Clemson University’s Entomology Department and a master craftsman, Sid pulled out an old wagon spoke. He kept this piece of his own history carefully tucked away in a little nook in his shop – anyone else would have thought it a useless scrap. But he pulled it down and told me its story.

“This spoke came from my Grandfather’s shop,” he said. A wooden wedge was tapped into one, hollowed-out end. Pulling out that wedge Sid explained, “One day I was tinkering with this, and I noticed this wedge and that the other, tapered end of the spoke, had splintered-off. I took out my pocket knife and pried-out the wedge, and look what fell into my hand.” It was a splinter, perfectly matching the broken end of the spoke. “In that moment, I had the strangest feeling,” Sid said to me. “My Grandfather, like most in his generation, saved everything. I imagine that on the day this spoke was broken, he took the splinter, dropped it down into this whole, and with his own knife whittled a little wedge that would make this splinter safe for keeping until he could repaired it. Likely, the day I discovered it, no one had touched it since he put it there. As the splinter fell out into my hand, I had a strange sense of his presence.”

Sid’s experience was not just a remembering. It was a re-membering,[1] for as he touched that splinter of wood, he was connected through more than just his physical senses to the life and work of one whose life had held great meaning to him, but a meaning that he had never known quite so well as he knew it then. For, in a sense, in that experience, Sid had become his Grandfather -- for just a moment. Holding that broken spoke Sid stood in his grandfather’s steps. Saw with his eyes. Sid’s hands touched exactly as his grandfather’s touched. His mind worked in unison with one who had died years before. And in that act of tactile (with the hands) and intellectual (with the mind) re-membering, he was changed.

Today, the table is set before us, and because it is World Communion Sunday, Christians in every little nook of God’s great, green workshop gather here, with us. To touch. To smell. And, in the words of the Psalmist, to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”[2]

As I come to this table, yet again, I want to ask, “But what does this mean?” Some of you have struggled with this question. You have found your approach to this time in worship, this particular dinner table, these strange elements and the liturgical words of consecration which we wrap around “bread and wine” to be troubling at best. At worst, some have come to experience it as meaningless. What does this all really mean, and how can we make our participation in “communion,” this “Supper of our Lord,” meaningful for faith and life and worship?

The question that I want to ask is, “What does it mean?” – but in a seminar this weekend at the North Carolina meeting of the Alliance of Baptists, I was challenged to think again. Bill Dols is the life-long Episcopal Priest, who served a six-year stint as the Minister of Education at Myers Park Baptist. Leading a gathered group of clergy and laity, he suggested that asking what something means has a tendency to cause us to reflect only with our minds, to intellectualize something, to seek to discover its so-called “theology” – and yet this kind of inquiry, says Dols, most often fails to deliver any real life-changing punch. It does so because in leaving the issue in our brain, whether resolved adequately or not, the issue misses us where real living happens most: in our hands, our eyes, our tastes and smells, in the outward marrow of life lived in relationship with a real world and its real people.[3] Perhaps it was to hear this one line of his presentation that I made the nearly six-hour round trip journey to Durham to participate in this three-hour session. According to Dr. Dols the question for us to ask as we approach all scripture is not what it means, but how it is being enacted in our own world and in our inner life.

So I come today, personally, to this table with a different set of questions. As a wanna-be theologian, a tireless intellectualizer (but not an intellectual!), as one who has already spent countless hours debating the questions in my own head, I come today, and I invite you to join me, not asking those relentless questions. Body? Blood? Broken? For me?

But wondering, anew, “Am I being broken, today?” For him? For you? For the homeless and helpless? For the war-torn and those desperate and lonely? Am I being broken, today, for anyone? Even for myself? Is the costly grace, the hard-earned maturity that I have spoken about in the last two weeks anything that I can rightly claim – with integrity to the name of Jesus?[4]

For if our memory of him is honest, as today’s prayer of confession suggests,[5] if we have “really remembered” his past – we will have to know that his life was mostly about his death. His living, mostly about his dying – to himself for God, to the world for Us.

My friend Sid Hayes, who is a master craftsman, has not repaired that old wagon spoke. He never will. Some things are meant to be broken. So it is with those of us who claim to be following in the Way of Jesus.[6]

How much of his way of life have you really known? How much of his way of death have you dared to experience? We come to this table, today, remembering, and re-membering. Committing our way to his.

Life is not science, and neither is this table – there is no figuring it out. Life is art, because life, even in our dying is always creating something new. And God is always making it beautiful.

[1] “We might do well to think of the Lord’s Supper not so much as just remembering, but also as re-membering. This affirms that we, as the Church, are the body of Christ. So when we commit to what the Lord’s Supper signifies, we re-member, we reassemble, the body of Christ… committing that body to death for others.” -- John Ballenger.

[2] Psalm 34.8

[3] In the sermon, “Knowing God – A Sacramental Journey,” I seek to address this issue more fully. www.parkroadbaptist.org/sermons.

[4] See, “Southern Hospitality and the Grace of an Unjust God,” and “The Authority of the Fifth Generation,” also available from the church website, listed above.

[5] From the order of service for today’s worship, the Prayer of Confession states: “Forgive us, O God, when we live in the past. Teach us, instead, to honor the past by facing each new day, and every change that comes, with excitement and courage. Forgive us more, O God, for living in that past without really remembering it. Open our eyes in an honesty that can celebrate and also seek repentance. And as we remember, let that act, itself, make us new creatures, through Christ our Lord. Amen” (emphasis added).

[6] The earliest followers of Jesus were called “Followers of the Way.” See Acts 9.2. Only in Antioch were his disciples first called “Christians” (Acts 11.26).