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“Relational Realities”
This week, we continue moving forward in the Gospel of Mark’s accounting of Jesus' life and ministry, and we hear two sayings of Jesus from among this teaching: one that makes many of us uncomfortable, and one that we find very comforting. Both, however, were ways that Jesus announced and enacted in history the new reality of God's surprising activity. And these two stories demonstrate this new reality: Women and children are accepted and valued, not dismissed as inferior. What does it mean to receive the kingdom of God as a child does?
This Sunday is also the annual “World Communion Sunday”, an observance among many Protestant Christian denominations on the first Sunday of October each year. On World Communion Sunday, we remember our oneness in Christ with all our brothers and sisters around the world. The apostle Paul tells us that we are to “discern the body” when we partake of Holy Communion, mindful that we note our relationship to all our brothers and sisters in Christ in the celebration. One is not to go hungry while another is drunk! (1st Corinthians 11:21)—and that’s true whether our sibling in Christ is around the block or around the world. The observance of “World Communion” Sunday was started by Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1933. Through the 1930s, it spread in American Presbyterianism and then into other denominations; in 1940, it was endorsed and promoted by the US’s Federal Council of Churches (a national ecumenical agency that eventually joined with others to form the National Council of Churches); and in the time since has been adopted by many Protestant denominations in many countries, including here in Canada among The United Church of Canada and others.