Communion Meditation from October 7, 2007
When the French talk about knowledge, they make a distinction that English-speaking people do not make. Whether we talk about the mechanics of a golf swing, the genetic code, another person or God, we use one word, know. We say, “I know the structure of the human genome,” and “I know my wife.”
The French on the other hand use two different words to talk about knowledge: connâitre and savoir. If a Frenchman talked about the human genome, he would say, “Je sais the human genome. But he would never say, “Je sais ma femme; I know my wife.” He would say, “Je connais ma femme.”
French, German, Spanish and many other languages use two different words for knowing, because there are two very different kinds of knowing. Savoir is knowledge of things. Connâitre is knowledge of people. So, what’s the difference?
Things don’t talk back; people do. We master things and use them for our own purposes. Things have no rights or opinions. We do not master people or use them for our own purposes. They have rights and opinions. The disaster happens when we treat people like things.
Let me show a biblical example of treating a person like a thing. The Gospel of John tells the story of a man born blind. Let’s drop anchor today in John 9:1-9.
Mr. Cellophane
Verse one sets the stage.As he (Jesus) went along, he saw a man blind from birth. Verses 6-7 tell what Jesus did about it. He spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” . . . So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.
Verses 8-9 give you some idea of what the man was up against. His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, “Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg?” Some claimed that he was. Others said, “No, he only looks like him.” But he himself insisted, “I am the man, it’s me, I’m the real deal.”
What do you people mean, “He only looks like him?” Did you look at him every day begging and just now see him? Did you never see him as a person with a name and a history and feelings about his blindness?
You’d notice
If someone stood up in a crowd
And raised his voice up way outloud
And waved his arm and shook his leg;
You’d notice him.
If someone stood up in the movie show
And yelled, “Fire in the second row!
“This whole place is a powder keg!”
You’d notice him.
And even without clucking like a hen,
Everyone gets noticed now and then,
Unless, of course, that personage should be
Invisible, inconsequential me.
Cellophane, Mister Cellophane
Should have been my name.
Cellophane, Mister Cellophane!
You can look right through me,
You can walk right by me
And never know I’m there. (From Chicago)
The Personal Touch of God
The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ does not treat people like that. Listen to the Word of the Lord. He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name
Even more lovely are these words of Jesus: Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God . . . Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrowsMark 5:26 describes a woman, who had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. She became desperate. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” And it happened. The bleeding stopped. Her body became whole.
Verse 30 says that at once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched me?” In that Galilean crowd Jesus knew that among all the nudging, bumping and grasping one touch differed from the rest. They pawed with curiosity. Her hand held His cloak in faith. The story magnifies the attention of our Great Savior to a single human life.
Maybe best of all, the Apostle Paul said in Galatians 2:20: The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. – Luke 12:6-7.
– Psalm 147:4. Revelation 3:5 strikes a personal note: He who overcomes will . . . be dressed in white. I will never blot out his name from the book of life, but will acknowledge his name before my Father and his angels.
The Pastoral Center of Gravity
For the past three Sundays I have talked about building bridges to people, who may be uncomfortably different from us. We’ll do that as we imitate our Father in heaven. We have no program for doing that; we don’t anticipate having such a program. Building bridges is something we do at work or with neighbors or over a meal. It’s a vision we catch, not a program we do.
We will provide attractive events that you can invite people to. For example, we have the Grand Opera House in Wilmington on Thursday, December 13. You may never again go to the Grand for $5 a ticket. So, buy ten, build some bridges, and invite people to be your guests for the evening with food before or food after. If you buy more tickets than the Grand has seats, we’ll do it on Wednesday night too.
And do you know the best training ground for building bridges to people and starting to know them? Right here. You ought to make it a personal mission to get to know everyone in a ten foot radius of where you are sitting right now.
Here around the Lord’s Supper we remember the Lord of all the earth, who knows your name and your history and your feelings about life. Here no one is an it, and everyone is a you.
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