drinking damnation

Tuesday April 2^nd, Acts 10: ³⁴ Then Peter began to speak: "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism ³⁵ but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right. The very early church got the message of Jesus, and Peter here explains it well.  God does not show favoritism.  All too often what the world sees is the politics of maintaining order and status quo, and what our Lord sees as fratricide. We are content with maintaining power through the breaking of the heads. Christ calls us to a different vision where in the breaking of the bread, we recognize one another as brothers and sisters and in the process see the risen Christ. It didn't take long for the early followers of Jesus to move from being church to being “the church.”  That is when the walls started to go up and the love started to go down.  You can see it in some of the later pastoral letters of Timothy and Titus, rules about who is in and who is out.  Over the centuries we in the church have gone back and forth from being marginally inclusive to being violently exclusive.  For the most part, even the inclusive times tend to be mostly exclusive.  It is always good to keep an eye on the prize, and the prize is the inclusive love of God.  Our biggest sin is that we are always putting asunder what God has joined together (thanks to Wm Sloane Coffin for that one). Now we recognize our savior, our brother, our sister, in the breaking of the bread, which is not meant to be exclusive communion practices but sitting down together in fellowship and true concern.  Exclusive communion is simply, as Paul would put it, eating and drinking damnation unto ourselves.