Sermon for April 17, 2025
Maundy Thursday
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
Many of you have heard of Warren Buffet, I’m sure. Known as the “Oracle of Omaha”, he has a fortune worth $125 billion dollars. Every year about 40,000 shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway corporation come to a convention in Omaha, Nebraska where he lives, and he answers their questions about his approach to things like investing and legacy giving. Warren himself has famously pledged that when he dies, 99% of his assets will be donated to charity. That leaves “only” 1% for his three grown children to inherit.
The way he has set up his will, his three kids will have 10 years after he dies to donate all his remaining assets. The unique thing is that all three will be required to be in unanimous agreement about any donation they wish to make. As you might imagine, each of the three has their own particular interests and causes that are near and dear to their hearts. So they will need regular conversation and probably some give-and-take as they decide the best uses for the money. [https://www.theblumfirm.com/2024/10/29/buffett-changes-his-willis-it-time-to-change-yours/]
Some commentators have pointed out the potential for a power struggle among the three of them. But Warren says he has complete trust in their maturity and decision-making, as well as their abilities to respond to changes in law and society. As I learned about Warren Buffet’s approach to all this, he seems to be confident that after he dies his kids will live by the values he has taught them, and that they will be able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, and be able to apply these values in ways they believe will meet the great needs of society.
There’s a word that describes this mindset—a word that by itself doesn’t have anything to do with money. That word is “tradition”. Tradition often takes a lot of knocks. There’s even a song about it from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”, where basically the characters know what they’re supposed to do, but they’re not exactly sure why—except that it’s “tradition”. It’s a humorous song, but what it’s really poking fun at is traditionalism. There was an influential theologian named Jaroslav Pelikan, who noted that traditionalism gives tradition a bad name. He defined traditionalism as “the dead faith of the living”—meaning a rigid adherence, without critical thinking, regardless of the circumstances, to “the way it’s always been done”. That’s traditionalism. [1983 Jefferson lecture on “The Vindication of Tradition”; 1989 interview with Pelikan in U.S. News & World Report]
Meanwhile, he defined tradition as “the living faith of the dead”—this means that tradition properly understood is more of a conversation between the past and the present, where we honor and learn from those who have come before us, while figuring out how to interpret and apply their core values to the circumstances of the present day.
Saint Paul writes about tradition. In 1 Corinthians 11, he reminds the church in Corinth about it: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you…”—that’s tradition; handing down from one generation to another. When Paul writes this, it is about 20 or 25 years after the Last Supper, and he’s putting that first Holy Meal into conversation with their present-day circumstances. In other words, Paul is going to teach them how to apply the values Jesus lived by to their own lives. And the reason he’s doing this is because he is heartbroken. The Corinthian church had developed a practice where, Paul says, whenever they gathered to worship, they were not really sharing the Lord’s Supper—instead they were betraying their Lord all over again (kind of like Judas). Now, Judas’s biggest failure on that first Maundy Thursday was not the 30 pieces of silver he wanted to jingle in his pocket after he betrayed Jesus, but what those silver pieces in his pocket represented—a betrayal of the values Jesus had taught him to live by.
The Corinthians’ betrayal becomes clear when you look at the broader context of 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. It was not that they had simply made a few changes to their worship practices, but that they were misapplying the tradition and values that Jesus had handed on to the disciples during the Last Supper. Their mistake came about like this: Their church had a great diversity of members—so far, so good. For the Roman society in which they lived, this diversity was unusual because most people were highly segregated along lines of ethnicity, class, gender, social status. So let’s give them some credit; on this point they had been following the example of Jesus who intentionally reached across human boundaries and included people in his ministry regardless of their ethnicity, class, gender, or social status.
But Jesus not only included them, he also ate with people he “shouldn’t have been” eating with—even sitting down for meals with notorious “tax-collectors and sinners” who were shunned by everyone else. It was the Corinthian’s segregated meal practices that finally got them in trouble with St. Paul, because the wealthy believers started hosting meals just for their fellow high-status believers, eating together before everyone else of lower status arrived for worship. They may not have even realized they were doing anything wrong, since hosting meals segregated by social class was the norm in their society. But, it was not the norm when it came to following the way of Jesus. This is why Paul is so adamant about their need for repentance. If they truly wanted to share the Lord’s Supper, they would need to abandon the segregated meal practices of Roman society, and embrace the revolutionary meal practices of Jesus, where every one of his followers, regardless of who you are is included on a level playing field.
Every time we share the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is speaking his Word to us—the Word of his tradition that we are all equals at his table; equally in need of forgiveness, equally beloved and included in his kingdom. His Word comes to us in a way that we can taste, see, touch, smell, even hear as we eat and drink the bread and wine of the sacrament together. As we hand over Christ’s body to eat, the bread speaks the word that Jesus chose to hand himself over to be crucified to secure our forgiveness and salvation. As we pour out Christ’s blood to drink, the wine speaks the word that Jesus chose to pour himself out for the life of the world. Therefore, as Paul writes, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
Proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes means that we admit, and even embrace as good news, that we have absolutely no ability to save ourselves—yet by Christ’s death on our behalf, he makes us alive again and sets us free. Set free—because the power of sin and death will not win in the end. Set free—to hand ourselves over to the pursuit of service, love, and justice in the world. Set free—to pour ourselves out by letting ourselves flow towards people in the community around us, so we may meet them where they are and love them as they are.
This “handing over” and “pouring out” as we share the Lord’s Supper across human boundaries is the “living faith of the dead”—it’s the tradition of St. Paul, and of those twelve disciples in the Upper Room; a tradition which was first handed over to them by Jesus himself. And each time we partake of this tradition we continue a conversation between past and present, a conversation that’s been going on for 2,000 years, as we seek to learn from our Teacher, Jesus Christ, for this day and age how we might fulfill the New Commandment he gave back on that first Maundy Thursday: “Just as I have loved you,” Jesus says, “you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” Amen.