James T. Cleland - Communion Meditation (October 7, 1962)
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| (chorus singing) | 0:07 | |
| (coil springing) | 0:09 | |
| - | Bless the words of my mouth and the meditations | 0:11 |
| of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, | 0:15 | |
| all of our strength and our Redeemer, amen. | 0:18 | |
| In the first World War, one of the most savage sections | 0:31 | |
| of the Western front was the Ypres Salient. | 0:37 | |
| For weeks and months, it was a center of an unending, | 0:43 | |
| monotonous, rugged trench warfare. | 0:51 | |
| In this British sector of the allied lines, | 0:57 | |
| there was erected a wooden hut a few miles back | 1:02 | |
| from the frontline trenches. | 1:08 | |
| It was named Talbot House, abbreviated to T-H, | 1:11 | |
| and known in the palace of the royal signal core | 1:20 | |
| as Toc H. | 1:24 | |
| It was the meeting place of men coming down | 1:28 | |
| from the trenches and men going up to the trenches. | 1:32 | |
| Over its entrance door was carved the inscription, | 1:39 | |
| "abandoned rank, all ye who enter here." | 1:43 | |
| Every night, the sacrament of the Lord's Supper | 1:50 | |
| was celebrated in the loft overhead, literally a last supper | 1:55 | |
| for so many men. | 2:04 | |
| Thousands knelt in that room. | 2:08 | |
| The survivors never forgot it. | 2:13 | |
| After the war in great Britain, an organization | 2:17 | |
| of ex-service men was formed and named Toc H, | 2:20 | |
| commemorating the fraternity of Talbot House | 2:28 | |
| and the companionship of the Lord's table | 2:33 | |
| in the loft upstairs. | 2:37 | |
| It was a lively fellowship born in a place of terror. | 2:41 | |
| The Lord's Supper too was born in a night of terror. | 2:51 | |
| There was in the background the steady relentless opposition | 2:58 | |
| of the Roman empire to anyone who threatened its power | 3:02 | |
| and prestige with wild words about a kingdom and a king. | 3:07 | |
| There was in the foreground the bitter angry hostility | 3:15 | |
| of the Jewish hierarchy who saw its political power | 3:20 | |
| and ecclesiastical prestige threatened by this carpenter | 3:25 | |
| from Nazareth who had taken to itinerant preaching | 3:30 | |
| and who seemed to be making such blasphemous claims. | 3:36 | |
| There was in the midst of the group, the group assembled | 3:42 | |
| its supper right there, a traitor, one who had already made | 3:47 | |
| a deal with the Jewish officials to betray his master. | 3:55 | |
| Death walked the streets of Jerusalem as it stalked | 4:01 | |
| the mire Flanders: brutal death, | 4:06 | |
| callous death, undiscriminating death. | 4:10 | |
| 1900 years separate the upper room from the upper loft | 4:15 | |
| but they were linked by the Lord's Supper. | 4:22 | |
| We are guests at the same supper. | 4:27 | |
| Let us think of it from the viewpoint of Toc H. | 4:31 | |
| Do you recall the words over the door of that near es prête? | 4:37 | |
| They were: "abandon rank, all ye who enter here." | 4:42 | |
| That was a surprising sign to read on any establishment | 4:50 | |
| connected with the British army. | 4:54 | |
| The British are fussy about rank, status, class. | 4:56 | |
| They were even more fussy back in 1916, and yet that | 5:02 | |
| strange concession, "abandon rank, all ye who enter here," | 5:08 | |
| that strange concession was accepted and allowed. | 5:13 | |
| It was even welcomed. | 5:19 | |
| The British have a knack of doing unexpected things | 5:22 | |
| in unusual places. | 5:26 | |
| One can never quite figure them out, but when a soldier | 5:28 | |
| trudged upstairs to that loft, the abandoning of rank | 5:35 | |
| was carried one step further. | 5:39 | |
| It was transformed before a wooden table on which | 5:43 | |
| was a chalice of wine and a plate of bread and a Bible. | 5:49 | |
| The abandonment of rank was transformed into a brotherhood | 5:58 | |
| of the friends of Jesus Christ. | 6:03 | |
| Now the transforming agent was that other upper room | 6:08 | |
| because there in Jerusalem, Jesus acted out a piece | 6:12 | |
| of his teaching, a piece of his teaching about the doctrine | 6:19 | |
| of the brotherhood of man. | 6:23 | |
| He took a towel and a basin and he washed | 6:25 | |
| the disciples' feet. | 6:31 | |
| That goes way beyond the abandoning of rank. | 6:34 | |
| It symbolizes the mutual goodwill, which is always | 6:38 | |
| the hallmark of the true church and some words which Jesus | 6:43 | |
| used on that occasion are marching orders for us. | 6:48 | |
| I have given you an example, that ye should also do | 6:53 | |
| as I have done to you. | 6:59 | |
| Now we can take that literally and make fools of ourselves | 7:02 | |
| or we can take it seriously and realize that before God, | 7:08 | |
| we are condemned or acquitted by the quality of humble love | 7:15 | |
| in our behavior. | 7:22 | |
| Though we may differ in our status in the eyes of the world | 7:25 | |
| because of birth or brains or power, but we stand on a level | 7:29 | |
| in the church in the gracious relationship of sons | 7:37 | |
| and daughters of God and therefore brothers and sisters. | 7:44 | |
| Paul knew that when he wrote, "for as many of you | 7:49 | |
| as were baptized into Christ, have put on Christ | 7:52 | |
| there is no room for Jew or Greek, slave or free, | 7:56 | |
| male or female. | 8:06 | |
| These worldly distinctions disappear in the church | 8:09 | |
| because you're all one in Christ Jesus. | 8:12 | |
| In him, at his table, in Jerusalem, in Flanders, | 8:16 | |
| on the Duke campus, worldly distinctions disappear, | 8:24 | |
| or are supposed to disappear, but there's something else | 8:29 | |
| for us to learn from this juxtaposition of Toc H | 8:34 | |
| in the upper room. | 8:37 | |
| Talbot House was only a carrying place, a way station | 8:40 | |
| on the road from the rear billets to the front lines. | 8:48 | |
| Their men had a chance to take time out before they entered | 8:53 | |
| the muddy purgatory of the trenches. | 8:56 | |
| There they had an opportunity to catch their breath | 9:01 | |
| before they returned from the strain or to the strain | 9:04 | |
| of monotonous deadly action. | 9:08 | |
| They couldn't remain at Toc H; wasn't a base camp. | 9:11 | |
| It was, in fact, only a wooden lodge in a bloody wilderness | 9:16 | |
| and yet it was more than that. | 9:24 | |
| It was a symbol of life at its human and divine best | 9:27 | |
| right there in a world that seemed to have forgotten | 9:32 | |
| the good things about God, even the good things about man, | 9:35 | |
| and so with the upper room in Jerusalem, it was more than | 9:42 | |
| a way station on the road to the betrayal in the garden, | 9:46 | |
| to the mockery in the courts, to the agony of Golgotha. | 9:50 | |
| In that room, the gracious dealing of God was remembered | 9:57 | |
| by the early Christians, so they returned there. | 10:02 | |
| The first official meeting of the church was held | 10:07 | |
| in that room and what did they do when they went there? | 10:11 | |
| One thing they did was to break bread together | 10:17 | |
| and later forever the Christians met in the Roman world, | 10:23 | |
| they reestablished the upper room and always | 10:28 | |
| on the first day of the week, they broke bread together. | 10:33 | |
| They returned to the upper room to be received | 10:39 | |
| with lively supper and then they went back into the world | 10:42 | |
| with renewed strength and so with us, we must live | 10:46 | |
| in the world, we must work in the world. | 10:50 | |
| We know that the world tolerates us as Christians, | 10:57 | |
| for the most part. | 11:03 | |
| Oh, it admires us in its generous moments, but it always | 11:06 | |
| has the latent hostility to despise us, to injure us. | 11:11 | |
| Ours is a continual warfare if we are conscientious about | 11:17 | |
| the things of Christ and we need our resting place | 11:20 | |
| where we can catch our breath, where we can draw strength | 11:27 | |
| before the next engagement, where we can have our spiritual | 11:32 | |
| weariness alaid, but we cannot bind here. | 11:38 | |
| We must leave. | 11:46 | |
| God doesn't stay in the church. | 11:47 | |
| He's too busy in the world. | 11:51 | |
| We cannot stay here. | 11:53 | |
| So we leave here, but God willing, we leave in better shape | 11:57 | |
| than we entered if we understand what it means to be guests | 12:00 | |
| at his table. | 12:06 | |
| Toc H and the upper room had an intimate relationship. | 12:09 | |
| Toc H existed because of the upper room. | 12:13 | |
| Its loft was the upper room and this church is Toc H | 12:16 | |
| and today this church is the upper room. | 12:24 | |
| Here we are one brotherhood having abandoned all rank, | 12:29 | |
| knowing only that we are the children of God and when | 12:36 | |
| we have received the bread and the wine in faith, | 12:41 | |
| then we can go back to the world to cope with it | 12:47 | |
| and we can return from the world for sustenance again | 12:52 | |
| when next this table is spread for our benefit. | 13:01 | |
| Let us pray. | 13:08 | |
| Almighty and eternal God who through Jesus Christ thy son | 13:10 | |
| hath brought us into the fellowship of the upper room, | 13:16 | |
| bless us as guests at the table spread for us | 13:21 | |
| that we may draw strength to witness to the world | 13:27 | |
| and to keep ourselves unspotted from the world | 13:33 | |
| through the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. | 13:39 | |
| Amen. | 13:46 |
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