Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places:

Greetings in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ!

Coca-Cola tried to bring the world together in 1971 with a commercial.

I would be surprised if you don’t remember it.  I preached a sermon on World Communion Sunday in 2013 (remember that?) and when I started to sing the song, the entire choir joined in and scarcely a beat later so did the congregation.

I’d like to teach the world to sing.

The commercial was filmed on a hilltop outside of Rome with young people from across the world, each holding a bottle with Coca-Cola labelled in their own language, lip-syncing the words about harmony and love (and well, yes, Coke).  It was recorded by The Hillside Singers and became an immediate sensation, topping the charts in the United Kingdom that year and reaching #7 in the United States.  Coca-Cola gave all the royalties from the song, a whopping $80,000 back then, to UNICEF.

I remember hearing it as a twelve-year old and would often race back to the TV when I had left for a snack during a commercial break.  It was an image and a song that captured me somehow, perhaps hoping it would drown out the Vietnam war and all the unrest of that era, and there was so much unrest then!  I would sing along and for a minute or two I was in a different world.  I wanted to join them on that hilltop.

What would you like to teach the world?  To get along?  To cherish each other?  To save the children from war?  To stop the killing?  To share?  To be kind?  To take a deep breath?  What else?

I would add:  to share a meal together.  This is one aspect of the definition of peace from the Greek word Irène.  When we share a meal, we aren’t hurting or killing each other.  The same can be said about singing.

We will be sharing a meal together tomorrow when we celebrate World Communion Sunday with Christians across the world.  When we come forward to the table might we dare to imagine that Palestinians, Israelis, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians are joining us?  That we are all standing there together as sisters and brothers, waiting for the bread of life and the cup of wholeness and peace?

That is my dream for tomorrow, for now and any and every day, that we all work for peace anew–the table is large enough for all of us—by singing loudly, hold hands as a world, and not stop until the tune of harmony and love is too irresistible to lip-sync or ignore.

Grace and peace,

Harry