Today, we are back at the start of the new month and we are looking at the value again of worship. The type of worship that we practice is what we would call Christ-centered worship. Christ is the center of our worship experience. Today we are going to talk about what I would consider one of the essential ingredients of worship and that is what we would refer to as Communion. If we value Christ-centered worship then the communion table will be the centerpiece of worship because it is at the communion table where we remember Christ and his sacrifice for us. In other words, at the communion table is where we begin to reflect on the core meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is what we are going to look at today. We are going to look at the meaning of communion. Really, you can consider this either a shortened sermon or an extended communion meditation because I am not going to follow with another communion meditation. From this, we are going to go right into our time of prayer and then followed with that right into our time of communion. Before we look at today’s passage, I wanted to remind us that we are all familiar with different types of communion. A lot of you come from different church backgrounds so you have experienced communion in a variety of ways. Usually the variety has to do with things like the frequency of communion. It has to do with the method of communion, but it also has to do with the meaning of communion. What is the core meaning behind communion? As much as I would love to spend a long time on talking about the various methods and meanings behind communion, I really don’t have the time to do that today so what I thought I would do is just kind of talk about what I would call the two major views of communion, the two extreme views of communion, and then help you realize that really everything else is just kind of a variation on those two views. Those two views are what I would refer to as a high church view and a low church view.
I want to talk first about this idea of a high church view. I suspect we have a few Catholics or former Catholics in here. Raise your hand. Don’t be ashamed. Be proud. Like my dad said “Once a Catholic always a Catholic.” The Catholic view is what I would call the high view of communion. A very high, exalted view of communion. My Catholic theology is a little but rusty so don’t criticize it too much, but the idea of what happens at the Catholic mass is that everything in that mass leads up to the communion. In fact, communion is the last thing you do before you head out the door. That is why when communion starts people start heading out the door. It is really the last thing that happens before dismissal. In fact, the word mass comes from the word dismissal. If you know your catechism you might know that when the priest gets up there and he opens up what they would call the tabernacle, the little metal container, it is not like he is just doing a normal preparation for communion. He is up there actually doing something that is amazing. He is actually getting ready to consecrate the bread, the host, the Eucharist, and the wine at which point when it is consecrated, when he invokes the word of Christ, their belief is that the host, the Eucharist, and the wine actually turn into the real presence of Jesus Christ. The absolute presence of Jesus Christ. Consequently, when that happens, at that point, people that come and take communion they come and bow down. They are bowing down before what they believe to be Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, in the wine. That is why in the old times it used to be that you couldn’t even touch the host. The priest would have to place it directly on your tongue. That is what is happening there. There is actually a 50-cent word for that whole idea of it turning into the actual substance of Jesus Christ. Does anybody know what that word might be? Transubstantiation. That is a long word. That is a fun word to say. It is the belief that by the power of God at the consecration in the mass, the bread and the wine change substance into the actual substance of Jesus’ body and blood even though they seem to retain their natural characteristics. That is a high, high view of communion. They believe it actually turns into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. When I was growing up as a young boy at St. Ann’s Parish in St. Louis, MO I remember sitting there in those long pews and being a little bored and fidgety like most kids are in church but when the priest got up there and he started ringing the bells and that sort of thing, I knew that something was about to happen. It would always get my attention. I remember him getting up there and ringing that bell I knew that something was going to attempt to draw my focus to what was going on there and I actually believed that while he was up there the host and the wine were turning into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. I would strain my neck to look around the bald man in front of me to see if I could actually see this happening as if I expected Jesus to kind of pop out from under the altar or something like that, which he never did. I still retain that sense of awe. To this day, when I take communion out to a shut-in and I come back home and I have those little chicklets that are left over, I am afraid to throw them away because it is like I am throwing away Jesus’ body or something like that. I feel this little twinge of guilt that I am throwing away the host because you can’t just get rid of a host like that. That is what I would call the high view of communion.
On the other extreme, you have what I would call kind of a low view or simpler view. Really it is the idea that communion is kind of an afterthought. You can go through weeks. You can go through months. You can go through a year without celebrating communion. Really what you have on that end is you have a reaction to the Catholic view. The Protestants were protesting the Catholics so in the early centuries, they didn’t want anything to do with the Catholics so they surely didn’t want to experience or practice communion in any way that would resemble the Catholic experience. Some went completely the other way and they gave a very low priority to communion. So much so that it is just practiced very infrequently or in certain churches when they do practice it, they actually assign the communion time to another area, another part of the sanctuary. I was in a church a few years ago where they actually had on the side of the sanctuary cloth partitions and after the service was over you would go into the partition if you wanted to partake in communion. It almost felt like you were going in to vote or something like that. It was just you and God in there. Then I have been to other ones, I think it was a church in Texas, where the service was over and it said if you want to take communion then you go to a different building and you take communion. There is something about that that just didn’t seem right. Because by the very nature of the word communion it implies community. In fact, communion and community are pretty much the same word other than the last two letters. Inherently built into this communion practice is the idea that we are to do it in community. Remember last week I taught community as the body of Christ, which also means that when you come to this community and we get ready to take communion together our particular tradition does not bar anybody from the table. We practice what is called an open communion. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, it is between you and God if you want to take communion. That is the way we feel like it is meant to be. It is a communion with the brothers and sisters in Christ scattered throughout the world. That is really important for us to have that unity. Not only are we in communion with each other, we are in communion with Christ because we are the body of Christ. Although we don’t believe that the host and the wine turn into the real presence of Jesus Christ, we do believe that Christ is present when we take communion. We believe what Christ talked about in, I believe it’s Matthew 18, and it says “Where two or more come together in my name, there I am with them.” When we are together, when we are celebrating the most sacred act of scripture, Christ is in our presence as we commune with each other.
So there are many ways to practice communion. There are many methods. There are many different frequencies of communion, but the common thread in all of the ways they practice is that they practice it. Because you cannot do a serious look at the Bible, especially the New Testament, without seeing that communion was a vital part of the life of the early church. You see that very clearly in Acts. It was just an important thing. You particularly see it in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that we look at today. A little bit of background before we look at the passage. Paul was dealing with a relatively new church. A church at Corinth in a fairly corrupt area and in a fairly pagan area. This new thing called Christianity people were coming in and were curious about it and trying to figure out what was going on. You had former Jews. You had pagans. You had people that were following different gods and you have obviously Christians coming together in a worship setting and they would bring in all their bad habits.
So really in this chapter 11, Paul is kind of slamming them a little bit. He is saying when you come together you are fighting, there are divisions. We have the meal before we have the communion and you people are jumping in front of everybody else. You are overeating. You are overdrinking and that sort of stuff. In the middle of that, that is when he comes and makes a statement about communion. He says “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” Then he goes on to say “In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” If you have been here for a while, you know that those are the exact words that the elders and the leaders of the church use right before communion. They tell you those words because just as those words were passed on to Paul, they are now passed on to the church today. So we carry that on. As a side note, we don’t know where Paul got this information and got this particular communion act. He says he received it from the Lord. We know that Paul had an encounter with the Lord on the Damascus Road. Possibly maybe he got it from the apostles, but he might have gotten it from direct revelation from Jesus on the Road to Damascus.
Whatever the case, he felt that this was so important he needed to continue to pass it on to all the churches that he founded and that is what he did. He wasn’t passing on a tradition. He wasn’t passing on a particular type of song or really even particular types of prayers. He wasn’t passing along a type of music. He wasn’t passing on the idea of what we experience the moments of hospitality. He wasn’t passing on the tradition that every Christmas Eve we light candles and sing Silent Night and that sort of stuff. Those things are mere traditions. What Paul was passing along, what we call an ordinance, was almost like an order. It was one of the few commands of Jesus Christ. He commanded them to do this. We will talk about next month when we go through the week of worship we are going to talk about the other command that he gave was to be baptized. We will talk about that next month. But it was a commandment. You think why did he say do this? He repeated it twice. “Do this in remembrance of me.” I think he did that because he knew people. He knew that people by nature are forgetful. We are all forgetful. The older I get, the more I seem to forget. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast let alone what happened 100, 200, 300, or 2000 years ago because it is not at the forefront of my mind. In order to remember things, it has to stay at the forefront of your mind.
As a side note, we think about some of the major events that happen throughout history. Most recently, the 9/11 terrorist attack. When you look back 60, 70 years you start looking at the moon walk. You start looking at the Pearl Harbor attack and the Civil War and all this stuff and you keep going back and we say we will never forget. We forget all the time. Frankly, as we age and a new generation comes on that was not alive when those events happened, it is not going to be at the forefront of their mind. They are going to forget. Jesus knew that about us. He knew that it was important that we would do this on a regular basis. Not to mention the fact that this was indeed a regular, consistent practice of the first century church. We see that in Acts 20 where it says “On the first day of the week we came together to break bread.” They didn’t come together for a potluck. They came together for communion. That is what breaking bread meant. They would come together and they would eat together but they would always have the communion meal. They did this on a regular basis because they did not want to forget. What did they want to remember is the question. We come here and we say “Do this in remembrance of me.” What particular thing are we supposed to remember about Jesus? And as simple as the answer is: everything. Everything that we can possibly grasp about Jesus Christ in the gospel of the New Testament and even the Old Testament. Those are the things we are trying to recall back into our memory. Really, when you think about remembering. It is actually the two words re-member. It is actually bringing parts together. Remembering things. Bringing them back together. We are taking isolated parts from the past and bringing them together so that we can recall it. Not just simply so we can recall it as some sort of a static fact like we do when we remember certain facts. The Hebrews had this idea that when you remember, when you bring something forward, it is not stale, dry facts. You are bringing the actual situation back into the present so you can re-experience it and then begin to apply it to your life. I came across a quote by this guy A.W. Hunter. He says “To remember something in Hebrew fashion is not merely to entertain a pale and static idea of it. It is to make the past ever present again. Therefore, to remember Christ and his death at the supper is to make the living Lord present again in the power of his accepted sacrifice.” It is a living memory. It is something that you are bringing forward so that you can experience it again and apply it to your life. When we come to the communion table and we pick up the little cup of juice and the little piece of bread, these have some power behind them. It is amazing that Christ would take two of the most basic elements of that time, wine and bread, and use those things to evoke a memory of the complete gospel and every way it would apply to your life. It is an amazing thing. It is the power of imagery that is going on here.
He would say “Do this in remembrance of me.” And you think about what would he want us to remember and I think the minimum that he would want us to remember is obviously the sacrifice. He wants us to remember that on the night he was betrayed he took the bread. It wasn’t a normal night. It was the night when he finished that meal he was going to go outside and he was going to go into the garden and when he got to the garden he was going to sit there and pray and before long it was the night that Judas was going to show up with the guards and have him arrested and drug off to Caiaphas. And then from Caiaphas he was going to go on and face Pontius Pilate and it was Pontius Pilate that was going to have him crucified on a Roman cross. I think he wants us to remember that. It was a horrid thing and he wants us to remember that. But I also think he wants us to remember that it wasn’t without purpose. The purpose was to deal with the problem we had which was our sin that was going on in our lives. Even though we were not present back then, we still sin today. Collectively, all of humanity have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Consequently, there is this huge gap between God’s holiness and our nature. A gap that could only be closed by the sacrifice of the perfect one, Jesus Christ, on the cross. So when we come, we remember the sacrifice. We remember our sin. We remember God’s holiness. We remember our unworthiness. And we remember the cross that solved that. But the problem is that when we go through communion in a particular tradition, it is so easy to get this idea that when we come to communion we need to come with our heads bowed down low and we need to really express remorse for our sinful nature and God’s holiness and I’m such a bad person, God, and just kind of beat ourselves up on our heads. We are terrible people. Thank you for this sacrifice. That is part of it yes, but it is not the only part of it. You see the table is not just for a table of agony. It is a table of triumph. It is a table of victory. It is victory in the sense that we know that by those wounds we were healed.
We have been going through the book of Isaiah at the men’s study on Wednesday night. We recently came through Isaiah 53. If you remember Isaiah 53 it is filled with what they call messianic prophecies, prophecies of Jesus Christ. It is the clearest picture, 600 years before Jesus was born, a clear picture of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In Isaiah 53:5, I believe it is, it says “The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” This is 600 years before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He is talking about “by his wounds”. Some passages say “by his stripes”. By the pain on his back, we have been healed. That gave us peace. It is not just a table of remorse. It is a table of victory. It is a table of joy. It is a table of healing. It is a table of peace because now we have peace with God. In a world that has gone crazy when you watch the TV news and you watch what is going on in Libya and Syria and all those places, when the world is just full of war, because of this you can have that peace inside of you because you know you have that peace with God. When we come to the table, we don’t just experience the agony. We experience the healing that comes through the agony.
Also when we come to the table and we begin to take the bread and we begin to take the cup and we meditate on it, we come to remember that we are new people. Something happened. It didn’t just give us a peace with God. It actually did something new in us. We call that the born-again experience where we are basically like newborn babes. In 2 Corinthians 5:17 he says “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come!” When you accept Christ as Lord and you come into conversion and you follow it along with baptism and you come out, you are like a brand new baby. You are a new creation. The old person that used to live in the way of the world is gone. You have something new going on in you. You have a new attitude and a new way of thinking. So that means when you come to communion once a week and you come before the Lord and the Lord may convict you and say you have to get rid of the old man. I think you are trying to put that old nature back on. What happened? Last Sunday you were all about worship and then what happened? You hit Monday, Tuesday, and by Wednesday you have the old coat, that old man back on again and you are acting in ways you are not supposed to be acting as a Christian. You are supposed to be acting differently. But you have to remember that you have a new identity. You have a new ID card and on that ID card it doesn’t say Pennsylvania. It says Christian. It says you are a Christian. If you don’t like the name Christian or if you don’t want to live up to what it means to be a Christian change your name. Don’t put it on places if you don’t plan on living it because you are a new person with a new identity as a child of God. Sin does not fit in that vision that God has for you. In fact, the idea of sinning or being somehow in sin while you are in Christ is almost an impossibility. Because when you are in sin you are acting contrary to who you really are in Christ. In other words, you experience a brief bout with insanity. That is what insanity is. Insanity is the idea that you have stepped outside of yourself and you are acting outside of who you know to be at your very core. You are acting insane when you are acting in sin and when you are not acting in Christ. You say that is tough. I don’t know if I can do it. And Jesus knew you couldn’t do it. That is why when we come to the table, we remember that he didn’t only give us his body and blood; he gave us his spirit to come alongside of us to help us, to counsel us, to teach us, and even to continue to remind us of the very words of Christ. In John, Jesus says I am going away, “But the counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”
As a side note, he can’t remind you of something you have never learned in the first place. You go and you try to be an engineer or something like that. You are trying to think of some sort of physics equation but you never took a physics class. It is not going to come is it? It is not going to come to you at all. What you are reminded of is the things he has already placed in your mind and placed in your heart through things like what we call the spiritual disciplines. By sitting down and doing the hard work of discipleship. Of sitting down and learning the word of God by yourself or in a group and allowing the word of God to speak to you to teach you new things. That can happen in a small group. That can happen in church. That can happen in choir time. It can happen in worship, but you have to be exposed to a thought before he can bring it back to you. You have to be able to know God. You have to learn the word of God. You have to learn about Jesus before he can remind you of what Jesus said and did. When we come to the table, we are reminded obviously of his sacrifice. We are reminded of the whole idea that we have the peace with God. We are a new creation. We have been given this new identity and that we have the counselor to walk alongside of us.
But really I think what is important for each person when they come in here every week is to just be reminded that they are loved. I know enough of you to know that when you come in here on Sunday maybe you were beaten down all week. Maybe you are feeling a little bit dejected. Maybe you are feeling rejected. Maybe you are feeling separated from the ones you love. Maybe you are in the middle of a separation. Maybe you have been separated from your job. Maybe you have been separated from your house. When you come in, if you know the word of God, the word of God is going to remind you that “neither death, nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” You wouldn’t know that unless you know the word of God.
As a side note, I am just throwing this in. All these verses I put in there, I didn’t look up. I wasn’t reading books and they were telling me to use these verses. I am not boasting but the reason I am using these verses is that I was doing my study, doing my prayer, doing my meditation, these are the verses that God reminded me of. I didn’t find them in books. They just came because over years of just spending time in the word. That is what you need to do because I personally need to be reminded of these things. He reminded me of a lot more verses that I didn’t even have time to put in here. I wanted to put in here dozens of verses that I think, when we come to the table of the Lord, we need to be reminded of.
In closing, when we come to the table of the Lord, it is not just to go through some empty ritual or some empty tradition. It is spiritual food for our soul. It is a feast for our soul. It is a place where we are reminded of these types of things. Most importantly, it is a place that we are reminded that no matter how bad things get in the world, how bad things get in your life, whether you lose a loved one or you are experiencing grief, a child is misbehaving, whatever it is, no matter how bad things get you know that things are going to get better. Because you know on the other side there is life. There is eternal life because of the reality of the resurrection. You remember the story in John where Martha and Mary were distraught because their brother Lazarus died. They said Jesus if you had been here my brother wouldn’t have died. What is his response? He says “I am the resurrection and life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” He is saying that 12 different ways basically that you are going to go on. This isn’t it. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Because he lives, you too will live. You say Chuck that is a whole lot of stuff to remember. It is. That is why we have communion every week because you can’t do this once a year. You can’t just meditate in communion once a year. There is just too much to remember. In fact, I would challenge you, and I think I put that in my study guide this week, maybe on Saturday night instead of staying up late and partying or whatever you like to do on Saturday night, how about if you just maybe fast after dinner or after lunch. Spend time reflecting on some of these things. Get up early Sunday morning and pray over some of these verses, reflect even deeper so that by the time you get here on Sunday your heart is ready to be fed by the word of God and to be fed at the communion table. Not just with cheap grape juice or bread. You are here to be fed the very nourishment of God that is going to give you the life of God and exactly what you need that day but you have to spend the time to prepare your heart for it.
In summary, communion has to be the centerpiece of worship. It has to take a priority over everything else in worship. That is why you might notice we never put the pulpit in front of the table. We never put the music in front of the table. Because those things are secondary. Everything we do on Sunday leads up to the centerpiece of the gospel right here because it is there where we remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We don’t just remember it. We bring it into our present experience and we apply it to our experience as something brand new. It starts with something very simple. It just starts again with the words of Christ and he said “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me. For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Let us pray.
