One Last Reminder
Sermon
Conversations Over Bread And Wine
Meditations For The Lord's Supper
One cannot read the gospels without being impressed with the way that Jesus dealt with the surprises. His life seemed constantly to be filled with them: an almost steady stream of the needy coming to him for help, intruding, as it were, on his time; conversations that led in directions he could not have anticipated; interruptions that became crisis moments in which he could only react. The patience, compassion, and composure he exhibited in such circumstances is truly amazing.
But not all in Jesus' life was reaction to the unexpected. There were occasions when he planned in detail what he wanted to do and carefully executed those plans. Palm Sunday seems to have been one of those occasions. Borrowing a donkey, to be released to the disciples at a certain signal, and Jesus' ride into Jerusalem to the adulation of the followers did not happen by chance; it was skillfully orchestrated - an example of what scholars call "dramatic prophetic action," conveying a message through action, and in this case living out the words of the prophet Zechariah. There are some indications that the cleansing of the Temple may also have been planned in advance by Jesus.
But certainly all would agree that the final meeting of Jesus with his disciples before his death - the meal in the Upper Room - was an event that Jesus planned beforehand. The gospels describe Jesus arranging with a nameless friend in Jerusalem to borrow the room and then sending ahead several disciples to prepare the meal. So when Jesus met his disciples for the Last Supper it was more than just another meal at the end of the day. It was an event carefully arranged by our Lord.
The Gospel of John suggests that it was the Passover meal that Jesus and his disciples shared that night, and the Passover always involved detailed preparation. But far more was involved that night than just Passover preparations. Jesus knew that it would be the last occasion to be with those he had chosen as his disciples and had been training for three years to carry on his work. In a sense, it would be his final opportunity to convey the essence of his life and message, one last chance to share what was most important to him - and to them.
It cannot be overemphasized that Jesus did not take his disciples to the Temple and in that sacred place, where the Jews believed God to be most fully present, share with them his final words. He did not invite them to the synagogue, the normal place for learning and instruction among the Jews. He didn't even take them to a mountaintop, which on other occasions had become nature's sanctuary where he taught his disciples eternal truth. He didn't meet with them individually, one by one, to lay out his plan and purpose.
No, when he had that last, final opportunity to share, it was to a home that he took his disciples - all twelve of them, and they shared in the most mundane of all human actions. They ate together. And the food that became the center of attention that night comprised the most common elements of all: bread and wine. And by that act itself, Jesus sought to convey incredibly important truth to his followers - then and now. Truth that focuses upon the nature of true religion, on what God wants and seeks for his children. The truth is this: We, God's creatures, who seek to be faithful to our Creator, will be a family, a fellowship, a communion, people bound together by love and a common loyalty to Jesus Christ.
When all is said and done, when Christianity is precipitated down to its most basic elements, this is the sum and substance of it: God wants his people to be a family, God's children committed to doing God's will. From the beginning of the human race that has been God's purpose. It is a message central to the Old Testament - the record of God's attempt to bring together a people who in a special way would live for God's purposes, a people who would be faithful to God's precepts, obey God's laws, and do God's will. That unique people, the Old Testament affirms, was to begin with Abraham, who would be the father of a nation as vast as grains of sand on the seashore. The tragedy is that it never happened; the Hebrew people came to think of themselves exclusively as God's people. With the exception of Jeremiah and a few of the other prophets, the Jews of the Old Testament times never understood the concept of being "a light to the Gentiles," reaching out to share with the world a place in God's family. More than that, the people of the old covenant, who were at best intermittent in their obedience, came to understand obedience to God as little more than strict adherence to endless legalisms. For those considered the most committed to the Hebrew religion, the scribes and Pharisees, doing the will of God, far from leading to righteousness and justice, got interpreted as fanatical devotion to minute details of legalistic interpretations. And so the old covenant was broken, not by God's failure to extend love and blessing to all people, but by Israel's failure to understand the kind of obedience and faithfulness God asked of it.
So God offered a new covenant - this one based not on law but on grace, not on obedience to rules but on a grateful commitment to the One in whose life the nature of God became manifest for all time as searching, endless love - Jesus of Nazareth. That is the central affirmation of the New Testament. It is the record of God's attempt in Jesus Christ to bring into existence that special people God has always wanted, a people who will in turn reach out to invite into their fellowship all of God's children, creating a new family of those ready to do God's will - God's family.
And that is what is symbolized in the Lord's Supper. When Jesus and his disciples entered the Upper Room in the long ago, it was the Christ bringing together his followers in that unique act by which their oneness would be manifest, indeed, the way that our oneness as families is always manifest - sharing together a meal. The apostle Paul spelled it out in his first letter to the Corinthians: "This bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." One body! One people! One family! That is what God has always been seeking to bring about in our world!
But God's purpose has constantly met resistance. Actually, there are two forms which resistance has taken, and to both of them the sacrament of Holy Communion speaks. One form is the age--old tendency toward exclusiveness, epitomized in the lines of the old doggerel:
We are the choice, elected few;
Let all the rest be damned.
There's room enough in hell for you;
We won't have heaven crammed.
All of us can identify that theme running through the Old Testament in the popular belief among the Hebrew people that to be called by God, to be the chosen people, meant an exclusive right to God's blessing and favor. It meant privilege rather than responsibility.
Tragically, that belief has been just as popular in the Church. History is littered with examples of barriers which Christians have erected to keep people out, to keep the Church pure, reserved only for the righteous and the holy. Even the sacrament of the Lord's Supper itself has been corrupted, in my judgment, by the practice among some denominations of closed communion. Only members of those churches, and hence supposedly the worthy, are allowed to participate in the sacrament. What a travesty of the gospel that is! How is it possible for Christians to shut some out as unworthy when the very meal we celebrate was hosted by the one whose chief "sin," the one that got him crucified, was, as the Gospel of Mark says, that "this man receives sinners and eats with them"? In everything Jesus said and did, he cut across the barriers between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned, the elect and the outcast. By word and example Jesus taught that God loves all his children and invites all into the Kingdom. And Jesus' words, spoken in the Upper Room when he handed his disciples the cup, are precisely that word of inclusiveness: "This represents my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many." Biblical scholars generally agree that the word "many" is not meant to say "many, but not all"; instead, it conveys the meaning "all, who are many." God's love is not exclusive but inclusive. It is for all! Hence the love of God's people needs to be equally as inclusive. The Lord's Supper assures us of that!
And the sacrament speaks no less to the other form of resistance to being a family, namely, the tendency to make religion a personal, private matter. Again, it has been a problem for the church throughout its history. No tradition has escaped it. For Roman Catholics its dominant expression originated in the Middle Ages when the Eucharist, the meal Christians are to share as brothers and sisters in their need as well as in their faith, became the Mass - a private thing doled out by the priests, an individual wafer set on the individual tongue. The cup became reserved only for the clergy, not available to the common people. And private masses could be said for the sick and the dead. How far removed that is from the meal that Jesus instituted in the Upper Room, that common, shared meal by which Jesus demonstrated that his disciples are a family and promised to be present with his followers!
But no less a travesty has been the tendency among Protestants to see religion primarily as a private matter between an individual and God, to view salvation, not so much as a private matter between an individual and God, not so much as a process of creating a new people, as to view it as the saving of souls from hell. And once we are saved, nothing else matters. All other issues become inconsequential and irrelevant. I'm saved! I'm in the Kingdom! I've got eternal life! And that is the end of it.
How different that is from Jesus' understanding of faith. And how different it is from what he intended for his people! Saving individuals from the flames of hell was not what our Lord came to do. Check it out in the New Testament. Jesus' purpose was to bring into existence a new people, a community of persons whose attention was focused, not so much on their personal salvation, as on servanthood, on ministry to others. Jesus wanted to create a new people on whom a new world could be built because they were living for a new purpose - one higher than their own. That purpose - seeking to do God's will instead of their own - Jesus called the Kingdom of God. And those who were in that Kingdom, living for the same causes for which he lived, Jesus considered to be his family, his body.
Do you understand that if we call ourselves Christians that is who we are? Whatever else the Church may be, with all our faults and failures, weaknesses, and sins, you and I are called to be a special people. We are more than individuals with a faith that brings us eternal life. We are a family called into existence by God to be like our Lord! We are a people who are in this world to serve it and so to save it! One body, committed to one Lord, and living for one purpose: to love others into the Kingdom!
But not all in Jesus' life was reaction to the unexpected. There were occasions when he planned in detail what he wanted to do and carefully executed those plans. Palm Sunday seems to have been one of those occasions. Borrowing a donkey, to be released to the disciples at a certain signal, and Jesus' ride into Jerusalem to the adulation of the followers did not happen by chance; it was skillfully orchestrated - an example of what scholars call "dramatic prophetic action," conveying a message through action, and in this case living out the words of the prophet Zechariah. There are some indications that the cleansing of the Temple may also have been planned in advance by Jesus.
But certainly all would agree that the final meeting of Jesus with his disciples before his death - the meal in the Upper Room - was an event that Jesus planned beforehand. The gospels describe Jesus arranging with a nameless friend in Jerusalem to borrow the room and then sending ahead several disciples to prepare the meal. So when Jesus met his disciples for the Last Supper it was more than just another meal at the end of the day. It was an event carefully arranged by our Lord.
The Gospel of John suggests that it was the Passover meal that Jesus and his disciples shared that night, and the Passover always involved detailed preparation. But far more was involved that night than just Passover preparations. Jesus knew that it would be the last occasion to be with those he had chosen as his disciples and had been training for three years to carry on his work. In a sense, it would be his final opportunity to convey the essence of his life and message, one last chance to share what was most important to him - and to them.
It cannot be overemphasized that Jesus did not take his disciples to the Temple and in that sacred place, where the Jews believed God to be most fully present, share with them his final words. He did not invite them to the synagogue, the normal place for learning and instruction among the Jews. He didn't even take them to a mountaintop, which on other occasions had become nature's sanctuary where he taught his disciples eternal truth. He didn't meet with them individually, one by one, to lay out his plan and purpose.
No, when he had that last, final opportunity to share, it was to a home that he took his disciples - all twelve of them, and they shared in the most mundane of all human actions. They ate together. And the food that became the center of attention that night comprised the most common elements of all: bread and wine. And by that act itself, Jesus sought to convey incredibly important truth to his followers - then and now. Truth that focuses upon the nature of true religion, on what God wants and seeks for his children. The truth is this: We, God's creatures, who seek to be faithful to our Creator, will be a family, a fellowship, a communion, people bound together by love and a common loyalty to Jesus Christ.
When all is said and done, when Christianity is precipitated down to its most basic elements, this is the sum and substance of it: God wants his people to be a family, God's children committed to doing God's will. From the beginning of the human race that has been God's purpose. It is a message central to the Old Testament - the record of God's attempt to bring together a people who in a special way would live for God's purposes, a people who would be faithful to God's precepts, obey God's laws, and do God's will. That unique people, the Old Testament affirms, was to begin with Abraham, who would be the father of a nation as vast as grains of sand on the seashore. The tragedy is that it never happened; the Hebrew people came to think of themselves exclusively as God's people. With the exception of Jeremiah and a few of the other prophets, the Jews of the Old Testament times never understood the concept of being "a light to the Gentiles," reaching out to share with the world a place in God's family. More than that, the people of the old covenant, who were at best intermittent in their obedience, came to understand obedience to God as little more than strict adherence to endless legalisms. For those considered the most committed to the Hebrew religion, the scribes and Pharisees, doing the will of God, far from leading to righteousness and justice, got interpreted as fanatical devotion to minute details of legalistic interpretations. And so the old covenant was broken, not by God's failure to extend love and blessing to all people, but by Israel's failure to understand the kind of obedience and faithfulness God asked of it.
So God offered a new covenant - this one based not on law but on grace, not on obedience to rules but on a grateful commitment to the One in whose life the nature of God became manifest for all time as searching, endless love - Jesus of Nazareth. That is the central affirmation of the New Testament. It is the record of God's attempt in Jesus Christ to bring into existence that special people God has always wanted, a people who will in turn reach out to invite into their fellowship all of God's children, creating a new family of those ready to do God's will - God's family.
And that is what is symbolized in the Lord's Supper. When Jesus and his disciples entered the Upper Room in the long ago, it was the Christ bringing together his followers in that unique act by which their oneness would be manifest, indeed, the way that our oneness as families is always manifest - sharing together a meal. The apostle Paul spelled it out in his first letter to the Corinthians: "This bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." One body! One people! One family! That is what God has always been seeking to bring about in our world!
But God's purpose has constantly met resistance. Actually, there are two forms which resistance has taken, and to both of them the sacrament of Holy Communion speaks. One form is the age--old tendency toward exclusiveness, epitomized in the lines of the old doggerel:
We are the choice, elected few;
Let all the rest be damned.
There's room enough in hell for you;
We won't have heaven crammed.
All of us can identify that theme running through the Old Testament in the popular belief among the Hebrew people that to be called by God, to be the chosen people, meant an exclusive right to God's blessing and favor. It meant privilege rather than responsibility.
Tragically, that belief has been just as popular in the Church. History is littered with examples of barriers which Christians have erected to keep people out, to keep the Church pure, reserved only for the righteous and the holy. Even the sacrament of the Lord's Supper itself has been corrupted, in my judgment, by the practice among some denominations of closed communion. Only members of those churches, and hence supposedly the worthy, are allowed to participate in the sacrament. What a travesty of the gospel that is! How is it possible for Christians to shut some out as unworthy when the very meal we celebrate was hosted by the one whose chief "sin," the one that got him crucified, was, as the Gospel of Mark says, that "this man receives sinners and eats with them"? In everything Jesus said and did, he cut across the barriers between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned, the elect and the outcast. By word and example Jesus taught that God loves all his children and invites all into the Kingdom. And Jesus' words, spoken in the Upper Room when he handed his disciples the cup, are precisely that word of inclusiveness: "This represents my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many." Biblical scholars generally agree that the word "many" is not meant to say "many, but not all"; instead, it conveys the meaning "all, who are many." God's love is not exclusive but inclusive. It is for all! Hence the love of God's people needs to be equally as inclusive. The Lord's Supper assures us of that!
And the sacrament speaks no less to the other form of resistance to being a family, namely, the tendency to make religion a personal, private matter. Again, it has been a problem for the church throughout its history. No tradition has escaped it. For Roman Catholics its dominant expression originated in the Middle Ages when the Eucharist, the meal Christians are to share as brothers and sisters in their need as well as in their faith, became the Mass - a private thing doled out by the priests, an individual wafer set on the individual tongue. The cup became reserved only for the clergy, not available to the common people. And private masses could be said for the sick and the dead. How far removed that is from the meal that Jesus instituted in the Upper Room, that common, shared meal by which Jesus demonstrated that his disciples are a family and promised to be present with his followers!
But no less a travesty has been the tendency among Protestants to see religion primarily as a private matter between an individual and God, to view salvation, not so much as a private matter between an individual and God, not so much as a process of creating a new people, as to view it as the saving of souls from hell. And once we are saved, nothing else matters. All other issues become inconsequential and irrelevant. I'm saved! I'm in the Kingdom! I've got eternal life! And that is the end of it.
How different that is from Jesus' understanding of faith. And how different it is from what he intended for his people! Saving individuals from the flames of hell was not what our Lord came to do. Check it out in the New Testament. Jesus' purpose was to bring into existence a new people, a community of persons whose attention was focused, not so much on their personal salvation, as on servanthood, on ministry to others. Jesus wanted to create a new people on whom a new world could be built because they were living for a new purpose - one higher than their own. That purpose - seeking to do God's will instead of their own - Jesus called the Kingdom of God. And those who were in that Kingdom, living for the same causes for which he lived, Jesus considered to be his family, his body.
Do you understand that if we call ourselves Christians that is who we are? Whatever else the Church may be, with all our faults and failures, weaknesses, and sins, you and I are called to be a special people. We are more than individuals with a faith that brings us eternal life. We are a family called into existence by God to be like our Lord! We are a people who are in this world to serve it and so to save it! One body, committed to one Lord, and living for one purpose: to love others into the Kingdom!
