================================
We are continuing our sermon
series on the sacrament of Holy Communion. Today and for two more weeks, not
including next week, we are looking at what Communion is, why we do it, and why
we should want to do it.
Last week we looked at why what
Communion is. It is one of two sacraments. A sacrament is, by classic
definition, “an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace, given
by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”[1]
Holy Communion is a sign or an
indicator, a reminder of God’s love; it is also a means by which God’s love and
grace are given to us. Communion is what John Wesley called a “Means of Grace”
– the ways God bestows divine love and power upon us. He called Communion “the
grand channel whereby the grace of his Spirit was conveyed to the souls of all
the children of God.”[2]
Before I read our scripture for
this morning, I want to answer one of the questions this series seeks to
answer. “Why do we take Holy Communion?” First, because Jesus commands us to do
so. In Luke’s telling of the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples, “Do this
in remembrance of me.” That imperative statement, “Do this” are the command
receive communion.
The second reason we do it is
that Communion offers spiritual benefits to us. It is those benefits that we
will talk about for the next few weeks.
======================
John 6:35, 41-51
35Jesus said to them, “I am the bread
of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me
will never be thirsty.
41Then the Jews began to complain
about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”42They were saying, “Is not this
Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say,
‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not
complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn
by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It
is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who
has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not
that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the
Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever
believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your
ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This
is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not
die. 51I am the living bread that came
down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread
that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”[3]
======================
Our reading this morning, takes place just after last week’s
reading. Last week, we saw the crowd come looking for Jesus. They were looking
for physical bread, and Jesus offered them spiritual bread and spiritual truth.
The crowd in today’s reading is different. Jesus is in the
Synagogue. And this time, instead of the crowd looking for and wanting more
from Jesus – instead of wanting to know more about Jesus – they know Jesus. Or
at least they claim to know him.
“How can he say he came down from heaven? This is just Jesus – of
Nazareth! He came from Joseph and Mary. We know him. We know his parents. He’s
not special. He’s ordinary.” They remember Jesus – they remember his family,
his upbringing, his heritage. In response, Jesus again uses the physical to
point to the spiritual. Or we could say, he uses the ordinary to point to the
extraordinary.
In that exchange between Jesus and those in the synagogue, there
are a couple of things that can help us to understand Communion and the
benefits it holds for us. One is the ordinary and the extraordinary. The other
is remembrance or remembering.
If you remember, in Holy Communion, the physical – the bread and
juice – points us towards the spiritual. The physical elements convey to us
Spiritual grace. Another way to look at that is that in Communion, the ordinary
serves as a vehicle for the extraordinary. What seemed, to this crowd, to be an
ordinary man, was actually something extraordinary – Emmanuel, God with us. In
Communion, what seems like ordinary bread and juice offers to us something
extraordinary – God’s divine love and power. It is something through which God
works. In Communion, God uses the ordinary to do something extraordinary.
One of the meanings of Communion I talked about last week was
remembrance. Like the crowd in the synagogue remembered Jesus as just the son
of Joseph and Mary, we remember Jesus in communion.
There are several different names for the sacrament of Holy
Communion. And those different names remind us of the different aspects of the
sacrament. When we talk about the “Lord’s Supper”, it helps us to remember. To
remember that this is indeed, Jesus’ meal. Christ is our host. We participate
at Christ’s invitation.
The name “Lord’s Supper” calls us to remember Jesus as our host.
It also is a reminder of the Last Supper. Which is not a name typically used
for the sacrament, but does remind us of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples
and his command for them, and us, to partake in remembrance of Him.
In The Lord’s Supper, we remember. We remember God’s great works.
We remember God lovingly creating all that we see – all that we can’t see. We
remember God leading the Israelites out of Egypt and the freedom that exodus
brought. We remember God’s presence through the prophets. We remember God with
us, in Jesus. We remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the
redemption – the freedom from sin and death – those actions bring us. We
remember the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the early church.
In The Lord’s Supper, we remember Jesus’ institution of the
sacrament. We remember the Last Supper. In that, we remember Jesus’ presence
with us. In the story of the two disciples walking to Emmaus, Jesus is with
them, talking with them, for hours, but the two disciples never recognized him.
Until they gather at the table to share a meal. It is in the breaking of the
bread that the disciples recognize Jesus. Likewise, it is in the breaking of
the bread of communion that we recognize, remember, and experience Jesus’
presence.
In The Lord’s Supper, we also remember the things that God has
done in our lives. We remember what Jesus’ life and actions mean for us. But we
also remember God’s action in our lives. We remember God’s presence and help in
times of trouble. We remember God’s presence in times of rejoicing.
We remember how we have experienced God in The Lord’s Supper at
other times in our lives. Many of the most meaningful worship experiences I
have had were gathered at Christ’s table. Gathered in a circle on the beach I
felt the Holy Spirit binding that group together as we took communion. Sitting
in a freezing cold 200 year-old Methodist church in Cade’s Cove, TN, the warmth
of God’s love was palpable as our group shared the elements. Or gathered in the
Assembly Hall in the Pool Camp at Camp Sumatanga, kneeling to pray after taking
communion and God never seeming more present or closer.
Those are some of the things I remember when I take The Lord’s
Supper. I remember what God has done, I remember my experiences with God. What
about you? What do you remember?
I mentioned last week that the remembering we do in The Lord’s
Supper is more than a simple intellectual recalling of events. We remember what
God has done for us. But we do more than passively bring those things to mind. This
Holy Mystery says it this way, “This dynamic action becomes re-presentation of
past gracious acts of God in the present, so powerfully as to make them truly
present now.”[4]
One of my professors said it this way. In The Lord’s Supper, we
re-member God’s actions. As in, we put back together – we reenact, relive –
what God has done.
In her book, United
Methodists and the Sacraments, Gayle Felton wrote this, “In Communion, we
do not simply remember what God has done for us in the past; we experience what
God is doing here and now.”[5]
In remembering what God has done, we are reminded and assured of God’s
continued action in and through us. As we remember, we feel God’s presence and
we expect God to continue to work. And God does work in The Lord’s Supper.
In our remembering, we are transformed. The Lord’s Supper is
transformative. It changes us. When we faithfully receive God’s grace, that
grace works in us to transform us.
As we re-member (reenact, relive) God’s actions in our lives, we
are transformed. God continues to work in us. Continues to pour grace upon
grace on us. As we, in the Lord’s Supper, re-member God’s actions it is like
encountering God over and over. We remember God’s action, we are reminded of the
changes we have experienced. We relive it. And we experience God anew. Each
time we gather at the table for the Lord’s Supper, we encounter God and those
encounters change us.
I mentioned last week that John Wesley talked about grace as
divine pardon and divine power. We’re going to talk about the pardon aspect of
grace in a couple of weeks, but I want to talk a little about the power we
receive through grace today. Gayle Felton says the Lord’s Supper “Puts us in
touch with the Power of God to make us into the people God wants us to be.”[6]
She says that as we continually encounter God through the Lord’s Supper, “We
surrender more and more of ourselves to God and we are progressively shaped
into the image of Christ.”[7]
One of the ways grace works is to change us from these earthly,
human images that are often guided by the power of sin, into the perfect image
of Christ guided only by God’s Holy Spirit. It is a life-long process that we
call salvation.
The Lord’s Supper is not the only way we experience God’s grace,
but it is one of the chief ways. As John Wesley said, it is the Grand Channel
of God’s grace.[8] And
the more we encounter and respond to God’s grace, the more like Jesus we become
– the more we live a life guided by God’s love.
This is what I mean when I say that The Lord’s Supper uses the
ordinary to do the extraordinary. It changes us. That’s what the sacraments do.
They use the ordinary to do the extraordinary.
The bread and juice in Communion are ordinary things – yet they do
extraordinary things. Those in the synagogue looked at Jesus and they saw the
ordinary – he’s just a guy from Nazareth! But Jesus was full of the
extraordinary. They had no idea that sitting before them was God embodied.
Christianity is an incarnational faith. Incarnation means assuming
human form. For us, the incarnation means God’s heart and mind made flesh in
Jesus. It is God’s love made real and tangible in Jesus. Incarnation embraces and
exemplifies the idea of the ordinary made extraordinary by the Holy Spirit.
Ordinary human flesh made extraordinary by the indwelling of God’s Spirit.
There is another aspect of Christianity as an incarnational faith.
We are called to allow the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that indwelt Jesus – to
dwell in us – to work in and through us. To be God’s love made tangible. To be
God’s love made incarnate through us – the Body of Christ.
That is how Communion transforms us. In Communion, we offer
ourselves to be the embodiment of Christ. And by God’s grace, we become the
embodiment of God’s love. As we experience God’s transforming grace, we become
a means of grace for those around us.
In Communion, not only is the ordinary used to do the
extraordinary, but the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The bread and juice
become a means for God to change us, to transform us. And we – we ordinary,
flawed people – as we faithfully accept God’s grace, become the extraordinary
embodiment of God’s love.
Though we are not sharing communion this morning, I invite you to
re-member the loving action of God – the things God has done in and though you
– and to allow that re-membering to transform you – to make God’s love come
alive in you.
[1] The Book of Common Prayer p. 857
[2] Wesley, John – Sermon on the Mount-Discourse Six;
III.11
[3] New Revised Standard
Version, ©1995
[4] This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion,
p. 8
[5] Felton, Gayle – United Methodists and the Sacraments; p.
55
[6] Ibid. p. 56
[7] Ibid.
[8] Wesley, John – Sermon on the Mount-Discourse Six; III.11
No comments:
Post a Comment