I'm getting the mechanics right, but we really
didn't talk about the theology.
And the way I learned my Lord's Supper theology
initially was by sitting there
as a child in the pew listening to the prayers
that people prayed and
observing how people around me took of the
Lord's Supper. They were usually
pinchers and sippers, you know, and so you
tried to see how little cracker you
could get in your hand and still get a pinch.
And you had to watch the communion
tray to see if that cup really had been drunk
out of, and they just got a sip
and put it back in because you certainly didn't
want to drink after Sister Jones,
you know. And so you learn a lot. Come on in.
And there's handouts if you
need them. So we had our heads bowed, our eyes
closed, everything was very quiet.
You didn't dream of unwrapping your peppermint
during the Lord's Supper
because everybody would hear it. It's like your
cell phone going off, which
reminds me I better clip mine here. I never
know when that thing's gonna play
Ode to Joy. The older males always led the
prayers, but any baptized male could
help with the service. And your prayers
probably went something like this. You
could say it as well as I can. Our Father in
Heaven, we thank you for this bread
which to us as Christians symbolizes the broken
body of our Savior hung on the
cross for our sins. Help our minds to go back
to Calvary as we partake. Our Father
in Heaven, thank you for this cup which is
emblematic of the blood of Jesus shed
on the cruel cross for our sins. May we
remember he suffered as we drink this
cup. Broken body. How many of you have heard
broken body? And where does the
scripture say his body was broken? Not a bone
of him was broken. Emblematic. If I
say the word emblematic, your mind
automatically goes to the Lord's Supper,
right? Is there any other context you have ever
heard that word used in?
Partake. Do you invite people over to
Thanksgiving dinner to partake of your
turkey? Probably not. That, you know, we have
all these words that are associated
with the Lord's Supper. Celebrate. When was the
last time you were allowed to
celebrate at the Lord's Supper? Observe. Are we
observers? Are we participants?
One of my elders recently told a story that I
thought was very good. They'd had
a big family reunion and they asked a couple of
the teenagers from the family
to pass the Lord's Supper and do the prayers.
These two young men are about
the same age, 12, 12-ish I guess, 11, 12. One
of them came from a very traditional
congregation and he got up and led the prayer
for the bread and did a very
fluid job. He had never led a communion prayer
before in his life and it was a
very fluid job of one of the prayers I just
read to you. The other
young man that grew up at our congregation got
up for the fruit of the
vine and he stumbled around a bit and really
was groping for what to say.
And he's a very polished young man. He made an
announcement at our congregation
two weeks ago and just did a beautiful job with
it. And so his dad was confused
and he was sitting there saying, now why was
Daniel's presentation so broken? And
then it struck him. The young man who did such
the smooth job is raised in a
congregation where he hears the same prayer
week after week after week. He had
it down pat. He knew what to say. Daniel was
raised in our congregation where we
have a diversity of Lord's Supper prayers and
he didn't have the repertoire
of sayings to go back to and grab to put
together for his first Lord's Supper
prayer. We have also, with our Lord's Supper
services, in many churches
established a funeral theology in a funeral
setting. We are here to go back
to Calvary. We are picturing in our mind Jesus
on the cross, his blood dripping
from the cross. And if you're real good you can
get a tear in your eye and that
makes your observance of the Lord's Supper
holier. That's one reason we want
it very quiet. This is a funeral. You don't
celebrate at a funeral. What I'm
here today trying to say to you is that the
funeral atmosphere is one of many,
many, many, many pictures that we can have of
the Lord's Supper. And I want to
just kind of open up some other ways of
thinking about it today so that maybe in
your congregation through years of working at
it you can transition the
people to see the Lord's Supper not as a
funeral but as a proclamation and
celebration of the entirety of the gospel. And
one of my thesis statements
will be that there is nothing that you can't
preach about that you can't also
connect to the Lord's Supper and use it to
reinforce one another in your
service together. Let me skip now historically
a minute. We tend to think
that if Paul and Barnabas were to show up at
our church on Sunday they would
feel very much at home and know what's going on.
And I suggest to you they would
be terribly uncomfortable in your congregation
and you would be terribly
uncomfortable in there because you just don't
know what you're getting into. For
the 1st few centuries of Christianity there
were no church buildings. Churches
were house churches. They met in homes and if
you had somebody who was a little
bit wealthy then you'd meet in his home. It
would be the largest home in the
church community. You had no cars so you
weren't going to drive across town and
pass six other churches to get to yours. This
was the one in your block or in
your immediate neighborhood. The church until
Constantine in the 4th
century did not have Sunday as a day off.
Sunday was a work day and you worked
from sunup to sundown. When it was light you
worked. When it was dark it was your
time. And so you didn't have Sunday off. You
had to meet either late in the
evening after the Sun went down and you got off
work or you had to meet early in
the morning before the Sun came up before you
had to go to work. That is
unless you were wealthy enough that you were
the boss and then you could
probably arrange to meet any time of the day.
And that's probably the situation
that's going on in 1 Corinthians 11. The church
was also for most of its
first 300 years an illegal movement. You didn't
put a sign out front saying
Church of Christ meets here. That's like
inviting the Roman centurion and his men
to come over and arrest all of you. And so here
you have this group of people
who are meeting fairly quietly, primarily in
the evening after they got off work,
Sunday night in a home. We have two
descriptions in the New Testament of a
Christian assembly. Those are not real detailed
but they are in Acts 20 at
Troas and in 1 Corinthians 11-14. In Acts 20 in
Troas it is the
first day of the week when the church assembles
to break bread. Interesting. The
Scripture nowhere says the church met on the
first day of the week to worship.
Worship took place in the temple even for many
Christians after the church
was established. Paul wanted to go up to the
feast and he went to the temple to
worship. And worship was to be the everyday
activity of the Christian. Your
life is a living sacrifice. It is a worship to
God every day. You are a royal
priesthood, etc. But they met on the first day
of the week to break bread and in
Troas it was in an upper room. Paul was there
and Paul dialogued with them.
There's two words used, one in verse 7, one in
verse 11, and both of these are
words of discussion, of dialogue. This is not a
lecture. He may talk a bit, they may
ask him questions, they dialogue together, and
they have a meal together. 1st
Corinthians 11-14 we have discussions about
Corinth and their
worship service together. And the Lord's Supper
was central. It is one of the
primary themes there of chapter 11. And this is
a meal. This isn't our pension
sip. They're bringing food. And the picture we
tend to get from 1st
Corinthians 11 is the wealthier people, the
haves, didn't have to work all day, so
they came and they probably brought the more
expensive stuff for the potluck, you
know, because they were the wealthier guys. So
they would have brought the meat
or whatever, and in our day they would have sat
around in front of the big
screen and eaten their snacks as they watched
the football game. But they came
around and they were eating before the poor
people who had to work till
sundown could get there. And of course the poor
would get there after dark and
they would bring what they could bring to share
with the group, but it was
probably the lesser food items, because they
were the poor. And so by the time
they got there, all the good stuff was already
eaten. All the fine wine was
already drunk, and so the poor were sharing
with the poor, rather than the
wealthy sharing and this being an equalizing,
unifying meal together. And
Paul says, look, wait for one another. This
thing is supposed to be unifying.
Every man is equal in the sight of God. This is
probably the best meal the poor
had. And even later on, centuries later, when
the agape meal got separated from
the Lord's Supper as separate institutions,
many churches kept the
agape meal because that was their benevolent
outreach to the poor of their
community. But at this time it was all
together, just like the original Lord's
Supper in the upper room, was a meal of which
there were elements that
celebrated the Lord. And of course there are
other things in Corinth that we're
not sure what to do with. Praying and
prophesying by women, the tongue speaking
and interpretation, the prayers, the singing,
the revelation, the prophecy.
There's a lot of things there that we could
talk about, but these are the only
two good pictures we have of New Testament
church worship, Acts 20 and
1 Corinthians 11-14. And so we see this
underground movement getting
together in the evening on Sunday in somebody's
home, having a potluck meal
together, and they share their memoirs of the
Apostles, and they pray with one
another, and they encourage one another, and
this is what's going on with this
church. In most of your congregations, the
closest thing you'll have to the
1st century pattern will be life groups or care
groups, if you have those
on Sunday night periodically. Many of you
probably do, but you'll gather in
somebody's home. And I find it interesting that
there has been so much,
so many churches have resisted that concept on
Sunday night, when in fact
it's probably the most biblical of all the
concepts we have of early Christian
worship. A third consideration. Many of our
churches have fixed procedures
concerning worship order and sermons that tend
to treat each element as
distinct, and I guess this depends on your
congregation. Some congregations
have a worship leader, they have a preacher,
they get together, they talk
about what they're doing, and they really have
a detailed embroidery of
materials that take place on Sunday morning.
It's been well thought out. Some
have worship teams that plan the worship.
Others, you just have song leader, and
Brother Jones comes in, and he knows he's
supposed to have six songs, and he's
picked six songs. But there's not a lot of
coordination as to what's going on.
For those of you who preach, we just have this
idea that we preach for 25-30
minutes, and we end in imitation. I'd like to
encourage you to think
broader than that sometimes. If you have three
good points, is there any benefit
in preaching three sermonettes, and connecting
those sermonettes with
readings that support what you're talking
about, and songs that reinforce
what you're talking about, so that you get up
there several times. I've done
that many times and love to do it, making the
whole hour, hour and a quarter,
hour and a half, whatever time you have on
Sunday mornings. Make it where
everything contributes to the next thing, and
is intertwining like that. If you
preach on unity, why not preach part of the
Sermon, and have it lead into the
Lord's Supper, which is a great statement of
unity, and then celebrate the supper
together, and then go ahead and finish up.
Maybe the topic you have fits an
invitation song for your members. I remember,
for instance, one I did
talking about relationships, and we'll get to
this later. But, do you have aught
with your brother? And Jesus says, if you're
going up to the temple, and you
know a brother has aught with you, lay down
your sacrifice. Go be reconciled to
your brother, then go off for your sacrifice.
Well, in this one we
talked about those relationships, and I said,
we're going to take the Lord's
Supper after this next song, and this next song
is an invitation to you. If you
have problems with this church, you may want to
come forward during this sermon,
and have us pray for you before we take of the
supper together. There may be
somebody in this room that you won't sit by,
because you don't like that person,
and you can't take of the Lord's Supper in
purity, if you're at odds with
somebody else in this room this morning. During
this next song, get up and go to
that person. Y'all pray for one another. Y'all
ask for forgiveness. And then we
took of the Lord's Supper together as a unity
meal, before completing what we
were talking about, and later having an
invitation for those who might want to
become Christians, or be a part of our
congregation. Try to think creatively of
ways you can coordinate the whole service
together, and ways that you can
involve the Lord's Supper into the message of
the day. So, the three major
points that I've been trying to make so far.
Our theology has been primarily
driven by Lord's Supper prayers, songs, and
watching others, rather than any
direct instruction. We fail to see the wider
biblical context of the Lord's
Supper, and we are very sermon-centered, and I
think we should strive for an
intertwined focus in our assemblies. Now,
having said that, what I want to do for
the rest of our... wait a minute... yeah, what
I want to do for the rest of our
time this morning, is I want to look at some
various pictures of the Lord's
Supper, that are given in the New Testament and
Old Testament. I think you
have to look at it in a very holistic way. One
of the books I have on the...
I brought some books here you might want to
look at. None of them are real recent, hot
off the press, so nothing I'm saying is
heretical and new. This book by William
Willimon. William Willimon has a couple of
books up here. I enjoy Willimon's
writings. We've used this one as a Sunday
school class book, Sunday Dinner, and it's
talking about the Lord's Supper from a wider
perspective. This one, Word, Water,
Wine, and Bread, traces specifically those
things through Jewish and Christian
history. The place, for instance, that the meal
placed, or the place that the meal
took in Jewish family life and Jewish religious
life, and then in the early
church, and then through some developments
through the century. Baptism
is a part of this, that's the water part, but
of course anybody who studies
baptism, if you haven't looked at the Jewish
concept of the Mikvah, gone down
to your local synagogue, if you have a
synagogue where you live and talk to the
rabbi about his mikvah, you've missed a world
of understanding about what
baptism is all about. Some tremendous stuff
there. So what I want to do is go
through just some various pictures and see if
this helps you. I originally
thought I had three hours, so if I'm running
fast, okay.
Thanksgiving. If you go into your
denominational friends assemblies, you'll
see they talk about the Eucharist. They don't
talk about Lord's Supper or
communion as much. Eucharist comes from the
Greek, Eucharistos, which means
grateful or thankful. In Matthew 26, Jesus took
the cup and after giving thanks, he
gave it to them saying, drink from it all of
you. In the Eucharist, the Church
expresses its thankfulness for God's benefits.
We recognize the abundance of
the blessings and are satisfied in the Lord.
Justin Martyr, A.D. 150, described an
early Christian worship service, and the first
thing they did was, as he puts it I
think, they had the memoirs of the Apostles. It
wasn't necessarily picking
up a Bible and reading, because you know it
wasn't even compiled by 150, but they
might have letters, they might have stories,
and they would share together
the memoirs of the Apostles, the story of Jesus.
A leader might expound on that a
bit, and then they would pray. Prayer would be
their response to the gift from
God that they just received. Then they would
have the Lord's Supper, which was
still a meal largely at this time, a gift from
God, and then they would make their
contributions financially, and those
contributions were their response to the
gift of God. Now again, as we talk about
contributions, we must remember we're in
a different culture. We live in a money culture
today, but I have preached and
been paid in chickens, I've preached and been
paid in a carton of Cokes, and this
would have probably been much more a barter
system back at this point than
any of us are used to. But again, you have
God's giving, the Church responding. God
giving, the Church responding. I personally
have a version every time I
hear somebody say, separate and apart, we're
now going to give. I can't think of
anything that's more fitting. God gave His Son.
Jesus gave His life. We just
celebrated the blood and the body of Christ
given for us. Let's give ourselves
back to Him. Why should it be separate and
apart? Anyway, remembrance. It is a
memorial. There's lots of ways to have
memorials. In our society, we have
monuments to people who are memorials. There
will be a big monument erected
at the World Trade Towers, and the reason that
monument is there will be to remind
people of what happened in 9-11-01. You have
monuments in your towns to people
who lost their lives in World War I or II or
Vietnam or Korea. Monuments.
Remembrance. Well, that's what's going on here.
The Lord's Supper is a monument. It
is a remembrance. It is our Ebenezer that we
raise to remind us. I remember my
grandfather. My grandfather and I were very
close. He lived next door. We had
lots of fun together. We went fishing together.
We caught blackbirds in
the backyard, and Grandma made a blackbird pie.
Yes, I've had one. We worked
in his garden. I climbed in his fig tree and
itched for days. I have so many
wonderful remembrances of my grandfather, and I
have things that were his that sit
on my shelf, and when I look at it, I remember
him. I rarely remember him in
his casket at his funeral. I remember him, and
I think when Jesus says,
remember me, yes, we remember what he did at
the cross, but that was a
part of a bigger him, and I think it's possible
for us to remember the way
Jesus was compassionate to people as we
remember him. I think it's possible for
us to remember just generically the love of God
or the grace of God. There's so
many ways we can remember Jesus other than
thinking of him nailed to the cross,
and even the cross itself is a sign of victory
and is a sign of celebration, and
I just want us to see there's other ways of
doing this besides a funeral idea.
Remember the fullness of Christ, his
incarnation, his servanthood, his ministry,
his teaching, his suffering, his sacrifice, his
resurrection, his ascension,
proclamation of Jesus to the world, a weekly
witness. It's a drama. We are doing
what happened at the Last Supper, and so we
have a play. Your church may say, oh, we
don't want dramas in our worship. Well, you've
got one every Sunday. You're
sitting at the Lord's table in the upper room
as he comes around and serves you
the Lord's Supper, and as he says, I won't do
this again until I celebrate it with you
in the kingdom, and so we kind of go back to
that upper room and we reenact what's
going on there. It is a proclamation. It is a
witness to the world of a united
people as we get all the diversity of our
congregations together around the
common table. It is a proclamation proclaiming
the Lord's death until he
comes. Until Jesus returns, we are proclaiming
that he came to this world
and he died to save sinners. Every time the
congregation, it acts out the
essential features of how the world is supposed
to be. It's supposed to be like
our churches on Sunday morning, and it
proclaims Jesus as the one who's central
to our identity. It's a proclamation. Communion
as being the presence with
Christ, communion with Christ, being present
with him. Koinonia is the word
there. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it
not a sharing in the blood of
Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a
sharing in the body of Christ?
Because there's one bread, we who are many are
one body, for we partake of the
one bread. We are together as a community, but
we are a community together in the
presence of Christ in the supper. We are
communing with him as a body together.
When it was evening, he took his place with the
twelve. He communed with the
twelve. He was present with the twelve. In the
Lord's Supper, he is present with us.
The name, when connected to the mental image,
produces a person or thing. When I
think of my grandfather, his name makes him
present in my heart, in my life. And I
think of the things we did together. When you
think of Jesus, the name produces the
person in your assembly, in your presence. You
are commuting with him. And the Lord's
Supper should be releasing the power, the
personality, the presence of Christ to
you as you gather around his table. This is in
fact what happened in Luke, that
should say 24, the road to Emmaus. When he was
at table with them, he took bread and
blessed it and broke it and gave it to them.
Then their eyes were opened and
they recognized him. As we take the bread
together, our eyes should open to see
the presence of Christ with us. And likewise, a
communion with a faithful,
unity and fellowship. The Lord's Supper has to
do with the whole church, and it
is incomplete as a private devotion. I think
this is an important thing to say,
and I think this relates greatly to our
discussion of singing during the Lord's
Supper. The reason people don't want you to
sing during the Lord's Supper is that
they are having a private communion with God,
and they don't want you to distract
them. I'm sitting here with my eyes shut, and
I'm trying to think of the cross, and
your singing is distracting me from my
communion with God. But we don't see
communion as a private, individual thing in the
New Testament. The church came
together to break bread. They met in one
another's homes and in the Temple daily,
and they came together to share meals together
and to be in common together
and to remember the Lord as a community.
The Supper demands reconciliation and sharing
among all those as brothers and
sisters. It is a demonstration of human
redemption, and there's an emphasis on
oneness. I list a number of passages here from
1 Corinthians. The Corinthian
Church was probably a very diverse church. Some
of our churches are very
diverse, some of our churches are very
homogeneous. And even at that, when we sit
in long rows and look at the back of each
other's heads, there's oftentimes
not a lot of communing that goes on. That's why
the table is so much more
fitting. When you can get 20 diverse people
around a big table, and you look
at each other, and you share your lives with
each other, then the communion has a
lot more meaning, I think, than when you're
just sitting in rows beside your
loved ones and, you know, you can turn the rest
of the world off or turn
them out. We have done this a couple times,
have another one scheduled
for next October, where we don't have Sunday
morning service. We go to the
Fellowship Hall, and we have a meal at 10:00 on
Sunday morning. And we sit at
tables, and we eat together. And, of course,
you try to postpone the meal as late as
you can, because 10:00 is a little early to be
eating. But we have the Sermon
while we're at the tables, we have the supper
while we're at the tables, we have
food together while we're at the tables, and we
even have a little time when you
do fellowship at the table. And try to get it
where you're not sitting across
the table from your best friend, but from
somebody who's not like you. And you can
share that unity together that's a part of who
we are.
Egotism is condemned among those who
participate. First be reconciled to your
brother, then offer your gift. There's no room
for malice and evil. Concept of
Jesus at the table, washing the disciples'
feet, John 13. The arguments among the
twelve over who's the greatest, there's no room
for that in the Lord's Supper.
The emphasis in the New Testament on eating
meat offered to idols
and proper meat preparation is directly related
to this. I don't know if you've
thought about that. Why does Scripture have all
this stuff about eating meat
offered to idols, or meat that's not kosher,
and of course the whole
Acts 15, Jerusalem Conference. Why is this so
important? Are Christians going
around looking at each other's garbage to see
what they're eating? Are they
sneaking behind each other to make sure they're
eating Kosher? No. The foods you
serve, or the foods you bring to the potluck,
to the agape meal, to the
Sunday service, is very significant. And if you
know, you know, you're the host,
you've got the big house, you've invited the
church to come over to your place
Sunday night, and you happen to be a Gentile
and you fix a nice pork loin,
what are your Jewish members going to think?
They can't have fellowship with
you. It's against their scruple. You see, it's
within the context of the
fellowship meal that all of this has great
significance. You wouldn't eat bacon
and eggs in the morning at breakfast, that's
fine, nobody's looking over your
shoulder. But when you come together as a
church and you have this great unity
meal, you better think about one another. A
kingdom meal. You've all
heard the story probably, but I'll tell it
again in case there's one who doesn't
know it, about the elementary school teacher
who was having show-and-tell, and
she told all her kids to bring something to
show-and-tell that signified their
religion. And so, you know, the little Hindu
boy brought his statue of Vishnu,
the Jewish boy had his menorah, the Catholic
boy had his rosary, the
Baptist little girl brought her handbell from
the Handbell choir, and the Church
of Christ boy walks in with a casserole dish.
And we laugh about that. I've heard
the same story told by a Baptist, so we're not
the only ones with casserole
dishes. But when the Baptist pastor told me
that, I said, isn't that wonderful? He
looked at me funny, and I said, the Bible has
such a huge, rich theology of food.
And he weighs about £300, and so he wanted to
know more. But think about it.
You can do a word study on supper, dinner,
feast, banquet, bread, eating, and you will
find all through Scripture significant things
happen when people sit down and
eat together. Some of the greatest covenants in
Scripture are sealed with
food. The Messianic banquet is one thing, and
I've got several things here that
I'll talk about meals together, so hang with
me, we'll touch on a number of them. But...
It holds a feast of rich food, a feast of
well-aged wines,
a rich food filled with marrow of well-aged
wine, strained clear.
And the Jews got this concept that when the
Messiah comes,
He's going to be on this mountain and He's
going to fix this wonderful banquet,
and there's going to be unlimited food and
unlimited fine wines, and we're going to feast.
And for people who are always trying to scrape
together their next meal,
you know, the Messiah is going to come,
and the Messiah is going to throw this huge,
wonderful banquet,
and we'll never be hungry again.
Revelation 19,
Blessed are those who are invited to the
marriage supper of the Lamb.
And he said these are the true words of God.
And you see the marriage supper of the Lamb,
the marriage banquet,
and the Messianic feast kind of flowing
together through a lot of New Testament thought,
but they contribute to this idea of the Messiah coming,
of the end times of the great banquet.
Well, Psalm 23,
Thou preparest a table before me in the
presence of my enemies, my cup overflows.
I am blessed with the food of God.
When Levi is called, he throws a banquet,
invites people to come and meet the Messiah.
The woman washes Jesus' feet, Luke 7, at a banquet,
and everybody's wondering, what's this about
that he accepts her?
Luke 9, the feeding of the 5,000.
The feeding of the 5,000 is one of those that
has traditionally been a Eucharistic text,
and I don't know if you've ever thought of it
in that way.
Now, in Luke, it's in the context of who do the
crowds say that I am.
That ending section of Luke, Herod says,
Who in the world is this guy?
Some people think he's Elijah, he's one of the
prophets, he's John the Baptist.
I killed John the Baptist. I know it can't be
John the Baptist.
Who is this guy?
And then Jesus feeds the 5,000 as sort of his
answer to who is this guy.
And then Jesus goes to his disciples and says,
Who am I?
And Peter says, Well, you're the Messiah.
But Peter clearly is saying what he's learned
in Sunday school,
but he doesn't know what it really means.
And then you have the transfiguration where God says,
This is who he is. He's my son. Listen to him.
But over in John, John adds a couple of words
that really makes a Messianic banquet
out of the feeding of the 5,000.
He says, It's just before Passover.
You see, the Messiah is going to come in the
spring just before Passover.
That's when Moses came.
I mean, that's what Passover is, isn't it?
Passover is the celebration of freedom, the day
of independence for the Jews.
And so they're looking for the Messiah to come.
He's going to come from the desert.
That's where Elijah and Elisha and the great
prophets came from.
That's where John the Baptist did his teaching.
So they're out in a desert place.
They're on a mountaintop.
Here comes this man and he takes one kid's lunch
and he feeds everybody until nobody's hungry again.
And it's 5,000 men.
Some of your texts say besides women and
children that can also be translated
without women and children.
I picture it as a zealot army of 5,000 men.
And he does the Messiah thing in the desert on
the mountain with the meal.
And John says they want to forcibly take him to Jerusalem
because this is Messiah and they know it in
this meal and what's happening.
And they want to take him to Jerusalem and
knock down the Romans.
And Jesus gets them all bedded down for the
night, stay here,
and he sneaks away walking across the Sea of Galilee.
That's messianic banquet.
Jesus is the Messiah.
Luke 14, one of the dinner guests on hearing
this says,
Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom.
And then Jesus tells the story of the great
banquet when he invites many.
And you know they send the messages back saying,
Oh, I can't come. I've got this excuse and that
excuse and another excuse.
And he says, Go out in the highways and the
byways and get them all
and compel them to come in.
That kingdom is going to look like the sheep
that Peter saw.
It's going to have all kinds of unclean in it.
And that's what the church ought to look like
as we gather around the table of the Lord.
The three banquets of salvation, they're in
Luke 15.
You may remember Luke 15.
It starts off, scribes and Pharisees come to Jesus
and they're criticizing him because he eats
with tax collectors and sinners.
He eats with tax collectors and sinners.
If you ever start paying attention to banquets
and eating,
it'll pop off the page to you all through Scripture.
But to answer their criticism of him eating,
he tells three stories.
The woman who lost her coin, the shepherd who
lost his sheep,
the man who lost his son.
And when they are found, they bring them back.
And in two cases, it talks about them calling
his neighbors together
and saying, Look, the lost has been found.
In the third case, it says he threw this great banquet.
And I have a feeling there was some food
involved in the other ones too.
This is kind of banquet theology.
The lost had been found. Let's feast.
Let's celebrate the goodness of God.
Well, this is something that talks about forgiveness.
It talks about the grace of God.
If you're doing a sermon on the grace of God or forgiveness,
what a natural thing to do to have the church
around the table
celebrating the lost has been found.
When somebody's baptized, what a greater thing
to do
than assemble the church around the table and
celebrate this lost has been found.
If you know you're going to have a baptism on Sunday,
always have the Lord's Supper after it.
Don't have it before and then take the newly
baptized person to a back room
and offer them their first communion.
No, this is church business here, bringing the
body together.
The road to Emmaus.
Okay, skip on down. Passover.
Exodus 24, the meal of the covenant, the meal
of freedom and salvation. Passover.
There's a tremendous video that I mention in
your bibliography at the end.
I think it's Maryland Public Television.
Passover, traditions of freedom.
Passover is not far from you, and if you have PBS,
you might look at your guide and see if they're announcing
that they're going to play this show sometime
and set up the videotape, learn how to get it
off at 12:00
and record this thing.
It will be very, very useful for you in teaching
and in understanding the Lord's Passover
and communicating it to your churches.
Passover is the 4th of July.
It's Freedom Day. It's Independence Day.
That's the day Moses led them out of Egypt.
That was the day Israel became the great nation.
It's a celebration.
And with you, 4th of July is a day of
celebration, is it not?
It's a day off for most of us.
We don't work. We have picnics. We have fireworks.
We have big dinners with our family and friends.
That's Passover.
Passover commonly was not for just a family,
but you might have some strays out there who
don't have family accessible.
You involve them in your Passover.
You shared the Lamb together.
This movie talks about the preparations that go
on for Passover.
It shows contemporary Passover services
and how much fun the Jews have and the games
they play over the Seder meal,
the stuff that's hidden around and the way
teaching is done.
Wonderful film.
Passover is a feast.
Isn't it interesting?
All the great celebrations of the Jews except
Yom Kippur are feasts.
The feast of the Passover, the feast of
Pentecost, the feast of Tabernacles.
Yom Kippur is the time of fasting.
And I wish we could get more of that feast and
celebration idea
into our services together as we take of the
Lord's Supper.
Look at what God has done.
Thank you, God, for what you've done.
Looking forward to what God is to do again.
And this is all a part of Passover.
They looked back to the Exodus and how God
freed them.
They looked at their presence, their present
state as they were a nation.
They looked forward to the return of the Messiah.
And, you know, in many Jewish circles they'll
have the chair for Elijah
that's empty in the room because they want
Elijah to come
because he's going to lead in God's Messiah.
I wonder how many of you have Seder meals at
your churches. Any?
We've done this for a number of years now
and have found it very instructive to help
people understand some of the background.
Of course, we deal a lot with some inner city kids,
and it's fun getting them around the table
and you start passing the bitter herbs and a
few other things.
There's lots of yucks among, well, children and adults,
but at least the adults will, you know, they'll
grin and bear it
and have some of the stuff.
But I encourage you, think about having a Seder
meal for your church
and trying to learn something of that background
because that is the setting in which the Lord's
Supper originally took place.
The marriage feast.
Blessed are those who are invited to the
marriage supper of the Lamb.
First miracle, water into wine at the wedding
at Canaan in Galilee.
And probably that, of all the healings Jesus
did, of all His miracles,
that probably gives Church of Christ people
some of the most trouble
because we don't want to think Jesus made water
into wine
and we just don't know what to do with this thing.
But this again, see, this is wedding feast.
Wedding feast has Messianic thoughts.
He takes this water that was probably Jewish
holy water for the ablutions of the wedding
and He makes of it the equivalent of unlimited
fine wines.
Back to Isaiah.
And Mama's pushing Him, and He's saying,
it's not my time yet.
This is kind of an introduction to the marriage
feast of the Lamb.
Messianic concepts that are going through there.
God's people are continually portrayed in
marriage terminology.
Isaiah 26, beautiful passage.
No, I'm thinking of Ezekiel, but it's still a
beautiful passage.
Therefore, as a young man marries a young
woman, so shall your builder marry you.
And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall God rejoice over you.
Jeremiah 2:2, Go and proclaim in the hearing of
Jerusalem, thus says the Lord,
I remember the devotion of your youth, your
love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness.
And that passage in Ezekiel 16, it's much
greater than just verse 8,
it talks about how God found Israel as a dirty
infant who had been given birth and abandoned.
And He ties the cord and cleans her up and
raises her,
and then she grows to be a beautiful woman to
the time, He says here, of love.
And He covers her with His cloak, He covered
her nakedness,
He pledged Himself to you and entered into a
covenant with you, says the Lord God,
and you became mine, a beautiful passage
describing God's love for Israel,
His adoption for Israel, and marriage to Israel.
So the whole concept of the church is the bride
of Christ
is but a continuation of the concept of Israel
as God's bride.
Ephesians 5, Husbands, love your wives as
Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.
Revelation 19, let us rejoice and exalt and
give Him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come, His
bride has made herself ready.
You know, you can talk about marriage in your sermon,
and you can tie it together to the Lord's Supper
as a foretaste of the marriage supper of the Lamb,
when we as the church will be presented to
Christ as His bride.
Revelation 19.
The blood of the covenant.
There's a couple of covenantial ideas that
we'll look at here.
The first one, the blood of the covenant, Jesus
at the Last Supper said,
concerning the cup, this is my blood of the covenant,
which is poured out for many for the
forgiveness of sins.
And that, of course, is patterned after Exodus 24,
where Moses takes the blood there at Sinai and
dashes it on the people,
throws it out over the crowd, and says,
this is the blood of the covenant that God has made.
The new covenant involves an urge from the inside
to be faithful to the relationship with God
in contrast with the old commandment, which was
from the outside.
That urge is the presence of the Holy Spirit.
In the new covenant, God assumes responsibility
for enabling humans to relate faithfully to Him.
We are making a covenant with God.
God has made a covenant with us.
And when we partake of the Lord's Supper,
we are reminded of that covenant.
We are being renewed in that covenant.
And you'll notice how many covenants in
Scripture involve food.
Begin in the Garden of Eden.
They could eat of the tree of life.
They couldn't eat of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil.
When they sinned, they were driven out of the garden,
so they could no longer eat of the tree of life.
Cain and Abel made their sacrifices.
And what did they offer? Food.
Noah leads his people out of the Ark.
They make a sacrifice to God.
It's the rainbow in the sky, and God gives them
meat to eat.
They couldn't have meat before that time.
The men come to see Abraham to tell him he's
going to have a son.
And what does he do?
He throws a great banquet for them.
I mean, three guys come, and he kills the
fatted calf
and fixes all this food to celebrate with them.
Look at Joseph's encounters with his brothers.
And where did they really get heart to heart?
It was around the dinner table at Joseph's palace.
The Passover was sealed with food, Exodus 12.
And when you read in Exodus 24, God gives his
law at Sinai,
and it says,
Moses and the leaders of the people, the elders
of the people,
went up on the mountain and ate and drank with God.
The Ten Commandments was sealed with a covenant
meal on Sinai
with God and the leaders of Israel.
Passover, Pentecost, tabernacle, Feast times,
covenant times, meal times.
And you can just go over and over and over
through Scripture
and look at times when covenants are sealed
between two people with food.
It's just in so many stories.
And so if we're talking about to our people,
we want you to covenant with this church for
the next year
to be involved in our ministries.
Or we want you today to covenant with God to be
a disciple who's going to grow.
Or we have these goals for this church,
and we want you to covenant to join us in
achieving these goals for this year.
What better than a covenant meal to do it?
We did something unusual at our congregation
last year.
We had a sabbatical month.
Sabbatical may be a new term to some of you.
But we kind of took the Sabbath principle to an
interesting degree.
We're busy, busy, busy.
We have a high involvement level at our congregation.
We had people who didn't have time for anything else
because they were just up to here.
And we said, okay, January is going to be a
sabbatical month.
In January, there will be no ministry team meetings.
In January, there will be no elders meetings.
In January, there will be no Bible classes.
In January, we're going to have Sunday morning worship,
and we're going to have a Wednesday night worship.
And that's it.
On Sunday morning, instead of Bible classes, we
opened the auditorium for prayer.
And we had elders there to pray with members
and other people there to serve as intercessors
with folks who wanted to pray.
We had a daily devotional guide that we put out
to the whole congregation
and sent out every week.
But we just said, look, for this month, we want
you to spend time with your family.
We want you to spend time in prayer.
We want all this busyness that we're about,
even though it's good ministry,
we want it just to stop.
And then at the end of that month, the fifth
Sunday, we have a covenant meal.
We all gathered in the fellowship hall.
Instead of in the auditorium, we had this meal
around tables, 225, 30 of us.
We had a covenant contract that we asked people
to sign,
pledging themselves to that church and its
works for the coming year.
And then we were asking people who were not
involved to get involved,
and those who felt like they were being too
busy to reassess what they were doing
and whether it was actually serving the purpose
they thought it was
or whether they were just being busy.
And we had some ministries that didn't start up
again after that.
And we had some new ministries that we felt
needed to happen
that immediately got staffed by volunteers
because some priorities changed,
and there was a tremendous amount of prayer
that month.
But a different idea, but we sealed it with a
covenant meal,
and it was, I think, extremely effective.
The Lord's Supper is a time of judgment.
1 Corinthians 11 calls those who partake of the
Lord's Supper to examine themselves,
to not examine others, examine themselves and
judge themselves.
If communion is to happen, confrontation cannot
be avoided,
since our exclusiveness, our self-concern, our self-centeredness
must be confronted if we are to die to our
selfishness and rise to community.
Luke wants to ensure that Judas is present at
the Lord's Supper, or the Last Supper.
A traitor can partake of the Last Supper, the
Lord's Supper, and still be a betrayer.
Presence at the Lord's Table does not guarantee purity.
And when you read in what Paul's writing to the
Corinthians, it has no magical powers.
There are some people who act like the Lord's
Supper has magical powers,
and you've probably had people call your church
to say,
what time is your service on Sunday, and do you
take the Lord's Supper early in the service or late?
And what they're saying is, I'm on the road,
I'm traveling from A to B,
and I've got to get my Lord's Supper in, and
I'm looking for a church
to get it at 10:00 and hit the road.
And they're missing what communion's about.
They're missing what the Lord's Supper's about.
There's no magical powers in it, in itself.
And the Lord's Supper calls us to honesty.
Several passages I quote there.
It is a life-giving meal, a transfusion.
From John, those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood have eternal life,
and I will raise them up on the last day.
This idea of the bread of life of Jesus.
I remember a sermon I did where I took a high
platform about, oh, it's good this high.
And I went to a local Jewish bakery and got one
of those beautiful halal loaves,
gorgeous piece of bread, and put it on that platform,
and it sat there during most of our service.
And I talked about Jesus as the bread of life.
And then in the middle of the Sermon, talking
about Jesus as the bread of life,
took the loaf down, broke it into eight pieces,
put it in the communion trays,
and then we served the bread to the congregation.
Eat my bread and drink my cup, or drink my blood.
Trying to incorporate, you see, the message of
the day along with the communion of the Lord.
Well, I'm out of time.
You'll see there's many more here, and this is
not exhaustive in any sense.
But what I want you to see is that the Lord's
Supper proclaims the gospel.
And whatever it is you're teaching or preaching on,
the Lord's Supper can be used as a part of that
teaching and preaching.
If you'll see some of the broader concepts that
are involved in the meals together.
I have some books here on the table if you want
to look at any of them.
As long as you look and don't take, you're
welcome to do so.
And there's probably a lot more good stuff out there.
I have not been looking at the latest material.
But I hope this will breathe a little new life
into your communion together.
Thank you very much.
Good job.
Thanks, Rob.
God bless.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Thank you.
I'm not feeling well, and I took some medicine
this morning, and I just had a hard time.
Well, that's okay.
Not because of you.
I didn't notice, but thank you.
I just felt like I needed to say something.
Thank you. Teacher.
I want you to use Sacramental with John Six. Yes.
I went to Lutheran seminary.
So I got the corpus. B-A-S-C-H.
It took a while to figure it out.