|
Receiving Holy Communion Regularly By Rev. Jonathan Gale Sunday 28th August, 2011 1 Corinthians 11: 23 - 28 23 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, 24and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ 25In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ 26For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Partaking of the Supper Unworthily 27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. 28Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
John 6: 35 - 51 35 Jesus 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. 36But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; 38for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. 39And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’ 41 Then 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 for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
How aware are you of God’s presence with you? I think there are times in our lives when we’re particularly aware of the fact that God is with us. God is tangibly real to us. And there are other times when we seem to go through life without a sense of God being with us. Every now and again it’s good to be reminded that God is real and that he’s with us all the time. This week someone said something to me that brought this to me strongly; but that’s for another occasion. When I was an impressionable little Protestant boy at a Roman Catholic Convent I can recall my young friends telling me that if you missed going to Mass on a Sunday, that was a mortal sin, and you’d go to hell. That made an impression on me at the age of 8. Some years later I went through a phase of drifting away from a sense of God. In fact I tried actively to convince people that there was no God, which is a bizarre thing to do. I eventually became a Christian and I met some pretty solid Calvinists whose practice it was to celebrate the Lord’s Supper once a month, and in the evening. As an Anglican I was scandalised. “Once a month! You go to church once a month?” “No. No. We go to church every Sunday to worship and to be fed by the Word of God, but we only have the Lord’s Supper once a month.” It was then that I realised that as an Anglican I have the best of both worlds! As Protestants we have a major focus on hearing God in the preaching of the Scriptures, as well as a focus on the Eucharist, the Communion meal Jesus commanded us to share. Our church architecture demonstrates that too: up front is the pulpit, the lectern, the busy place in the building, the place of the Word – and we enter through there to the more mysterious and holy place where we share a mystical meal together. In both places we meet God, and it’s important that we understand that, because as Protestants we have a tendency to think that preaching and the Scriptures are more important. It’s fairly straightforward to appreciate the working of God in us as we hear the Scriptures expounded. Easier than that mysterious ritual that takes place in the darker part of the building where – scandalously we sort of eat the body and blood of our God! Eeek!! What’s that all about anyway? As my little friend Charis Gumbeze said to me when I told her that the wine represented the blood of Jesus: YUK! What is it about? Why do we do Communion? The story is told of a little girl who was watching her mum prepare Sunday lunch. She noticed that her mum cut the each end of the ham before putting it in the roasting tin. She asked ‘why?’ Her mum explained that she did that because it allowed all the juices to enter the ham and so flavour it and also because that was the way her mum had roasted her hams. So the little girl goes off and asks her grandmother why both ends of the ham were cut off before roasting. Sure enough she got the same answer but her grandmother added that she should ask her Nana (that’s her great-grandmother) because that is what she did. So the little girl phones her Nana and explained that both mum, and granny had said that they cut off both ends of the ham to allow the juices to flow through and flavour the ham and that was the way she had taught them to roast a ham. Her Nana started to laugh and said – “I cut both ends off the ham because my roasting tin was too small.” You know there are times when we do things for the wrong reasons because no one has ever stopped to ask ‘Why?’ There are also times when we continue to do things for a long period of time based on nothing more than habit. So we need to stop and ask ‘Why Holy Communion?’ Why did Jesus command us to share this meal together? What are the effects of communion and why should we do this regularly?
Communion is a kind of re-enactment of the Last Supper Jesus had with his disciples. The Last Supper was a Passover meal – and that was all about celebrating salvation – originally salvation from the Egyptian slave masters and freedom to a life as God’s people. This was the signal that the people (a rabble of slaves) were setting out to form of a nation, a nation covenanted to God and therefore under God’s direction, a people redeemed and formed into God’s community in the Promised Land. Once slaves to the Egyptians. Now a people saved by God and joined with God in the task of being a light to the Gentiles – a light to the other nations. Communion plays a similar role. It is a sign that we are redeemed – saved by the blood of Christ and that we are a community of the redeemed whose task is to be a light to all those who don’t know Christ. Coming to Communion is a sign that says: We are the people of God!
Jesus said, Do this to remember me. What did he mean? In one sense it means just that. Call to mind all that Christ has done and continues to do for us. We recall with love and gratitude the immense love that took God’s son to a cross to pay the ultimate price (death) because of your sin and mine. We remember and we are fed by that remembrance. Gratitude wells us within us. But remembering means more than that. As the body of Christ, the church, we are Jesus’ arms and legs, his hands and feet. He is the head and we are the body, St Paul says. Many members, one body. So coming together is like putting together the church, re-membering, bringing the members of the body together for nourishment: nourishment so that we can do what it is God wants us to do. There is sustenance in coming together regularly. It’s a bit like the packing down of a rugby scrum. There is mutual strength in unified action. We are Christ’s hands and feet in the world and we need to be a co-ordinated body. It’s about forming the community of God, really. Charmaine told me a story of woman who had something wrong with her and she couldn’t eat in the normal way. (I think she was fed liquids through a colostomy bag). What she experienced was being cut off from family, friends and the community, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t physically cut off. Eating together is such an integral part of being community. It’s deeply imbedded in our culture as a mutually reinforcing activity – it’s community-forming.
But Communion is more than just community-forming. There’s something very physical about Holy Communion. It’s like an altar-call. We get up out of our pews and come forward to eat and drink. It involves our whole bodies and it involves all of us as a community, doing something – enacting a ritual that is 2000 years old. What you do on a regular basis hugely influences the way you see yourself – the things you identify with. And your sense of identity influences the way you think and in turn the way you act. Charmaine spoke to us a little while ago and mentioned that when an architect designs a house, he forms it according to certain principles and parameters, but that when on lives in the house, the house forms you. You are influenced by the physical features with which the engage. This is so important – that we are proud (in the good sense of the word) to see ourselves as part of the noblest tradition on earth, as belonging to the group of people Jesus formed and sent the Holy Spirit to initiate. How proud are you of being identified as a Christian, how happy, how joyous? How proud are you of belonging to an organisation God suffered and died to establish – for you and me? How aware are you that we hold in our hands the words of life to a hurting and lost world, which is blind to its need but nonetheless desperately needs God? I ask myself often how aware I am of these things: just as I started by asking us how aware we are of the presence of God with us. There’s a concept called “practising the presence of God”, being consciously aware that God is within us. Give your spiritual side a bit of help by saying, “God is within me; all the time.” Speak to God in everything you do. Communion is a bit like that. We eat and drink; normal things to do, and yet there is something very spiritual about it. Regularly acting out, being part of the ritual Jesus commanded us to go through with our fellow Christians is a powerful influence on the way we see ourselves, and is part of that process Paul speaks about when he says, “be transformed by the renewing of our mind.” (Romans 12: 2)
And when we experience this ritual of Holy Communion we realise there is something even more significant to it than a fellowship meal – where we eat and drink together to celebrate our community together as believers. Something even stronger than mutually reinforcing our identity as Christians. The Eucharist is a sacrament (an action commanded by God – in this case Jesus) – and a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inner and invisible grace – God actually meeting us in the act of Holy Communion. God reassuring us of our salvation from sin and fortifying us for our mission – which is sharing the Gospel with all who don’t know Jesus. And just as the Israelites moved out of Egypt with some urgency in order to follow God in his task of getting them to Canaan, so we move out after Communion with some urgency to follow God in his task of bringing his love in the Good News to those who need it. If Jesus told us to do it, it is because it is vital to our spiritual and physical well-being. We will not be able to get the job of a Christian done without it. So God meets us in Communion to strengthen us for the job in hand.
It’s worth remembering, there’s nothing magical about Communion. Simply eating and drinking the bread and wine (no matter how many times a priest has said special words over them) is not going to do anything for you. We do everything in the Christian life by faith – we actively believe that as we eat and as we drink – God meets with us. Faith is reaching out to God. As we do so in taking Communion, so our own faith grows and we receive strength to share Christ’s love – all in faith.
But why bread and wine? Jesus said, “Take and eat; this is my body.” And “Drink from it all of you. This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” The bread and wine are representative of the life of Christ. In the Old Testament the Israelites were not allowed to eat the blood of an animal because God said it represented the life of the animal. Bread is the staple diet of the people. It is that which keeps them alive daily. So both the bread and wine are about life. Bread is the staple diet for our physical bodies. Christ is the staple diet for our spiritual life, and the life of Christ within us is necessary if we are to be effectively used by God’s Spirit to do the work of a Christian. When we partake of the bread and wine, we partake of the life of Christ.
Intriguingly Jesus in our reading says: 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 for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ If you recall, the Israelites collected manna in the wilderness each morning. When some tried to store it, it went rotten. I’m not saying we have to have Communion every day, but the principle is there – we have it with regularity and we have it frequently. So really it’s quite straightforward. There is something mystical in the Eucharist. We eat and drink by faith and experience a special presence of God. We take it in. We internalise God. We do this in obedience to the command of Christ. It strengthens us for the task of the Christian – introducing other people to Christ. We do it as a sign that we are the redeemed community of God. We recall with gratitude the love of Christ in dying on the cross for us. We re-member the body of Christ – bring it together for nourishment for the task of being Christ in the world. It’s a vital thing for our lives as Christians. Here’s a thought: we don’t live to eat and drink, we eat and drink to live. There is more to our life as Christians than a Communion boost, if you understand what I mean. Finally and crucially, we come to Communion to give. Yes we get. The whole conversation Jesus conducts around Communion is about him giving himself to us. He certainly does. God gives generously of himself all the time. But the Christian life is a life of giving, and the more we give, paradoxically, the more we get. We come, responding to the altar call of God, to give ourselves afresh to him each week. When we kneel at the Communion rail we are kneeling at the foot of the cross and saying, “Thank you, Jesus!” Thank you for your death on our behalf, and thank you for rising again, for you are the bread of LIFE. Our life is found in you, and here I am giving myself to you again! God bless you Amen |
