Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-march-12-2024
I Corinthians 11:17-26
The Lord’s Supper
17 In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good.18 In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. 19 No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. 20 When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, 21 for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One person remains hungry, another gets drunk. 22 Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not!
23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
One of the strangest aspects of church life in the first year of the covid pandemic was that lots of us couldn’t participate in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper for the first time in our adult lives. For close to a year, we could only celebrate the sacrament together on rare occasions. Taking communion by zoom isn’t quite the same.
Today’s reading from First Corinthians makes it clear that from its earliest days, the church has taken the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper pretty seriously. In yesterday’s Reflection, we read the apostle Paul’s thoughts on Christian freedom. But in today’s passage, he makes it plain that he thinks there’s a right and wrong way to go about the sacrament. And in his mind, the people in the Corinthian church were doing it the wrong way.
You might remember that the church in Corinth seems to have been a ‘problem child’ for the apostle Paul. The members were fighting among themselves, they were splitting up into factions, and they were tolerating scandalous sexual behavior in the church. And it turns out they were also demonstrating a disrespectful attitude toward the Lord’s Supper.
Church historians tell us that in the earliest years of the church, congregations would actually gather for a meal – a “love feast” – when they celebrated the sacrament. It wasn’t just a symbolic bite of bread and a sip of wine or grape juice. This shared meal was meant to illustrate the unity of the church as the body of Jesus. It wasn’t just symbolic – the sacrament was actually supposed to make that unity a reality in people’s lives. But according to Paul, the sacrament was being abused so irresponsibly that it was actually fostering disunity instead of love.
Some well-to-do members of the Corinthian church were coming to the meeting place with the equivalent of a gourmet picnic basket. Then they were eating their fine food and drinking wine – even getting drunk – in front of poorer members of the congregation, who had only cheap food or even none at all.
It seems that in those early years of the church, some members knew about the death and resurrection of Jesus, and they wanted to celebrate that. But apparently some church members didn’t really know much about his teachings. Or at least they didn’t understand those teachings. Remember that most or all of Paul’s letters were written before any of the gospels were published. So the early Christians in Corinth might have been taught that Jesus rose from the dead without learning much about what Jesus said about concern for the poor. That might explain their strange attitude toward the Lord’s Supper.
So in this passage, Paul reminds the Corinthian followers of Jesus what the sacrament is supposed to be: a remembrance of Jesus’ willingness to sacrifice his very life – to allow his body to be broken and his blood to be shed – to establish a new covenant between God and humankind. And to form a new community of his followers. It’s pretty clear that Paul understood that the sacrament was meant to unite people and not divide them by wealth and class.
This passage provides us with a good chance to stop and think about our own observance of the Lord’s Supper.
For those of us in the Reformed branch of the church, the Lord’s Supper is said to be a “sign and seal” of God’s promises to us.
It’s a sign in the sense that it represents God’s willingness to bring together the followers of Jesus into his own family. In the sacrament, we gather symbolically around God’s family table, so to speak – that’s why we have a “communion table” instead of an altar. In our theology, the sacrament also symbolizes the church’s participation in the life and ministry and the suffering and death of Jesus.
It’s a seal in the sense that – in the words of John Calvin – it “effects what it symbolizes.” Sharing in the sacrament doesn’t just symbolize our unity – it actually causes us to be unified as we celebrate it. We’re physical beings, and participating in a ritual with concrete physical elements makes God’s love more real to us. It transforms theological doctrines into physical realities.
I’ve always found it interesting that God chose to establish this sacrament around the simplest and most ordinary elements of human life: bread and wine or juice. There are some parts of the church that use very specialized bread and wine and extremely fancy cups and plates and stuff in the sacrament. But we tend to aim for a very simple approach. We use flatbread, because we think that might be the kind of bread Jesus himself used. And it’s ordinary bread from a local store. It’s not the ‘fanciness’ of the elements that gives the sacrament its power, but rather the way God takes ordinary things and invests them with special power by the presence of the Holy Spirit.
That’s the point Paul was trying to make to the church at Corinth, I think: that the Lord’s Supper is robbed of some of its power when people make it about feasting on gourmet food and fancy wine. It’s supposed to be about how God takes ordinary elements and uses them to do something special. Just as God takes ordinary people like us and uses us to do something special – to tell the world about his love and help bring about his reign on earth, as it is in heaven.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the gift of the sacraments, and we thank you that through them, you make your love concrete to us and you unite us as the body of Jesus at work in the world. Amen.
Every Blessing,
Henry
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