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CHRISTIANS DO many things with the
Lord’s Supper. Some celebrate it weekly, some annually,
some in the morning, some at night. Some let any believer
lead, others restrict leadership.
CHURCH
DIVERSITY
None of these things is intrinsically wrong. Different
churches do things differently, often because that is
what works for them.
But, if you were planting a new church, what
would you want? How would you design the buildings?
How would you structure services? What is the irreducible
minimum for a real church?
The early church was marvellously diverse. In
his letters, Paul recognises bishops in some churches,
elders in others, deacons in others again, and there’s
not even any clearly fixed leadership at Corinth. They
are all different.
Maybe style of church
isn’t so important.
But people feel comfortable with one style and not with
another. Several people here have been to Assemblies
of God services and come out holding their ears because
of the noise, whereas I am comfortable with noisy worship.
It was how many Baptist evening services were in the
60s, and I still like it.
Still, the Bible gives a lot of leeway, and you can
trace a lot of different styles to seeds first found
in the Epistles.
After all, if you are
Catholic, Anglican or Presbyterian, you could trace
your kind of church back to the line which has elders,
if you are Baptist or Adventist or various kinds of
Pentecostal, you trace back more to the churches with
deacons, and if you are Brethren or Quaker, you are
more like the Corinthians.
And no one in the Bible
tells the elder–type churches they’d better elect deacons.
Paul never tells the Corinthians he’s sending them a
bishop. They are all different and that’s OK.
In fact, theologians and church historians have been
looking again at Paul’s missionary strategy, and they
say that one reason he got such a diverse group on his
team was that he wasn’t going around planting Paul–type
churches. He had a team which could devise the best
way for the church to be in the place where it was planted.
It’s the same with the
Lord’s Supper. Jewish congregations followed the Jewish
Passover format, but the Corinthian Church followed
the style of meeting they were used to in their clubs,
with a meal and dinner table speakers.
Some Christians focus
on institutions and others focus on ideas. In Burma
before the Communists came to power in the 60s, pre-Vatican
II Catholics brought an institution with them, and the
Communists picked that institution off. But Baptists
brought the idea of the gospel without an institution,
and the Communists got rid of the missionaries, but
they couldn’t get rid of the idea.
It’s the same with the Lord’s Supper. Some focus on
it as an institution, which must follow certain patterns
and practices to be rightly done; others focus on the
idea behind it, and only expect the symbols of bread
and wine to sharpen the focus on what Jesus did for
us on the cross.
We should be thinking about these things. We should
put a lot of thought into what the church should be
like, what we do at the Lord’s Table, and all those
kinds of things, because we at Silver Street Mission
have to keep changing until we find what suits our area
best.
I want to repeat that.
It has to suit our area best. As soon as we give in
to the idea that it has to suit us best, we have ceased
being a church and have turned into a club. And Jesus
does not extend his salvation through clubs, but through
the church.
THE BASIC FRAMEWORK
How we think about the
Lord’s Supper is part of our overall thinking about
what the church should be like. We need to understand
the basic and essential framework of the church and
how the Supper fits into it.
Many of the conflicts between Christians have been over
what kind of church is “right”. In 1923, the Lambeth
Conference — that’s all the Anglican Bishops coming
together for a conference — the world Conference to
set Anglican policy decided to invite all the other
Protestant denominations to join the Anglicans. It was
a very generous offer, and the Bishops made a great
many concessions in order to make it easy for others
to join them.
The sad thing is that
all the Protestants stood around looking bewildered
and wondering what the Bishops were on about.
When you read the Bishops’
offer, it sounds very much as though they assumed that
everyone would really and truly want to be an Anglican
if they could be. They thought that Baptists didn’t
have bishops only because they had no one to ordain
bishops for them. It seemed that the bishops thought
that the Congregationalists would rush for a prayer
book if they were allowed to have it and Brethren would
stop crying themselves to sleep if they had chasubles
and copes — whatever they are — and Anabaptists really
needed access to the Cathedrals so that they could start
baptising their babies again.
I’m exaggerating, but you get the picture. We all think
our way is the best, and we all wonder — just a little
bit — why the others persist with such strange ways
of doing things!
Check the New Testament! You’ll be fascinated by how
much freedom it really gives us.
I asked you earlier what you thought might be important
in a new church plant. It’s a question many people have
asked over the years. I copped a lot of flak over a
collection of articles and essays on "Reinventing the Church”
in The Australian Baptist
when I was the Editor. But we must keep thinking, and
rethinking what kind of church we are. We are not bound
by history, but we are all responsible to the Bible.
The Catholic Theologian,
Hans Küng, wrote a book, What must remain in the Church?
He criticised the power of the pope and the cardinals
and urged the adoption of a much more “grassroots” type
of church. He was given a very hard time for writing
it, but gradually his ideas filtered through.
Shortly afterwards,
a Protestant theologian, Francis Schaeffer, wrote a
series of essays which in effect answered the question
Küng asked.
Schaeffer argued that
there are two basic concepts covering the New Testament’s
ideal for the church. These are, first, form, and, second,
freedom.
The form, as Schaeffer puts it, is that believers get
baptised and then they devote themselves to the Apostles’
teaching, to the fellowship, to breaking of bread and
to prayers. In other words, baptised believers form
a balanced church when they learn from the Bible, when
they learn to have close, supportive fellowship, when
they maintain the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and
when they pray together.
All who
believed were baptised and they devoted themselves to
the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking
of bread and to prayers.
That is the sum of the
necessary form of the church. And, according to Schaeffer,
all the rest is freedom. If we want prayer books, we
are free to use them, and if we don’t, we don’t have
to. If we want bells and smells, that’s OK, and if we
would rather sit in silence and contemplate, we are
free to.
THE PURPOSE OF THE LORD’S SUPPER
So why is the Lord’s Supper, of all things, such a vital
aspect of Christian life together?
Some Christians deny that it is all that important.
For example, the Salvation Army doesn’t observe the
Lord’s Supper, because they say they are a mission rather
than a church, and it is the church’s role to worship
by using this ceremony. The Quakers, also, don’t observe
the Lord’s Supper, but for a different reason. They
say that all outward observances are diversion
from the real inner life of the Spirit.
On the other hand, Catholics
and Orthodox consider it so vital that it is observed
several times daily.
In mediaeval times, the congregation regularly left
after the main part of the service and just left the
priest and his attendants to celebrate the Supper. People
believed that the important thing was that the sacrifice
should be repeated every day, and there was no point
in hanging around and watching. Let the priest get on
with his job!
Maybe that piece of
information will help you understand why Protestants
were so upset about what they saw as Catholic abuses
in the Mass. Today all churches emphasise the participation
of the whole church in the Lord’s Supper.
At Jesus’ last supper
with his disciples, we read...
LK 22:19 And he took bread,
gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying,
“This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance
of me.”
LK 22:20
In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is
poured out for you. 21
But the hand of him who is going to betray me is with
mine on the table. 22
The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed, but woe
to that man who betrays him.” 23
They began to question among themselves which of them
it might be who would do this.
There are very few places
in the New Testament which even hint at the idea that
the Supper is really a sacrifice. Nor are there any
real suggestions that the bread and the cup are actually
transformed into the physical body and blood of the
Lord.
Jesus did say, “This
is my body..." and “This is my blood...” But he
also said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
In Aramaic, it is very rare to use the verb to be. In
Greek, though, you are almost forced to use it, even
when you would prefer not to.
Jesus would actually
have said, “This my body given for you... this cup my
blood of the New Covenant poured out for you...” The
emphasis is on giving and the pouring out.
Martin Luther got into
a debate over the Supper, so he arrived in the conference
room first, pulled out some chalk, and scrawled across
the table, Hoc est corpus meum
— this is my body. Then he underlined the word est three times for emphasis. This IS my body. It might have been
good Latin, but it wasn’t good theology or good Aramaic.
Jesus gives us the key
to the meaning of the meal when he says,
Do this in remembrance of me.
He is saying, “My body
is broken; my blood is shed, and it’s all for you. Keep
it before your thoughts.”
It is never to be forgotten.
REMEMBERING TOGETHER
When a preacher preaches
over any length of time, he will probably learn to introduce
the death and resurrection of Jesus, and salvation through
his name, no matter what the topic is.
But, when you try to
preach comprehensively, that message will not always
be the main thrust.
That’s the reason why we need to stop and take stock
every now and then.
As I said earlier, there’s form and there’s freedom.
Jesus never said, “Do this on the first and third Sundays
of every month in remembrance of me,” nor did he say,
“Do this every week, or only on the first Sunday of
every quarter, or at Passover each year.” Different
groups have followed all of these patterns, and Jesus
never said that any of them is wrong or any of them
is right.
So we stop and take
stock as we feel is right for us. When I was part of
a Retreat Group, we used to celebrate the Lord’s Supper
on our last day together. That was right for us, that
one Thursday each August when we were about to leave
each other’s company for another year.
To Jewish thinking,
remembrance was much more than just running over old
memories. If you really remembered something, you participated
in it in your mind. As the leader of the group broke
the bread and prayed over it, in your mind you went
through how that same thing had happened with Jesus.
As the leader passed the cup around after praying over
it, you went over how it must have been at that Last
Supper. The Lord’s Supper was the kind of guided meditation
where you became a participant in the events of Easter
Thursday, 6 April, 33 AD.
As Jesus broke the bread and spoke, you would recall
the shudder that struck you as you half remembered and
tried to forget that Jesus had said he would die in
Jerusalem at the hands of the Priests and the Romans.
As he shared the cup around, you would recall that the
cup meant the shedding of Jesus blood on the cross.
This meal is more than a bare memorial. And it is more
than mere transubstantiated flesh and blood. It is the
trigger for a fresh participation, in memory and faith,
in all that Jesus did in dying on the cross.
Those symbols are more
than just symbols: they are keys to unlock our involvement
in the gospel.
For some time, until just recently, we celebrated the
Lord’s Supper here every Sunday.
Part of the reason was that we had people coming here
who just couldn’t concentrate through an entire sermon.
But they could stop and participate with us in this
supper, and experience the gospel, even if they didn’t
understand it.
Those people are now
gone, and part of our remembrance as we share in the
gospel meal.
But the meal itself
continues.
Paul wrote,
...whenever you eat this bread
and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until
he comes.
Next time we meet to
celebrate the Lord’s Supper, let’s meditate on what
it means. By our actions, let’s proclaim the Lord’s
death to one another. And let’s rejoice, knowing that
his coming is closer than it was the last time we celebrated
in this way.
AMEN
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