Imagine this – instead of having communion in the context of a church service, we had communion at the conclusion, or end, of one of our shared meals. Imagine having communion after a culture night, when we celebrated the differences which contribute to the oneness of who we are as a church. Our tables would still be filled with the dishes of the meals shared and prepared, dirty plates and half-filled glasses – there would be nothing clean about it and then someone would say:
‘Now that we have finished feasting
for our bodies, let us remember the one who gave his body for us so that we
could have complete wholeness. Now that we all have had enough to drink, let us
raise our glasses in remembrance of the one who spilled his blood for us as a
living redeeming sacrifice.’
How easy would it be for each of us to take communion out of
the cleanness of the church service, the lace cover cloth, the communion trays
and pre-cut bread, and have it as one the final course of a full-blown meal?
How comfortable would we feel in this context? And what would it reveal about
ourselves, and our church and the way we do life together?
I want to suggest that over time, communion has become more
and more sanitized. Jesus never said, have a ritual set apart in a church
service called communion. He did call us to a ritual of communion, but he
demonstrated, and the Corinthian Church demonstrated, that ritual would be
ingrained in everyday life and love. Let’s look at the context of the first
communion.
What we do know is that the first communion between Jesus and
the disciples did not happen in a church or in a synagogue. In fact, it was
honoured at a traditional time – the feast of the Passover. And the Passover feast
always happened in the order of life and love not the order of service. The
Passover meal was one that happened within families and between families, in
people’s home. And this was the case with the first communion.
Mathew 26 and Luke 22 have the disciples asking Jesus –
“where do you want us to make preparations for the Passover?” Jesus responds,
go ahead into the city to a certain man (a man who is unnamed, a random man of
history an unnamed significant man). Jesus says – go to this random but significant
man’s house and tell him – we will be sitting at your table this Passover.
It was during this time, a time of seven days, and at the
conclusion of a meal – the Passover meal, when the table would still have the
remits of Passover – the bones and head of a roasted lamb, unleavened bread, and
bitter herbs, along with glasses of wine in front of each of the disciples.
From this table, not a clean table, Jesus would pick up a piece of unleavened
bread, bread that we learn in Deuteronomy 16:6 symbolised the affliction of the
Israelites as they fled Egypt.
Jesus would pick up the bread of affliction, he would proclaim
in the breaking of the bread that he would carry the affliction of brokenness
for all of us and he shared it, each disciple breaking off a piece. He would
pick up a glass of wine from that same table and speak into it, this wine, an
added addition to the Passover meal would now carry the symbolism of blood and
a new covenant.
The first communion was an order of life and love. Communion
was more than something to be built into an order of service for Sunday worship,
but into a love for our God and each other – a remembrance event to be had at
the table, not the alter.
It is important to remember this as we approach today’s
reading from 1 Corinthians, because these verses will make so much more meaning
and sense if we read them in the context of the church Paul was writing to –
not the church today.
1 Corinthians 11: 17-34. From the Passion Translation
Now, on this next matter, I wish I
could commend you, but I cannot, because when you meet together as a church
family it is doing more harm than good!
I’ve been told many times that when
you meet as a congregation, divisions and cliques emerge—and to some extent,
this doesn’t surprise me. Differences of opinion are unavoidable, yet they will
reveal which ones among you truly have God’s approval.
When all of you gather as one church
family, you are not really properly celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
For when it comes time to eat, some
gobble down their food before anything is given to others – one is left hungry
while others become drunk! Don’t you all have homes where you can eat and
drink?
Don’t you
realize that you’re showing a superior attitude by humiliating those who have
nothing?
Are you trying to show contempt for
God’s beloved church?
How should I address this
appropriately? If you’re looking for my approval, you won’t find it! I have
handed down to you what came to me by direct revelation from the Lord himself.
The same night in which he was handed
over, he took bread and gave thanks. Then he distributed it to the disciples
and said, “Take it and eat your fill. It is my body, which is given for you. Do
this to remember me.” He did the same with the cup of wine after supper and
said, “This cup seals the new covenant with my blood. Drink it — and whenever
you drink this, do it to remember me.” Whenever you eat this bread and drink
this cup, you are retelling the story, proclaiming our Lord’s death until he
comes.
For this reason, whoever eats the
bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in the wrong spirit will be guilty of
dishonoring the body and blood of the Lord.
So let each individual first evaluate
his own attitude and only then eat the bread and drink the cup. For continually
eating and drinking with a wrong spirit will bring judgment upon yourself by
not recognizing the body. This insensitivity is why many of you are weak,
chronically ill, and some even dying.
If we have examined ourselves, we
should not be judged. But when we are judged, it is the Lord’s training so that
we will not be condemned along with the world.
So then, my fellow believers, when
you assemble as one to share a meal, show respect for one another and wait for
all to be served. If you are that hungry, eat at home first, so that when you
gather together you will not bring judgment upon yourself. When I come to you,
I will answer the other questions you asked me in your letter.
Let’s put these verses into context, with the understanding
that Paul is talking about communion as an order of life and love, not an order
of service. If we try to relate these verses to our ritual of communion today –
they just don’t seem to fit, and to be perfectly honest can lead to some, like me,
misunderstanding the purpose of these verses.
So, let’s break this passage down; in short there are three
sections: the first section deals with the church at Corinth as it prepares for
Communion, the second focuses on Communion itself and the third is about the
needed response in preparation. Now I want to suggest that many of us read
these verses with a focus on Communion and our Response, we don’t focus on the
Preparation verses. There is a very simple reason for this, the preparation
verses clearly position the Lord’s table in a different way than we are used
to.
It is clear that Communion is more than what we are used to
here – there is no way in our church that there is going to be those who miss
out of bread, because others are taking their fill first, and there is certainly
no way that some are getting drunk on the Ribena Juice while other miss out.
Reading these verses in their fullness suggests, that
Communion happened during a much bigger meal. A sharing of people coming
together to share food and take communion together. Paul makes it clear, it is
no ordinary meal, if it was you could have it in your home, it was a communal
meal.
Commentaries would tell us that a common practice of the
early church was something called a love feast. This is a time for the church
to come together in brotherly love to celebrate differences and the fact that
the cross brings unity and healing. Bread would be broken and wine drunk – but
not to exclude others or in an act of drunkenness but in an act of
understanding that Christ’s body had become the bread of affliction and his
blood, the new Covenant. The church became one with Christ at the cross in all
its diversity.
But Paul was dismayed at the Corinthian church; instead of
coming together in love, they had allowed the divisions that divided them to
come to the Lord’s table. And we know from the beginning of the letter that
these divisions were real – some said they followed the ways of Paul, others
the ways of Apollos, some said that sexual indulgence in the church was normal
and okay, some accused others of having debt against them, others refused to
lower themselves and their beliefs because those who were young in their faith.
These differences do not appear at our communion table today,
because we separate it from a meal and have it as an order of service not of
life and love. We also do communion very privately, even if we take the
elements together, we really don’t engage in testimony and discussion over the
elements.
But this doesn’t mean we are any better; that the human
condition today has improved since the time Paul wrote this letter, just look
at our children and shared lunches. Back in the day, when I was growing up in
state housing in Westport. Mum would always make the best cinnamon buns
complete with fresh whipped cream or whitebait fritters made to Grandad’s
secret recipe. When we took our plate to school we had strict instructions that
the food was not ours, it was food to be shared first and foremost.
Other kids would bring a variety of dishes, but three things were apparent:
1) The most popular kids always got the first choice and their fill, while the poorest and most rejected kids were lucky to get something at all;
2) Some families would bring the best plate possible to school, but as soon as the lunch started, they would quickly grab their plate and hide it to take home complete with food still on it;
3) Shared lunches did not foster unity but showed where divisions of power and inequity existed.
We could take from this that the church at Corinth was no
better than a contemporary classroom of kids; but I want to suggest that both
demonstrate two very real issues with our broken human condition – the first
being a sense of entitlement. There are times in which some feel entitled to be
first at the table, entitled to be seen above others and entitled to be
acknowledged. The other issue with our broken human condition that leads to
division at moments of shared communion is the flipside of entitlement, and
that is a blindness to inequity. When you feel entitled to something, and you
use that argument you are more likely to be, in that moment, blind to inequity.
Blind to those less fortunate or different to who you are.
This is exactly what was happening in the preparedness of the
love feast, at the Lord’s table of the Corinthian church – division meant that
some felt more entitled to a place at the table and the food and drink being served. This entitlement led
to inequity and some missing out because of the conditions set by the entitled.
Paul would say “Don’t you realize that you’re showing a
superior attitude by humiliating those who have nothing?” If you want a table
of entitlement – set it up in your own homes, because at the Lord’s table there
is a seat for everyone. And, if everyone is treated as equal then gluttony and
drunkenness would be non-existent because everyone would be sharing. After all,
reading Luke 22, Jesus even broke bread and shared communion with Judas.
I would suggest that we cannot judge ourselves better or
worse than the Corinthian church as we prepare for the table of Communion. But
I would say that any divisions that exist in our church and we do have division
and difference, then the way we manage these conditions don’t happen in the
order of a church service, where we are all nice to each other, the way we
manage division and difference happens in the order of life and love.
So, do we do life and love together?
Thankfully, we are not working with the tricky verses of last
week, verses about gender, worship, the head and whether I should have long or
short hair. Thankfully, these verses make plan simple sense when it comes to a
common sacrament of the church yesterday and today. Thankfully, we can forget
about context and just focus on content. Thankfully, communion is something we
have never had doctrinal arguments about.
Hmmm, realistically just as communion divided the church in
Corinth, over the centuries the church has become more divided over communion.
My father got to have his first communion at the age of 12 in a denomination
which believed that children should not have communion until they understood it
and that the bread became the body and the wine became the blood.
My very first experience of a church as a child was a denomination
which refused to have communion. Not because it disagreed with communion but
because it was a denomination which drew in the broken often those who had been
once part of other churches. It order to reduce arguments about difference,
leadership made the decision that it was best to focus on unity than doctrines which
caused disunity.
I can’t help but think that the way we do communion in our
own church, and in others, has been a direct response to issues such as how do
you ensure that everyone is able to take part, you cut the bread up, how do you
ensure no-one gets drunk, you use Ribena juice, how do you ensure that there
are no arguments, you restrict those who speak and predominately do communion
in silence.
Now, I am not saying that the way we do communion today is
wrong, but I am saying that if Paul was picking up on anything in the
Corinthian church, it was often that the practices of worship – starting with
communion have the risk of dividing us – and showing a deep human scar that
exists in the brokenness of our being: “Don’t you realize that you’re showing a
superior attitude by humiliating those who have nothing?”
A few months ago, I suggested that the whole of the letter of
1 Corinthians was a call for love. A deep love. An agape love – a love that
demonstrates the compassion and deepness of the love of God for his creation. When
I put communion into the context of the church of Corinth, I suggested that
this occurred in a time of shared feasting. A common feast and act of worship
called the Love Feast, the Agape Feast.
Today, we do communion very differently, and one suggestion
that I have made is that we have potentially made communion too white, and too
pure. I have also suggested that we do tend to be inward in communion. In the
last communion, Lisa reminded us that communion was a call to common unity. I
want to suggest that the only way we can achieve common unity is through deep
and intentional acts of life and love and getting to know each other.
I want to finish with a hint I made when I started, and that
for decades, I have misread these verses because I focused on content. These
are the verses I have for too long misread:
So let each individual first evaluate
his own attitude and only then eat the bread and drink the cup. For continually
eating and drinking with a wrong spirit will bring judgment upon yourself by
not recognizing the body. This insensitivity is why many of you are weak,
chronically ill, and some even dying.
You see when I have read these verses I have focused only on
one relationship, that of myself with God. There have been many times that I
have not had communion because I have not been in a good place with God. But if
I read these verses in the context of this chapter, in the context of this
letter – the attitude Paul is asking us to evaluate is the attitude that we may
have towards each other. Attitudes of entitlement, attitudes of selfishness and
attitudes of being blind to the inequities in our church. Attitudes of
judgement and bias.
Paul calls the Church to Corinth back to the first principles
of life and love – to come to the communion table, whether it be at a feast, or
with little square bits of bread, to come to the table when there is division
only leads to our church being sick both spiritually and physically. The call
to life and love is real – but are you, are we, ready to walk in the way of
love. 1 Corinthians 13 is harder than we think.
No reira tena tatou, tena tatou, tena tatou katoa.
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