“For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In 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.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
Long ago, so long that the story includes a streetcar, a pastor hearing a commotion pushes his way through the crowd to where a policeman and a doctor where tending an injured man lying in agony. When the doctor learned that the newcomer to the scene was a priest, he said, “It’s too late for me to do anything, you take over.” The priest knew exactly what to do. He got out his little black book and addresses the man:
“My son, are you of the Catholic faith?”
“Yeah. Yeah…”
“Do you know that you are sinner against God?”
“Uhuh, yeah, I guess…”
“Do you believe in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?”
“What is this, Father, I’m dying and you want me to recite the catechism?
Every catechism deals with the Sacrament. Libraries are full of books of dogma that define teachings about the Lord’s Supper to protect it from misuse. Committees and commissions set the rules for who should come to a meal they call the Lord’s. Only a crude trampler of treasures from the past would kick these things aside. We inherit this treasure from people who got it-for whom it mattered enough to protect it and pass it on.
While the Lord’s Supper is an act of God directed towards humans, this act that originated two thousand years ago at a supper in Jerusalem would have been forgotten, along with all the other suppers, if we did not have words recording it. The first words of Jesus transmitted in writing are quoted in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Before we hear anything else from Jesus’ lips, we hear him say, “This is my body that is for you.” The initial act of Jesus is to overcome the distance between Jerusalem and Ashby, to cut across the years from his time to ours, and to tell me about me.
The “me” who receives the Lord’s Supper is a human who in the presence of God is learning to become more human. But this meal does not merely teach. It is not a cookbook but the food itself. To share it is to experience eating and gain its benefit of becoming part of the larger “we” in the sharing of the meal. This meal, the Lord’s Supper, is often called “Holy Communion,” a coming together of bread with body, wine with blood, God with creature, and believers with one another sharing common miseries and joys with the Speaker, who was himself near a death sentence and knew that you did not want to run through a catechism as important as that is, but to be grasped and loved as a dying person by God.
Now, it is our turn to share this blessed Sacrament with seven young people who will be joining us at the table for their First Communion on Easter Sunday. As we join with them may we experience the privilege of passing on to them what has been given to us and receiving from them the assurance that the feast will continue. So come, join us, eat, drink and proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
~Pastor Dan