The idea that the early church never had
any problems or difficulties except for the Romans and the
lions is rooted in nostalgia, not in fact. It is certainly
not rooted in Paul’s letters! In fact, if Excedrin had been
around in the first century, Paul could have written a new
commercial for them. He could have called it The Corinthian
Headache; it was substantial, and part of it had to do with
what we now call Holy Communion.
I say “now call it” because
they didn’t call it communion in those days. They called it
The Lord’s Supper, and it seems to have been a fellowship
meal, more like a potluck than a sip of juice and a tiny
piece of bread. I say this because there seem to have been
enough ingredients that Paul accused some of the
participants of gluttony and drunkenness, and that would
sure be hard to do on the portions we are serving! Listen to
Paul in the section of the letter just before the passage I
read a moment ago:
When you come together, it is not the
Lord’s Supper that you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes
ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry
while another gets drunk.
That sounds like quite a time! More like
chow time at a lumber camp than a service of worship! But it
was in this context that Paul issued these strong words of
caution about communion, words that have been so
misunderstood that some will not take communion because they
do not feel worthy to do so, mistakenly thinking that Paul
was referring to “unworthy people” instead of an “unworthy
manner.”
Paul was not asking for perfection in the
lives of those who shared in the Lord’s Supper. If it was on
that basis, we wouldn’t bother to have it. Who could come?
What Paul was asking for was a proper regard for what they
were about. He was telling them not to treat what they were
doing as a common meal and not to treat this cup as a common
cup.
But this was a Corinthian problem twenty
centuries ago. What does it have to do with us? We do not
come to communion with that kind of irreverence. Besides, we
could not begin to get drunk on Welch’s grape juice! At
least not when it was prepared within the last 24 hours. And
you could eat a whole tray of the bread and it wouldn't
amount to a medium pizza. Does what Paul wrote to the
Corinthians mean anything in the twenty-first century, or is
it just a bit of history that reminds us that divisions and
unseemly behavior go back a ways?
We do not have the usual time for the
sermon this morning because the Sacrament itself is the
primary message for today, but let me suggest that we can
still use the reminder that this is no common loaf that
we break, no common cup from which we drink.
Over the years, the church has gone to
great lengths to visualize the special nature of the chalice
used for communion. For centuries there were stories of
searches for the Holy Grail, referring to the cup that Jesus
actually used at the meal in the upper room. Didn’t Indiana
Jones once go looking for that? Some years ago, our
denomination, in celebration of the 200th
anniversary of Methodism in America, made a thousand
replicas of a silver communion chalice owned by John Wesley.
They sent one to each of the first thousand churches
contributing $1,000 to a special fund to establish new
churches. This church has one in the display case in the
parlor, numbered 141. Vatican treasurers in Rome could show
you chalices inlaid with gold and precious jewels. Artists
today tend to make them less ornate, more in keeping (they
feel) with the character and spirit of the Christ, but still
with observable efforts to make them something different
than any other cup. The large white chalice on the altar
this morning is made of Corinthian marble, and I cherish it
because I had the privilege of using it to help serve
communion to a large gathering in the great amphitheater in
Ephesus, where the Apostle Paul preached and then got run
out of town. Those of us who served that day were permitted
to keep the chalice that we used. But this is not the kind
of “uncommonness” I have in mind.
I know that we sometimes use the phrase
“common cup” to refer to the method of communion in which we
use a single chalice for many people instead of the little
glasses, and I am not trying to belittle the phrase in that
context. But I would suggest that such availability to all
is precisely what makes this cup uncommon!
Where else is there such a breaking down
of barriers at a table? In most special meals, the guests
are carefully chosen and many others would never expect an
invitation. This is true at either end and all along the
social scale. Even our churches often reflect something of
the social strata of a community on a typical Sunday
morning. But at the table of the Lord, such barriers are
broken down and no one is kept away because of class or
color or ability or status in life. At least that is our
United Methodist tradition, and it has been true at any
church at which I have ever been a pastor. This is a very
uncommon cup from which we drink.
A few years ago, Andrew Wolfe, a United
Methodist pastor from Alabama, wrote about his experience of
communion while on a trip to Eastern Europe. This was in
1967, forty years ago, long before the more open borders of
today. While his group was there, they visited a church in
Moscow. They were late in arriving and the service had
started. The building was filled to overflowing; people were
standing in the aisles and on the stairways. But it was
known that they were coming and seats had been reserved for
their group in the balcony.
They sat there, he said, not
understanding a word of the service, but understanding very
well the expressions on the faces of the people as the hymns
were sung. And they understood when the bread was brought
in, along with great chalices of wine, that they were to
celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Bread was taken and blessed,
broken and passed into the congregation. Let me tell the
story in his words:
As the elements made their way
around....people would reach out for the elements with what
could only be described as thankful hearts.
It came our turn to receive. We stood,
but somehow the bread passed me by without my getting any. I
simply waited for the chalice. But as I stood there, there
was a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to look into the
face of an ancient Russian woman, her head tied in a
kerchief, wrinkles covering every inch of her face, but with
eyes that sparkled. And then she did something that I shall
remember for as long as I live. She tore her bread in half
and handed it to me. She wanted to make sure that I shared
fully in the banquet of Christ.
We did not speak the same language, she
and I. We were generations apart; from two nations separated
by politics, by economics, by ideology, broken in nearly
every way a human family can be broken. And yet none of that
mattered in that moment of reconciliation and oneness. We
were brother and sister in Christ, and that mattered more
than all the world’s dividing lines.
(Pulpit Digest, Oct.-Nov. 1984, p.
5-6)
There is nothing common about a loaf
like that. And as you receive the elements this morning, I
invite you to think of others sharing this Lord’s Supper
with you—not only in this sanctuary, but around the world—as
the voices in our call to worship and the prayer and the
hymn tried to remind us.
As you take the bread, I invite you to
think of persons about whom you care very much—some who may
be sitting with you, some separated by miles, some even
separated by death. Recognize that this is a very uncommon
loaf that you break, and know that you eat with them.
But it gets more uncommon than that. That
Christian lady in Russia did a beautiful thing, but she was,
after all, a stranger. And we share this table not only with
strangers, but symbolically, and sometimes literally, with
people we know quite well. And that sometimes means people
we dislike as well as those we like. Those folk are invited
to this table, too.
So when it is time to lift those tiny
cups, I invite you to think of any with whom you have had
difficulty getting along, whether at work or at home or at
school. Again, remember that this is no common cup that you
hold. You are sharing in the remembrance that Christ’s blood
was shed for all, even those we may have trouble liking very
much. “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup,
you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (I
Corinthians 11:26)
There is nothing common about this cup,
about this loaf.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
