Communion on a Sunday with no Communion

1 Corinthians 11:17-34

So, no communion today. It’s a fourth Sunday of the month. Hence, the great irony of preaching on communion with no communion following two Sundays of preaching on Baptism with no baptisms. This got me thinking…

Nothing is so important for the practice of the church than the Lord’s Supper. I think that’s mostly true—at the very least, nothing that is regularly done in the life of worship is more important. You could say baptism is even more central but we are baptized once. Communion allows us the regular practice of receiving Jesus intimately, physically. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

But communion is also a difficult thing to wrap our heads around. It wasn’t that long ago—and in some places even to today—that we practiced communion once a year, maybe twice. In the days where pastors and preachers would travel by horse and buggy communion practice became very occasional. In some churches it would be years between communion celebrations. Because of this, communion took on a different kind of gravitas. It was something special, occasional, rare. Jesus, however, gave us only one instruction about how often to do communion: “Do this as often as you drink of it. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes,” he said.

That could be interpreted a number of ways. So, too, can the bit about preparation for the Lord’s Supper. Paul’s letter to 1 Corinthians is pretty clear that we are to “discern the body” of Christ or risk judgment on ourselves, but what does that mean? Do we have to reach a certain level of worthiness in God’s eyes to receive communion? Do we need to have a certain level of understanding? If so, I’m a little concerned, because I’ve done plenty of first communion classes and I can tell you that what we talk about then doesn’t stick much between then and when we talk about communion in Confirmation. If it doesn’t stick then I don’t have a lot of hope that it sticks beyond that either. Should we institute a test before receiving communion where all of you come forward and answer the question, “What does the Lord’s Supper mean to me?”

You can see what I mean. There is legitimate fear around communion. It’s not just “Am I worthy?” but also “Will I mess it up?” Will I drop the bread/wafer? Will I spill the wine? Will I accidentally eat the wafer on an intinction Sunday and stare, wide-eyed at the wine that I was supposed to dip that wafer in? We’ve all been there.

A new day--What baptism means to me

Romans 6:1-11

Baptism is daily dying and rising.

I don’t remember the first time I heard that but I guarantee that I, like maybe some of you, was surprised to think of baptism in that way. I thought of baptism as something that happened a long time ago. It’s something in the past; something to remember or, more likely, to have others remind us of. It is a passive past action. But that’s absolutely not true. It’s not passive, it’s not past; it’s active and present reality. It doesn’t just save us for some future but drowns us daily. Baptism is something that lives with us. If you have been baptized and do absolutely nothing with it then you aren’t so much a human being as a human in waiting, or if you’re treating baptism as insurance to allow you to do whatever you please, as if baptism is the one and only key to salvation, then Paul has some strong words.

He says, “You … must confess yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” You must confess you are dead to sin and alive to God…

Here’s a completely non-comprehensive list of what that means:

It means that you must be dead to hate and bigotry and any way you may try to lift yourself over another person. Rather, you must be alive to humility and seeing others as equally beautiful children of God.

It means you must be dead to narcissism. You can’t believe you are the center of universe because this God who brought you through the waters of baptism demands you see yourself not as creator but as creation. To be alive to God is to admit that I am not God, which is done daily through every action we take and every word we speak that points not to myself and how great I am but to God and how great God is.

To be dead to sin and alive to God means we stop counting the score, we stop judging whether others have done enough to please God, and instead we live out of the joy of abundance and practice gracious giving, not overly concerned about what others are doing but instead giving of ourselves more fully and loving more strongly—even if somebody might take advantage of us. We know that ultimately there is nothing we can lose that matters.

We are to be dead to sin by calling a thing what it is. Evil is evil. Good is good. And when we don’t know which is which we are to turn to God with the same humility that it takes to admit that I am not God. We are not to say “anything goes” but instead to sit in patience and prayer to discern God’s will for us.

To be dead to sin is to not trust my old self to determine right and wrong or when I am justified or not. It is not trust my own sense of what makes me righteous. It is not to trust my desire to take good things by force. It is especially not to trust that I can save the world, or that the world would be a better place if only I had more power. Instead, to be alive in God is to trust that God will take me, in all that I am and all that I am not, and make me righteous apart from what I can take and what I would accomplish if given the chance. To be alive in God is to put aside all quests for personal power; it is to give up my power for the sake of others.

There are countless examples of these things in our life.

Baptism, Repentance, and Grace

Acts 2:37-42

When a scripture reading begins with “Now when they heard this…” it sort of begs the question of what it is they heard. Like when you find “Therefore” in scripture and ask, as you should, what is the therefore there for?

            In this case the things that the people heard about were things about Jesus, specifically Acts 2:36, which reads, “Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

            Ouch.

            Not “this Jesus, the Son of God” or “this Jesus” period, but “this Jesus, whom you crucified.” You did this, Peter says, pointing the finger at the very people who are beginning the church.

This gets at a strange tension in what it means to be a Christian. Yes, we are people who follow God, but we are also people who would probably nail our God to a cross again if we were given the chance—probably not knowing what we were doing. These people in Acts were the original big tent church, spirit-filled, Pentecostals of a sort. These, of all people, were ready to receive the body and blood of Christ in communion with the words “Given for you” or “Broken for you” or “Shed for you.” And yet, these were also the people who betrayed Jesus to be crucified. At least they were by association. To be a Christian is to be a person who is saved by Jesus even while we are people who killed Jesus in the first place. As with these people in Acts, that cuts us to the heart.

            So we repent. We ask forgiveness. Not cheap forgiveness; not “because we got caught so we sort of feel bad about it” forgiveness, but real, tough forgiveness. The kind that sits with us. This is evident enough in what Peter tells us to do: Repent, be baptized, participate in the life of discipleship through teaching and visiting and eating together and praying together. All of this happens as a gift of God who, Peter says, calls us to him. God calls us; we respond by how we live.

            This is really what the sacraments are about: God’s gifts pushing us to respond by living out of gratitude for the grace we have been given.

Active attitude, passive resistance: Putting on the armor of God

Ephesians 6:10-20

            I’ve always thought the warfare language around faith was kind of troubling. I mean, God, I hope I don’t demonstrate my faith in you by going out and slaughtering a bunch of villagers. That sounds like I’m some Viking praying to Odin, not so much a Christian. I mean, I can sort of understand the Old Testament; the rules were different then—it was about setting Israel apart, and, yes, there was a lot of killing going on there—in spite of God giving the Israelites an explicit commandment, “Thou shall not kill”—but these examples of killing tended to lift Israel over some occupying force, some people who were not where they belonged, and so while it may still make me a bit uneasy I can understand it. But, after Jesus, the warfare images feel like they maybe shouldn’t be needed. After all, we are no longer Jews or Greeks, so what on earth are we fighting about?

            Yet, the images persist, begging us to consider why. Paul, in Ephesians—in Ephesians of all places, where he has spent pretty much the entirety of his letter talking about unity in and through faith—writes about putting on the armor of God because of the threats to the people from the ruling authorities. This sounds like it might be the pregame pep talk leading to war. This has been used by Christians during the Crusades and the Inquisition, where putting on the armor of God has meant converting the savages by means of a sword. Something about that doesn’t feel right. If someone came to ransack our town and told us to convert or die we would (I think rightly) assume that their faith is pretty weak if it takes threats of violence to achieve conversion.

            So, it seems like we might be heading that direction. Paul takes us to the precipice of where we have been before—war, death, destruction—it’s the old ways again, time to pick up our swords or grab our guns and head to battle, but that’s where things change. It’s precisely at this point where we discover the change in what it means to be a God-follower after Jesus. Yes, we put on the armor of God but the armor of God is not battle armor. Rather, Paul says it is the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, and shoes to proclaim the gospel of peace. Paul’s message is particularly effective because he leads us down one avenue—war, battle, man-things—and takes us on a sharp left turn toward something different, a saving grace that requires us not to fight for our lives but to give our lives away. This is the stunning left turn of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

            But, if I’m being honest, this is kind of a tough turn to make, especially for men. Many men are excited to throw on the armor. And here I want to draw a quick distinction between joining the military, which at its best is about serving for peace at home, and going on a personal war, which is about achieving our own ends. Paul wasn’t writing against the choice to defend your country—after all, the people to whom he was writing were under foreign rule already, rather he was taking a certain attitude that tries to achieve its ends through violence and turning it around.

Now, we don’t go to battle as much these days. We certainly don’t do religious wars so much anymore, which is I believe very much for the best. But instead we throw on our Vikings horns or cheese heads or Sioux and/or Fighting Hawks jerseys or smiling Golden Gophers shirts—because nothing so terrifies the enemy as a brick of cheese or a grinning rodent—and then we go and cheer on our team. Or we throw on the armor in other kinds of competition. We throw on the armor of a business suit and make cunning deals and take home lots of money. We put on the metaphorical armor of parents and we defend our families. One of the reasons I find that men do not connect so much with the church these days is because there is sometimes very little here that feeds that sense of going to battle for something. The church may feel passive because we are preaching a grace given to you, for you, and there’s nothing for you to do about it. There’s nothing to seize; no dragon to conquer that isn’t beaten for you. Some of us are like those knights in medieval stories who apparently go kingdom to kingdom looking for a troll or dragon or monster of various size and strength to slay. It’s their purpose.

            Some people just need to battle. But this is where we tend to misunderstand the role of faith, because there are things worth fighting for. Putting on the armor of God is not a violent exercise but it is not a passive one either. Instead, it is living a life worthy of the Gospel to which you have been called. There is a response to grace and that is in how we live. It is what we do with those shoes we put on that are supposed to be bringing peace. It is the work we do—fighting for our families, our communities, our selves. We do this not primarily against antagonistic regimes—I feel like many Christians are walking around looking for a made-up enemy to fight and so they go to battle against the “the culture” or “the world” or worse yet a particular subset of people they imagine to be the enemy—no, most of the time we aren’t fighting anything but ourselves and the power of sin over us.

            The thing we should realize—that is so hard to realize in the moment—is that most of the fights we fight against sin are not fights at all. We don’t wage war on cancer—cancer is part of us. We don’t battle depression—depression is woven into us. We don’t go to war with grief—grief is the product of love, which is the very thing we are fighting for. Often what we need is an active attitude that accepts a passive resistance. Accepting that I cannot fix a thing is the hardest thing to do, but it is very close to what putting on God’s armor is about—it’s remembering that I am not the one I am fighting for.

            But many of us are only happy trying to fix things. If there’s nothing to fix we feel we are lacking a purpose. So, when some tragedy strikes we try to fix it. When others are sick we try to fix it. When something we cannot repair gets broken we obsess over trying to fix it even when it cannot be done. A relationship is not a pipe. A human body is not a car. So, to put on God’s armor is a reminder of our vulnerability, and it’s an acceptance of the things I cannot change, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. That doesn’t mean—just because we admit that we can’t do it all—that there aren’t things worth doing. And that’s where I worry that we lose men in the church, because just because you can’t fix everything—and you have to rely on a higher power to save you and the people you love—doesn’t mean that you can’t be the hands and feet of Jesus. In fact it means you have a real duty to do it. We all do.

            So let’s put on the armor of God for the right reasons. To do good for the world. To be little Christs. Then, let’s accept we can’t do all the good we would like. So, we remember what we are fighting for—not our strength but the strength of God through us.