Sermon Transcript
Today’s scripture comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verses 20 through 34.
When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What, do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?
What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.
In the same way also, he took the cup 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. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup, For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.
But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for judgment. About the other things, I will give directions when I come.
Love it when Isaac’s home to read Scripture. That’s awesome. Awesome, man. Well, across the last 2,000 years of church history and across the many cultures around the world who follow Christ, there has been a great variety in customs and practices for how to do church. A church in Los Altos does not look the same as a church in Uganda, does not look the same as a church in Iran.
And no church today looks fully exactly like the very first churches. In the very first churches, they didn’t have pews to sit in, they didn’t have chairs. In fact, they didn’t have a place to sit at all. People stood for the entire service. That’s whether you were 2 years old or 80 years old.
Sunday school for children didn’t start until the late 1700s. Before that, children were part of the service for the whole service. No idea what parents did. In those original services, at least for a few decades in the first century, they didn’t meet in a building because they were worried about being discovered and then facing persecution. So many of the early Christian gatherings met in catacombs underground.
When they finally moved above ground into a consistent meeting space, space, it was often a converted pagan temple of some kind that they repurposed. And part of the Christianizing of that space was to paint murals and frescoes on the walls depicting significant biblical events or figures. There are some churches still today have their walls decorated like that, and other churches like ours do not. You’ll also see a variety in the dedicated space from which the Bible was taught. All churches taught the Bible.
They all had a space to do it. Traditionally, we call that a pulpit. Today we might call it a podium. But the very first pulpits didn’t actually appear in church history until several hundred years after Christ. And since then, they haven’t always looked the same.
In some churches like ours, the pulpit is located in the center of our worship space because we want to communicate the importance that we place on God’s word. It is at the center of everything that we do. Where other churches, the pulpit can be off to the side. That doesn’t mean they don’t believe in the Bible, but their architecture is communicating something else. Maybe they put like an altar at the center because we need to give our lives as a living sacrifice to God.
Something like that they’re trying to communicate. If you visit a church that dates back to the 1700s or 1800s, you will often see a pulpit that looks more like a crow’s nest on a ship where a lookout would, you know, watch for trouble. And the idea was the preacher needed to climb a set of stairs to proclaim the word of God from high above.
Sometimes songs are led from the pulpit, sometimes not. Sometimes songs are led by a choir. Sometimes songs are not led by any one person at front but are more so the entire congregation all together, kind of around each other. As for types of music, churches have had more variety and utilized more musical instruments than probably can be You could send a question to Nate about that, but from Gregorian chants with no instruments whatsoever to full-blown rock bands to pipe organs, I mean, churches have adopted just about everything. And in some cultures, while the congregation is singing, you will also see dancing, either down the aisles or sometimes they will form what looks like a conga line and kind of march around the church dancing, singing, celebrating.
Of course, in other churches you will see no dancing, and instead you’ll see Christians try to remain as stiff as possible through the entire service. In other words, there is a wide variety of Christian practices across church history, across different cultures, around the world. But one practice that is universal to all churches, all gatherings of Christians from every century in every corner of the world, is communion, also called the Lord’s Supper or the Lord’s Table or the Eucharist in some traditions. The bread and the cup in remembrance of the body and blood of Christ sacrificed on our behalf. We all participate, we all always have from the very beginning.
Now we don’t all observe communion in the same way, some churches have, you know, one cup everybody shares, others have individual cups, sometimes bread is placed on your tongue, other times it is handed to you, and there have been church schisms over how to understand what the what the bread and the cup actually are. Are they literally the body and blood of Christ, or is Christ spiritually present in these elements? Are they simply symbols of what he did for us on the cross? There is not total agreement on those questions, but all of us have always celebrated it. It is a practice that ties us all together— Eastern Christians, Western Christians, 1st century Christians, 21st century Christians, we have all gathered to take part in the same meal, as it is often called.
Today, as we study or continue our study through 1 Corinthians, we’ve been in this book for a few months, we’ll be in it until Christmas, but we’re looking at a passage that sheds some light on how the earliest Christians celebrated communion. And as we study the passage, we will see what communion was meant to be, what communion had become, and what it means for us, which will answer 3 questions for what it means for us. What communion was meant to be, what it had become, and 3 applications for what it means for us. So first, what communion was meant to be. It was meant to be a shared meal of thanksgiving.
A shared meal of thanksgiving. We’ll cover the shared meal part first and then the of thanksgiving part second. In terms of a shared meal, you can see in this passage whatever else communion was, it was apparently enough food that you could consider it dinner. People came to the event hungry. Now unfortunately, they came so hungry that they didn’t wait for everyone else to get there before they started eating.
But it was— sorry, and by the time other people got there, all the food was gone, which betrayed the idea of a shared meal. It was an extension of what the Israelites had celebrated as the Passover meal. Once Christ got here, the Jewish people who had become Christians really didn’t celebrate Passover anymore. They understood Jesus was the Passover Lamb, And now they are now celebrating communion as Passover. So it’s an extension of a meal, which is what Passover was.
And the picture we have here of communion looks similar to what many of our Thanksgiving gatherings will be this week, though probably with less food on the menu. Everyone coming together, everyone bringing something to share if they can, and not all of them could. Which brought up another problem, to borrow from our next point just briefly. Those who contributed a lot to the gathering were belittling those who couldn’t contribute very much, and Paul steps in and says this is not the spirit of what this is meant to be. When a family gets together for a celebratory meal, you know, the uncle who can only afford to show up, you don’t make him feel bad.
You’re just glad he’s there. You hug him when he walks in the door. You give him a plate. You tell him to pile it high with all the food that’s around, right? The point is being together.
The point is sharing a meal when you are together. Again, it’s not, it’s not unlike the Thanksgiving gatherings that many of us will enjoy this week, right? We are together with people that we love. Sometimes that is biological family, sometimes not. Sometimes it’s familiar faces, sometimes it’s brand new faces.
And there will always be that one guy who shows up and the only thing that he knows how to cook is a smile, but you welcome him, right? You give him a plate. I remember, uh, Thanksgivings when I was a kid at my grandma’s house. My grandma was a superhero. She baked 3 or 4 pies from scratch.
She made ham, turkey, and roast beef every Thanksgiving, 3 meat options, mashed potatoes, gravy from scratch, of course. She had 2 kinds of gravy, which is going to sound weird, but I’m telling you it was delicious. She had gravy, as you would expect, without noodles, and she had gravy with noodles. You know, just in case the potatoes weren’t enough carbs on their own, we needed to put some extra carbs, uh, into the gravy. So she had gravy with noodles, and she handmade the noodles.
You know, this was before the KitchenAid mixer that kind of squirts out noodles for you. She hand-cut them, and she was doing all of this when she was 70, 80, 85, like my whole life growing up. Later on when Beth and I got married and we tried to host our first Thanksgiving, we only made one turkey instead of Grandma’s, you know, 3-meat spread. One meat. We bought a pie.
We didn’t make one. And we asked everyone else to bring everything else. So our Thanksgiving was like 5% of Grandma’s. And we had 2 of us. There to pull off all the work, whereas Grandma, it was just her.
But I’ll tell you, afterwards, even with just the, like, setting up and cleaning up and hosting and the one meat that we scrapped together, Beth and I both felt dead. And I was like, how in the world did Grandma pull all this off by herself for all the years that she did it? It’s amazing. But what also struck me about those Thanksgivings was occasionally one of my cousins would bring a friend, maybe someone who didn’t have anywhere else to go, maybe someone had a new boyfriend, whatever. And that person, the new person who didn’t contribute a single thing to the meal, who had never met most of us before, that person would be given a plate, right, would be welcomed.
Would be loved as everyone else who was there. And it struck me as a little kid, like, yes, there is our family, that is who’s gathering here. But then there are others that our family welcomes as family. And these others are not an intrusion. They are part of what this thing is that we’re doing.
That’s the shared meal aspect of communion, of what it is meant to be. Wait for everyone to get there so you can be together. But it was also meant to be more than only a shared meal, more than being together, breaking bread, drinking from the cup. Communion was about being thankful together, celebrating together, which is actually the original purpose, intended purpose of our Thanksgivings, at least why we put it on the calendar originally. We’re supposed to pause and be grateful for another year, for life, for everything provided to us.
You know, dating back to the Pilgrims making it through winter and having the first harvest, that’s why we said we put it on the calendar. It’s supposedly about being grateful. And to be fair, there are some of our Thanksgiving gatherings that do that quite well. It is a time of thanksgiving. Others, not so much.
But communion must always include gratefulness, thankfulness, celebration, because the point of communion is to remember the most sacrificial act of love that has ever happened on the planet. Jesus instituted communion to illustrate, to be a tangible manifestation of his work on the cross for us. The bread representing his body, the cup representing his blood given and shed for us, that the Creator of the universe carried the guilt of his creation so that we could be restored to him, restored to our position in his kingdom which we had forsaken. Communion tells the story of a king dying in place of the traitor so the traitor can become royalty. It’s the story of a groom winning back an unfaithful bride by being condemned in her place.
It’s the story of the unforgivable being forgiven. It’s the story of our deepest, darkest shame being put on trial, exposed to the world, and then in the ultimate plot twist, The judge steps in and joyfully accepts the execution in our place so we can be free. It’s the story of how we are accepted, not rejected, of how we can be known to the very bottom with no secrets. Every corner of everything we’ve ever hidden is brought into light, and then instead of God abandoning us, He adopts us.
That’s the celebration of communion. If there were ever a reason to feast, that’s it. I mean, not to discount the significance of surviving a winter in Plymouth, Massachusetts and having a successful harvest in 1621. I’m sure they were very grateful. You know, I would have been too.
But that Thanksgiving celebration is nothing compared to the significance of what Christ has provided for us. That even when we were in the very middle of our biggest regrets, that God still ran to us with love in his eyes. And not only does he not reject us, he fully exalts us, praises us, and cherishes us. That’s what communion symbolizes. It’s Christ in our place.
So we can be in his high and lifted up place. That’s what it’s meant to be, giving thanks for that together. But it had become something else. What it had become was self-centered debauchery, um, probably like our Thanksgivings or Christmas gatherings can sometimes become. The communion meal for them had simply become another excuse to eat too much and drink too much.
I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember being surprised the first time I heard someone say— this wasn’t about Thanksgiving, but they said they were looking forward to Christmas so that they could get trashed. And I thought, what? You mean you’re not looking forward to Christmas so you can stay in your PJs and open presents and eat something peppermint and be with your family, or I don’t know, celebrate Christ? That’s not why you’re looking forward to Christmas? But no, for some people Christmas isn’t that.
Christmas is maybe more like New Year’s Eve, just another reason to be wild. You know, and I’ve heard for some companies their holiday parties, right, they’re less about organizational unity or celebrating milestones or achievements, right, they’re about cutting loose. Everyone makes sure to book an Uber in advance so no one needs to drive home. And for these Corinthians, that’s what communion had become. They had cheapened the rejoicing of what Christ had done on their behalf to down to gluttony and drunkenness.
And as a result, naturally, since their aim was to indulge themselves, they then neglected others, which is what actually always happens when our focus turns inward. We stop noticing those around us. If we are consumed with our own comfort, if our primary concern is our own escape kind of from the troubles of the world, then we become much less aware of those around us. We’re probably not intentionally rude to anyone, it’s just we don’t even see them or their needs because we’re so focused on us. And that seems to be what was happening in Corinth.
The poor among them were neglected, left out. Paul uses the word humiliated. They show up to this celebration, but it was more like they were on the outside of the party. All the seats had already been reserved and not for them. So Paul calls them out.
He says, you guys are totally off course from what communion is supposed to be. He says they are taking communion in an unworthy manner— more on that in a second— and therefore they were bringing judgment on themselves, he says. Paul even says it’s why some of them have gotten sick and died. It’s a big deal to cheapen the redemptive work of Christ down to an excuse to get drunk. God will respond.
There will be a consequence.
But Paul is quick to frame God’s response, God’s discipline of them, even as severe as it apparently was, Paul frames it as part of their restoration. He says God’s discipline is so that they will not be condemned, verse 32. So even as far off as they were, God’s response still is not condemnation. It was to prevent condemnation. God’s discipline is always for restoration, always, and he will do whatever it takes to restore us.
To align us with him. Even if it takes our death, he’s going to get the job done. And for them, at least some of them, it looks like that is what it took. Which brings us to what does all this mean for us? We have 3 questions you might be wondering regarding what it means for us.
One, what does a worthy manner mean? 2, who should take communion? And 3, does it really they need to be a feast. So first, when Paul warns them not to take communion in an unworthy manner, what is a worthy manner? Great question.
Let’s begin first by saying what a worthy manner isn’t. A worthy manner isn’t that we need to be morally pure enough before taking communion. It is not that. If we needed to be good enough, right enough, long enough in order to earn the right to take communion, um, we would never get there. The whole point of communion, in fact, is to declare we have failed at being good enough, right enough, long enough, and we need Jesus to restore us.
If we needed to be sin-free before taking communion, we would never take The act of communion itself is an admission. We are so full of sin, only the death of the sinless God in our place could restore us. So quite the opposite of getting ourselves righteous enough for communion. Communion is a declaration that we are not righteous. We need to be forgiven.
We need to be restored. We need to be redeemed, and Christ did it for us. So Paul’s warning that we must take communion in a worthy manner does not mean that we need to be good enough to merit communion. That is not it. What he means is realize when you celebrate communion, realize what you are celebrating.
It is not an excuse to indulge yourself. It is a time to remember and celebrate what Christ has done. It should be a little like when you came to faith in the first place. When it first clicked for you that even though you were so full of sin, that God still runs to you and calls you his own, that he paid for every failing so you could be together with him, that Christ knew all the times you would ever betray him, just like he knew Peter would betray him, right? But he still went to the cross for Peter, and he still joyfully went to the cross for us to die in our place.
Because that’s what would make it possible to win us back to him. Communion proclaims Christ’s work, Christ’s death, Paul says, verse 26. And when you take it, take it as a celebration of that. That’s a worthy manner, which basically answers our next question of who should take it. Since communion proclaims Christ’s work on the cross to reconcile us to God, It should be taken by people who agree with what it proclaims.
If you don’t believe Jesus died in your place, why take part in the practice that symbolizes Christ died in your place? Now, for us here at Bridges, we leave it to you whether you take it or not. You know, we don’t have any ushers trying to discern if you have the proper view of communion before they hand out cups. It’s up to you, okay? But think it through.
If you don’t believe in Jesus’ substitutionary work on your behalf to reconcile you to God, that what he did freed you from guilt forever and now you have zero condemnation, if you don’t believe those things, if you think Jesus is some kind of fairy tale story, If you’re not a Christian, wait until you are before taking communion.
You don’t want to do something with your body that your mind rejects.
I mean, it’s up to you, but it can’t be healthy to divide yourself like that. You would want alignment between your body and your mind. You’d want your body to do what your mind believes.
So, communion is for those who actually trust Christ to reconcile them to God because that’s what communion represents.
Now, in regard to if it needs to be a feast, you know, do we need to eat more or eat more bread, you know, than just one cracker? No, it doesn’t need to be a feast. There’s nothing in Scripture that requires it to be the size of a full meal, and we will continue our practice in here for forever, the different ways that we celebrate it. But I would love for our life groups in particular, I would love for them to consider how to celebrate their restoration into God’s kingdom through a shared meal. Where you have everyone come together, each person brings what they can, for the point of rejoicing that Christ has made it possible for us to enter into an eternal feast, a feast where our cups runneth over forever, you know, the banquet to end all banquets, the marriage supper of the Lamb.
However we celebrate communion, we need to point our minds there. So today when you receive your bread and your cup, may you reflect on how Christ made your acceptance possible. May you look forward to our eternal future with him and with each other, and may it be a time for you to rejoice. May it be a time where you know that you are known and you know you are loved. And you know that you always will be, not because of what you have done, not because of what you have achieved, but because of what Christ has done for you.
Let’s pray and then let’s celebrate communion together. Father, thank You for the sacrifice of Christ and thank You for an image a practice that can remind us, that can remind every culture of what he’s done, that he has taken our place and given us his place, that he has redeemed us, that he carried our guilt, that he made us guiltless by dying on the cross. May we turn our hearts there, Lord, and rejoice that we can be with you in an eternal feast forever. It’s in his name we pray. Amen.
Um, well, in just a second, our ushers are going to come forward and they’re going to pass trays down our aisles for which you to collect cups. And I would encourage you to just hang on to those. As we’ve discussed here, communion in the early church was a meal shared around the table. And just like at your table at home, you kind of want everybody to be there before you have the meal together. And so in honor of that early practice, we like to hang on to it and for us to all take the bread and the cup together.
While they are passing these trays, our band is going to lead us in a song And I know the words will help us all to reflect on exactly what it is that we are so thankful for this week and always. Ushers, you can come forward.
