May 12, 2014
In Remembrance of Me
As with most nationally recognized holidays,
Mother’s Day was interwoven in our Sunday worship service. Mothers were acknowledged
in the announcements, communion meditation, sermon, as well as with a token
flower gift at the end of the service. While we mothers love the recognition, I
think these special occasions can sometimes take a commanding presence in the
service. For instance, our lengthy communion meditation became more of a
tribute to the speaker’s mother than it was a memorial representing the body
and blood of Christ. The mother’s story was well told with wonderful imagery,
but I wonder which story, the mother’s tribute or the Lord’s Supper, is most
likely to resonate with the audience in the week to come. On the night Jesus
was betrayed he took the cup and the bread and gave it to the disciples saying,
“…do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor 11:24 NIV).
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2 comments:
Gail;
-----This is precisely the charge which gets laid against doing communion every Sunday. They say it becomes a meaningless repetition. I’ve been going for several years to a church where it is done only on the first Sunday of every month. I can’t speak for anyone else, but communion doesn’t seem any more meaningful done less often. The preacher says many more words over a bunch of little ritual type activities. But they are always the same ideas, month in and month out, explaining every last detail of its ritual, month in and month out. At least when I was going to the church which did communion every week the repetitive explanations were mixed in with some little yarn or other handful of insights about the many different aspects of being God’s children knit together into the body of the Lord commemorated by the bread and wine. We don’t get that mix monthly, just the explanations.
-----I think meaning is mostly in our heads anyway, or in our hearts, if you would rather. This makes meaning kind of my responsibility. If during communion I think about checking the transmission grease in my Bronco, it’s not going to be very meaningful. If I think about how the grape juice represents the blood of Christ, it gets more meaningful. But when I think about how that blood bought me into this fellowship of eternally living souls become the temporal body for the Lord on earth in place of the one He sacrificed, and how when we even somewhat make our decisions by the wisdom of His Word then the accumulation of all our actions effect the wondrous workings He would be doing if here. That makes it better. I used to keep a rolling meditation from week to week, picking up my silent meditation one week about where I left off the week before. Nobody in the room could make communion meaningful for me.
-----Now, to anyone who insists that doing communion weekly makes it more meaningless, I haven’t found it easy to locate in heart and mind what I was pondering during the communion silence the first Sunday of a month earlier. And wouldn’t jotting it down on an index card for jogging the memory next month really ice the ritual?! I believe Paul gave the key to meaningfulness in proclaiming, “ Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” (I Cor 11”27-28). It isn’t how often you take communion that makes it meaningful, it isn’t how many or few words are spoken over it. The key is how seriously you bring yourself to it having cleaned all up and inclined your heart towards God’s Word.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
-----I don’t know about all the churches doing communion once a month instead of every Sunday, but this church I attend gives me cause to ponder maybe why once a month is more beneficial. They make such a giant production out of it. When the bread is handed to you it is with the proclamation, “The Lord’s body, broken for you,” which then you’re expected to repeat when you pass the bread on. So too with the grape juice and, “The Lord’s blood, spilt for you.” I don’t escape the meaning of that. Nor do I escape the meaning of the assurance given before the ceremony that this event is for everyone calling upon the Lord, not just for those of this denomination.
-----But the meaning I do not find in the ceremony I must go searching for myself. And finding it, I struggle. God’s Word was given us in the vessel of man’s language. One of the first rules of man’s language is that the writer means the reader to know what the writer means, not what the reader means. So, when the Bible says stuff straight forward the reader should take it straight inward. The “unworthy manner” and “self examination” and “discerning the body” are all conclusive ideas to a contextual discussion of the chaotic self-ambition happening at the Corinthian communion meals. The rules of love were abandoned as much as the meal was partaken with abandon. The “unworthy manner” was not the ritual aspects of it; it was the abandonment of love for order. The examination of one’s self is for the operations of love within the heart and mind and for the love of God, for the love of His Word and for the righteousness it teaches. The actions Paul described in this context testify to no love observed: the factions amongst them, the being first to the hog trough, and the drunkenness of the gluttony of it all are activities come from disregard of God’s Holy Word.
-----At the beginning of the communion service, I notice women going forward to serve the symbols. The Bible nowhere states that only men must serve. But having listened to this church’s women deliver sermons, and knowing it has nearly as many women elders (any being the husband of one wife?) gives me the creeps. My wife loves this church because most of them take their relationships with the Lord so seriously. I like that, too.
-----But what’s being dodged when the straightforward Word of God is not taken seriously? These people bristle at the idea of every man being the head of his wife. But Paul wrote this right into the letter in which he also wrote that women should be silent in church, about which command he asserted that if any objected they were not to be recognized. (I Cor. 14:33-38) And all of that is in this letter wherein he says we must examine ourselves before partaking.
-----Often we do communion similar to the Catholics. We all go to the front and break off a piece of bread held by one and dip it into a cup of juice held by another. Almost always the bread is served by a woman. That reverberates denial, not because women shouldn’t serve, but that they deny the Word by insisting women can do all the other, too. It pokes the Bible right in the “i”, almost with fanfare. One Sunday after hearing a great sermon on the importance of obeying the Word, I was shocked at myself for squinting my eyes and turning my head with bad flavor written all over my face when this woman stuck out the bread and proclaimed “Christ’s body broken for you.“ Yes, now, it was. And at that moment I definitely felt we all needed His broken body and spilt blood more than ever.
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