August 22, 2014
Avoiding Judgment
In my church the pianist will
play a hymn softly while communion is served to the congregation. Respectfully,
she keeps a watchful eye and continues to play until everyone has been served
before proceeding with the worship service song. I had a very different
experience in a church I visited that took their communion in small groups
scattered around the perimeter of the auditorium. One group of four people was
still in prayer when the worship leader stepped to the stage, picked up his guitar
and commenced with another praise song. Paul, referencing a fellowship meal
combined with the Lord’s Supper, offers words of correction to the Corinthian
church that I think are applicable to this situation, “So then, my brothers,
when you come together to eat, wait for each other. If anyone is hungry, he
should eat at home, so that when you meet together it may not result in
judgment.” (1 Cor 11:33-34 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I think all of the different ways you are finding communion done indicates two things. First and most obvious, we have lost touch with what gathering together was in the church’s beginning. How should that relate to all the differences in communion services? We’ve lost grasp of what the communion service was to the first Christians when they gathered. The context of your quoted verse shows a glimpse of both. Their gatherings were for an extended period of time, since the communion they practiced was a meal. If it weren’t a meal Paul would not have stated, “For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal, and one is hungry and another is drunk.” (I Cor 11:15) “Eating” and “meal” could certainly be metaphors if not for “hungry” and “drunk”. The message is simple: some would eat up all the food and drink too much wine; the rest were left hungry. Filling up on tiny cracker bits and getting drunk on snifters of wine is about as unrealistic as is considering these to comprise a meal. Communion in the beginning was a meal with everyone who gathered for worship and fellowship, so, their gatherings must have been more involved than the couple hours we get together. Nor did this way of communing last very long. So also the Lord dictated in His letter to the angel of the Church at Ephesus, "
But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first." (Rev 2:4-5) Certainly, the manner and habits of the worship service, fellowship, and communion were not all the Lord meant by "the love you had at first," but I think it was part of that flavor.
-----Second, we look for meaning in what we do. Sometimes, we fail to notice that when there are so many different ways of something’s being done, maybe the real meaning of it has been lost with the way in which we won’t do it. We haven’t lost the way communion was first done. It’s written right there in I Corinthians. But, without doing it, how will we know the meaning the doing of it communicates? The culture of the worship service must have been entirely different in those days. Maybe the culture of being the church was even different. It just keeps nagging at me that the bigger part of life then must have been gathering and interacting. I fear that gathering a couple hours a week, and only to sit beside each other passively, too easily turns the whole of fellowship and worship service into nothing but an emblem like has become the tiny cracker bit and the snifter of wine.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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