Will Fitzgerald
November 2, 2008
Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship has been meeting since January of 2007, and in that time we have met pretty much every week. We have worshipped God together, prayed together, learned from the Scriptures together, cried together, rejoiced together, enjoyed soup and bread together. We have been mostly out of sight and mind of the larger Mennonite organizations, nor have we publicized our presence much. In the past few weeks, it has seemed right to a number of us to start moving, slowly and deliberatively, towards becoming more of what a local church needs to be--getting official recognition, blessing and oversight from the Mennonite Church, taking up and dispersing offerings, letting more people know about what we are doing here. Another thing that seems right is to move towards celebrating the Lord's Supper together, and, during the month of November, we plan to devote our teaching time to this topic. I hope this will be a rich time together, both in the teaching time, and in our conversations with each other over lunch and in our times of prayer and private study.
Although we are the Kalamazoo Mennonite Fellowship, not many of us--not that there are that many of us to start with--are traditionally Mennonite, so we might not all be familiar with the Mennonite understanding of the Lord's Supper. We did touch on this some time ago when we did our series of teachings on the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, but it's worth revisiting what the confession says in Article 12. And I want to beg your indulgence as I read this.
We believe that the Lord's Supper is a sign by which the church thankfully remembers the new covenant which Jesus established by his death. In this communion meal, the members of the church renew our covenant with God and with each other. As one body, we participate in the life of Jesus Christ given for the redemption of humankind. Thus we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
The Lord's Supper points to Jesus Christ, whose body was given for us and whose shed blood established the new covenant. In sharing the bread and cup, each believer remembers the death of Jesus and God's act of deliverance in raising Jesus from the dead. As we relive this event with a common meal, we give thanks for all God's acts of deliverance in the past and present, for the forgiveness of sins, and for God's continuing grace in our lives.
The supper re-presents the presence of the risen Christ in the church. As we partake of the communion of the bread and cup, the gathered body of believers shares in the body and blood of Christ and recognizes again that its life is sustained by Christ, the bread of life.
Remembering how Jesus laid down his life for his friends, we his followers recommit ourselves to the way of the cross. Confessing our sins to one another and receiving forgiveness, we are to come as one body to the table of the Lord. There we renew our baptismal covenant with God and with each other and recognize our unity with all believers everywhere in all times.
All are invited to the Lord's table who have been baptized into the community of faith, are living at peace with God and with their brothers and sisters in the faith, and are willing to be accountable in their congregation.
Celebrating the Lord's Supper in this manner, the church looks forward in joy and hope to the feast of the redeemed with Christ in the age to come.
That's a lot to take in at once. As I said earlier, not a lot of us grew up in the Mennonite Church. When Bess and I were undergraduate students at Michigan State, we attend University Reformed Church, a church the Reformed Church of America denomination. One of the things I very much appreciated there was a set-piece the pastor would say at communion as part of the RCA liturgy. He would say:
Beloved in the Lord Jesus Christ, the holy Supper which we are about to celebrate is a feast of remembrance, of communion, and of hope.
And then the liturgy would expand a bit on what it meant for the feast to be one of remembrance, communion and hope. And I would like to follow that basic outline over the next few weeks. Today, I want to talk a bit about communion. Next week, our plan is for Matt Bruski to talk about the Lord's Supper as a feast of remembrance. Then we'll talk about hope, and return to the topic of communion.
Over lunch and perhaps over email and the phone, I'd like us to talk about the practical aspects of taking the Lord's supper together. I do want to say one thing, though. Bess and I did meet with Tim Lichti, one of the conference ministers, and he affirmed that there was no reason, from a church polity standpoint, for us not to celebrate the Lord's Supper together. He did encourage us to approach it seriously, and, of course, this is just what we are attempting to do.
So, let's talk about "communion." Today, we talk about communion with one another; in another teaching, we'll discuss the communion between us and Jesus. Just hearing the word "communion," we can hear echoes of the word "common" and "union." And it's the commonality that we want to think about today. In the past weeks, we have looked at the idea of being "of one mind," of being in unity together. For example, We talked about how Paul teaches us to live in unity by rejoicing with one another, by begin gracious to one another, to be thankful, and to think on the good, the beautiful and the true.
With this in mind, I read Paul's critique of the Corinthians' communion antics in 1 Cor. 11:7-22:
In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval. When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk. Don't you have homes 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 praise you for this? Certainly not!
Implied in this is that when the early Christians were getting together, they were getting together to eat a substantial meal, with food to eat and wine to drink. It's just the right setting for bringing people together--in this respect, it's like what we hope for in a good Thanksgiving meal. But many of us can remember dysfunctional Thanksgiving dinners, and in this the Corinthians were ahead of their time. I imagine a kind of rush for the food table, or a rush for the wine bottles--whoever got there first got what he or she wanted, and the devil take the hindmost. How ironic! Their common meal led to a disputes and division. No wonder Paul is upset.
At communion, we have this this in common, at least: we take the bread and wine together. We may differ in age, gender, race; we might even understand the meaning, structure and function of the Lord's Supper differently, but we are act in common. As Paul writes, echoing Jesus:
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. (1 Cor 11:23-26)
If the Lord's Supper is a "is a feast of remembrance, of communion, and of hope," and if that communion is between among ourselves as well as between us and Jesus, it seems to me that achieving communion with one another is perhaps the easiest of these things to understand and to do. All it takes is for us to get together and share the elements together and to do that "decently and in order." With time, the good feelings that come with any common ritual well done will come. It's an unfortunate fact of American society that we are unlikely to celebrate the Lord's Supper together for a long time, just because of the mobile nature of our society. It's also the case that traditional Mennonite practice is to celebrate the Lord's Supper very infrequently--often only once or twice a year. No doubt this is in part a reaction against the dead ritual the early Anabaptists experienced before their break with the state-run churches. And no doubt it's also in reaction to the serious warnings that Paul gives here in 1 Corinthians:
Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.
Well, there's a simple solution for that! Just take communion once or twice a year, and it will decrease the number of times you participate in the Lord's Supper in an unworthy manner! But it's also possible to make the opposite mistake: to *not* eat the bread or drink the cup. Remember the context of Paul's admonishment: they were doing the opposite of what the meal was supposed to do: to unite them in the meal they had together. His stern admonition was not meant to make them take supper together less frequently. Rather, he has rather simple and practical advice:
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)
I think this is easy enough to do, don't you? It's simple table manners: don't rush the table, wait for others, don't take too much.
The Lord's Supper over time became more ritualized, and it's rare (but not unknown) to celebrate with a real meal, so this is not the common Christian's problem. But I'd like to point out that we are small enough, and we already incorporate a meal into our meeting together, that we might consider how to return to this early Christian practice of a substantial meal as part of the supper of the Lord.
As it turns out, this is "All Souls' Day" in the Catholic tradition, coming on the heels of All Saints' Day and (of course) Hallowe'en, or All Saints' Day Eve. And this is a good reminder that when we celebrate the Lord's Supper, we celebrate not only with those gathered around the table, but with all believers everywhere and "everywhen." The creed says, "I believe in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." If we believe these things, we believe that the "communion of saints" is the communion of all who believe and follow Jesus Christ, in every place and every time. If we believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, it means that those who have died before us are also part of that communion *right now*.
When I was a very new Christian in high school, I went to this small church, and there was a very old man there named Mr. Rector. I'm sure that after all these years I'll get the story wrong, but what I remember is that I don't think I liked him very much. I was young, and he was so old. I don't think that I disliked him so much as that I didn't have anything in common with him (or so I thought). And then he died. Of people that I have known personally, he was one of the first to die. And when he died, I felt sorry that I didn't try to be kind to him, or even talk to him. I had missed my opportunity forever, even to ask forgiveness for that. But later I realized that, because I believed in life after death for God's chosen, it was possible that he could become aware of things on earth. It's kind of like the criticism that some people make that Jesus never read the New Testament--do they think he's not given it a glance since his resurrection? And whether it was naïveté on my part or a common sense thing to do, I asked God to let Mr. Rector know that I was sorry for the way I had not respected him. I like to think that when I take the Lord's Supper, I take it along with Mr. Rector. I believe that at the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb there will be time to enjoy face-to-face communion with Mr Rector, and all the faithful saints of God who "from their labors rest."
To sum up, the Lord's Supper is a feast of remembrance, of communion, and of hope. In frequent, orderly celebration of the Lord's Supper, we share with one another a great good thing, and build memories which can help us celebrate with ever more joy and poignancy. Not to sound too catholic here, but we also remember the holy dead, and look forward to sharing the Lord's Supper with one another and with them at the Great Wedding Feast of the Lamb.