2009-03-29 - "Many Courses, One Meal"

"Many Courses, One Meal"
Communion is a multi-dimensional meal
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Text: Matthew 26-17-29

It was exactly 9:15 a.m. Atlantic Standard Time last Sunday when I was driving between Halifax and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, on my way to worship at an 11 o'clock service. I realized that I got out of the city very quickly, and what I thought was a long drive was actually a shorter one. I had forgotten that I wasn't in Toronto with its traffic, and I had time to kill before I went on to Wolfville. What do I do? Well, you pull off and you have a coffee at a Tim Horton's, don't you? So, I did that in the town of Windsor, situated mid-way, sort of, between Halifax and Wolfville. The sun was shining and the water was blue off the Bay of Fundy. It was a magnificent day!

I pulled into the middle of the old town of Windsor, got my coffee, sat in the car and just enjoyed the sun coming through the window. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walking along the sidewalk. He had a wool cap pulled over his head and a dirty coat on. He had two plastic bags attached to his belt. The reason for the first one was obvious: He was picking up used cigarette butts and putting them in this bag. I had no idea what the second one was for until he came right in front of my vehicle, where there was a garbage receptacle. He removed the lid and started to pull out aluminium cans, which he put in the bag on his left hip. Then he found the discarded Tim cups and began to “roll up the rims” to see if he could win something.

After doing that, he did something very strange. He reached in to the bottom and pulled out a half-eaten apple fritter. I watched, and he put it in his mouth. Like a rabid animal devouring its prey, he consumed the fritter in a matter of seconds. A tear lodged in my eye. He walked across the sidewalk to the other side of the street, and there he opened yet another garbage can, and yet again he did the same thing with cans, cigarette butts and roll-up-the-rim cups, but there was no food in that one. He looked hungry, ravenous.

I really didn't know what to do. So, I got out of the car and I went over to him and asked, “Have you had breakfast yet?” He said, “No, I haven't.” I said, “Would you like me to get you breakfast?” He said, “Okay.” So, I took him in to Tim's, got him a bagel and a coffee, sat him down and he began to eat. Before I had even paid for it, the bagel was almost gone. He devoured it! He was shaking with hunger.

Realizing that my time was now getting close and I had to get back on the road, I left him. I waved to him, got in my car and drove off to church in Wolfville. It is amazing, though, what I learned about this man in those few seconds. I don't know his story, I don't know his life, but this I do know - he was hungry. He seemed to be not just hungry to devour food that morning, but clearly there were other things in his life for which he was still hungry.

There was a profound need in this man's life, whatever it may have been. Oh, I did nothing special in buying him a bagel - anyone can do that. I just thought what a profound sense of emptiness in a man's life at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning going to try to find food and cigarette butts. Clearly, he was empty of much more than just food.

When Jesus sat down with his disciples that last night at the Last Supper, broke bread, took wine and shared it with them, he was revealing to them more than simply a meal - he was revealing himself. Father McAfee Brown, the great theologian, said that the breaking of the bread in that upper room that night was the enactment of the Gospel. When Jesus said to the disciples, “This is my body which is broken for you,” and when he took the cup and said, “This covenant is the new covenant of my blood, drink ye of it,” he was inviting them to share in the very power of the Gospel that he was enacting in the days to come.

They saw more, and we see more, in that one action than in probably any other act in the whole of the Bible. In the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the wine, in the last Passover meal, there was everything that we really need to know about Jesus, and perhaps even more than words can ever account.

I am preaching about this today knowing that next Sunday we have Communion, and maybe I am just doing advertising. Who knows, but you will come next Sunday? More than that, you might prepare yourself for next Sunday: Prepare yourself to share in the meal that Jesus shared with his disciples when, in so many ways, he revealed the entirety of his Gospel, for what we find is a multi-dimensional meal. It was one meal in time, place and history, yes, but a meal that has multiple courses, multiple dimensions and multiple meanings.

I want us to grasp what these dimensions are in order that our lives and the hunger we have in our souls might find some degree of fulfillment. First, this was a meal that was looking backward in time. I don't know if you and I could possibly imagine the sense of surprise that the disciples must have had upon hearing Jesus' words. They went, like good Jews, for a Passover meal, to celebrate God's setting Israel free. Like any Jew, they would have had the washing of the hands; they would have had the candles; they would have had the statement, the story of God's salvation of people through the Exodus; they would have recounted the story of God's liberation of his people; they would have had a Seder meal and celebrated with four cups, then a final one. In the midst of this meal, which the disciples were anticipating was a Passover meal with those they loved including Jesus, they got far more than they ever bargained for. As most scholars agree, when the third cup was handed out, it was the Cup of Redemption, the Cup of Salvation. In the Passover, this is the high moment, the moment when the people remember the blood on the door that saved those who were going to be persecuted and killed. In that moment, Jesus says, “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood.”

At this moment, Jesus, the one they followed, says that this cup is the New Covenant in his blood, that he is the enactment, the fulfillment of this promise. They would have awaited the last cup, the Cup of Elijah. This is the cup that must be drunk in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. Right before that, Jesus says, “Take this cup and drink it.” The disciples' whole world must have been shaken up. They were planning on looking back at the Passover, but Jesus was saying this event is now taking place in me - right here, right now, the New Covenant in my blood.

There is also a forward-looking dimension to the meal. Jesus is very clear. He says, “You will drink of this cup next time with me, but you will do it in Heaven, not here. This cup that I am giving you is not only for this meal now, but it is for eternity and for all time.”

This last week I decided to go back and visit my parent's home in the Annapolis Valley, seeing as I was down there. I wondered what the neighbours would have made of it, and whether or not the mail box would still be the same mail box, the bushes the same bushes and the drapes the same drapes. I drove past the house and just stopped out front, and my heart sort of stopped. I thought, “Wouldn't it be lovely if I could just pop in now and have a meal with them; just have dinner like we used to.” But, of course, that is impossible - they are deceased - so I drove on.

Yet, I thought to myself, as I had been reading this text all week in preparation for this morning, there will come a time when there will be a dinner. There will be a banquet feast hosted by the Messiah, and I will sit down with those I love, those who believe, and countless others who I do not know and have never known, at this great banquet with Christ. There will be a day when I will break bread and share a cup with those who love the Lord.

Pastor Martin Neimoller, the great German theologian and pastor who opposed Hitler and was eventually put in Dachau concentration camp in 1944, took some of the men around him in the concentration camp on the eve of Christmas and gave them Communion. He'd asked the guards for some bread and a little wine, and he was given it. Pastor Neimoller says:

It is a meal that looks forward, but it is a meal that moves us inwardly as well - a third dimension. Jesus says, “This cup is poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.” At the heart of everything is forgiveness. Whoever takes of this bread and drinks of this wine will experience the forgiveness of Christ, the salvation of Christ, the redemption of Christ. We sometimes aren't always clear about just how powerful that can be.

I was reading Time Magazine this week. To my absolute astonishment, it talked about the 10 great trends that will affect North America in the years to come. One of them was entitled, The Trend of the New Calvinism, and immediately my ears pricked up and my eyes swelled out. A new Calvinism! What the article says is that people are fed up and tired of a plastic religion that offers you instant success and immediate gratification - that happy, clappy, banal faith that seems to sweep so many of our book stores at the moment. Young people especially, the article says, don't buy it. They don't buy that kind of simplicity; they need something deeper. It said a lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness - divorce, drugs, sexual temptation and violence. They have plenty of friends, but what they need - and know they need - is God. Never mind just saying, “Everything is going to be fine; be happy, have a shallow faith.” No! There is a growing new sense that what people need is something that is redemptive, something that is transcendent. What they need, says the article, is God, and no one embodied that more clearly in his writings than Calvin. They are right! People have an inward brokenness and they know it in our culture. Jesus said, “Take this cup and this bread, and you will have forgiveness. You will have the grace of God.”

But there is also an upward dimension. When I was a young boy, they used to bring around the Communion plate, and there were all these small pieces of bread on it, just like we do here at eleven o'clock. I looked at this plate and thought, “We are being gypped. There is not a whole lot of bread here.” In fact, I used to flick the pieces of bread off the plate once in a while, just for fun, to get the back of the head of the person in front of me. It all seemed just so ridiculous! A little bit of bread! What is this? This is crazy! It doesn't mean anything. You can't even break it, it is so small!

As I have got older, and hopefully a bit wiser, I now look at that and say, “No, this points to something much more dramatic, much greater. This bread actually doesn't matter. What matters is the resurrection - that the body broken and the wine shared are symbols. But they are more than symbols. They are a reminder of the fact that the brokenness of Jesus was not the last word; the brokenness of Jesus was the preparation for eternal life, for the resurrection that was to come.”

When those disciples sat in that upper room and heard what Jesus was saying, they were hoping beyond hope that this man who was sitting in front of them and saying, “This is the New Covenant,” was going to rise from the dead, because if he wasn't, they were in deep trouble. Of course, they wrote of this event after the resurrection; they knew the glorious power of it. So, when Mathew recorded it, he recorded it knowing that this was a meal that points us upwards, that lifts us up beyond even the confines of death and sin to the glorious resurrection of Jesus. It is the hope of eternal life. This is profoundly an upward meal.

It is also a meal about us. The fifth dimension is that it is very much a family meal. Just as those who eat the Passover meal do so as a family, so we need Communion as a family. With all the brokenness and distortions, with all the problems Jesus had with the one who was going to betray him, with all of that, still it was a family meal; a meal to be shared. “This is my body which is broken for you, eat of it” he says, and he shares it with them. This is, as one theologian put it, “The most democratic meal on earth, the sharing of Christ with one another.”

The great Charles Haddon Spurgeon once told the story of a young Covenanter girl. The Covenanters were those from the tradition of which I come, the Dissenter tradition in Britain. They are part of the Presbyterian movement in Scotland, and would not bow to the king. They believed that they could have the sacrament without the priests always being present - always a debatable point! Nevertheless, they did this. The problem was that it was illegal to meet and have Communion without the sanction of the government. So, if you were going to go and have the sacrament and you met people from the government, you had to keep it quiet.

This young Covenanter girl was stopped by the military, and they were asking her where she was going. She was on her way to Communion, but she didn't want to tell them she was going there, for she would be arrested. She didn't want to lie either - you are not to lie; you are to tell the truth. So she said, “I am going to have dinner with my elder brother, who has done something for me, and left something for me, and will hear his last will and testament and I will share it with all my other siblings.” And they let her go!

She understood Communion. She understood that Jesus was her elder brother, that she had been adopted into the household, the family of God. She understood that he had something for her, that he had done something for her, and that she was now going to hear his last will and testament: “This is my body broken for you. This is my blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.” She was going to share it with her siblings - her fellow believers.

Communion is about the family of God, but it is also an outward meal. It is a meal to which there is an invitation: “Come and dine; come and receive this meal.” In receiving this meal, you receive the very power and love of Christ. You receive this very blessing that it is an outreach to the broken-hearted; it is an outreach to the hungry; it is an outreach to those who are in need.

Dr. Criswell once said that this meal is the memorial for Christ. In Washington, for George Washington himself, there is a monolith. In Egypt, there are the obelisks. In India, there is the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jehan to celebrate the beauty of his wife. It is a great mausoleum - a magnificent thing, one of the wonders of the world. For the Christian, there is no such monument to point to where Jesus was, but there was a meal. There was meal that invites everyone to take of it. Matthew made that clear. There is an imperative in the text, “Take it and eat it.” Here it is, a body broken for you. This is the invitation from Christ, and this Holy Week is the beginning of you taking hold of the invitation that Christ has given you to participate with a family, to be part of the eternal kingdom, to prepare yourself for an eternal banquet and to receive the forgiveness that Christ has given you. Christ says,

All I can hope for is that the man I saw in Windsor, the man I left behind, just might one day dine with me again, but this time at the banquet of the Lord, in the Council of Heaven, at the meal that is for all time. Amen.