Ordinances

According to a French story, a drowned girl's body was recovered from France's Seine River sometime in the late 1800s. Her body, displayed in a Parisian mortuary in an attempt to identify her, captured the imagination of one of the mortuary's pathologists. So, he had a sculptor take a plaster cast of her face. The beautiful, enigmatic mask—named "L'Inconnue de la Seine" ("The unknown woman of the Seine")—was soon for sale among artists and writers who found it a muse for their work. In fact, no fashionable European living room of the late 1800s was complete without a mask of the Inconnue on the wall.

But her image didn't stop there. And this is where the story gets really interesting: In 1955 Asmund Laerdal saved the life of his drowning young son, grabbing the boy's motionless body from the water just in time and clearing his airways.

Laerdal at that time was a successful Norwegian toy manufacturer, specializing in making children's dolls and model cars from the new generation of soft plastics. When he was approached to make a training aid for the newly-invented technique of CPR, his son's brush with death a few years earlier made him very receptive.

He developed a mannequin which simulates an unconscious patient requiring CPR. Remembering the mask on the wall of his grandparents' house many years earlier, he decided that "The unknown woman of the Seine" would become the face of Resusci Anne. She has a pleasant, attractive face, with the hint of a smile playing on her lips. Her eyes are closed but they look as if they might spring open at any moment.

So, if you're one of the 300 million people who's been trained in CPR, you've almost certainly had your lips pressed to the Inconnue's.

Possible Preaching Angle:

How like God's work of redemption this is: to take the very worst things imaginable—like the horror of death—and make something new that would save countless lives. This is what God did for us on the cross, which we remember each Easter and Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:26). The difference between the cross and the “unknown lady” is that our Lord was raised triumphantly from the grave and we serve a risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:1-58).

During World War II General Douglas MacArthur wanted an island airfield from which to launch his forces and so he invaded the Indonesian island of Biak. Six months after they secured the island, in June 1944, a chaplain named Leon Maltby arrived on the island to minister to the troops. He had a 20x60 canvas structure to serve as his chapel but nothing in it except for a floor made out of packed coral and a roof made from a yellow parachute. So with the help of some carpenters he built pews, a platform, and an altar.

He wanted to serve communion but had nothing to serve it with. He found some unused 50 caliber bullets. He used new shells because he didn’t want to use any that had been used to kill. He pulled out the lead, gunpowder, and firing caps. He welded them, pressed them into the right shape, and shined them. Each took about two-hours to complete and he made enough for 80 communion cups which he used to serve his men.

In 1945 Chaplain Maltby sailed into Japan and was actually the first Protestant chaplain to enter Japan. He became good friends with a local Japanese pastor and used that same communion set to serve the Lord’s Supper with him, which moved the Japanese pastor deeply. The set is now on display at the Veterans Museum in Daytona Beach where a sign reads, “The pastor clearly understood the significance of ‘Instruments of death becoming a symbol of eternal life.’”

London witnessed a spectacular scene when a giant wooden replica of the city ignited and burned brilliantly to the ground. The conflagration was planned, however, in honor of the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London. The original fire began on September 2, 1666, in the early morning at a bakery on Pudding Lane. The surrounding structures were soon engulfed, and the fire spread to the rest of the city, lasting four entire days. The modern-day festival to remember the disaster is known as "London's Burning" and contains four days of free art events, concluding this year with the grand burning of the replica of medieval London.

At first glance, it seems a bit odd to celebrate such a catastrophe-especially with another fire. However, as gruesome as the Great Fire may have been, it now has its place firmly etched into the city's history as a turning point: the beginning of a time of regrowth and resurgence for London.

Christians arguably perform the same "odd" type of ritual when we take communion and decorate our homes and sacred buildings with crosses. We not only commemorate the brutal murder of Jesus, but we adorn our worship with the murder weapon: the cross, one of the most widely known torture devices of that time period. And yet it doesn't seem strange to us—because we know that what Satan intended to be the ultimate act of evil, God turned around to be the ultimate act of love.

Potential Preaching Angles: Redemption; Cross; Crucifixion; Easter; Communion

In her memoir Take This Bread, author Sara Miles shares how the first time she ever took Communion changed her life forever. She writes:

One early, cloudy morning, when I was forty-six, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I'd led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.

Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not as symbolic wafer but actual food—indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.

And so I did. I took communion, I passed the bread to others, and then I kept going, compelled to find new ways to share what I had experienced.

In his Letters to a Young Evangelical, Tony Campolo shares a story from his youth about taking Communion:

Sitting with my parents at a Communion service when I was very young, perhaps six or seven years old, I became aware of a young woman in the pew in front of us who was sobbing and shaking. The minister had just finished reading the passage of Scripture written by Paul that says, "Whosoever shall eat the bread and drink the cup of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:27). As the Communion plate with its small pieces of bread was passed to the crying woman before me, she waved it away and then lowered her head in despair. It was then that my Sicilian father leaned over her shoulder and, in his broken English, said sternly, "Take it, girl! It was meant for you. Do you hear me?"

She raised her head and nodded—and then she took the bread and ate it. I knew that at that moment some kind of heavy burden was lifted from her heart and mind. Since then, I have always known that a church that could offer Communion to hurting people was a special gift from God.

Imagine that your organization is an ocean liner, and that you are "the leader." What is your role? I have asked this question of groups of managers many times. The most common answer, not surprisingly, is the captain. Others say, "The navigator, setting the direction." Still others say, "The helmsman, actually controlling the direction," or, "the engineer down there stoking the fire, providing energy," or, "the social director, making sure everybody's enrolled, involved, and communicating." While these are legitimate leadership roles, there is another that, in many ways, eclipses them all in importance. Yet, rarely does anyone think of it.

The neglected leadership role is the designer of the ship. No one has a more sweeping influence than the designer. What good does it do for the captain to say, "Turn starboard 30 degrees," when the designer has built a rudder that will turn only to port, or that takes 6 hours to turn to starboard? It's fruitless to be the leader in an organization that is poorly designed. Isn't it interesting that so few managers think of the ship's designer when they think of the leader's role?

In an interview with a long-time friend, international pop superstar Bono, of the hit band U2, responded to the sometimes-stained reputation of the church throughout history:

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. A list of instructions where there was once conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship.

Baptism today often means sprinkling water on the head. At one time, for some Christians, it amounted to washing feet.

Most early Christians practiced baptism by immersion, but a minority took their cues from (John 13:10): they believed baptism by the washing of feet precluded the need to wash head and hands. This view began in Syria and spread west by the late 100s. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (in modern France) conjectured that Jesus, during his descent into hell, purified the dead by baptizing them by washing their feet.

Not everyone agreed on foot washing's sacramental value. By the early 300s, the rite was so controversial, one important church council outlawed it. At the end of the fourth century, though, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, defended footwashing's baptismal significance: while full baptism purified someone from personal sins, he argued, foot washing purified the neophyte from original sin.

In the early medieval period, foot washing increasingly was seen merely as the supreme example of humility. And the rite was moved to Maundy Thursday, the night the Last Supper is commemorated.

Today, several Protestant groups hold foot washing in high regard. Seventh Day Adventists, in reverse of Ambrose, believe baptism represents justification once and for all, and foot washing, ongoing sanctification. Some even regard the ordinance as a "miniature baptism."