Sacraments

In his book, Paul Gould writes:

The writings of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson are infused with a sacramental theology. Her writing helps us see and savor the divine in the midst of the mundane. In an oft-cited passage, she invites readers to consider the ordinary—in this instance water—from a new vantage point. In her book Gilead, the Congregationalist minister John Ames knows his time on earth is coming to an end, so he writes a series of letters to his young son. Ames shares a memory of an earlier time when he watched a young couple stroll along on a leisure morning:

“The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running. The girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth.”

“I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”

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.’”

In a 2017 lecture, Mark Meynell addressed the connection between identity and memory:

BBC Radio 3, the U.K.'s primary classical music station, ran a fascinating series of articles on music and memory. Adam Zeman, a Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, wrote about amnesia and memory loss and their relationship to epilepsy. Zeman mentioned two patients, Peter and Marcus, who described their amnesia in very similar terms. One said: "My memory of my past is a blank space. I feel lost and hopeless. I'm trying to explore a void." Both described how disconcerting it is to look at photos. Even though they recognize themselves, they have no recollection of the moment. One said that it's like "reading a biography of a stranger." He's conscious of recent memories slipping away from him, like ships sailing out to sea in the fog, never to be seen again.

Two things stand out in Zeman's essay. First, without memory, it's hard to cling to an identity. So one of the patients said: "I don't have the moorings that other people draw on to know who they are." Second, it's hard to have hope when we don't know our past. As Zeman explained, "The inability to invoke the past greatly impedes their ability to imagine a future."

Possible Preaching Angles: In the Lord's Supper Jesus has invited us to be a community of remembrance. The Lord's Supper gives us our spiritual moorings. It gives us the "ability to imagine a future."

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 his book titled The Gospel According to Jesus, Chris Seay shares the following story:

"One week I was preaching in our church about the kingdom that is coming, and on the way out a young man grabbed me. He said,

Pastor, the kingdom [of God] is already here. Every Sunday I used to be in the same neighborhood. I used to come down here to a bar called Emo's, and I'd start every night with a drop of ecstasy on my tongue and wash it down with Bicardi 151. That's what I did Sunday after Sunday. Now I come [to a worship service] instead, and I finish the evening with the body of Christ on my tongue, and I wash it down with the blood of Christ. This is the kingdom of God."

Chris Seay adds, "This man is experiencing the kingdom; he lives in its presence. We may not recognize it, we don't often see it, but it is right here, and we long to get past the mundane existence of religion and get a taste of the kingdom."

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.

We live in a fast-paced culture, but some things just ought to happen slowly.

The book Final Salute tells the story of Major Steve Beck, a U.S. Marine whose heart-wrenching task is to inform the nearest of kin when a Marine is killed in Iraq. Beck doesn't just break the sad news and then leave; for several days he may help the family through the process of the funeral. That includes supervising the Marine honor guard that stands near the fallen soldier's body.

The honor guard learns from Beck how to salute their fallen fellow-Marine as they leave or resume guard with a slow salute that isn't taught in basic training. The slow salute requires a three second raising of the hand to the head, a three second hold, and then a three second lowering of the hand—a gesture of respect that takes about nine times longer than normal. Beck explains: "A salute to your fallen comrade should take time."

Indeed, those who die serving their country are worthy of great honor, worthy of a slow salute, worthy of extra time. To do some things fast, just to get them done so we can move on to the next thing in our lives, sends a subtle message of disrespect.

So it is with our worship of God. God deserves a slow salute. The Savior who gave his life for us is worthy of our time.

Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969. Most of us are familiar with astronaut Neil Armstrong's historic statement as he stepped onto the moon's surface: "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." But few know about the first meal eaten there.

Buzz Aldrin had brought aboard the spacecraft a tiny Communion kit provided by his church. Aldrin sent a radio broadcast to Earth asking listeners to contemplate the events of that day and give thanks.

Then, in radio blackout for privacy … [Aldrin] read, "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit."

Silently, he gave thanks and partook.

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.

In his book Doubting, author Alister McGrath shared the following story to illustrate how we can know God loves us:

An aunt of mine died some time ago, having lived to be 80 or so. She had never married. During the course of clearing out her possessions, we came across a battered old photograph of a young man. My aunt had, it turned out, fallen hopelessly in love as a young girl. It had ended tragically. She never loved anyone else and kept a photograph of the man she had loved for the remainder of her life.

Why? Partly to remind herself that she had once been loved by someone. As she had grown old, she knew that she would have difficulty believing that, at one point in her life, she really had meant something to someone—that someone had once cared for her and regarded her as his everything. It could all have seemed a dream, an illusion, something she had invented in her old age to console her in her declining years—except that the photograph gave the lie to that.

It reminded her that it had not been invented; she really loved someone once and was loved in return. The photograph was her sole link to a world in which she had been valued.

The communion bread and wine are like that photograph. They reassure us that something that seems too good to be true—something that we might even be suspected of having invented—really did happen.

Every December since 1992, Morrill Worcester, owner of one of the world's largest holiday wreath companies, has taken time in the midst of his busiest season to haul a truckload of wreaths to the Arlington National Cemetery. Morrill and his band of volunteers spend a day laying wreaths on the graves of over 5,000 soldiers as part of the Wreaths Across America program.

Worcester started the program when one of his warehouses called to report an overproduction of several thousand wreaths. He said: "Well, I'm not just gonna throw them away. That's when I thought of Arlington." He called Washington and asked for permission to lay his wreaths. To his surprise, he got it.

"When people hear about what we're doing, they want to know if I'm a veteran," Morrill said on the Wreaths Across America website. "I'm not. But I make it my business never to forget." His wife, Karen, agrees: "We want to honor the veterans, and we do it with the products we make ourselves. We're like the Little Drummer Boy. He had his drum; we have our wreaths."

For Morrill and Karen, the program is a way to give back. Christmas wreaths had made them rich. Through Wreaths Across America, they feel they are reclaiming the true meaning of a wreath, showing it as something more than a glitzy holiday ornament: "We wanted to get back to the simple idea of what a wreath represents—respect, honor, and victory."

Just as wreaths help us remember those who died to protect our freedom, so the bread and cup of Communion help us remember him who died so that we might live.

Pat Bailey shares the following thoughts about the contribution of each part of the meal in a traditional Thanksgiving feast:

The wheat gave its best as it was beaten to separate the heart of the wheat from the plant. That heart was given to the wheel of the mill and ground into flour. The flour was mixed and beaten down time and time again as it was prepared for the oven. Then the oven, with great blasts of heat, baked the bread that now sits on our table.

The cow gave her milk, sacrificing part of herself that we might drink. And the milk gave its best, as the cream was separated from the milk. The cream was beaten to become the topping for our desserts, and it was churned to become the butter for our bread.

The grapes gave their best, as they yielded to the hand that bruised and crushed them. They were tipped from vessel to vessel to purify them as they aged and became the wine that now sparkles in the crystal on our table.

And the turkey gave the greatest gift of all, as it gave its life to be the meat that is the main course at our feast of plenty.

There is another table, another feast, that has been carefully planned and prepared for us by God. He has given his best, his only begotten, beloved Son. Jesus was crushed, bruised, broken, and poured out unto death for us. All the planning, all the preparation, all the work, all that was needed is now finished, and he calls us to remember—to come, be filled and nurtured—as we celebrate Communion.

There's a wonderful story by Isak Dinesen called Babette's Feast, about a strict, dour, fundamentalist community in Denmark. Babette works as a cook for two elderly sisters who have no idea that she once was a chef to nobility back in her native France. Babette's dream is to return to her beloved home city of Paris, so every year she buys a lottery ticket in hopes of winning enough money to return. And every night her austere employers demand that she cook the same dreary meal: boiled fish and potatoes, because, they say, Jesus commanded, "Take no thought of food and drink."

One day the unbelievable happens: Babette wins the lottery! The prize is 10,000 francs, a small fortune. And because the anniversary of the founding of the community is approaching, Babette asks if she might prepare a French dinner with all the trimmings for the entire village.

At first the townspeople refuse: "No, it would be sin to indulge in such rich food." But Babette begs them, and finally they relent, "As a favor to you, we will allow you to serve us this French dinner." But the people secretly vow not to enjoy the feast and instead to occupy their minds with spiritual things, believing God will not blame them for eating this sinful meal as long as they do not enjoy it.

Babette begins her preparations. Caravans of exotic food arrive in the village, along with cages of quail and barrels of fine wine.

Finally the big day comes, and the village gathers. The first course is an exquisite turtle soup. The diners force it down without enjoyment. But although they usually eat in silence, conversation begins to take off. Then comes the wine: Veuve Cliquot 1860, the finest vintage in France. And the atmosphere changes. Someone smiles. Someone else giggles. An arm comes up and drapes over a shoulder. Someone is heard to say, "After all, did not the Lord Jesus say, love one another?" By the time the main entrée of quail arrives, those austere, pleasure-fearing people are giggling and laughing and slurping and guffawing and praising God for their many years together. This pack of Pharisees is transformed into a loving community through the gift of a meal. One of the two sisters goes into the kitchen to thank Babette, saying, "Oh, how we will miss you when you return to Paris!" And Babette replies, "I will not be returning to Paris, because I have no money. I spent it all on the feast."

Can you think of anyone else who gave his all to make us a loving community through the gift of a meal?

In the night when his people betrayed him--the night of intensest enmity--the dear Lord Jesus said, "This is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many." Then! Can we comprehend the joining of two such extremes, the good, and the evil together? In the night of gravest human treachery he gave the gift of himself. And the giving has never ceased. The Holy communion continues today.

In baptism we are initiated, crowned, chosen, embraced, washed, adopted, gifted, reborn, killed, and thereby sent forth and redeemed. We are identified as one of God's own, then assigned our place and our job within the kingdom of God.

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."