Celebrating God in Scripture and Breaking Bread

Adapted from Simply Christian, by N.T. Wright.

Text: Communion

Focus: remembering Jesus' sacrifice

Function: to help people worship from a pure heart.

Form: Storytelling

Intro:

Worship is Celebrating God.

We worship God because he both created us and he redeemed us. God saved us. And his salvation wasn't cheap. Perhaps the plan, all along, was for sin to destroy this world, and then God Himself appears to destroy sin and save us. He proved His love by personally coming to earth as Jesus, walking among us, healing us, showing us how to live in love, and then dying on the cross for our sins. The best response to all that is worship.

Some people would dispute the idea that we are sinners.

There are two ways of looking at our world. We can behold all of its beauty and believe that everything is peachy keen. Or, we can accept both the beauty and the evil that has overtaken much of the planet

Wise Christian worship takes fully into account the fact that creation has gone horribly wrong, has been so corrupted and spoiled that a great fault line runs right down the middle of it-and down the middle of all of us, who, as image-bearing human beings, were meant to be taken care of it.

That's why Christian worship is also the glad celebration of God's action in the past in Jesus the Messiah, and the promise that what he accomplished in dying for our sins will be completed. In other words, as in Revelation 5, worship of God as Redeemer though, the lover and rescuer of the world, must always accompany and complete the worship of God as Creator.

Celebrating God through Scripture:

We've a story to tell to the nations. A story of good news.

Telling the story, rehearsing the mighty acts of God: this is near the heart of Christian worship, a point not always fully appreciated in the enthusiastic, free-flowing worship coming in many circles today.

We know God through what he has done in creation, in Israel, and supremely in Jesus, and what he has done in his people and in the world through the Holy Spirit.

Christian worship is the praise of this God, the one who has done these things. And the place we find that God-given an account of these events is of course Scripture: the Bible.

Later on, we will focus for a few sermons on the importance of Bible and Bible study. But in the context of worship: reading the Bible aloud is always central to Christian worship.

I have been guilty of cutting back on this for whatever reason: sometimes trimming reading so that the service doesn't go on too long, or having only the few verses I am to preach that misses the point.

The reason we read Scripture in worship isn't primarily to inform a congregation about some biblical passage they might have forgotten. Reading scripture in worship is, first and foremost, the central way of celebrating who God is and what he's done.

Unfortunately, today's worship services are so short that it would be impossible to read chapters of the Scripture and keep the worship service to a manageable time. The worship of God is more important than our time.

Somehow, when the Scripture is read out loud, it changes us. We enter into the realm of the divine. Spiritual things begin to happen in our own lives. It is like a twisted piece of steel that is suddenly straightened and made useful again. God's word heals us.

Even the simplest acts of Christian worship ought therefore always to focus on the reading of Scripture. Sometimes there will be a time for the congregation to meditate on one or more the readings. Sometimes there will be an opportunity to respond.

That's how Christian worship begins to develop the particular shape, a “liturgy”: as a showcase for Scripture, a way of making sure that the faithful are treating it with the seriousness it deserves.

And yet, the idea of liturgy is often discarded as being old-fashioned, to traditional, boring, or even meaningless.

However, the Bible is one of Gods great revelations of himself to humanity. It is important to God. Psalm 138:2 says: “You have exalted your word over your name.” Honoring Scripture, honors God; as long as we use the Scripture to point us to Jesus, instead of justifying ourselves.

The Bible is, in short, the staple diet of Christian worship, as it is of Christian teaching. The story of the two disciples walking with Jesus shows us the good. As Jesus explained scripture to them, the text says, their hearts burned. But then, Jesus revealed Himself to them.

But their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, when he broke the bread.

Celebrating God-through the breaking of bread

The second aspect of Celebrating God comes from a pattern that Jesus Himself taught us. And no, I am not speaking of the Lord's prayer. I am speaking of Communion.

Three opening remarks. First, we break bread and drink wine together, telling the story of Jesus and his death, because Jesus knew that this set of actions would explain the meaning of his death in a way that nothing else-no theories, no clever ideas-could ever do. After all, when Jesus died for our sins it wasn't so he could fill our minds with true ideas, however important they may be.

Jesus didn't die just to fill our minds with true ideas.

He died, so he could do something, namely, rescue us from evil and death.

Second, it isn't a piece of sympathetic magic, as some have often worried it might be. This action, like the symbolic actions performed by the ancient prophets, becomes one of the points at which heaven and earth coincide.

Paul says “as often as you eat the bread and drink the cup you the Lord's death until he comes” (First Corinthians 11:26). He doesn't mean that it's a good opportunity for a sermon.

Like a handshake or a kiss doing it says it. Like a handshake or a kiss doing it says it. When we do communion, we proclaim Jesus.

Third, nor is the bread-breaking a mirror occasion for remembering something that happened a long time ago. When we break the bread and drink the wine, we find ourselves joining the disciples in the upper room. We are united with Jesus himself as he prays in Gethsemane and stands before Caiaphas and Pilate. We become one with him as he hangs on the cross and rises from the dead. Past and present come together. Events from long ago are fused with the meal we are sharing here and now.

But it isn't only the past comes forward into the present. The bread-breaking is one of the key moments when the thin partition between heaven and earth becomes transparent, it is also one of the key moments when God's future comes rushing into the present.

Like the children of Israel still in the wilderness, tasting food which the spies have brought back from the secret trip to the promised land, in the bread-breaking we are tasting God's new creation—the new creation whose prototype in origin is Jesus himself.

This is one of the reasons why he said “this is my body” and “this is my blood.” we don't need elaborate with long Latin names to get to the point. Jesus—the real Jesus, the living Jesus, the Jesus who dwells in heaven and rules over us as well, the Jesus who has brought God's future into the present—once not just to influence us, but to rescue us; not just to inform us, but to feed us, with himself. That's what this meal is about.

Perhaps the biggest problem that Christians have faced about this meal is the idea that it is a “good work,” which people “do” in order to earn God's favor. Some still feel that way about anything that is “done” in church; but unless we are to sit absolutely still and say nothing at all, we are bound to “do” something in our worship together.

Even choosing to be silent, as in a Quaker meeting, is a choice to do something—namely, to come together and be silent. Of course, there is a danger that fussy ritual will forget what it's there for and become an end in itself.

Sometimes the building, the ritual itself, the pastor, the organist, the choir can be the best that money can buy. But then, people stop caring about the object and focus on the form of worship.

Yesterday, Kathy and I celebrated 35 years of marriage. I had a friend, whose friends surprised them with an anniversary celebration. They told them to dress up in their finest. At the appointed hour, a rented limousine picked them up from their home. The limousine driver proceeded to take them to McDonald's where they were served McDonald's food by candlelight, fine linen, fancy silverware, and an haughty taughty maître d'.

But it was still McDonald's food.

Stuffy formalism and traditionalism can be just that: something all fancy but the substanced isn't there.

Equally, there are some that are so proud of having gotten rid of the stuffy formalism and ritual for a free worship which iitself can be reduced to a McDonalds' form of worship. They too, are concentrating on the outward form rather than the real meaning.

The danger, you see, is not confined to “high-church” ritual. It is not only present when people insist on crossing themselves at exactly the right moment and exactly the right manner; it is just as present when people insist on raising their arms in the air during worship, or indeed when they insist on not crossing themselves, raising their arms, or doing any other action.

I have on occasion been wryly amused when the churches abandoned its robed choir and organ because they seem to “professional,” and then employ half a dozen people to spend the whole service twiddling knobs and pushing sliders to control the sound, the lights, and the overhead projector.

Anything that needs to be done during worship can become a ritual performed for its own sake. Likewise, anything that needs to be done during worship can be done as an act of pure gratitude, a glad response to free grace.

Christians argue whether bread and wine should be done every Sunday, once a quarter, or once or twice a year accompanied as it was with the first communion service, the love feast.

There is also the danger that doing Communion means that we are ourselves practicing our own form of sacrifice. People sometimes suppose that the point of the sacrifice, in the Old Testament, was for the worshiper to “do” something to earn God's favor. Not so. That rests on misunderstanding of the Jewish law itself, in which the sacrifices were required by God, and were offered in Thanksgiving, not as an attempt to bribe or placate God but as a way of responding to his love.

Communion is worship within our larger picture of heaven and earth, of God's future in our present.

Heaven and earth overlap, and do so at certain specific times and places. That's why Christian worship is what it is.

In Worship, heaven and earth are joined.

This, I believe, is the right framework for all our thinking about worship. The rest of the discussion about worship is footnotes, temperament, tradition, and—let's face it—individual likes and dislikes (which is what I call them when they are mine) and irrational prejudices (which is what I call them when they're yours).

What I love about communion is its mystery. Every time I approach the bread and the wine, I think of the terrible truth behind it. Jesus was killed to restore us to God. They took His life. But the symbol of us eating the bread and drinking the wine means it wasn't them who killed Jesus. It was me.

And that thought makes me shutter. But on the other hand, Jesus gave his life. We took it. But He willingly gave it. And He did it for love.

Let us break the bread together.

We will prepare ourselves. I spoke of the way that worship can be mere tradition, focusing on the form instead of the person we worship. I spoke of how that form can be just as bad in the churches that claim they are free and have no form as much as it can be bad in the churches that have elevated ritual over God himself.

When the text from today states that it is possible to take the bread and wine in an unworthy manner, he is speaking as much about anything as insincere forms of worship.

We often give pause to consider if there is someone with whom we need to offer forgiveness, or a sin we need to repent of. And that is good and important. But we also must consider the importance of the meaning of it.

In communion, we are proclaiming Jesus' salvation.

Our communion is not closed to members only. But understand this, God set it aside for believers only. That doesn't mean that you have joined us, although belonging to a body of believers is important. What it means is that you accept Jesus mercy on your behalf and by taking this bread and wine, you are saying to God: “I believe in Jesus and what Jesus did to save me and my hope, my salvation, my reconciliation to You rests in Jesus.”

Take a moment to self-examine.