Body and drink his Blood, we proclaim the Lord’s death.” Certainly the Lord’s Supper means death, it signifies the Lord’s death, but it signifies ours also, the death of self, not merely the sharing of our supper but the giving of ourselves utterly for our fellows.
But this is death with a future. “He that loves his life shall lose it, but he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.” The future is pledged in the resurrection of Jesus, and realized, day by day, in the future to which we look—until He comes.
•
“BREAD AND CUP”—1 Corinthians 11.26
[Preached five times from 7/25/93 at North Road to 5/20/02 at Coxhoe]
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, many years ago, I bought a notebook at Woolworth’s and began to use it as a commonplace book, copying into it striking passages from books that I read. I thought I still had this book, but looking for it this last week, as I wrote this sermon, I could not find it. That means that I must depend on my memory for words that I have never quoted in the pulpit, but have never forgotten. The book must be fifty years out of print; I do not remember the title; a number of authors contributed to it; I never owned a copy but read it in the University library. I shall not quote, I fear, with verbal accuracy, but this is the sense: Christian history would have been very different if Christians had not ceased to continue their distinctive practices with their sacraments and prayer meetings.
For they did continue them. I have in mind the passage from which this text is taken. There are others but I shall be reading this one to you later. In the church at Corinth they did not advertise of course “next Sunday at 10.30 there will be a service of Holy Communion.” It would have done no good anyway; people would have been at work. Everyone, except Jews who had their Sabbath, worked a seven-day week, and thought it silly to have a day off. So they said, “See you at supper, 8.30 Saturday night.” And they brought their own food along in their own bait boxes, and shared out—a fish supper we should call it; and as they ate they talked, and the talk came around to the business, the very difficult business, of being a Christian in heathen Corinth. You can pick out from their letter the sort of question they had to discuss. Most of them were very practical questions.
“The Nicanor family here invited us to supper next Wednesday. Do you think we ought to go? They are a bit free aren’t they? If they can get their meat cheap at the Isis temple, they do; and there is no knowing what there will be to drink. Perhaps we should not go, though they are such nice people.” Or this, “Do you think I ought to marry Persephone? I do want to. I love her very much, but wouldn’t it take my mind off of being a Christian? I mean marriage, it isn’t very spiritual is it? Perhaps we could live together without, you know what I mean, without going to be together.” Or this “Did you know that old Mr. Pericles died last week? He was a wonderful chap, where do you think he is now? Is there a life after death? Do you think he keeps the same body? Should we know him there? Or is death the end of it all?”
Then someone starts speaking with tongues, and a neighbor from the flat next door puts his head around the door and shouts, “what on earth are you mad folk up to?” Fortunately, the tongue speaker stops and someone begins to prophesy—a bit like preaching. The visitor comes in and sits down. “Good heavens he might be talking about me. That’s what I like, that’s what I need. If God can do it for him, perhaps he can do it for me. I believe God really is here.”
At length, someone gets up and says, “Friends, I think most of us have finished. One more bite and one more sip. We have had our meal; the Lord had his, and before he went out to die, he said ‘eat in memory of me; drink in memory of me. So we proclaim his death until he comes again in glory.’”
I suppose I have been warming the mixture up a bit, but what I have just been saying is as good New Testament scholarship as I am capable of. This is what the Lord’s Supper was like in Corinth, and in many another place where Christianity began. We are having a simple sort of service today, but even so we shall not be doing what I should really like to do. I should like to have been able to say, “on July 25th we shall meet not at 10.30 but at 12.30, and we shall have the Sunday roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on the premises. And we shall talk together about our joys and our problems as Christians and our church members, and how we say our prayers, and how we can possibly pay for the roof. Then a dozen people will give us bits of Christian truth, and we will pray together. Then I or some better person will say, ‘Do you remember what Jesus did?’ We’ll do it in remembrance of him—remembrance that means faith, and loyalty, and love and service and obedience. It isn’t only the Yorkshire pudding; I couldn’t have produced that. And if I had, perhaps you would never forgive me. Perhaps now that we have only one service on Sunday, we could do it some Sunday evening, and if there are a few who would like, in thoroughly Methodist fashion, to share our understanding of Christian faith and life, not to mention our failures to understand Christian faith and life, they could do so. But that is not for me to say.”
Doing it in this way, mixing up dinner practice and the sacraments, trusting to spontaneous Christian reaction on the part of a mixed assembly, most of whom who had only recently emerged from heathenism, was a risky business. It is not surprising that before long the Church was taking refuge in service books to make sure everything was done decently and in order. But Paul should not have had occasion to tell us how things are done right if the Corinthians had not done them wrong, so we may be grateful to them.
I described a share-out, a faith supper. It was a fine idea. If I could afford it I brought enough for two or three, or four. When my poor fellow Christians arrived I said come on, there’s enough for all. And Saturday night was wonderful in the first instance because it was the best supper of the week. That was the ideal; and I suppose that as long as Paul stayed at Corinth, it worked. But when he left? Then things could change and they did. I could pop the champagne cork and bring out the foie gras, while my neighbors scrounged in the market and all they could manage was some beets to bring with them. “You needn’t,” says Paul, “call that the Lord’s Supper. It’s your own supper, and much good may it do you.” This is a good telling off.
Some things are missing that might have been there. He does not say, “Make sure you get the service books out and don’t deviate from them by a single syllable.” He does not say, “All of you wait until the Rev. Mr. So-n-So arrives. Don’t begin until he gives the word and stop eating when he says Let us pray.” He says only, “Wait for one another,” and reminds them of where it all started—“The Lord Jesus, in the night when he was betrayed, took bread and wine and gave thanks and said, ‘This is my body, this is my blood, this is the new covenant and they are for you. And so every time we eat and drink together we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’” It’s enough to make the foie gras choke you, isn’t it?
Confronted by disorder at the Lord’s Supper, and that means lovelessness, he has in the end only one thing to say—Christ is coming! That was Paul’s way of dealing with problems. That and not historical reconstruction is the real theme of this sermon. This is where we begin, only to glance at the theme in three or four settings each of which could become a sermon on its own. A minute or two for each.
PREACHING
How do you begin to commend the Gospel in a strange place, where no one has ever heard the name Jesus? We ought to know because more and more this becomes the condition of our land. If we do not know, we shall grow into an aging ghetto, never renewed by an inflow from without. Paul knew the possibilities. There was wisdom. That meant philosophical thinking, arguing from nature to God. It meant also a fine style, and rhetorical polish, the art of persuasion. “I shall have nothing to do with that,” says Paul. “I don’t want your faith to rest on so insubstantial a basis as my cleverness. I have only one theme, one truth to present to you—Christ and him crucified. That is all.” And it was that which overcame the world. A successful mission, you might say too successful,
