By Donald M. Tuttle

Not long after I joined the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), I was talking with a friend about our tradition. I mentioned that we celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. My friend came from another Protestant tradition, and he wasn’t as excited about that as I was. He said he wasn’t sure he would want to have Communion every Sunday because gathering at the table weekly might make it routine. He feared it might lose its meaning and power if celebrated more than quarterly or once a month.

That has not been my experience. After 20 years of weekly communion, I still value each and every opportunity to eat the bread and drink the cup. Yet I am also aware that there are times in which the significance of what is recalled in the Lord’s Supper has escaped me. There have been times when the words became too familiar to reach beyond my mind and into my heart.

Maybe that has been your experience too. If it has then maybe tonight we can reclaim so of the meal’s meaning. As we prepare to gather at the table, I want us to hear and contemplate what are called “The Words of Institution,” the passage from the writings of Paul that we heard just a few moments ago. My hope is that by working our way through these all-important verses some part of them might speak to us in a powerful way.

First, Paul begins with these words: “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.”

Our culture places a premium on the new and the improved, often denigrating tradition. Those ideas or practices passed down from generation to generation are often looked at with suspicion. They can be seen as relics of a day gone by.

But at the table we celebrate not something new but something old, not something innovative but something traditional. We celebrate the Lord’s Supper. How incredible to think that Jesus—the child of the manger and the man of the cross—started the tradition that we continue today. Only hours before his death, he gave this meal and spoke these words to his disciples. And now, after nearly 2000 years, Christians in every age and in every imaginable place and in every conceivable circumstance have faithfully received them and passed them on. And it all goes back to Jesus. The Supper is nothing less than a living link to our Lord and all of those who have, do and will love him.

Second, Paul says, “the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you.”

It was World Communion Sunday and worshippers at the chapel at Duke University were welcomed with a communion table overflowing with breads. Worship planners had collected breads representing cultures from throughout the world and brought them together in that one place. It was not hard to do because bread is basic. It is a fundamental source of nourishment for virtually everyone in every land.

Jesus recognized the importance of bread when he took this simple form of sustenance and gave thanks to God for it. “Bless are you, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” He knew bread was life, but he also knew it was not enough. One does not live by bread alone, the Scriptures tell us. To live, to live abundantly and eternally, requires something far more basic—the grace of God, grace that has been revealed, even incarnated, in the body of Jesus, a body that would be broken on the cross, as bread is broken at the table. In the Lord’s Supper, we experience the bread that has come down from heaven, bread that satisfies the hungry heart not for a moment but for an eternity. In the bread, in the body, we receive life.

But bread is not all that Jesus shared with his disciples. There was also the cup.

In the ancient temple, maybe not far from the Upper Room, the people would bring animals to be sacrificed as offerings to God. Some of those sacrifices would be for sin—expressions of the people’s desire to be reconciled to God. On those occasions the priest would sacrifice the animal and then catch its blood in a chalice. He would take the blood and pour it out as a sign of the covenant God had made with all of Israel, a covenant in which he would be their God and they would be his people.

Jesus knew well the chalice of the priest, the blood of that old covenant. He also knew that those sacrifices were not enough. A greater sacrifice was to be made—a once-for-all sacrifice, a final sacrifice like no other. And so not long after his final meal with his disciples, Judas and a mob came to the Garden of Gethsemane and hauled Jesus away. He would be tried, convicted and crucified in a matter of hours. Like the lambs at Passover, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world would be sacrificed. His blood—his life—would be poured out from his hands, his feet, his brow, his side. No one was there to catch his blood in a chalice, but that would not be necessary because he had already shown it to his disciples. As Paul wrote: “In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” At the table the disciples saw a chalice filled with wine, wine that represented the blood that Jesus was going to pour out for them and for us.

At the table, we too drink of the cup. We too share in a new covenant, one that no longer requires constant sacrifices in an attempt to appease God but one in which a contrite heart and faith in Christ pleases God, one where the blood of lambs has been supercede by the blood of one man, Jesus Christ.

And when we eat the bread and drink the cup, we do so, in Jesus’ words, “in remembrance of me.”

One of the early church leaders was man named Pelagius. He said that in the Lord’s Table:

Jesus left behind a last commemoration, or memorial. This is rather like someone who, when about to go on a journey, leaves some token of himself with his loved one, so that whenever she looks at it she will be reminded of his goodness and love toward her.

But to share the bread and cup in remembrance of Jesus is more than simply recalling what he did long ago. Memory, in the Jewish tradition, is more than a mental exercise. It is no less than participating in what is remembered. As F.F. Bruce, a New Testament scholar puts it: “At the Passover feast the participants are one with their ancestors of the Exodus; at the Eucharist [or Lord’s Supper] Christians experience the real presence of their Lord.” In other words, when we gather at this table, we become one with Peter and James and John and all the rest who met that night and shared bread and cup with Jesus. We do not “remember” it as in, “oh yes, that happened long ago,” but we remember it as in, “Jesus gathered us in the upper room and around the table, where we shared in the bread, his body, and the cup, his blood.” When we partake “in remembrance of Jesus” we share with him as surely as those who met with him that night.

Finally, Paul tells us, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

We could be anywhere tonight. We could be at the Town Club with delicate rolls and fine wines. We could be at Crystal’s eating tortilla chips and drinking margaritas. We could be at McDonald’s downing French fries and Coke. We might do so together, enjoying the company, the friendships, that we have forged in the community of faith. We could, by doing so, witness to the joy we share as Christians. But only the Lord’s Supper, only the meal that we celebrate as the people of God, only the meal that recalls that night in the upper room, testifies to the hope we have. The Lord’s Supper invites us to witness to the hope we have that one day our Lord Jesus will come again. It invites us to anticipate that day when every wrong will be righted, every injustice corrected, and every tear finally wiped away. The Lord’s Supper is the promise that one day, in God’s good time, we will gather with Jesus and all our brothers and sisters everywhere having witnessed the end of the age and the redemption of all creation.

“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Four simple verses; verses that we have heard again and again and again. And they can, I suppose become routine, but the depths of what they say, and the depths of the meal they grace, can never be routine for they remind us that the cost of our redemption, the cost of our peace with God, was nothing less than the body and the blood of God’s Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.