We are a week out from Thanksgiving, a time when many people gather together to have that big meal with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and a salad that almost no one eats because there are two many carbs available. It is best served with good company and lots of love. The same goes for Christmas and Easter, or whenever people gather together for a meal. However, that is not always the case. Many meals together are spent trying not to say the wrong thing that will set someone in the family off or rife with painful reminders of who is not at the table.

I share this piece about meals because unlike the little piece of bread we have when we partake in communion or the itsy-bitsy glass of juice that we drink as part of our communion service, the earliest Christians shared their communion as part of a larger meal with full loaves of bread and bottles of wine. Somewhere along the line that meal became a small bit in the midst of a worship service, but that was not the case with the early church.

In that time, people would gather in a home to share a meal, and as part of that time together someone would take the bread and the cup and share the story of that last supper saying…

The Master, Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, took bread.

Having given thanks, he broke it and said,

This is my body, broken for you.

Do this to remember me.

After supper, he did the same thing with the cup:

This cup is my blood, my new covenant with you.

Each time you drink this cup, remember me.[1]

Only, as people are so apt to do, they messed it up. This meal was meant to put everyone on equal footing. No one person was more important than another. This was a reminder that the gifts of God were for all the people of God.

The original meal, or what we have come to call the Last Supper with Jesus, took place after Jesus had washed the feet of the disciples, humbling himself to the place of a servant. Not only that he said these words to and shared this meal with people who themselves were imperfect. One of them was about to betray him, and he still said these words, still shared the meal with all of them.

Now many years later as this Corinthian church was doing what they had been taught to do by Paul, this sharing of the meal and remembering the words Jesus said, well, they were letting hierarchy and privilege, gluttony and carelessness, get in the way of partaking in the meal the way it was intended. They forgot that this was a shared meal, a shared experience.

Let me explain. This meal was one thing that all Christians did because in Jesus’ words they were to do this. When gathered together they were to take bread, break it, and eat it, and when doing that, to remember Jesus’ broken body …to remember him.

Also, when taking the cup and drinking from it, they were to remember that in his dying there was going to be new life, that this was a new covenant. A covenant being a promise between God and God’s people. The promise that God was with God’s people, and now that was happening through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Not only that, it meant that people had made a promise to love and worship God, with the responsibility of living grace filled lives that blessed others. None of that has changed in our own time.

There is so much more to this act of remembrance, but getting back to the letter that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, we learn that those who gathered as the church were not blessing others.

Again, may I remind you that this meal of remembrance, this communion meal, didn’t take place in a church like we understand it, such as this grand sanctuary. Church was in someone’s home. People brought or provided food for sharing, but we know from Paul’s letter was that things were going sideways. Let me share what was said in that letter. Paul writes,

“Regarding this next item, I’m not at all pleased.” (There had already been a litany of things Paul had addressed in his letter that the Corinthain church was messed up about.) He continues, “I am getting the picture that when you meet together it brings out your worst side instead of your best!” … “- you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.”[2]

What we have come to know as communion or The Lord’s Supper, was always meant to be the ultimate equalizer. Everyone was welcome. Everyone was meant to be able to come to know God’s love for them through the sharing of this meal. Yet, in the way that society has always been, even back then, even with those earliest of Christians, there were those who forgot about welcome, about hospitality, about the love of Jesus for everyone regardless of social status, power or prestige, wealth, colour of skin, culture, race, or anything else that we might use to separate one another from God’s love.

God’s love is for everyone and this meal, that in the church has become symbolic in its little piece of bread and tiny glass of juice, is no less impactful when we remember the acts of love through Jesus, God’s own son, and the power of the Holy Spirit still moving in us and in the world.  It is not so much that we get this all right, with the right words, and the right actions, as professor Matthew Skinner says, “this meal is meant to be an act of love with everyone else in the room” and then asks, “How do we show love in the ways we gather in our ritual and everyday life?”

Look around you…. having this meal with each of us present is meant to remind us of God’s love for us and for everyone in this place and beyond.

This is especially impactful when we remember that this is World Communion Sunday and there are Christians around the globe who are partaking of this same meal, breaking the bread, taking the cup, and remembering Jesus.

This is not just done as an act of remembering like we do when we think of loved ones who have died, but rather it is like participating again and again in the meal with Jesus. Making this very moment present again, so that we can remember how we are to live, how we are to treat others by remembering how Jesus treated others. How we are to live with love and grace as we remember how Jesus handed himself over to be crucified so that we might have fuller more intimate access to God through the power of the Holy Spirit being the presence of God in our own time.

This meal was never meant to become routine, familiar, or rote, just going through the motions.  As Eugene Peterson paraphrases the Apostle Paul’s own words in this letter, “What you must solemnly realize is that every time you eat this bread and every time you drink this cup, you reenact in your words and actions the death of the Master. You will be drawn back to this meal again and again until the Master returns. You must never let familiarity breed contempt.”

You must never let familiarity breed contempt. Don’t ever let this meal become something less than what it is…a reminder of love, of grace, of forgiveness, and of what it means to live each day blessing others. Feeding those who are hungry. Loving those who feel unloved. Bringing water to the thirsty. Visiting those who are alone, and welcoming the stranger in our midst.

Each time you eat this break or drink this up, remember Jesus, all of Jesus, his life, his, death, his resurrection, and that he now lives and reigns with God, sending the Holy Spirit to be with us, to remind us of all that Jesus taught while continuing to move in and with us today.

May the smell of bread, the taste and texture, the sweetness of the juice, and it refreshment continually remind you of Jesus’ love, God’s grace, and the power given to you to love God, yourself, and others. Amen.

[1] The Message (MSG) Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson

[2] Ibid.