Communion
From the Series: Ritual
Speaker: Mark Batterson
Date: October 18, 2009
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Transcript
NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH
October 18, 2009
Rituals: Communion
Mark Batterson
I feel like I’m in the Middle Ages. Welcome to everyone at each of our five locations, Ballston Common Mall, Georgetown, Kingstowne, Ebenezers and Ebenezers! If you missed last weekend – surprise! We got a phone call a week ago that the movie theaters at Union Station were shutting down and if you missed last weekend, you need to checkout the webcast or the podcast, we’ll that up a little longer so you can get updated. I want to say this, what an amazing prayer time on Sunday night as we seek the Lord, so many of you fasted for favor as we try to discern what is next. If you want to keep updated, like what is the Lord saying and how is He speaking to us and where are we going in terms of an alternate meeting space for Union Station, you can check out my blog, www.markbatterson.com. We will keep you updated. One of the things I’m trying to do during this season, what’s important is not that we get out of this, but what’s important is what does God want us to get out of this. What is the Lord trying to teach us? Where is He taking us? The bottom line is this – where we meet is not important, what is important is that God is glorified.
We have an opportunity here my friends to really be the church. I know many of us had quite an interesting week. When I got the news, I was in an emotional funk for a couple of days, sad and grieving, but I am strangely energized. We may be between an Egyptian Army and a Red Sea trying to figure out where we want to go and where we need to go, but listen to me, I can’t wait to see when and where God is going to open that Red Sea and we are going to walk through it into God’s plans and purposes for us. Amen!
This weekend, after a short interlude, we continue our ‘Ritual’ series. Turn over to Luke Chapter 22 and we will spend some time in Scripture this weekend, so pull out your Bible or you can follow along on the screen. We are talking about ancient rituals. Two weeks ago, we talked about the Sabbath, this weekend we talk about communion. Some people call it the Eucharist, some people refer to it as The Lord’s Table or the Lord’s Supper or maybe you grew up in a tradition where it was Holy Communion or Blessed Sacraments, but all those labels refer to this ritual whereby we remember what Christ did on the cross. The bread and cups symbolize his body and his blood that was shed for us. Here’s the amazing thing, this weekend, hundreds of millions of Christians around the world will break the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of what Christ has done for us. Would it be safe for me to say that this is the most practiced ritual in the history of human kind? We are part of that, but if we aren’t careful, communion, like every other ritual, can loose some of its meaning. It can become an empty ritual and that’s why we are doing this series, we are trying to do a little reverse engineering. Why do we do what we do?
This is interesting to me, did you know that the phrase hocus-pocus actually comes from a Latin phrase that translates to mean this is my body. It is what was repeated as communion was celebrated, but very interesting because if you aren’t careful, it can become an empty incantation. You can learn how and forget why. What you end up with then is not a spiritual ritual, you end up with a mindless ritual. Let me say this at a 30,000-foot level, we aren’t the most traditional church on the block! Movie theaters, coffee house, we love doing church in different ways. We have a core conviction that there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. We love that because the Holy Spirit is infinitely creative and God is omnirelevent and He wants to enable us to share the gospel, and it goes across cultures and across chronology and it is relevant to everyone, so we believe that there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet, but there are some ancient rituals that we practice just like every other church.
We believe that there are two ordinances, if you will, that are non-negotiable. One of them is called baptism. It is the right of passage, when you cross the line of faith and make that decision to follow Jesus Christ, baptism is the next step, it is how we identify with Christ, it’s the way we go public with our faith. We will talk about baptism during this ‘Ritual’ series. The other ordinance is communion. The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly how or even how often to celebrate communion, so we have some freedom in terms in frequency and creativity. On the way in this weekend at each one of our locations, you got a little baggie with a tin inside it. We did that precisely because we wanted you to hold on to the elements as we talk about communion. Just have them in your hand. Some weekend, we pass out trays and you take it as it goes down a row, that is not significant. What is significant is this, that we understand what it is that we are celebrating.
So, this weekend, as we prepare to celebrate communion at the end of each of our services, we want to talk about the significance of this ancient ritual. Luke 22:7 records one of the most amazing episodes in the gospel. Jesus is just three years of ministry, on the brink of events unfolding where He is going to eventually go to Calvary and right before that is what we know as the Last Supper where Jesus celebrates with his disciples. Luke 22:7
Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover." "Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked. He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, and say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?' He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there." They left and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God." After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, "Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes." And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.
What Jesus celebrated and what we refer to as the Last Supper was not communion as we understand it. He was celebrating the Passover. He himself was celebrating an ancient ritual that dated back more than 1,000 years. Every Jewish male over the age of 12 was required to go to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. It was one of three pilgrimage feasts. And the Passover was followed by a seven-day feast called the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Now, this entire celebration, maybe the easiest way to think of it is this. We celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks, we celebrate our Independence. This was their Independence Day, if you will, after 430 years of slavery in Egypt, God delivered them from the hand of Pharaoh and they are set free. Nine miracles precede a tenth miraculous sign called the Passover. Turn over to Exodus Chapter 12, verse 1, if you want to fully understand what Christ has accomplished for us on the cross, you’ve got to go all the way back to the Passover because Jesus takes this ancient ritual and applies it to us, but if we don’t understand what happened before, we are not going to fully appreciate what we celebrate. Exodus 12:1
The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, "This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the people of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs.
What a strange commandment! I think we read the Bible and I think we take a lot for granted, but if you’re hearing that for the first time, are you like, are you sure that’s what God said? Blood on the sides of the doorframes and on top.
"On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn—both men and animals—and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the LORD. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt. "This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD -a lasting ordinance.
The cross looks back to the Passover, and what a symbol, it is the blood that covers and protects us. But I would also suggest that the Passover looks forward to the cross. The word atonement means to cover and there was a Day of Atonement when once a year, the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies and offer a sacrifice for the people of Israel, it didn’t cancel the sin, it just covered it. Every Old Testament sacrifice looked forward to the final sacrifice. What’s one of the names for Jesus? The Lamb of God. It looks forward to the perfect Lamb of God that would be sacrificed for us.
I grew up in a church where there was this little phrase that I think has gotten out of our dictionaries spiritually speaking, covered by the blood of the Lamb. There is something about that protective covering that covers us spiritually and we’ll talk about the significance of that.
Let me make a couple of observations about this passage. First of all, Passover was a pilgrimage feast and what I want to do is I want to give us a little picture of how I view communion and how I think biblically we ought to approach communion, because the Passover involved pilgrimage. People made a pilgrimage to a sacred place where they celebrated the deliverance that they had received from Egypt. In the same sense, I would suggest that communion is a pilgrimage back to the foot of the cross, and when we celebrate communion, it is like we are going back to that place where we found hope and grace and love and forgiveness. Can I make a little observation here? I think all of us need a place to go back to. This really ranges across the board but we need a place to go back to. I think about a lot of different places, the beach where we went on vacation every year, it was cool to have a place to go back to. I think about spiritually significant places, we need somewhere to go back to.
This week, a pastor friend of mine was in town and he stopped by and we grabbed a cup of coffee and he told me that he was here with his 88-year-old father. He had brought his father because his father was a World War II fighter pilot. This is so cool, he is still flying! That’s awesome! By the way, this week, I met a couple who came up to me and told me they had been married 67 years. That has nothing to do with my message, it is just awesome! Wow! Where was I? So, this son wanted to bring his father to this memorial. Why do we have memorials? Listen, we live in the city of memorials, why do we have those? Well, it is because it is so easy for us to remember what we should forget and forget what we should remember. And there is something so significant about making a pilgrimage to a place. Pilgrimage historically has always been a part of spiritual practice and I’m not sure we really practice this the way we could or should. I think you have to be careful, because again a pilgrimage could become an empty ritual but the Jewish people modeled it. Passover Pilgrimage Feast was a way we experienced that as Christ followers, and as we celebrate communion, we don’t have to go anywhere because Christ has come to us and we are able to go back to the foot of the cross. It is a pilgrimage.
Jesus said, at the end of the passage in Luke, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The word remember is repeated approximately 250 times in Scripture. This is a memory ritual. It is about reminding ourselves of what is truly important. Let me say this, what is really important is that God, our heavenly Father, sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross so that we could be saved, and in right relationship with Him. I want to tell you right now, if you don’t have anything else but you have that, then you have everything. And if you don’t have that but you have everything else, then you have nothing. That’s everything. It’s the way God has demonstrated his love for us and that’s why communion is so central to what we celebrate.
Here’s what I want to focus on in our time remaining as we prepare to celebrate communion. Jesus said something very interesting. In verse 20, He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you.”
I want to talk for a few minutes about the blood. Blood is a theme that runs throughout Scripture and I know it makes some of us queasy or we get squeamish with the idea of blood or maybe some of you at the sight of blood. It doesn’t come up in a lot of normal conversations, but the bottom line is this, the blood is such a significant thing in Scripture and before we take the cup together, I want to make sure we have a better understanding of what we’re celebrating and why this is so significant.
I spent half of my undergrad at the University of Chicago and one of my favorite classes was a class I took at the University of Chicago Hospital Center, a class in immunology. I loved the class. Every class was like, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The human body is amazing, specifically the immune system. Do you know that we have 60,000 miles of blood vessels that run throughout our body and we have veins and arteries that are like four-lane highways but we have capillaries that are these two-lane roads or bike paths that go 60,000 miles throughout the human body. The blood travels 12,000 miles a day. We have about 6 quarts of blood in our bodies and they carry an endless supply of oxygen, nitrogen, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, even these things called hormones. A speck of blood the size of a little dot has about 5 million red blood cells, 300,000 platelets, about 7,000 white blood cells. What I love is the fact that Scripture stated this long before we had the science to discover it. Leviticus Chapter 17, verse 11: The life of a creature is in its blood. So Scripture pointed to this long before and that is why the blood is such a significant thing.
Now, for the sake of time, I only have time to talk about white blood cells, but as I talk about them, I want it to maybe expand a little bit of our appreciate of what it means to be covered by the blood of Christ. About two weeks ago I went in for the flu shot. They injected into my bloodshot a little bit of that flu virus, enough so that I would build up some immunity to it. Now, that’s a pretty cool thing because hopefully it will keep me from getting the flu. It traces all the way back to the 18th Century, it was a pastor’s son named Edward Jenner who was chosen for a procedure called buying the pox. At that point, small pox was devastating nations. There was no cure for it and entire populations were decimated by this toxin. Edward, at the age of 8, this seems like cruel and unusual punishment, was part of a crude attempt to ward off the disease. For six weeks, the town doctor bled a handful of boys repeatedly, then at the town apothecary, a physician would scratch their arm with a knife and place the dried scab of a small pox victim on it. After a month, Edward recovered and he was forever immune to small pox. It was Edward Jenner who went on to coin the word ‘vaccination.’ That’s his word, and it has revolutionized the way we think about disease, that we can borrow the defensive properties from someone else’s blood to protect us. What an incredible thing! Is it possible that maybe we have a picture of what Christ has done for us?
Let me dig a little deeper, I apologize if you don’t like immunology. When our bodies are invaded by a bacteria or virus, the body responds by producing and sending white blood cells which attack the antigens. During healthy periods, the body has about 25 billion white blood cells. When you are sick, your white blood cell count goes up because the body produces them as a defense mechanism. The body can mobilize about ten times that number. The average white cell only lives about ten hours. A select few live 60 or 70 years and preserve the chemical memory of previous invaders. That’s why you don’t get the same virus twice. The immune system has an amazing memory. When an antigen invades, a circulating lymphocytes cell touches it, memorizes its shape and rushes to the nearest lymph node. It turns into a chemical factory by passing along this newly acquired information to thousands of lymphocytes than then in turn produce billions of antibodies, and over time, we build up immunity to the antigens we overcome. In a sense, the secret of defeating specific antigens are locked in our cellular memory and the more antigens we have overcome, the greater immunity we have. Let me make the connection here. Once you overcome a particular antigen, a second infection of the same type will do no harm. Why? Because in the words of Flannery O’Conner, it is because you have wise blood. Blood that has learned the secret of overcoming whatever it was that you were faced with.
Jesus Christ has wise blood. Hebrews 4:15 says, “He was tempted in every way just as we were.” Every spiritual antigen you can encounter, He encountered. But it also says, “Yet He did not sin.” I like the way Dr. Paul Brand says this, I love wise blood but I like what Dr. Paul Brand says even better. A person who overcomes a particular antigen has the blood of an overcomer because they have overcome that antigen, they have overcome it and they have immunity to it.
Revelation 12:11, are you ready for this, they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. Revelation 7:15, these are they who have come out of the great tribulation, they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in his temple and He sits on the throne and will spread his tent over them. I love that covering analogy right there.
Let me cut to the point, we have a sin problem. Or is that just me? We have a sin problem. What I’m trying to say is that the only solution, the only immunity is the blood of Jesus Christ. Hebrews Chapter 9 says it this way, without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. In God’s economy, it was the blood that Jesus shed at Calvary, the perfect Lamb of God without defect. In Exodus, it specifically says that it had to be a lamb with no broken bones. You go read John 19 as they are about to break the bones of Jesus on the cross because that’s what they did to hasten death, what did they do instead? They ran a spear through his side, thus fulfilling this ancient prophesy that no bones can be broken, perfect Lamb of God, our sacrifice for sin.
Let me close with this. I have a couple of books in my library that I love, I’ve already referenced Dr. Paul Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image. Maybe it’s because I love immunology and I love science so I read these books written from a medical perspective and in the book, he shares about a defining moment in his life, and I’m going to close with this. He was preparing for the mission field, and in preparation for the mission field, he enrolled in one class in hygiene and tropical medicine because they thought it would help him on the trip, and lo and behold, he falls in love with medicine and becomes a medical doctor. But this was the defining moment, the moment he determined to do that. He was assigned to a local hospital where he would dress wounds and assist the physicians and during one night shift, a woman was rushed into the hospital who had lost so much blood that her body was as white as you can imagine, there didn’t seem to be any life, she was unconscious because of oxygen starvation to the brain, and a doctor immediately ordered a blood transfusion. One of the doctors told Paul Bland to put a blood pressure cuff on her and he did that and then put his hand on her wrist and detected no sign of life whatsoever. They bring in the blood transfusion and I guess the longer the line, the more pressure and they punctured her vein and blood began to rush into her body again and there is a moment Paul Brand says, “Nothing in my memory can compare to the excitement of what happened next.” As the other left the room and he is there with her with his hand on her wrist, he said he nervously held the woman’s wrist and suddenly I could feel the faintest press of a pulse. The bottle of blood arrived and the color started to return to her body first to her cheeks and then in her lips, then her eyelids opened and she asked him for a glass of water. What a miraculous moment! The life is in the blood. But what I love is that Paul Brand kind of waxes philosophic about this experience, so stick with me and imagine this. He said, “Who had given these pints of life?” He wanted some mental picture of the donor who had made the miracle possible. In the registry, he discovered that the donor lived in 7 Kings Essex. With eyes closed, he envisioned one of the burly men from that blue-collar neighborhood. At that moment, he could have been out climbing ladders or laying bricks, oblivious to the frail young woman revived by his own blood cells miles away. I just think on a human medical biological plane, that is awesome! What a moment for someone to be saved by a blood transfusion! Just on a human plane, that is miraculous.
2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ shed his blood. I Peter Chapter 1, verse 18, “It was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a Lamb without blemish or defect.” Immunity, spiritual immunity, grace and forgiveness is in that blood. The blood of Christ.
I want to tell you this weekend that He didn’t just shed his blood, He shed his blood to share his blood. When we celebrate communion, we are symbolizing the blood that was not just shed but was shared with us, a blood transfusion, if you will. It doesn’t just give us life, my friend, eternal life.
Every time we celebrate communion, what I want you to understand is this, the cup is the new covenant of my blood, every covenant throughout Scripture always established with blood. There is an old covenant, always a blood sacrifice, but in the new covenant, it is the blood of Christ sacrificed once and for all, and when we drink that cup together, we are renewing the covenant that God Almighty has made with us through the death of his Son and his resurrection. Amen!
Father, we thank You for the life that You’ve given to us, that life blood that revives us, that resurrects our dead spirit and gives us life. Right now I pray for those that have maybe never made that decision to receive the grace that’s been offered to them. God may this moment by their moment. Lord I pray that many at each of our locations would celebrate communion for the first time understanding the significance that the bread symbolizes your body which was broken for us and the cup symbolizes your blood that wash shed for us that cleanses us from all sin and gives us immunity spiritually. Lord we love You and we thank You for what You’ve done for us, in Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
