Sermon Tone Analysis

| *F-165* |

Scripture:             Mark 14:12-26

Subject:                /Jesus celebrates the Last Supper.../

Complement:       ... /initiating and explaining the New Covenant./

Big Idea:               The Lord’s Supper is not a boring ritual, but a /celebration/ of Christ’s victory over death, and a /proclamation/ of what the atonement means for us.

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Introduction

Back in the mid-70’s I worked for three straight summers in a Johns-Manville factory in North Bay that manufactured sheathing and ceiling tiles for homes.

It was an old, run-down place as I remember it, and much of the work which was doubtless automated at other plants still had to be done by hand.

It was back-breaking, mind-numbing work.

My favourite job to hate was piling the 4’ x 8’ sheets of sheathing that came off of the assembly line.

At one end of the dryers – huge furnaces with a conveyor belt inside – the wood pulp was formed into a sheet some sixteen feet square and was sent through to be dried.

When it came out at the processing end, these sheets were then sawed into 8 sheets of pulp-board used in the manufacture of homes.

Problem was, these sheets had to be taken off of the assembly line.

That’s where I came in.

For twelve hours a shift we would catch the heavy sheets as they came through the imprinting wheel that put on the company logo, and then hoisted them onto a wheeled dolly in lots of 100.

And the line never stopped.

Miss your grip?

Too bad.

Need a new dolly?

Change in mid-fly.

It got to where my body was there working, but my mind was elsewhere!

It was as boring a job as one can imagine.

Nothing but endless repetition that should have been done through automation.

To this day when I drive by that plant, I get shivers!

Too much repetition, and we get bored.

But does repeating something over a long period mean that something /must/ become boring?

Set out before us today is a meal that Christians have been celebrating for two thousand years.

We believe that we know the ritual off by heart.

So why come?

Why celebrate?

/What does this all mean for us?/

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I.          The Lord’s Table means a new solution to an old problem

To properly answer this question, we must look back to the very first time the meal ever happened, before it became a ritual.

Jesus, on the very night when Judas betrayed Him to the Temple authorities, on the night before His execution, gathered his disciples together for one last meal.

Only His disciples didn’t realize it would be their last meal with Christ before their world came apart.

And it wasn’t just any meal to begin with; it was the Jewish Passover, the most sacred of all the festivals for God’s Chosen People.

That night all over the world, Jews were gathering in homes to eat the same foods according to the same ritual that Jesus and His disciples observed: a roasted lamb, bitter herbs, flat unleavened bread, and wine.

In every Jewish home, the host was taking up a piece of the flat bread and saying, “/This is the bread of haste, which our ancestors ate in Egypt/,” before passing it around.

But Jesus changed the ritual, broke the routine.

He did something /new/.

“/This is my body/,” Christ said as He passed around the bread.

“/This is my blood of the covenant which is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins/,” he said, commanding everyone to drink from the cup.

Hard words that doubtless confused and confounded His followers.

But how does the Jewish Passover and Jesus’ words that night relate to us and to /this table/ here this morning?

The Passover meal celebrated the Jews’ deliverance from Egypt.

He said to them (in effect), “/I will be your God; now you must follow my laws/.”

But try as they might, there was no way they could keep their end of the bargain.

That first covenant was flawed, because /we/ are flawed (sinful) and unable to obey God in the least degree.

And so Jesus, sent by God, did something about it.

Like the first Passover, the celebration took place before the event!

And like the first Passover, every time this meal is eaten, we are reminded of what He did.

This simple meal of bread and grape juice is in fact a /covenant/ meal.

He was saying to His followers, “/I will be your Lord; now you must follow my way of love/,” and then to prove His love He offered Himself as the covenant-initiating sacrifice which solemnized and sealed this /new relationship/ between God and His people.

Only now, “His people” means anyone who will receive Him.

That is why the Apostle John would write

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

And so every time we eat the Lord’s Supper, we are remembering that his death brought us a “new deal” with God, a new relationship that provided for the removal and forgiveness of our sins.

Every time we eat the Lord’s Supper, we are remembering that Jesus in His body became our Passover Lamb, providing a “new way” out of an old problem.

There’s an old Lucille Ball sketch where Lucy took a job at a cake-decorating factory.

She had to squirt icing out of a tube onto the tope of the cake, put a cherry on the top, and put it in the box.

But the belt bringing the cakes out to her moved just a little too fast for her to keep up.

She gradually got a little more behind until finally she was trying to balance about seven cakes in her hands while she dealt with the new ones that kept coming out.

It was a hilarious picture of ineptitude.

There was no way she could handle it.

That’s an absurd but accurate portrait of humanity.

We broke God’s laws, and we could never quite make up the ground we lost.

We needed someone to stop the assembly line, to get us out of the mess we perpetually wind up in.

Temptation keeps coming down the line, and we keep falling.

So how do we escape this deadly routine?

Jesus.

Of Christ Paul wrote: “/What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord/!“

(Romans 7:24-25).

So when we eat at this table, we are celebrating the /newness/ life that Christ offers to all who will come.

This is not a boring, hum-drum ritual that we celebrate here today.

Although it takes us back to our very beginnings every time we celebrate, we are reminded of the /new/ thing Christ did for us.

*The Lord’s Supper is not a boring ritual, but a /celebration/ of Christ’s victory over death, and a /proclamation/ of what His death and resurrection means for us.*

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II.

The Lord’s Table means we are telling an old story to a new generation

Jesus left us specific instructions for the meal: “/Take, eat, this is my body; drink of this cup, all of you/.”

Jesus meant for us to keep celebrating in this fashion until He comes back for us.

But why so much repetition?

Why keep doing the same ritual over and over again?

Back when Christianity was still illegal, churches continued to meet in homes at great peril to celebrate with the bread and the wine.

As the Church spread from Greece to Italy and from Italy to Western Europe to North Africa: “/This is my body/” and “/This is my blood/” was spoken in Greek and Latin and Coptic and Syriac and Ethiopic and Slavonic and countless other languages.

After the Church became legal, the Christian faith was carried all over the world, as missionaries went to England, China, India and even Japan.

Down through the Middle Ages, priests spoke the words sometimes not even knowing what they meant, but /still they spoke them/.

Down to the time of the Reformation, when Luther and other reformers reinterpreted the supper, down to our own Baptist ancestors in England, who celebrated communion secretly in the woods lest they be killed, down to those who taught us.

Do you see?

This meal ties us to the /whole history/ of the Christian Church, the entire Body of Christ.

/We/ are the next step in the chain of tradition, /we are the ones/ who must faithfully celebrate and proclaim what this means not just for our own spiritual well-being, but for all who will come after us!

As Hebrews 12:1 reminds us we are never alone in our journey of faith:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

And through it all, through all the changes and mistakes the Church has made and will make, Jesus has been our Lord, and we have followed his command to eat this meal.

It is a part of who we are, and who we are becoming in Christ.

As Paul wrote, “/There is one body and one Spirit— just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all/” (Eph 4:4-6).

*The Lord’s Supper is not a boring ritual, but a /celebration/ of Christ’s victory over death, and a /proclamation/ of what His death and resurrection means for us.*

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III.

The Lord’s Table means new hope from an old ritual