PMC sermon 21-09-08pm

Pinelands Methodist Church

Sermon 21 September 2008

Worship and the Lord’s Supper

We have been spending the last 5 weeks or so in DV8 Sunday on Worship—There is a Louie Giglio Series called “Worship, that thing we do” that can be basically summed up in 2 over-encompassing statements. I hope those in DV8  know these two things—please!  What are they? Now can anyone define worship for us? (Worship is our response, both personal and corporate to God—for who He is! And for what He has done!--expressed in and by the things we say and the way we live. )

1. We are great Worshippers
2. The critical thing is what we worship

We are great worshippers. If you happen to go to a Springboks game and are standing in the middle of Newlands Stadium and the game is tied against the All-Blacks you don’t have to remind people to get excited. It just comes naturally. Everyone is screaming their heads off. There is great worship going on at Newlands. Great worship! We looked at a segment from an Oprah Winfrey interview with Michael Jackson when he was famous before he went into his bizarro phase and saw vast seas of people caught up in the worship of Michael Jackson. It was great worship---pretty tiny god, but great worship.

We are created to worship and are really, really good at it. The problem isn’t that we aren’t good worshippers—things break down for us because of what we worship. If you follw me around for a period of time or I follow you around it doesn’t take long for me or for you to see the pattern that emerges in our lives that shows the world what we worship. We leave a worship trail and if you follow the trail it leads to who or what is on the throne of your life.

God knows us—He created us to be worshippers and helps us get worship headed in the right direction when he tells us through the Apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 10:31, “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” Everything is worship—eating, drinking, going to school, going to work, hiking Table Mountain—it is all to be done for God’s glory. The interesting thing is that there is nothing in Scripture that says this must be done on Sunday. We don’t segregate out part of the week and call it “worship” or find a specific building and make that our “worship building”. All of life is to be worship. Worship is to be a natural rhythm of our life, as easy and normal as eating and drinking. We were created to be great worshippers and when our lives are spent worshipping God we in sync with what we were created to do. Notice that I didn’t mention singing, although you can worship with your voice. It isn’t a special posture inflection. If we fall into the habit of equating what we do in church with the only way that we worship, then I think we miss the radical point of Jesus teaching in the New Testament: Jesus said in John 4 as he talked with a woman at a well that worship is no longer a place, but it is an attitude of your heart—spirit and truth. From your heart worship flows that impacts all of your life, not just church services.

Anyway, that is just the introduction. The essence of worship is the inner experience of treasuring the true beauty and worth of God. I want us to consider tonight what worship looks like in light of the  Lord’s Supper. One of the outward forms of worship that we do together as a church is to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Paul helps to provide guidance for this practice in Corinthians 11:17-34 (The Message)
17 Regarding this next item, I’m not at all pleased. I am getting the picture that when you meet together it brings out your worst side instead of your best! 18 First, I get this report on your divisiveness, competing with and criticizing each other. I’m reluctant to believe it, but there it is. 19 The best that can be said for it is that the testing process will bring truth into the open and confirm it. 20 And then I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, 21 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! 22 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. 23 Let me go over with you again exactly what goes on in the Lord’s Supper and why it is so centrally important. I received my instructions from the Master himself and passed them on to you. The Master, Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, took bread. 24 Having given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, broken for you. Do this to remember me. 25 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. 26 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. 27 Anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Master irreverently is like part of the crowd that jeered and spit on him at his death. Is that the kind of “remembrance” you want to be part of? 28 Examine your motives, test your heart, come to this meal in holy awe. 29 If you give no thought (or worse, don’t care) about the broken body of the Master when you eat and drink, you’re running the risk of serious consequences. 30 That’s why so many of you even now are listless and sick, and others have gone to an early grave. 31 If we get this straight now, we won’t have to be straightened out later on. 32 Better to be confronted by the Master now than to face a fiery confrontation later. 33 So, my friends, when you come together to the Lord’s Table, be reverent and courteous with one another. 34 If you’re so hungry that you can’t wait to be served, go home and get a sandwich. But by no means risk turning this Meal into an eating and drinking binge or a family squabble. It is a spiritual meal—a love feast. The other things you asked about, I’ll respond to in person when I make my next visit.

The Corinthian church had a number of issues—not unlike you would expect if you planted a church in a pagan culture filled with people with bad morals, were hard drinkers, and were sexually promiscuous. Although Paul stayed with them for over a year to help the church get their start, as you can tell they had a long way to go. Paul loved this church, but wasn’t afraid to bring them up short when they needed it. Instead of being worship, the Lord’s Supper had turned into something that was actually offensive. Some were degrading their brother’s and sisters in Christ through their behaviour. They were “divisive, competing with and criticizing each other.” (v. 18). They were separating themselves by social class.  They did this by bringing in a lot of food and drink when they gathered and were literally making pigs of themselves. While some got so drunk that they had to be carried out, some were completely without due to their poverty, which would bring shame on them. This couldn’t be tolerated in the church and Paul wasn’t pleased.    

So he sets up some ground rules to help the church in this act of worship. I would like to look at them as 4 separate instructions for us in worship as we eat the Lord’s Supper together.  It is worship because in doing so we show others how much we value Jesus. Paul’s instructions come from Jesus: “The Master, Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, took bread. 24 Having given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body, broken for you. Do this to remember me. 25 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. We worship by remembering. Jesus gave us this simple supper to help us keep him in memory, especially as we remember how he died for us. It was no easy thing to be crucified on a Roman cross, bleeding and broken to pay the penalty for our sins. Remember! Don’t forget what Jesus has done for you and for me.
2. We worship through the symbolism in re-enacting his death. It is a proclamation of what Jesus has done for us every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The bread represents his body, broken for us. The wine represents his blood shed for us. There is tremendous power in that worship. Symbols help us to see truth. (Story of “The journey”) When we worship in this way we show again his value to us and how what he has done in our lives can happen for others.
3. We worship  in our replenishment. I think we see this by the fact that this is a “supper.”  We are nourished by what we eat. And here Jesus tells us that we are eating his body and the cup we are drinking is “ is my blood, my new covenant with you.” The new covenant is God’s commitment to save those who trust in Jesus. This eating and drinking is no ordinary eating and drinking. Paul said earlier that we should take care of our bodily needs for nourishment at our own homes. This supper is not about physical nourishment. It is about spiritual nourishment.

How does this work? We believe that the bread and wine or juice are symbols or emblems of the real, literal body of Christ that was crucified in history and today is at the right hand of the Father. There is a real feeding on Christ that goes on by faith—not on his physical body but on his spiritual presence. We come to him desperate for Him, and he feeds us.

    4,   We worship by anticipating his return. We remember his death “until he returns.” He promised us that this is only temporary—we look forward to his return as we partake of the bread and the cup. 

So, in a few minutes when Mike leads us in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, when we eat the bread and drink the juice , we may nourish our souls by faith on the spiritual presence of Christ. When we remember and proclaim his death through these symbols, he manifests himself to us as infinitely beautiful and precious. This is the food for our souls. With this we are nourished and find the strength to follow after Jesus.