What Is Communion?

Scripture Reading/Prayer

Tonight’s Scripture reading is going to come from a passage that many of you are likely very familiar with if you’ve been attending Redeemer for any period of time. That passage is 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, which is on page X if you’re using a black bible.

1 Corinthians 11:23–26 ESV

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 he took 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.

Let’s pray: Our Father in Heaven, we thank you and praise you for this gift of the Lord’s Supper, and how you use something as simple as a small piece of bread and some juice in order to feed, restore, and nourish us supernaturally through the work of the Holy Spirit. I pray that as we look at what the Lord’s Supper is tonight that your Spirit would fill us with awe and wonder and how gracious and kind you are, and would give those of us in here who are Christians an eager anticipation to partake in this gift on Sunday. I ask this in the name of Jesus, amen.

Introduction

As I mentioned a bit ago, this passage of Scripture is a passage of Scripture that is likely very familiar to those of you who have been attending Redeemer on Sunday mornings for any period of time. In fact, this is the only passage of Scripture that we read as a church every single Sunday of the year - it doesn’t matter what the sermon is about or what time of the year it is, we always read this passage in our services because every Sunday, we take the Lord’s Supper as a church.

A couple weeks ago, JR Favela explained to us what it means to be a Christian, and last week Andrew explained what baptism is. We are concluding this brief little mini-series tonight by looking at what the Lord’s Supper is, and why it’s so important to our faith and why it’s something we do every single week at Redeemer. Like Baptism, the Lord’s Supper is a practice that goes all the way back to the beginning of the church, and is a practice that we call a “sacrament”, or an “ordinance”, because it’s something that Jesus Christ himself instituted as something that his people ought to practice. Whether you attend a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a Lutheran church or any other church, some version of the Lord’s Supper will be practiced. Some churches call it “The Lord’s Supper”, some churches call it “Communion”, some churches call it the “Eucharist”, but all three names refer to the same thing; some churches observe it every week, some once a month, some once a quarter, and some once a year, but every church observes it with some consistency. In fact, communion/the Lord’s Supper/the Eucharist, whatever you prefer to call it, is one of a handful of practices of our faith that is distinctly unique about our faith (and I am going to use all three terms interchangeably tonight). If anyone ever tries to tell you that all religions basically believe the same thing and value the same things at the end of the day, ask them what the Muslim version of the Lord’s Supper is, or ask them how a Hindu can observe something in the remembrance of Jesus Christ. They won’t be able to give you an answer because there isn’t one. No other religion has a practice that is comparable or equivalent to the Lord’s Supper of Christianity, and the Lord’s Supper is something that even secular society finds absolutely fascinating because there is nothing else to compare to it.

But what even is communion? And what is a “sacrament”? If you were here last week when Andrew talked about baptism, he said that a sacrament is “a physical act that symbolizes a spiritual truth; an outward sign that points to an inner reality.” And the example that he used was how his son James absolutely loves Waffle House, and that whenever they drive by the one on Western he sees the Waffle House sign and gets really excited. But the point of the Waffle House sign isn’t just for you to park in the parking lot and stare at it; the point of the sign is to what’s inside the Waffle House, which is waffles! (I will say that as a former pest control technician who used to be responsible for several Waffle Houses in Amarillo, waffles are not what I think of when I see a Waffle House sign). In the same way, a sacrament is an outward sign that points beyond it to a greater reality - the point of the sacrament is not to stare at the sign, but to come in and experience everything that the sign is pointing towards. In baptism, the sign of a person being dunked into water and raised up out of it shows the greater reality that this person shares in all the benefits of Jesus Christ dying, being buried, and rising from the dead on their behalf; they share in the cleansing and forgiveness of sins Jesus Christ purchased for us by living the perfect life we could not live, but dying the death we deserved on the cross. In communion, the sign of a person receiving bread and wine (or, in our case, grape juice) at the direction of a pastor in a church service is communicating a greater spiritual reality, and we also believe that God is doing something supernatural inside of us in taking the Lord’s supper. But, before we get to that, I want to take a couple minutes and get a couple of misconceptions about communion out of the way and explain what communion is not, so that when I get around to the reality that communion symbolizes, hopefully you’ll be able to see it more clearly.

There Is Nothing Special About The Elements Themselves

First, we need to make clear up front that even though we believe that God does something supernatural in us through communion, and that there is a greater spiritual reality behind this little wafer and grape juice, we do not believe that God does these amazing things because these elements themselves are special or supernatural. Back in 2020, after Redeemer resumed meeting in person from being in lockdown for a bit, we switched from the way we used to do communion to these pre-packaged single use elements to help make sure we weren’t spreading Covid, and it’s not a secret that nobody actually likes these. The “Bread” tastes like cheap styrofoam and you gotta shake it to get the juice all mixed up. But here’s the thing - God works just as faithfully and powerful through communion through these just as much as he does back when we were passing a plate with pie-crust bread pieces and freshly poured Welches. The quality of the elements has nothing to do with whether or not God works in our hearts through communion, because there is nothing special about the elements themselves.

The elements do not transform into anything other than bread and juice

Related to this first point is an extremely important point y’all need to understand about the relationship between the elements and the body and blood of Christ. In the Gospels and in Paul’s account in 1 Corinthians, Jesus gives us bread and says “this is my body”, and Jesus gives us wine/juice and says “the is the new covenant in my blood”. Not only is there nothing inherently special about the elements themselves, we absolutely cannot stress this enough: the bread and the juice do not transform into the literal body and blood of Christ when we take communion. They stay exactly what they are: a small piece of bread and a small thimble of drink.

Why bring this up? Well, if any of you grew up attending a Catholic church or have Catholic family and friends, one of the biggest differences between Protestants and Catholics is how God works in us through the Lord’s Supper. In Catholicism, it’s taught that when the priest blesses the elements, they supernaturally transform into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, and that the spiritual benefits of communion come because you are eating something that has been supernaturally transformed into something that is an extension of Jesus. This teaching was one of the biggest points of contention in the Protestant Reformation, and one of the reasons we remain Protestants here in this room is that we do not believe that we are literally eating and drinking the flesh and blood of Christ. Just like the Waffle House sign is a symbol pointing to something beyond itself, we believe that when Jesus gave his disciples bread and said “this is my body” and gave his disciples wine and said “this is my blood” that he is using bread and wine as signs for something beyond themselves. If Jesus wanted his disciples to literally eat his flesh and drink his blood, Jesus had a physical body and physical blood he could’ve given to his disciples to eat in that moment - but if he didn’t do that then and the disciples did not actually eat and drink the literal body and blood of Jesus while he was physically with them, we would we think we do differently now? That would be like climbing up the pole of the Waffle House sign and trying to bite into it thinking it was a giant waffle!

“Bread” and “Wine” are not placeholders for other things!

You may be thinking “okay, if the bread and the juice aren’t anything special and don’t transform into something special or supernatural, why do we need to use bread and juice? Couldn’t we just use Mt. Dew and Takis instead?” And that’s a great question to ask! Why does it matter what we use if the elements themselves aren’t what makes communion so special?

There are two answers to that question, a short answer and a longer answer. The shorter answer is this: they matter because they’re what Jesus told us to use. The longer answer is this: they matter not only because Jesus told us to use them, but because they communicate something very specific and special. We’ve been saying for the past couple of weeks that “how God gave us the Bible matters just as much as what is in it”, and the same is true for communion: how Jesus told us to observe communion matters just as much as what communion symbolizes! And once we understand what these elements are communicating to us, we can begin to understand the benefits of communion and how God uses it to strengthen our faith.

The Benefits of Bread and Wine

Let’s start with the bread, because this is probably the easiest to understand. Bread is food. Without food, we will die. In our wealthy modern culture it’s hard for us to imagine not having food to eat, but in other parts of the world and especially in the past, food shortages were always a dangerous threat. We just finished the story of Joseph a couple weeks ago, and how does God use Joseph to save the world? Essentially, by storing up bread to get the region through a famine. While “bread” may be boring to us today, bread was the standard sign that all was well. If you had bread to eat, you’ll be okay.

When Jesus tells us to pray “give us this day our daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer, he is teaching us to depend on the Father for everything that we need, because everything we have comes from him. In communion, by receiving the bread, we are reminded that God is our provider of not just our physical needs, but our spiritual needs as well. Not only does God care about our bodies, he cares about our souls as well, and the fact that the bread symbolizes the body of Jesus Christ tells us that God has provided the greatest provision he could possibly provide for us - salvation through the death of his son. The broken bread represents the broken body of Jesus on the cross, which not only saves our souls but is proof that God cares about all our needs. The greater spiritual reality here is that we remind ourselves that God cares for us, and has provided generously for us.

Now let’s look at the wine (or in our case, the juice). This is where things get awesome. We are going to look at one more text real quick before we wrap this up,, which is Matthew 26:27-29

Matthew 26:27–29 ESV

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

Notice that last part - what is Jesus saying here? What is he referring to? Jesus is saying that that as a part of this new covenant, Jesus will not simply forgive us of our sins, Jesus is going to make the whole cosmos new - and that when he does, we will celebrate with Christ together. Jesus - right now, this very second - is waiting to drink the fruit of the vine in celebration together not just with us, but with all the saints who have come before us and after us.

If bread communicates God’s nourishment and sustenance of our lives, the wine represents a celebrating that is coming, and when we take communion, we remind our hearts to look beyond our lives and our immediate circumstances to the hope we have in Jesus Christ. The greater spiritual reality that we participate in when we take communion - the substance that these signs signify and point to - is the fullness of life in Christ. In the bread, we tell ourselves and remind ourselves that God is our source of provision and life, and that it is not to use in our own strength to provide for ourselves, because everything we have comes from God. In the wine, we tell ourselves and remind ourselves that not only has God provided salvation for us through the broken body and shed blood of his son, which forgives us of our sins, but that Jesus Christ is coming back, and he is going to make all things new. Through these meager little elements, God strengthens our hearts and our faith with the truth about who he is, and about who we are in Christ. As Paul says, “26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”, in taking communion we testify that we believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be true, and that we desire to participate in the full life that God has given to us in Christ now - and forever.

If you are a Christian, when you take communion on Sunday, I hope these truths stir your heart to receive everything the Lord does for us through this sacrament. If you’re not a Christian, or you do not know whether you are a Christian or not, it is very important that you do not take communion on Sundays. But if you want to become a Christian, or you have questions about communion, talk to your leaders! And this Sunday, at Redeemer, come share this meal together with us, and let your soul be fed with the truth that Jesus lived the sinless life you couldn’t live, but died the death you deserved in your place, and that because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead and has defeated Satan, sin, and death, we have hope in the new world he is going to make when he returns.