Sermon Tone Analysis

A couple of weeks ago, I got the privilege of going with my whole family to an all-inclusive resort in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico.

While it snowed and was cold here in Ontario, we got to sit by the pool in 30 degree sun, listening to the waves of the ocean.

It was a wonderful holiday and one I have been saying I needed for about two years now.

And while there, I shut off from work.

No emails, no texts, no calls.

The only thing that was close was I said hi and watched the Instagram live of our last youth group for a few minutes and I watched the livestream of Sunday service, for as long as my wifi held.

But even though I shut down, I had two experiences while in Mexico that made me contemplate one of our church rituals and I wanted to share those with you today.

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The first experience I had that made me think of communion happened on the Friday night we were there.

There was a show that the resort put on at 8:30pm that night.

Abby’s feet were blistered and sore from all the walking we did, Hannah wanted to be on her iPad in the room and my mom was tired, so Bekah and I went.

There was this outdoor area set up for this event and it seemed like most of the resort was there, with no one practicing any COVID wisdom like masks or physical distancing.

After one of the staff sang some lovely songs, which was the best part of the show in my opinion, the “real show” began.

You can see here an image of it that I took.

Picture

The show consisted of people dressed up like ancient Aztecs and dancing around some fire pits.

The dancing was repetitive and maybe best described as “fine” but not great.

But what struck me the most was there seemed to be some narrative at play, but you couldn’t figure it out and it felt like they were trying to have a sacred moment but there was no explanation of what was going on.

We were just observers and any sense of sacredness to the event was lost by the people ordering their drinks, by the vendors selling food and by the chatter of a mostly disengaged audience.

I realized that true participation in sacred moments requires knowledge of what’s going on, what symbols mean and why we are doing it.

Which brings me to today.

In the church, we have a couple of sacred rituals.

One, that we practice infrequently, in baptism.

But the other, we do every month and I wonder if the sacredness of communion is lost because we don’t really know what’s going on and why we are doing this.

The other experience I had that connected me to communion happened in a cave.

On the Saturday of our trip, Bekah and I went on an outdoor adventure.

We drove ATV’s through the mud

We leaped off of a platform and swung in the air

We even ziplined into a cenote - which is a natural pit or sinkhole that has fresh water in it.

After we ziplined though, we stripped off our harnesses and swam in the cenote.

We went through a small, narrow passage- which, if you have claustrophobia, isn’t for you - and it opened into a cave.

There were bats flying above us and the only light was from the flashlight of our guide.

As we swam, he pointed out some really interesting details about the cenote, the stalacites and the ancient Mayans who used to come into this place.

Here is a picture of Bekah and I in the cave.

They had named the cenote Iglesia - which means church - and our guide encouraged us to experience it the way the ancient Mayans used to, so he extinguished his flashlight and he wanted us to just float in silence and be present to the moment.

It was a sacred moment.

Well, it was supposed to be.

There was a family there.

I won’t say where they were from, but they made me appreciate how our good friends Stuart and Cathy are nothing like them.

This family couldn’t engage.

Just as we were settling into the moment, they would talk loudly and shout and say, “who touched me?’ while laughing.

They simply couldn’t be silent, at any point whatsoever during the tour.

They, through their disengagement of the moment kept the rest of us from experiencing this sacred time.

I realized that sacredness requires buy-in.

You can participate in anything and not experience any soul connection if you don’t really buy into what you are doing.

Sacredness requires intentionality and effort.

This is true in your scripture reading, your praying, your participation in our worship services, in everything you do where you connect with God.

And it’s true when we participate in communion.

For communion to be a sacred ritual, we have to approach it with intentionality and effort.

So today, we are going to talk about that sacred ritual we practice called communion and my hope is that by understanding it deeper, and by approaching it with intentionality, our sense of the sacredness of this ritual will increase and that our intimacy with and worship of God deepens.

Speaking of worship, let’s spend a couple of minutes getting our hearts and minds connected to God.

Would you pray with me?

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Pray

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Communion has a few names in the church world.

It can be called Communion, the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist The word communion is a compound of two words: common and union and it goes back to the 4th century to Augustine.

The idea is that it is something that unites us as believers to each other and to God.

The term “the Lord’s supper” is taken from 1 Corinthians 11, when the Apostle Paul talks about a specific meal that Christians shared, upon which much of our basis for communion stands.

The term Eucharist comes from a greek word that means “thanksgiving, or gratitutde.”

But whatever you call it, we are speaking of the same event.

At North Park Stratford, we usually host communion once a month, often the last Sunday of each month.

During this time in our worship service, we distribute two things to all who want them - a small piece of bread or cracker, which represents the body of Jesus and little cup grape juice, which represents the blood of Jesus.

Then, whoever is leading (which is usually me) will read from the Bible in 1 Corinthians 11, and we will eat the bread together.

Then the leader reads another verse or two and we drink the grape juice together.

Then we close in prayer.

That is often how we do it and other churches have other customs.

I remember as a teenager going to a friend’s Anglican church and there we all had to go up to the front, kneel before the priest and he would do the sign of the cross while holding the very tasteless wafer which he would place in our hands.

We would eat it and then he would give us a sip from the one communion cup that we all used that he held of red wine.

It wasn’t what I would call COVID safe by any means but for the believers in that church it still had spiritual significance to it.

For me, at age 13, I wasn’t a believer yet so it didn’t have any significance; it was simply a chance to drink wine on Sunday morning.

Maybe it didn’t have any significance because I didn’t understand what it meant.

So what does communion mean?

Why do we practice this ritual each month in our church?

To answer that, let’s look at communion as three acts: an act of remembrance, an act of faith, and an act of hope.

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Communion as act of Remembrance

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a great memory.

Not for life stuff anyways.

My wife always goes to me, “Remember on June 2, 2003 when we saw that commercial that only aired that one time while we ate pepperoni pizza and you wore that blue shirt and Rebekah said ouch?”

And I go, “No.

I don’t remember that.

I don’t doubt that it happened, but I don’t remember it.”

And sometimes, I think God gives us ritual to help people like me to remember the important things.

Communion is an act of remembrance.

It invites us to remember two historical events - separated by more than 1000 years and yet intimately connected - and the importance of them in our lives.

1.

It invites us to remember the Exodus.

In the last week of Jesus’ life, Jesus and his disciples participated in an ancient and holy meal called Passover.

It was a meal that was celebrated every year to remember when God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt.

For those who are new to the Christian faith, you may not know that the Israelites all moved to Egypt during a famine and settled there for years.

But when a new Pharaoh arose, he enslaved the Jewish people for hundreds of years.

But then God raised up Moses and Aaron to lead Israel to freedom.

God used them to perform amazing signs and wonders to convince Egypt to let the Israelites go.

The last sign that God gave was a plague that killed the firstborn of every family.

But to his people, the Jews, God told them to take a pure, spotless lamb, sacrifice it, eat it and brush their doorposts with the blood.

Then the angel “passed over” those houses, sparing the Israelites and breaking the hard heartedness of Egypt.

God then led the Israelites out of Egypt and gave them their own land in Canaan.

Since that event, the Jewish people created a holiday called Passover where they remembered that they were once slaves, but God set them free.

It helped them to both be grateful that God intervened in their history and gave them hope that he would do so again.

And Jesus celebrated this event with his disciples in Matthew 26.