What are we doing when we come to this table? Some in the Christian family approach this table believing that when the words of institution are pronounced, the bread and cup become the literal bread and body of Christ. For others, it becomes a kind of mystical and spiritual co-existing substance with the body and blood of Christ. Most mainline Protestants come to this communion table in a state of memory. Holding the bread and drinking the cup is a call to remember that Christ broke bread with his disciples many times. He ate with people others shunned, the he invited himself to eat with Zaccheus (Luke 19), on the night we call Maundy Thursday, he sat at a Passover meal and shared a last piece of bread and a last cup of wine with his closest disciples. We are invited to remember as we come to this table. In fact, if we removed the parament from this communion table, we would be able to read the words, “In remembrance of me”.

We remember the first time we ever had communion. For me, it was the same Sunday I was baptized. Last Sunday, Elizabeth Sliker stood at the lectern and in just a few words, she called us to the communion table. The words I remember were these, “when I first took communion here, I felt like I was a full member of Broad Street Christian Church”. This table of communion, these elements of bread and cup – whether bread or wafer, whether real wine or grape juice, tell us that we belong, if we will remember why we set this table.

Paul writes to the Corinthians to remind them that the Lord’s Supper is not something we do for ourselves. Some in the Corinthian church were so sure of their own rightness and righteousness that they mistook Christian freedom for license to do whatever they wanted. So Paul writes to them to help them understand some things. If you read through First and Second Corinthians, you will get a sense that the conflicts we face in the churches these days are nothing new. What do we do about marriage, what is the role of women in the church, how do we understand the resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose church is this, and what about the Lord’s Supper?

What was happening is that when members of the Corinthian churches got together there was not a fair distribution of the elements. Some had more than they needed, some had nothing.

Paul writes to them, “for when it comes time to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry, and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing” (I Corinthians 11.17-22)? The Lord’s Supper was celebrated at the end of the meal, in the same way Jesus used the remnants of the Passover meal. Some had more than needed, others didn’t have anything.

As we come to this table to receive what Jesus shared so long ago, we remember that these symbols are a sign of something real, and while we have this bread and cup, the presence of Christ is so real, and the memory so deep, that something is missing in many of us when communion is absent from Sunday morning worship. I had the opportunity to worship in several congregations this past spring. Many of them were not Disciples congregations, and the only one of them with a tradition of weekly communion was the Episcopal church. Worship in those other congregations was fine, but I missed not having communion on the Sundays I was there.

We remember in this bread and cup that we are joined in a new kind of covenant with each other. The covenant unites us as a church. The hymn says, “One bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing which we bless. And we though many, throughout the earth, we are one body in this one Lord” (One Bread, One Body, Chalice Hymnal St. Louis: Christian Board of Publication, 1985, #393).

The covenant to care about each other unites us as people. Late last month, the river town of Fargo, North Dakota was without a single bottle of water to be had. Every single bottle had been purchased, put on trucks and shipped to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. What does Fargo, sitting way north on the border with Minnesota have to do with the Gulf Coast? Of course there was the impulse we all felt to do something. But there was another kind of solidarity. Though different in scale, the Red River flows through Fargo like the Mississippi river flows through New Orleans. In April of 2000, the Red River overflowed its banks, and parts of the town flooded. The people of Fargo remembered what it was like to have its streets overrun with water, and they responded to the human suffering they saw and decided to help by sharing what they had.

We remember when we come to the table, that we are connected by the love of God for all humanity, by our confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, by baptism, and by this table as we remember. Communion in this congregation unites us in many ways.

Remember that you did not come to one leader to receive the bread and cup. Your were served by leaders of the church. As the trays were picked up and prayed over and passed, you fed each other. And as you did, you acted in love and hope that is so strong, we can feel its presence wherever we are.

The story is told of a priest who was arrested and imprisoned not for a crime against persons or property, but because his preaching had offended his government. He was among his nation’s 10,000 political prisoners, and he describes the scene on the first Easter he was in prison. His is a powerful story.

“There is not a single cup. But a score of Christian prisoners experienced the joy of celebrating communion – without bread or wine. The communion of empty hands. The non-Christians said, ‘we will help you; we will talk quietly so that you can meet.’ Too dense a silence would have drawn the guard’s attention as surely as the lone voice of a preacher. ‘We have no bread, nor water to use instead of wine,’ I told them, ‘but we will act as though we had.’

“This meal in which we take part, ‘ I said, ‘reminds us of the prison, the torture, the death and final victory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The bread is the body which he gave for humanity. The fact that we have none represents very well the lack of bread in the hunger of so many millions of human beings. The wine, which we don’t have today, is his blood and represents our dream of a united humanity, of a just society, without difference of race or class.’

“I held out my empty hand to the first person on my right, and placed it over his open hand, and the same with the others: ‘Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me’. Afterward, all of us raised our hands to our mouths, receiving the body of Christ in silence. ‘Take, drink, this is the blood of Christ which was shed to seal the new covenant of God with men. Let us give thanks, sure that Christ is here with us, strengthening us.’ We gave thanks to God, and finally stood up and embraced each other’” (Thomas G. Pettepiece from “Visions of a World Hungry” in A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants. Reuben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck. Nashville: The Upper Room, 1983, p. 143).

Remember the strong presence of Christ and the way we are strengthened as we take the bread and the cup and find in them the energy not only to remember, but to find our deepest connections with God, to build relationships with each other, and to do justice. We are moved by the hospitality of God through Jesus Christ, hospitality that brings us to this table and sends us from this place to invite others to join us. Don’t you know that if our souls are fed at this table, there just may be another hungry soul in the world waiting to be invited by us to come to this table and be fed?

Remember and be creative as we open ourselves to new ways of doing things. The story is told about a “church in a deprived neighborhood in Britain [that] found that it was attracting four times as many children as adults in a culture where children were accustomed to being on their own, without the company of their parents. The church decided to gives its principal worship area to the larger group, the children, and take the adults into a side room. The adults rejoined the children after about 45 minutes, and the children would ask the adults what they had done in their group. Visitors noticed that instead of the children feeling patronized or uncomfortable, it was the adults who felt they had to learn to accommodate themselves to the change” (Christian Century, p.2). I love the idea of adults who are accountable to the children here. What will we say when the children here ask us why we come to the communion table week after week? Surely we can tell them that it is at this table that we find the sustenance we need to share the good news of Jesus Christ.

In the meantime, we remember those whom Jesus asked us to remember. We remember the least of these, those without adequate housing, or education, or access to health care or access to the hope. We remember the most vulnerable among us, the physically and mentally ill, the elderly and the young and we do all that we can to say to them, you have value and respect in this place.

We remember we are the church, the body of Christ, people of faith, a community gathered to spread the good news. Our good news is that we are people of memory who know what it is to be fed at Christ’s table and who understand that the memory does not call us to nostalgia but to action.

“When you do this, remember me”, Jesus says. When you act in my name, remember that I acted in the name of the one who sent me. Remember I loved you so much that I gave up my life for yours. When you share the bread, remember the hungry, when you drink, remember the thirsty. When you worship, remember in whose name you gather, and to whom you give your praise and thanksgiving, and by whom you find your grace and salvation.

And when you do this, remember that in the bread and in the cup we have shared, there is food and drink to satisfy our needy souls. Thanks be to God, and to Jesus Christ, the bread of life. Amen.

Dr. LaTaunya M. Bynum
Senior Pastor