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January 7, 2007
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Relationships
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"Come to the Table"
Luke 22: 7-23
- 85 year old Laura Geiser walked into the room that separated the fellowship hall from the Sanctuary at our local church in San Jacinto one Sunday morning, walked up to me and said, "Pastor, when I read that article in the newsletter I wanted to punch your lights out!" Laura was never one for beating around the bush.
"Really, Laura," I responded. "Come let's sit down and you tell me why you wanted to do that." And thus continued my training in the gift God has given us in relationships.
We sometimes cannot live with them or without them, but all our lives have them.
In fact, as I noted in the January newsletter's opening article, you cannot describe who you really are without including significant relationships in the description. You will end up talking about your home background, school, job and all of this will also include the people that were and are a part of those areas in your life.
So relationships are central to our lives and are what bring depth and meaning to our lives. Even God lives in ongoing relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that relationship teaches us much about how we are to be living out our relationships with one another. That is what we are going to be looking at all year - how God lives in relationship and how we are called to live in relationship, first with God, for we are invited into that fellowship of the Trinity and secondly with one another.
But that will take us the whole year.
Today, and every month with communion, we are going to look at this meal together. In the 12 messages I will be sharing about this meal this year, I believe we will be able to begin to scratch the surface of the meaning that God has put into this simple meal.
It has many names. "Holy Communion" for in it we commune with the Holy God; "Eucharist" which is the Greek word for Thanksgiving but the word literally means "Good Grace" and in this meal we receive God's grace anew in tangible form into our lives. It is also called the Lord's Supper for Jesus took something that was ancient, the Passover Meal and forever transformed it into His Meal by specifying how it was a meal that had always foretold His coming, His sacrifice and His victory.
But beyond what it is called, it is simply a meal, a very simple meal of bread and wine, which carries a great depth of meaning. Why would a meal find its way into the very center of what it means to be Christian?
- Well, one reality is that meals in and of themselves are so very important.
I am struck with what a gift a mealtime is in my family's life together at home. There are often meetings in our lives but on most nights of the week, at least those who are home will sit down at the table, with candles lit, cloth napkins and enjoy a meal together. There is something rich in this practice of ours of allowing a meal together to be an event, especially in this culture where to some extent eating together has become a lost art. In one recent study, just 43 percent of 9- to 14-year-olds ate with their families every night, and 17 percent of children never ate with their families at all. The reasons include busy work schedules for parents, and busy school and athletic schedules for children. But many believe this is a real loss. One researcher at the University of Washington, Dr. Donna Johnson has statistics that show how much families benefit when they sit and eat together. She says, "Kids who eat together tend to have better school success.... tend to do less substance abuse… (and) tend to move on and transition to adulthood easier."
To me those were some amazing benefits borne simply of a eating together. Not of some special event, but just an ordinary time where you sit with those you love and share over food. I know that many in the congregation appreciated the Advent Breakfasts just because they offered that opportunity to sit and eat and fellowship with others over the meal.
- In the Bible the very action of eating with someone carried great meaning. The old Middle Eastern saying is that to share a drink with someone means you are a friend for the day but to share a meal, you are a friend for life.
That is the meaning placed upon ordinary meals.
So Jesus ate with people, he was even named a "glutton and a drunkard" because of how he ate and enjoyed meals with others.
He used meals to reveal himself to others - such as His first miracle of changing water into wine or when the eyes of the 2 disciples in Emmaus finally recognized Jesus when He became the host at their table, broke the bread and gave it to them.
By the Sea of Galilee on two different occasions Jesus fed multitudes of people as God multiplied the few loaves and fish into a meal with leftovers enough for the disciples' families. He went home and ate with tax collectors and sinners. He shared in fellowship with ordinary people over ordinary meals.
In the upper room after his resurrection, the disciples had shared a meal together before Jesus joined them there, saying "Peace be with you." Then to convince them He is truly solid and real, He asks for a piece of broiled fish and eats it in their presence. (Luke 24:42-43).
In John 21 Jesus comes along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and invites the disciples and Simon Peter who are out fishing to breakfast. It is at this meal that Jesus takes Peter back to his triple denial of his Lord and sets him free from his guilt by having him three times affirm his love for Jesus.
- Even a cup of wine carried symbolic meaning for the Jewish people. Beyond its central place in the Passover, the cup was used in the betrothal ceremony.
At a betrothal, the girl's father hands a cup of wine to the intended groom and the groom then is to offer it to the girl saying, "This is my blood given for you," the very words Jesus used of the cup during the Passover meal with the disciples. It is a picture of the groom's willingness to offer his life for her. If the girl received the cup then the couple were formally betrothed, legally married except the marriage was not consummated until the man had completed the place where they would live, usually a room built onto the father's home, and then the wedding would take place.
When Jesus said this as he handed the cup of wine to them at the meal, the disciples heard more than one message in that offered cup.
Beyond this the Holy Spirit employed the very idea of "eating together" as an image to show us the kind of fellowship into which God has invited us. It is not only to Zacchaeus that Jesus says, "I must dine at your house today," but to all who come to him.
Jesus says in the book of Revelation 3:20 to the Christian believers at Laodicea who have locked Him out of their lives by the way in which they have ceased to follow him: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me" (Revelation 3:20).
Clearly this is not a picture of the Resurrected Jesus standing at a physical door, but the door of their hearts, the door into their lives. And with this and other passages it is clear that God's desire is for the physical to picture a spiritual reality-the reality of meeting the living God in a meal and fellowshipping together.
God knows that meals are essential to our lives and relationships, so ties the very invitation to salvation and the experience of His presence in our lives to meals. As you eat and drink, remember God has invited you into relationship with Himself to eat and drink, to fellowship with Him, to be your lifelong friend.
- All this spiritual truth is found just in an ordinary meal, so it is no wonder that a meal is placed in the center of our faith since our God is a God of relationship and fellowship!
But now look at this meal before us today, this meal of communion. We read in Luke 22 verse 15 that Jesus said, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom Of God."
Here Jesus is introducing them to how He had been foreshadowed in this ancient meal and in the process forever transforms the meal. He says he wanted to eat it "before I suffer" for He came as the Lamb of God and even that night the suffering would begin. He alludes to the fact that He will not be living through the suffering, for this would be the last time he would eat this meal until it found fulfillment in the Kingdom of God.
Of course the Passover was a meal that the Jewish people had been eating together for centuries. In Exodus 12 the event first occurred when Israel was in slavery to Egypt and God came down to deliver them. The deliverance was enacted as warfare between the Living God and the gods of Egypt. Each god is defeated until the final plague, the coming of the angel of Death into Egypt who came to destroy the firstborn of all in the land, except will pass over the homes of those in the land of Goshen where Israel lived as long as they marked their homes with the blood of a lamb.
Each family or family group was to choose a lamb, kill, roast and eat it. Some of the blood was to be placed on the lintel and doorframe of their home. The marking of the blood then would be in the shape of a letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, a letter that stands for the cross. The angel would see the blood and spare them. For centuries the Jewish people had been celebrating God's deliverance without understanding all the symbols God had placed in the meal.
Until this night when Jesus, the Lamb Himself, serves the meal and tells his disciples He has eagerly desired to eat it with them before he suffered and then during the meal transforms it from the Passover to the Lord's Table, as Jesus redefines the meaning of the meal. What He did that night created a new meal, a Christian meal. He embodied in Himself all the other foods that had to be a part of the Jewish celebration, and left us simply with a cup of wine and some bread, these elements which Jesus said were to be eaten in remembrance of Him, thus proclaiming His death until He returns.
Can you imagine with me just how staggering this would have been for the disciples around that table? What a change in meaning! And for them they would also have heard a bridegroom offering the cup to the bride saying, "I am betrothing myself to you, will you be only for me?"
When you take this meal you are accepting the Lord Jesus as your husband and you are declaring yourself to be the bride receiving your Lord's betrothal of Himself to you until the day of the wedding feast.
When you take this meal you are receiving in tangible form the evidence that He really gave his life that you could live and you can receive anew the gift of forgiveness.
When you take this meal you are testifying to the fact that by giving up his Body had incorporated others into his body, as they trust in Him, and that you too are a member of His Body, the Church.
When you take this meal, you are coming to the place of grace. It is certainly not about physical nourishment, it is kind of a small meal for that, but rather, it is about spiritual nourishment. It is a place of receiving grace into your life; it is a means of receiving God's grace into our lives.
And because all this is placed in the context of a meal, any meal can become a place to remember and be reminded of the grace God has given us in Jesus Christ.
http://www.king5.com/health/stories/NW_112505HEBfamilymealsKC.105c25cd.html
http://www.emmitsburg.net/klc/deacon_charlie/2005/lets_eat.htm
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