Beyond the Bread: Communion as Our Life’s Purpose | Cabe Matthews

Hello, family, and welcome to Kingwood Methodist. In John 4.23,

Jesus states that a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers

will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of

worshipers the Father seeks.

As we gather at church and open God's Word, we are not just coming together

for the sake of gathering, but also to learn the truth of God and how we can

grow to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength.

As we continually surrender our lives to the Word of God by the power of the

Holy Spirit, we become the type of worshipers our Heavenly Father seeks. Let's dive in together.

Once again, good morning, Vine family. If I don't intervene,

I feel like this would just like carry on through lunchtime.

Which is great. I love the, I love, this is music to my ears here.

So this is the moment in our service where we release children to go to children's church.

If you're between kindergarten and second grade, I see Miss Whitney back there

and she is ready to go and take you back to go be a part of that.

As we're kind of working that out, figuring that out, the rest of us,

let's bow our heads and pray.

Gracious and merciful God, pour out your Holy Spirit on us. God,

that as we open up your scriptures, God, we ask that you would encounter us,

that you would meet us right where we are at.

God, as we open up your scriptures, we ask that you would open us up,

open us up to hear, to receive, to be moved by, to be transformed in just whatever

ways you would have for us this morning.

God, we ask this in the name of your son, Jesus, and in the power of your spirit.

Amen. So we are kind of between sermon series here at Kingwood Methodist Church.

We just finished an eight-week series looking at different marks of discipleship,

eight different marks of discipleship, and we're going to start a new thing next week.

So today we kind of have an interlude. We kind of had a week off.

And so we're taking advantage of this opportunity to kind of lean into a particular topic.

And hey, it happens to be World Communion Sunday.

And even though in my more cynical moments, I might call that a made-up holiday.

It is, I mean, in my less cynical moments, I'd acknowledge, they sort of all are, right?

Some of them all are. Somebody made them up. But 1936, we started doing the

first Sunday of October as World Communion Sunday.

And I love communion and I love the world. And so this is great.

Let's just let's embrace it.

So so I'm excited to kind of to kind of focus on on what is going on here.

Really, in a way, though, what we're going to focus on is not what goes on right here.

But what it's sort of pointing to.

We're going to kind of look beyond this table to sort of what it is,

what it's really kind of gesturing toward, what this means, what we're supposed

to be up to here in this moment.

Because in a really real way, what I want to say is the purpose of life,

the purpose, the meaning, the significance of human existence is wrapped up in communion.

The reason why you're here, not just the reason why you're here,

but the reason why you're here has to do with communion.

And again, not a bit of bread and a little bit of grape juice.

The reason why we're here has to do communion. By that, I mean communion with,

mainly with, especially with God, and also communion with one another.

Communion is related to the word community. It's related to the word communal.

It's related to the word common, commonality, as in we have a lot in common.

Communion, it's about relationship.

Communion, it's about connection, but it's a good bit more than relationship.

It's a good bit deeper than connection.

It suggests a kind of depth, a kind of intimacy of connection and of relationship

that's just a little bit more than what we normally,

maybe a lot bit more than what we normally mean by those words.

So we want to, we're here as human people.

We exist for communion with God, for connection at a deep level with the living God.

And that's not just, that is why we're here in a big picture way.

That's why we exist as human creatures.

But it's also why we're here in this room this morning or joining online. Hi.

This is why we're here to connect.

We're here to relate to.

We're here to experience communion with the living God in the first place,

but also with one another, our brothers and sisters in Christ, right?

This is what we're about.

And this is why we gather around a table with where we'll all in a little bit

eat a bit of bread and a bit of grape juice from this table.

Because when it comes to relationships, when it comes to investing in relationships,

when it comes to building relationships or deepening relationships,

we tend to do that as human beings.

We tend to do that around food.

Somebody's ready for lunch man,

But it's true, right? We do this around food. When I, the day I met my wife, we hit it off.

There was a spark. There was a connection. I'm getting a, I'm getting a kind

of a like, maybe a little too reluctant.

But like, but there was enough of a connection there to where she was,

she and I went out to dinner right that night.

And, and the rest is history. And probably I can't think of any exceptions.

There's, there might be a few exceptions to this. but probably every time that

we ever hung out after that until our wedding day, which was some years later, we probably had a meal.

If not every time, it probably wasn't every time, but there might've been a

few exceptions, but almost every time, I'm sure almost every time we hung out

between then and the day we got married a few years later,

there was at least one meal that we shared together. This is something that we do, right?

And then when we got married, Guess what? There was food.

We had a food truck. We had a cake. It was delicious and it was not good for you. It was awesome.

It was great. And then you know what? Like when we celebrate big moments,

we celebrate big markers, whether it's a wedding anniversary or a birthday.

When we found out that our first child was going to be a little girl,

I put on a pink shirt and we went out to dinner, right? That's what we do, right?

We celebrate. We build relationships.

We experience communion, community around food and around shared food from child's

birthdays to getting together with in-laws, to getting together with my family,

to getting together with good friends.

We do this. We do this around food.

And this is just a basic, this is a human thing that we do. And so it makes

sense for us as humans when we gather to experience communion with our God and with each other.

We do it around a table with, yes, a bit of food on it.

With that all kind of in the background, let's turn in our Bibles to 1 Corinthians.

We're going to be in 1 Corinthians 11 today. If you've got a Bible, you've got a Bible app.

You can join me over there. 1 Corinthians 11. I'm going to start in verse 20,

but before I actually start, I'm just going to give you a little bit of background

so you have a little bit of time to frantically flip over there.

1 Corinthians is a letter. It's a letter written by a man named Paul to a group

of Christians, to a church, that he started in the city of Corinth,

in the Greek city of Corinth.

And he wrote this just shy of 2000 years ago.

This is within the first generation or so after Jesus died and rose again,

ascended into heaven, left his Holy Spirit.

So this is very, very early Christianity. This is very, very early church.

And so this is what Paul, he's writing to encourage them.

But in the case of 1 Corinthians, these, he's mostly writing to challenge them,

to correct them, to call them something more, and at times it feels like to angrily yell at them.

1 Corinthians is not Paul's angriest letter. That would be probably Galatians,

but it's closer to that tone than it is to Paul's friendliest letter.

So with that in mind, we're going to hear Paul yell at them a little bit.

So 1 Corinthians 11, starting in verse 20, it goes like this.

He says, So then when you come together, it is not the Lord's supper you eat.

For when you're eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers.

As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk.

Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God

by humiliating those who have nothing?

What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you?

Certainly not in this matter. Did I capture the vitriol there?

Did I get it okay? Did I do that? Do you feel a little yelled at?

I want you to get your money's worth here. This is good.

So this is what Paul is doing in 1 Corinthians. So there are some strange things

going on in the church in Corinth.

I almost called it 1 Corinthians, but that's not right. There's some strange

things happening in the church in Corinth in Paul's day, which we're gonna talk about in just a minute.

But first, just let's set the stage a little bit. Let's imagine what these early

Christian gatherings would have been like.

They didn't gather in a room with 100 plus people.

They didn't gather in big groups.

They tended to gather more in spaces that would have felt more like to us like

living rooms. They gathered in personal homes.

And then when they gathered, they gathered around not just a bit of bread and a bit of grape juice,

but they gathered around a full meal, a full a full complete meal like that

included at some point in a special moment that would have been highlighted

sharing a bit of bread and a bit of,

fermented grape juice. So this is one kind of picture of what it looked like.

A New Testament, British Methodist New Testament scholar, C.K.

Barrett, who was kind of active and kind of at the peak of his career,

maybe a generation or two ago, he preached a sermon once on, I think, this passage.

And he describes kind of the background like this.

Again, this is from a sermon delivered in a church setting in England.

He says, this is what the Lord's Supper was like in Corinth,

and in many places where Christianity began.

We are having a simple sort of service today, but even so, we shall not be doing

what I should really like to do.

I should like to have been able to say, on July 25th, we shall meet,

not at 10.30, but at 12.30, and we shall have the Sunday roast beef and the

Yorkshire pudding on the premises.

That's the most British that I've said in at least a week. I don't know.

And we shall talk together about our joys and our problems as Christians and

our church members, and how we say our prayers and how we can possibly pay for the roof.

Then a dozen people will give us bits of Christian truth, and we will pray together.

Then I or some better person will say, do you remember what Jesus did?

We'll do it in remembrance of him. A remembrance that means faith and loyalty

and service and obedience.

So what they would do is they would gather around.

I don't think they had the Sunday roast beef and the Yorkshire pudding in Corinth 2,000 years ago.

So I don't know exactly what they would have had, but I'll tell you,

if we were going to do it, we would probably have smoked brisket and banana

pudding would be my guess.

Chocolate pudding would be okay. I could go along with that.

But so they gathered together for a full meal. But what happened when this church

gathered, they did something really odd.

They did something that sort of subverted the whole purpose.

The whole meaning behind the whole thing.

Remember, the point is communion. The point is connection. The point is deepening

relationship with God and with each other.

But in Corinth, what seems to have been taking place is some of the folks who

could get there a little early, which would generally have been the more well-to-do

folks in the community, of which there would have been at least a few, apparently.

They got there early, and they basically ate up all the food and drank up all the wine.

So then later on that Sunday, late afternoon, evening, when the folks got off

work who didn't quite have the same level of leisure when they got there,

there was nothing left to eat.

So on the scale of like communion to complete perversion of communion,

where does this land? Right.

Right. So like this is this is not a good look. This is this is kind of doing

violence to the whole purpose of the thing. It's offensive.

Can you imagine like showing up for dinner at somebody's house?

They invited you over and like, oh gosh, we just finished dinner.

Let me see if I have any leftovers for you. You know, like, oh gosh,

we have, we had some spaghetti last night.

Maybe you can, you know, like, can you imagine, right? That would be,

that would be like, would that feel like we're deepening the relationship here?

Would this feel like a good, a good, would this feel like a good vibe here for

dinner and for, you know, wouldn't feel particularly honoring,

would it? Wouldn't So this is what's going on in Corinth.

What they're doing is just doing violence to the whole idea of what they're

supposed to be doing, which is connecting with Jesus, with the Lord,

with God, and with one another.

And there's something about, Paul seems really strongly, I mean,

really strongly, you could hear it, to believe that there's something about

when we do violence to that connection to each other, we're really doing violence

to our connection to God, too.

So where does he go from here? He just yelled at them for doing this thing that

is kind of ridiculous. Pardon me, I kind of think they deserve to be yelled at.

So Paul goes from there. Where does he take it from that? Am I going to praise you? Shall I praise you?

I certainly not in this matter, he says. Where does he go from there?

How is he going to correct this? How is he going to bring this back home?

How is he going to try to reroute them back in their purpose and what this is

all supposed to be about?

That's the context where he launches into this, which is maybe some words that

you've heard similar versions of before.

He says this, he says, for I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.

The Lord Jesus, on the night 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, after supper,

he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me.

So you have these people gathering together. and in Paul's reading of the situation,

they aren't sharing the Lord's Supper. They're not sharing the Lord's Supper.

They're sharing their own private suppers is the way he puts it.

And he says, when you gather together, you're not eating the Lord's Supper.

You're doing your own thing.

You aren't interested in what God's interested in. You're not interested in

communion with God or with each other.

You're interested in doing your own thing. You're interested in filling your

own belly. You're interested in satisfying your own desire.

You're interested in the thing that you want, not the thing that God wants,

not the thing that God drew you here together for.

So how he corrects that is by rerouting that in the Lord's Supper.

And in the fact that we're supposed to do this in remembrance of Jesus.

That this meal represents Jesus giving something to us.

And so when we make it all about taking what we think is ours or what we want.

We're sort of missing the whole spirit of the thing, aren't we?

So Paul says, you're not gathering for the Lord's Supper when you gather for

worship and you behave in that kind of way.

You're gathering for your own private suppers.

And then he tries to reroute it in Jesus and what Jesus is about and what Jesus gave.

And then where does he go? Where does he go from there? One more,

just three more verses here.

He says, for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup,

you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So then whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy

manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and the blood of the Lord.

I'm just going to skip down a little bit to verse 33.

He says, so then my brothers and sisters, when you gather to eat,

you should all eat together.

There's something about communion right

that obviously I mean like it seems like obviously we're

calling it communion the thing is about communion

it's about community it's about how holding things in common there's something

about communion that just doesn't work when we when we make it about us there's

something about really communion is like let's just zoom out and talk about

all worship something about worship that just doesn't work when we do it for

ourselves when we do it and we make it about us,

when we do it and we allow these different little distractions to come into it.

Paul has, in the case of the Corinthians, Paul has kind of three things,

at least, that he points out that he's accusing them of.

If I can use that heavy-handed language. His language is pretty heavy-handed,

so I feel okay being a little heavy-handed here.

He says, when they gather together, they're not doing the Lord's Supper,

they're doing their own private stuff. They're doing their own thing.

And when they're doing that, when they engage in worship in a way that's self-serving,

when they engage in worship in a way that says, hey, look at me,

when they engage in worship that divides the body.

When they gather for worship in a way that does violence to communion within

the church, they're doing three things. Paul says they're despising the church.

He says they're shaming the poor. I think if not the poor, we'd be shaming whoever

it is that we're, we're dividing or excluding or whatever.

We're despising the church. We're shaming the poor. And we are,

and this one's the, my least favorite one.

We're guilty of Christ's blood. When we make worship about us,

we're guilty of Christ's.

Right? I mean, at some level, of course, we have to be honest,

we all are, right? We're all guilty of Christ's blood, right? That's just the truth.

Like, that happened because of us, because of who we are, and because of our

shortcomings as human beings, and Jesus did that. But the thing is, Jesus did that.

Jesus did that. He paid that price to buy something.

What did he buy with that? He bought communion. He bought community.

He bought deep connection. He bought the possibility for relationship with you.

So when you violate that communion, when you violate those relationships in

the church, you're violating that relationship with God, which means you're,

I mean, it's as if Christ's death means nothing to you is what Paul's saying.

Strong words, but Paul at least seems to think this is pretty serious.

So if you don't like this message, you can just take it up with him.

So, okay, just to kind of bring this a little bit, I mean, only a little bit

more contemporary, and then we'll kind of bring it all the way to the present day.

Going back about 100 plus years ago, do you know how churches funded their ministry

budgets a century plus ago?

This like fascinates me. I heard like a rumor about this, but then I finally

like looked it up the other day this week and just like it blows my mind.

It just feels like Paul would have his hair on fire if you heard on this.

Like he wouldn't be light, like it would just be on fire. I don't know how,

but his hair would just be on fire.

So the way that churches funded their ministry budgets and like kept the lights

on or whatever 100 plus years ago is by a practice that was called pew rentals,

which is just exactly what it sounds like.

Pews as in the benches that people sit on in sanctuaries. Have you heard about this?

And rentals as in you pay a monthly fee to be able to sit in one of the good ones, right?

So what you'd have is basically you would pay more for the for the more visible like good seats.

You know, I got to confess to you, part of me finds this appealing.

I would love to, like, have people sitting here every week and just,

like, I feel like we set up these chairs just to give people permission to sit

on the third row. You know what I'm saying?

So, like, so part of me thinks, like, maybe if we charge y'all money for them,

maybe we'd have, like, a different—but no, of course we're not going to do that.

But, like, but the idea was, like, you could stand in the back of one of these

sanctuaries and you could look and you could just—you could see the socioeconomic

makeup of the congregation played out right in front of you.

Right? You can see, okay, they're sitting there. So they probably are connected

with the mayor and his family or something.

They're sitting there. So they're probably, you know, they're doing okay.

They're not the wealthiest, but they're doing okay.

And they're sitting there. So they, you know, they're, they're always,

they're always free seats in the back.

And you didn't want to be one of the families that had to sit in the,

you know what I mean? Like, isn't that just bonkers? Like, especially in light of this passage, right?

Doing violence to the church community by just dividing. And of course,

of course, I mean, And we could bring up other examples of this, right?

Where like where the church was literally divided and people sat based on race

or by gender or by all kinds of other different.

I mean, there's other sorts of examples of this kind of dynamic,

but it kind of just has led me to wonder.

It has led me to wonder to what

extent we do that today that kind of thing what are

the things that we're doing what are the ways that we as a

church here or the ways that we as a capital c church or whatever how are we

dividing the body on sunday mornings and so i just want to invite us all to

wrestle with that and to worry a little bit about that because i gotta be honest

with you i'm a little worried about it myself. How do we divide the church?

How are you, I mean, is there something you might wear on a Sunday morning that

might be a distraction or might cause some division?

Is there some way that you might behave or not behave that might cause some

kind of distraction or sense of division?

Like, who are you willing to talk to and not talk to?

Who are you willing, who do you want to sit next to? Who do you want to definitely not sit next to?

You know what I'm saying? Like, is there any of that going on here or something

else that might divide us in a different way?

Something else that might provide a barrier between us and communion,

communion again with God, communion with each other, which is again,

the whole reason why we're here and the whole reason why we're here.

I want to paint a quick picture of just one time where I experienced something

of that sort of communion.

That I think Paul is talking about here in the context of a worship service.

It wasn't in a traditional sanctuary.

It was in a chapel, in a prison. I know a lot of folks here at KMC are really

actively involved in Kairos prison ministries.

And so probably a lot of you are familiar with it, but I have a really just

strong, I've never been a part of a Kairos weekend myself, but I've been a part

of the youth version, which is, it goes under a different name and it's in,

you know, like youth facilities.

But anyway, so these are just weekend retreats for incarcerated,

in this case it was men, but they do them in women's prisons as well,

where they just sort of show and tell these men or women about Jesus and his love for a long weekend.

And just shower them with grace, and they eat really good food,

which they really appreciate, and they just get loved on, really, for a long weekend.

And I had an opportunity to go to a closing ceremony, a closing worship service

for one of these several years ago.

And it was just really moving. It was really, it was really profound.

Because I remember at one point we were singing worship songs.

At one point we, it was sort of cheesy, but like we put our arms around each

other's shoulders and we were just all kind of locked together.

All these men, grown men in this room.

And we're white and black and Hispanic and we're all different socioeconomic backgrounds.

And there's probably one or more murderers in the room.

I really don't know. you know there's former drug

dealers all kinds of different people right here but we

all know we're sinners saved by grace we

all know that Jesus loves us and

we were just singing together and we were singing kind of an older song to me

like we were singing we are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord you guys

know that song we are one in the spirit we are we're just swaying and we're singing this song.

And of course, some of you, if you know the song, you know that that's,

and they'll know we're Christians by our love.

They'll know we're Christians by our love. And so I just want us to,

I just want us to think about how we're coming off.

Do they know we're Christians by our love? Or do they know we're Christians

by something else that we probably shouldn't be known by?

What are the things, what are the ways that we divide?

Sometimes I know the church gets divided by worship style or by language,

and that maybe has some practical necessity, good, bad, or indifferent.

I mean, we're also divided by other kind of more complicated things, right?

Race, economics, culture, politics.

And I guess, I guess I just want us to wrestle with that a little bit.

I want us to just worry about that a little bit and just wonder how,

how Jesus might call us to be

more faithful, how Jesus might call us to be more fully one in the spirit,

more really one in the Lord, how we can be the church in such a way that when

they look at us, they know we're Christians by our love. By our heads, pray with me.

Gracious and merciful God, pour out your spirit on us.

God, help us to be a church that isn't about our own personal suppers,

isn't about our thing and what we want,

and what we like and our preference and our opinion.

I'd help us to be a people who struggle our way toward getting over as many

of those things as we possibly can so that we can be about you and about what

you want and about your opinions.

God, forgive us, forgive us where we fail at this. As I know we do,

I'm sure we do in ways that I don't even know or realize.

I'm sure I do in ways that I don't even know and realize.

But God, I guess just help us to be a church, help us to be a church where people

can come, whatever people can come.

And if they're, at least if they're open to it, at least if their hearts are

open to you, God, that they would be able to find and to encounter real communion,

real communion with you.

And communion with the church family that genuinely accepts them and loves them.

Head, pour out your spirit on us. Help us to be your church, truly.

Help them to know that we're Christians by our love.

In the name of your son, Jesus, and the power of your spirit, I pray. Amen.