“A Word of Encouragement” by Lisa Harper

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Last week, I got to take my daughter Missy.

Um, some of y'all know I became a mom through the miracle of adoption, and she turned 16 tomorrow.

Can hardly believe it.

But I got to take Missy, and then my nephew is here for the very first time.

This is his first gateway experience, and um it's pretty amazing.

And I mean, I already told him y'all basically walk on water as a community, so he was he was predisposed to love y'all.

But John Michael lived with us for three and a half years um when he was in college, so he's kind of nephew's son.

He's a I was gonna say nun, but that's not very positive.

Anyway, he's kind of a nephew's son, Missy, and then two of my closest friends got to go to the lake, my favorite lake in Tennessee.

It's called Tim's Ford Lake, and we spent the entire day on the lake, wake surfing, skiing, tubing where I leaked a little, um, because I'm 61 and it doesn't um belly laughing in public is usually involves a little leaking, excuse me.

But I was in a bathing suit.

We're at the lake, it's no big deal.

Um and we just had so much fun.

We had music going on the boat, and so we had 80s tunes because I love me some Bee Gees and worship songs.

And there's not much better than being on the lake and having the Bee Gees and Brandon Lake in the same song list.

It was just awesome.

And after we were waterlogged and and most of us were sunburned except for Missy, we went to the uh it's just a dive at Tim's Ford Lake.

It's called the Bluegill Grill.

And it's at a meat marina, it's not a bougie marina.

This is like for people who it is just not bougie at all.

It's really, really awesome.

And this restaurant floats, the whole thing floats.

There's bluegills everywhere, and we had fried okra, we had um fried signwinders, which are really fat French fries, we had um fried hush puppies, we had fried burgers, we had um fried catfish.

We had, I mean, this was a precursor to heart disease, is is what it was.

Uh we did have coleslaw to get our vegetable in, but there was enough mayonnaise in that whole coleslaw to like fuel a dooley truck.

I mean, it was just, it was probably the most unhealthy meal I've had, but we were there for two hours on this floating marina because this is family, friends, family.

We laughed until you knew when you laugh so hard, you're almost weak.

And then we lingered long enough to also talk about some of the hard parts in our story.

And and so there was actually, it was almost like the beginning of healing to share it in that little community.

Here's the point I'm making.

I think the best meals we share have a whole lot more to do with the company than the cuisine, it's who you're with.

And we're gonna talk about communion tonight.

And sometimes in first world Christian culture, we get all caught up with the elements of communion and we miss the main point.

Because communion for Christ followers is actually much more about uh the company than it is the cuisine, it's much more about the ministry than it is the elements.

And so, whether you're from a high church background or like me, you got a little Baptist in your DNA, so it has to be grape juice.

We tend to focus on the minors instead of majoring on the majors.

And so I want to talk about what, if you're old school, you might call the Lord's Supper.

And we're gonna look at a couple of passages and then we're gonna land in uh a story that John gives about the Lord's Supper.

He doesn't call it the Lord's Supper.

Uh, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul refer to communions.

Sometimes my seminary professors will call that the sacrament of communion.

Sacrament is just a fancy seminary word that means the outward expression of an inward grace.

That would also be water baptism.

Some of the pillars of the foundations of our faith, people would refer to as sacraments.

Sounds fancy.

Just it's an outward expression.

We can see it.

Sometimes we can experience with our other senses of what the Holy Spirit is doing internally within us.

The sacrament of communion, of celebrating the grape juice or wine, and the bread in memory of what Jesus has done for us is often called the Lord's Supper.

I want to read a couple of passages, but I want to tell y'all, those of y'all who are who are Enneagram eights and ones, you'll be interested in this.

The Lord's Supper comes from two Greek words.

The first is Kyrdiakos.

Kyrdiakos is where we get the word Lord from.

Kyrdiakos means the Lord's.

It's possessive.

And then the second word is daip non.

That's the Lord's Supper.

And what that denotes is it was the last meal Jesus celebrated around a table with his family, with the disciples.

It was the last, and that would be where daepnon comes in.

That just refers to in Greek the last meal of the day.

Sometimes they had that in the late afternoon, sometimes they had that in early evening.

If you're me, I have lots of mini daipnans because I think keto is from the devil, and I believe in small or large meals often throughout the day.

But in first century Semitic culture, they had one meal toward the end of the day, and that was the last meal.

And then because it was the Lord's supper, that that word comes from um kirios, which stands for lords.

That word is also used to describe um things that were owned by Caesar.

He was considered a lord.

So something that was cordiakos, they would use that word for Caesar was in control of the national treasury.

And so they were common words in their culture that we've turned into something kind of formal.

You know, people will use DJ voices when they talk about the Lord's Supper and say, we're celebrating the Lord's Supper.

And I'm like, well, that doesn't sound like a celebration.

That sounds stiff to me.

So I want us to get some context of how community should be really the hub of the communion wheel.

So let's look at what Matthew says about the Lord's Supper.

Again, Matt, Mark, Luke, and Paul refer to it as the Lord's Supper.

Kyrias, the Lord's Supper.

So this is Matthew 26, 26 through 29.

I'm actually going to read this off the screen, so if y'all got it on the screen.

Um, now as they were eating, Jesus took bread and after blessing it, broke it and gave it to the disciples and said, Take, eat, this is my body.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink it, all of you, for this is the blood, my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness.

Some translations say the remission of sins.

Now they're celebrating this first communion at his last supper.

Are you still with me?

During the festival of Passover.

And Passover, some of you have experienced a Passover meal, a Passover Seder.

Passover was practiced during the time of Jesus' earthly ministry by every single Jew, not just in Jerusalem, but all over the Diaspora.

Fancy word that just means where Jews lived all over the modern world.

They would come back to Jerusalem for four of the high holy festivals, including Passover.

Passover and Pentecost are how many days apart?

50.

That's where we get the pinta from.

So they didn't have a whole lot of extra coin.

And so they had to come to Jerusalem for Passover.

So they would usually stay until Pentecost because they didn't have enough money to go back home where they they lived.

They'd stay there, and table fellowship was a huge deal.

So Jesus is eating a meal in a cataluma.

We call that an upper room.

It just means it's like an ancient Airbnb, because the people who lived in Jerusalem thought we can make some bank when all these Jews, kind of our cousins, come to Jerusalem to celebrate the high holy days.

We can rent out a room and we can make some extra money when they come in town.

So Jesus and the disciples were in a cataluma, an upper room, an ancient Airbnb.

They're sitting, remember back then they didn't have tables like we have tables.

They're tables in the first century in this particular culture.

It was like if you had a picnic table and a coffee table, got hooked up on a harmony and had a baby, got married and had a baby.

I want to do that right.

It was a very low rustic table.

This would have already been in the Cataluma.

And then they didn't have chairs.

The way we sit in chairs when we eat nowadays, they had low cushions, and meals were segregated by gender.

So it's Jesus and the 12 are eating this Passover Seder together, as were people all over town.

And then he kind of flips the script on them and he says, I want you to take this wine and I want you to take this bread.

And y'all, they didn't really know what he was talking about.

They're like, okay.

They didn't, they didn't understand he was talking about the crucifixion, even though he had told them his death was imminent.

And that's obvious by the way, you know, they started throwing breadsticks at each other and fighting over who was going to sit at his right and his left.

I mean, this was this was not the most holy meal.

They didn't totally get what he was talking about when he explained communion.

And this goes on again and again.

I won't read these other passages, but you see basically that same story also in Mark, also in Luke, and then Paul refers to that in 1 Corinthians, refers to this last supper.

And then we get to John's gospel.

Now he's telling a story about the exact same gathering.

Exact same gathering of the disciples and Jesus there at Passover, just prior to the crucifixion and resurrection.

Only John tells the story differently.

In John 13, it's not framed by those words, last supper.

As a matter of fact, when he tells the story, he totally minimizes the bread and the wine.

Turn to John chapter 13.

John 13 · chapter mention

In verse 26, Jesus, it says, so when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas.

Then after he had taken the morsel, it keeps talking about morsel, that comes from a Greek word, somion.

It means a tiny petite piece of bread.

So John tells the story of the Last Supper, only he doesn't get into the bread and the wine.

He's like, those are just, those are just not that important.

What's important is the context of the meal.

And here's the context: John chapter 13, verse 1.

John 13:1

Now, before the feasts of Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of the world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son did betray him.

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper, from the date nine, rose from that meal.

He laid aside his outer garments and taking a towel, tied it around his waist, and he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him, he came to Simon Peter, who said to him, Lord, do we wash my feet?

Do you wash my feet?

Jesus answered him, What am I doing?

You do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.

Peter said to him, You shall never wash my feet.

Why did Peter say that?

Y'all can talk back.

I'm not a pastor.

Because in this culture, that was that was typically something only slaves did.

Footwashing was very common in their culture.

Why?

Because they walked everywhere they went and they didn't have paved roads.

And so when people came into your home, it was just not even highbrowed.

This isn't like a bougie Dallas thing.

This is like over by Love Field thing.

If somebody, I mean, I love those homes.

But if somebody comes into your house, you're going to, if you have money, you're going to hire somebody to sit at the door and wash their feet because their feet are going to be grimy.

If you don't have money, you're going to at the very least have a package of wet wipes.

But that's just common in their culture is to take care of your guest feet.

Only that was relegated to the lowest people in their sociodemographic.

And so Peter says, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I don't want you to wash my feet.

Jesus, you can't wash my feet.

And Jesus says, You don't understand the context of this, Pete.

If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.

Simon Peter said to him, Lord, not my feet, but also my head and my hands.

Jesus said to him, The one who is bathed does not need to wash except for his feet, but is completely clean, and you are clean, but not every one of you is talking about Judas there.

For he knew who was to betray him.

This was why he said, Not all of you are clean.

When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, Do you understand what I've done to you?

You call me teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am.

If I then, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet.

For I've given you an example that you also should do just as I have done to you.

So the context of communion is community.

It's much more we than it is me.

In America, we tend to privatize it.

I love those little cups.

I actually ordered a bunch of those off Amazon because I wanted to teach Missy what it was to practice communion on a regular basis, to remember what Jesus had done for us.

But there's something about those little cups that sometimes keeps us from realizing we're doing this as a family.

This is more we than me.

So Jesus gives them this example.

This is Dr.

Irene Fambrough, who is a dear friend of mine.

And I text her today, and I said, Um, I need to use you as a prop tonight.

And because she loves me and knows me, and we've belly laughed together and we've eaten text mech together, she said, okay, but I I don't believe that you're not gonna embarrass me.

And I said, I promise I'm not gonna embarrass you.

I hope it honors you, but I did not tell her what I was doing.

But I wanted us to have a visual, and I told her to wear sandals.

So would you please, Dr.

Fambro, put either foot in this basin?

And does anybody know where I put the soap?

Her feet are already clean.

I brought this from my hotel, so I'm not re-gifting or re-juicing it.

Um I know that you have carried a really heavy load the last couple of months.

And I know you would really, really rather be the one washing somebody else's feet than having your feet washed.

And I know you would probably rather have me poke hot bamboo under your fingernails and do this in front of your friends and your colleagues and your toe ring is very unacademic.

See this one.

Um you gotta want to go to a university where the president has a toe ring.

I'm sorry, that I bet you have tattoos that no one has seen.

Um This is a smidge awkward for you.

And you would much rather be giving than receiving your sixty-one year old.

The one who is instead of chastising those prone to wanderer disciples.

He knew that Peter was just about to get scared.

He knew that despite his protest that he would never, ever renounce the Christ, Jesus knew Peter was just about to vehemently and vulgarly betray him three times a day.

And yet he washed his feet.

He knew that Judas was just about to sell him out for a modest amount of money.

Yet the last thing he gives Judas is a communion.

And he says, Now I want you to do likewise.

I find it so significant that Jesus didn't stand up after washing those men's feet and go, All right.

I showed y'all how it's done.

I rubbed up on y'all's nasty feet.

Now I want y'all to form a line and massage mine and give me a pedicure, and it better be good.

He doesn't say that.

He says, now I want you to go wash each other's feet.

That is the context of communion.

Communion is not just about remembering what Jesus has done.

It's committing to be a little more shaped like Jesus.

It's recognizing while I was still a sinner, he washed my feet.

The king of all kings took the robe around him and wrapped around his waist, knowing when he laid down that scepter in glory that he was going to wash my nasty feet.

If he could do that for me, then surely I can listen to a neighbor who tells the same story over and over again.

Then surely I can give to somebody who's struggling in the hill country.

Surely I can have compassion towards somebody who's lost a loved one or lost their job.

Or is afraid they're gonna lose their breast.

It's about the ministry.

It's so much less about the cuisine and whether it was Perrier or a Pinot Noir.

It's about it's about the company.

He says, here's the context of communion.

I want y'all to love one another well.

I want you to be an authentic community.

I want you to be in the process of giving and receiving care and compassion.

And so if you really remember the cross, your life will be shaped differently as you celebrate what I've already done for you and as you await the parusia when I come again and claim you as bride.

I want you to be shaped like this when it comes to authentic community, the community that always comes to mind when I think of.

Authenticity and giving and receiving care and compassion is a community that I've had the undeserved privilege of spending a lot of time with over the last 15 years, and it's uh a community of women in Nashville who are in active recovery from addiction.

And most of my friends have come from TPW, the Tennessee Prison for Women.

And um I've never seen freedom like I've seen it in this community.

They don't put on DJ voices when they use church semantics like the Last Supper.

They celebrate communion.

They can't not express gratitude for what Jesus has done for us.

They just don't wear emotional spanks anymore.

I've learned so much about the pillars of our faith from these women who sometimes don't pronounce all the multisyllabic theological terms correctly.

And I was there a couple of years ago teaching a Bible study.

Or just five of us, me, four other girls, sitting in a borrowed office.

I don't even remember what I was teaching on.

It was one from one of the gospels.

But I had my Bible open, I'm teaching, and maybe 15 minutes into this Bible study, the girl to my left, who I love, her name is Melissa, same name as my daughter.

She spent six years at TPW for possession uh with intent to sell, um, lost all six of her children to the welfare system while she was incarcerated.

All six of their names are tatted in her neck in a dragon's tail.

Um, wow, big girl.

Every time I come and I'm in her presence, she grabs me and just lifts me up, which is thrilling to me.

Um I don't get lifted off my feet that often.

I need to put that in my harmony profile.

But anyway, Melissa just gets so excited she lifts me off my feet.

Well, Melissa, who's to my left, I'm teaching the Bible, she just interrupts me mid-Bible study, and she went, Ah miss having communion.

And I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I thought I just sense we're not gonna finish Bible study tonight.

And so I closed my Bible and I said, Honey, how long has it been since you've celebrated the sacrament, since you've had communion?

She said, Oh, Miss Lisa, it's been at least six years.

And I said, Well, honey, the entire time you were at TPW, Prison Fellowship, always had had chapel with communion on Sundays.

And she goes, Yes, ma'am, but I was always in solitary confinement for fighting.

And I was like, That's right.

I forgot about her anger management issues.

And I said, Well, honey, we can have communion tonight.

And she went, Oh, Miss Lisa, it's hilarious when you offend a woman who is incarcerated and struggled with addiction.

But I offended her and she said, We can't have communion.

We ain't got no preacher and we ain't got no grape juice.

And I said, Well, baby, I know that's what you're used to, but you know, according to the Bible, all these passages that give us the context of communion, they don't focus on the meal, they focus on the ministry.

So I said, in a pinch, you don't have to have the grape juice or the wine.

It's symbolic of Jesus shedding his blood for us.

You don't have to have bread or crackers.

You can have anything really to chew on because it's a reminder that he gave his body on our behalf.

I said, so I don't have, I don't have crackers and I don't have grape juice, but I can see behind your shoulders, somebody left a Pepsi in their cubicle.

We were in a borrowed office surrounded by cubicles, and somebody had, you know, about like that much left in a Pepsi bottle on their desk.

I still don't know whose Pepsi we shoplifted.

But I said, we can use that Pepsi, that'll substitute for the juice or the wine.

And I said, I've got Ricolas in my church, in my purse.

And I said, Ricolas are actually better because it takes a long time to suck them down to nothing.

So we'll think about it more than you would with a little petite cracker.

And she just was like, I mean, she was horrified.

And she said, We don't know whose Pepsi that was.

And I said, Baby, you were an IV drug user for 11 years.

Does it matter whose Pepsi that was?

And so she came around to my right line of reasoning pretty quickly.

We got the Pepsi.

And I had five cough drops.

I was so grateful I had enough that we didn't have to share a cough drop.

But I read the passage, I didn't read the passage from John, I read the passage from Mark.

Mark is our first gospel, even though he's listed as second chronologically.

That's the first literary account we have of the earthly life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

So I read the story of the Last Supper from Mark's gospel.

Then I turned to Melissa and I just handed her the Pepsi bottle and she held her hands up.

Because like so many of us, she thought, oh no, this is formal.

This is um this is something that only only a pastor can disseminate.

And I said, honey, if if you trust that every word of this is true, Jesus himself says that if we put our hope in him, all of us are ambassadors of the new covenant.

So I said, we're we're more comfortable when we have a pastor or priest, but we can celebrate this meal together and remember Jesus.

And so she reluctantly took the Pepsi from me and she unscrewed the lid.

And y'all, I want this is my favorite communion I've ever had, the privilege of being a part of.

She poured a little Pepsi in that cap.

And then she turned to Tara, the girl next to her, who lost her husband to a meth overdose while she was incarcerated.

They lost all their kids too.

And she said, Tara, this Pepsi represents the blood of Jesus that he shed because he thinks you're worth it.

And then she just handed Tara that Pepsi cap.

And it went around the circle with each of them saying that to each other until I got that Pepsi cap with a little bit of warm Pepsi.

I couldn't speak.

And then Melissa took that first cough drop and she said, Tara, this cough drop represents the body of Christ that he broke for you because he thinks you're worth it.

And by the time the fifth cough drop came to me, I not only couldn't speak, I just had tears streaming down my face.

And I thought some of my seminary professors would have a cow if they could see how informally we're celebrating the sacraments tonight.

But I did not sense that God Himself was displeased.

I sensed that God was just leaning over from glory, saying, Tonight my daughters get it a little deeper.

Tonight, my daughters believe at some level that they're worth it to me.

We're gonna celebrate communion, this uh pillar, this foundation of our belief system as Christians.

We've been doing this for over 2,000 years.

Don't miss the miracle in what for some of us has become mundane or way too formal.

As we celebrate the sacraments tonight, I wanna, I don't want to be manipulative, but I hope you'll think of two things.

One, you are worth it.

Not because of your behavior, not because of your deservedness or lack thereof, you are worth it because from the beginning before the beginning of time, God numbered your days, he knew you before you were in your mother's womb, and he said, She is wonderful, and she is perfectly made because I designed her, I wove her together.

He is my son.

I love him, they're worth it to me.

You are worth it to Jesus.

That's what he was trying to explain to these Yehos.

If you have a hard time hanging on to deep theological truisms, so did they.

And he chose them to spread the gospel.

You don't have to know all the multisyllabic theological terms.

What you have to know is what the blind men knew in the gospels.

They tried to trip them up, the Pharisees did, by asking them, what's your theology?

And he said, I don't know.

I don't know what you're talking about.

All I know is I was blind, I met Jesus, now I can see.

That really is the posture of communion.

It starts with humility and then it is sustained by gratitude.

And it's done in the context of community.

You are worth it to Jesus, and so is your neighbor.

So as we celebrate this communion, can I ask you to just be allowing Holy Spirit to let this question permeate your mind and your heart?

Who in your community needs their feet washed?

Maybe literally.

Who in your story needs their feet washed?

Who needs to be heard?

Who needs to be hugged?

Let's do this as family.

Let's not do this as religious people.

Let's do this as messy people who the Messiah said, you're worth it to me.

You're worth it to me.

You're worth it to me.

I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna go into this family meal.

Those of you at the online family campuses, um, after I pray, would y'all just celebrate this um really as honestly and as much like a family as you can?

This is not gonna be formal.

I wish we had Pepsi.

Um, gentlemen, forgive me for being so um, I know sometimes I'm a little too demonstrative for y'all.

But can I ask y'all to just reach out and touch that saint next to you?

They are family, whether you've recognized it or not.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, King Jesus.

Pray that you would um disrupt us tonight, that we would recognize in a fresh way the miracle that you got down on your knees and you washed their feet.

Knowing Peter was going to betray you, knowing Judas was just about to sell you out, you still washed their feet and you served them communion even though they didn't get it.

Oh Lord Jesus, thank you, thank you, thank you for the grace that we live on this side of the cross, that we can look back through this love story, and we can even understand more than they could because we see what you did.

We see how you stretched out your arms on that tree and said they're worth it, they're worth it, they're worth it to me.

Father, it is finished.

I've paid the price.

I love them so much that I didn't just wash their feet, I shed my blood so that all of them would be washed and be made clean.

So, Jesus, we pray that as we celebrate these sacraments as a family, oh Lord, would you just quicken our gratitude that we would remember in a fresh way what you chose to do for us, even though most days we don't feel remotely worth it?

Lord, would you give us fresh eyes for the saints that we rub shoulders with so we would recognize he says they're worth it too?

And Lord, would you break our hearts for what breaks yours?

May we be people who are quick to get on our knees and pick up a wet towel and wash the weary feet of saints around us.

We love you, Jesus.

We cannot make it by ourselves.

We are, we will always be grateful and indebted to what you've done and continue to do on our behalf.

We love you, we love you.

Knit us closer together as a family of faith, Jesus.

Amen.

Thanks for joining us today.

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We hope you have a great week.