The Last Supper

Well, good morning. My name is Steve Treikler. I'm one of the pastors here at Hope Community Church. Particularly, I helped form or start Hope Community Church downtown 30 years ago, and I'll talk more about that at the end of the service. It's pretty exciting. I wanted to share something with you. It really doesn't kind of fit here, but I'm going to do it anyway. Anyway, that is, we have been part of a group, it's a network of churches called Acts 29 for, since 2007. And what Acts 29 is, is a group of churches around the country, now around the world, that are helping to start new churches that love Jesus, have good, solid biblical theology, but also really have a passion to see new people come to faith in Christ and also to keep starting churches around the world. Well, they got wind of Our latest church plant or our latest location in last September. And so if you're brand new to Hope, maybe you don't know this, but we have helped start now 12 different churches in our directly and many more indirectly. But in September, we started our location in Shoreview at the Chippewa Middle School. And so they sent out a videographer and it actually made us look pretty good so uh this is pastor i'm in the video and that's and i'm not showing it because of that well maybe i'm no i'm not the uh but it's uh pastor paul stiver and his wife allison and this is about uh hope community church north lakes do you mind doing that I'm Steve Treichler. I'm the founding and still the senior pastor of Hope Community Church, which now has four locations. And the idea was to reach people like myself, because I knew there was a lot of us out there who really didn't engage with the culture of Christianity, but had kind of engaged with the culture of religion. My name is Paul Stiver. I have the joy of being the lead pastor of Hope Community Church, North Lakes. My story is kind of a wild one. I didn't expect to be here. I wasn't planning my life to turn out this way. I remember I was 17. I was sitting out in front of my dorm and I looked up to the sky and I said, God, if you exist, show me. And nothing happened. And so I became an atheist at that point. I was actually an atheist for about 10 years, just looking for life in the things of this world, whether it was career, profession, partying, you name it. All those things let me down. Paul came along here in 2014, and he came to us pretty rough around the edges. He was an atheist, but he had a lady in his life who thought otherwise of him, and so drug him to church by his teeth. I heard preaching from Pastor Steve, and he was walking through this list of religion versus the gospel. Religion being I do things, and then God has to accept me. Whereas the gospel says God accepts you, and then you actually respond to him, but you're accepted by Jesus because of his finished work. It blew my mind that the gospel would work that way. It was March 1st of 2015, and it was a baptism Sunday. People were getting baptized, and I wrote in my notebook, today I give my life to Jesus Christ. Right after that, God really started working on my life. The next year, I became an intern here, and I was just going to explore what ministry had. Paul then, he's one of those guys that when he came to faith, he just went all in. And I was like, I think I might want to pursue church planting. In 2000, we started an internship program that we call Leadership Development Institute. Many of our church planters have been raised right up from this church. We actually have people that come to this church with the expectation that they're going to go with our next church plant. So we've had the chance over the last 30 years now to start 12 different churches. We just want to see a difference. We want to see the Twin Cities changed for Christ. I really felt God using my story, my journey, and my gifts in ministry. So I did two more years of the internship and then waited until we were going to plant the church. For years we'd always known that we wanted to plant a church. We'd been in St. Paul for a number of years when we first got married and it just wasn't working. It wasn't working. In that waiting time we had our first son Chase and then we had our second son Brooks. When Brooks was two months old about nine weeks he was diagnosed with Down syndrome. We just started going through the grieving process of like our life just looks different than we thought it was, and we knew we needed to move to a spot where we had a school district that would really serve him well. Where can we go to get him the best care? And we found the school district of Moundsview had really great care, so we started looking for homes out in Moundsview, Shoreview area. And then God moved and got us into our house in Shoreview. So he's totally rewriting our story. We didn't expect to be out in the suburbs, and all of a sudden now we're in the suburbs. He ended up moving to a different location, and it's kind of amazing that that happened because that's our first church plant that's more in a suburb area. I think it's really easy to assume in the suburbs that people have life all figured out and things are going really well. I'm a fan of my new water bottle. You're a fan of your new water bottle? That's awesome, too. Like seeing that there's a hunger and a need for gospel-centered churches, even in the suburbs. And God starts bringing people from all around the suburbs that say, we want to be a part of something. We haven't found a church like Hope out here. We want to be a part of building something. From that, God made a core team that really got us going. And Allison loves to talk about that we're going to reach people with the gospel. And a big reason why we're there is because of Brooks. We meet in Chippewa Middle School every Sunday we pull our trailer, up we get to the building at 8 o'clock we unload it in about 10 minutes with just an incredible team and then we set up and worship God. We're coming up on one year. It's been so cool to watch God bring that first wave of people that started to launch this thing. And now he's added a second and a third wave of people who are bought in on our vision to help more people in the north suburbs start and strengthen a relationship with Jesus Christ. It's been so awesome to be a part of a network that is invested in planting churches. We joined Acts 29 in 2007, primarily because we wanted to see an organization that was high on theology, but also really high on mission and church planting. That was big. It's hard to find that, actually. So when my wife and I felt ready to plant a church, one of the things we got to do was go out and be assessed by Acts 29. And this was a great experience because you get to be around seasoned leaders, people that have planted churches that know ministry, that understand how the church works and how the gospel moves forward in the world. And then they get to give us feedback, support us, encourage us, give us growth areas. Assessment was such a great process for us to go through and continue to learn and develop as leaders. Being a part of a network like Acts 29 that is raising up leaders, that is sending out those leaders to start new churches, that's really what is the blueprint for us at Hope North Lakes. How can we continue that church planting culture? How can we find new leaders to raise up and send out and start new churches. And just every Sunday watching kids just run around has been really cool and just thinking about like, what does that next generation of people that grew up in the church and know and love Jesus, what that impact will be? There are more people like me out there than we realize. And so we keep that gospel going forward. We find those people and God uses them to transform lives with his gospel. Every time I watch it, Screen gets a little blurry at the end, you know? I don't know, I'm choked up again, but I share that with you for a few reasons. One, and we have a great videographer here, Dan, but he doesn't have time to do something like that. They put a lot of time and effort. They flew a guy out here to do that for us, or for, it's for Acts 29 as well. They'll use it for their promotional videos and different things. But it's, I also did it because I want you all, you all probably won't get a chance to go up to North Lakes. And maybe you will, maybe you won't. And I get the privilege as this is part of my job to go to all these new churches and to preach in them and to be there and to see them go. And it's a blessing. What you all get to see time and time and time and time again is your friends leaving to start these new churches. And the downtown location has paid a significant price. And just thanks for that. We'll celebrate that even more next week when we look at our 30th anniversary and kind of celebrating church planting around the world. Okay. We're going this week to a very iconic passage in the Gospel of Mark. Probably, arguably, one of the most famous biblical portraits ever is The Last Supper, painted by Leonardo da Vinci. You know, you think it's not a painting. It's in a building. It's in a convent in Milan, Italy. And in fact, they didn't really know what they had when they had a da Vinci painting. So somewhere in there, they just decided, well, this would be a good place for a doorway. And they ruined part of the painting. You see the doorway at the bottom of the painting there. And so they didn't really know how iconic this would become. Now, one of the things about da Vinci's famous portrait here is there's 13 of them at the table and they're all on the one side, right? Now, that wasn't originally how, that's not how it worked. Nobody ever does that. How many times you had your whole family over for Thanksgiving and you all eat on one side of the table, you know? It was probably more something like this. And painters up until around that time, they struggled with, which disciples do we just sew the back of their head? And so it was before da Vinci. Da Vinci did not come up with the idea. A guy 50 years earlier in another church building. And this was very popular because in those days, it wasn't a literate crowd. And so they would have paintings all over the place so you could see the biblical events. You know, you had to have the Bible read to you. This is even before the printing press came on the scene. And so this guy, Andrea del Castigno, he comes up with the idea of putting them all on the one side. And of course, that leads to our famous Last Supper portrait here. It's a little hard to see what they're eating there, but that's buckets of KFC. So anyway... That's just modernizing it just a wee bit. So we are back in the gospel of Mark. We've been here now. We came back after our Jesus First series. And this week we are going into what I would say is the pivotal event. I would even say that it's the point of no return. It's when the last supper happens, this final week of Jesus, you get now where things are set in motion and it it it takes off and it's going to lead right to uh good friday the crucifixion of christ and the resurrection of christ so uh We're i'm going to walk through the passage we're not going to read it ahead of time i i took that time to show paul's video i'm just going to walk you through the passage we're looking at luke chapter 14 12 to 26 if you want to if you got a bible you can follow along it'll all be on the screen as well so Verse 12. On the first day of the festival of unleavened bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus' disciples asked him, where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover? Okay, so now just a couple things here. First off, let's just remember where we are in the account. Pastor Cor read, preached on the last, or the first 11 verses of this chapter. And it says here that they were, Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were only two days away. And the chief priests and the teachers of the law were scheming to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him. But not during the festival, they said, or the people may riot. Okay, so I'll show you a little thing here. This happens on Wednesday. Our account now is gonna move to Thursday. And Passover is gonna be Friday on this particular, but they would sacrifice the Passover lamb the day before. Okay, and so this now Wednesday before Passover, which is a huge event in the Jewish community, which remembers the Exodus story and the last plague was The killing of every firstborn unless you put blood of lamb over the doorway. Then you were passed over. Your household was passed over. And so they celebrated this and it was a big deal, okay? So now these religious leaders from last week, they're thinking about how can we kill Jesus? But we can't do it now. We gotta wait till all these people leave because this would be crazy. Well, in the midst of that, then this woman, while they're in this house in Bethany, this woman comes and she breaks a very expensive jar of perfume And she pours it all over Jesus' head, which means it gets into his hair and into his beard and it would just into his clothes and everything. And people rebuke her. What are you doing? That's expensive. You could have, that was almost a year's worth of wages. You could have used that money for a variety of things. You could have paid, you could have helped the poor, all these kinds of things. And Jesus says, hey, leave her alone. You're always gonna have the poor with you. In other words, that if she had sold this a year's wages, that's not gonna solve the issue of poverty. But what she just did here is a beautiful thing. And she was preparing me for my burial. Okay, and then it says that Judas Iscariot, little foreshadowing into our passage today, one of the 12 went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. They were delighted to hear this and promised to give him money. So he watched for an opportunity to hand him over, okay? And so Mark, and this is a, boy, I tell you what, this Mark didn't used to be an all my favorite gospel. It's my second favorite. Now, John is still my very favorite. Sorry, Mark. But Mark is, the way he puts this stuff together is incredible. He gives an account, then he gives a teaching, and then there's another, usually like some event happens, and then Jesus teaches or something, and then there's another event, or the opposite way, Jesus says something, there's an event and then they says something else. It all kind of fits together. It's a sandwich and the sandwich is the religious leaders wanna kill Jesus. Judas wants to betray Jesus, but in the middle, the meat, the thing you're supposed to really chew on, the impossible burger for everybody who's a vegan here, it is this costly gift of lavishness to prepare Jesus for burial. Now, as Kor was preaching this last week, a thought occurred to me. So this is Wednesday. Jesus is going to go to the, on Thursday, is going to go to the Last Supper. And then that evening, then, he's going to get arrested. Okay, spoiler if you don't know. Sorry. But anyway, he's going to get arrested. And then Friday, he's going to be put on, Friday night, Friday into the morning, he's going to be put on trial. And then Friday, he's going to be crucified. Now think about this, she had poured all this into his hair, onto his clothes. Chances are, he hasn't necessarily bathed between them, he hasn't changed clothes. Recently, I just changed, I used some, I put product in my beard. I've put product in my hair once in my life. It was for your wedding. I did. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I put hair, I put hairspray in my hair. I was there, girl. Why are we arguing about this? I put hairspray in my hair and that's when, hairspray. I got a lot of hairspray. And Nathan, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, does this magic trick where this big ball of flame is right in front of me. You know how this, wow, could have just been all gone, girlfriend. I don't think you did it. Oh, my goodness. Why are we doing this? We were happy that you didn't do it because you were thankful that you hadn't done that. Woman, where is my super suit? I need my super suit. No. If you were here last week, that makes sense. We can argue later. You're wrong. But you might actually be right. You might actually be right, yeah. Anyway, I'm preaching. Steve's my name. What are we doing here? Well, think about this now. I recently changed, I got a new beard oil that I put in my beard. And Carol loves the smell, but she says it's a little bit strong. And it lingers for days. Like, I can't, it just lingers for days. Jesus, throughout the rest of his time on this earth, smelled of this perfume. When he was getting arrested, he could smell the perfume. When he was being tried, he smelled this perfume. When he was getting beaten, he smelled the perfume. When he was on the cross, that perfume was still there. It's kind of a beautiful thing to think about. This moves into our passage continue. Oh, I'm sorry. So you have, this is where, it's a little hard to see there, but think of the days of the Holy Week. We're moving into Thursday today, which is often called Maundy Thursday. Day. Monde means it's from a Latin word. Anybody? I had to look it up this morning. I don't even know. Anybody? It means command, which is weird, but it's the command where Jesus told his disciples in the Gospel of John, love one another as I have loved you. And so they call it that. Now, Let me give you a little historical background on what's taking place here. On the eve of Passover, and in the Jewish month, this would have been the 14th of the month of Nisan, work normally ceased at noon, and the ritual slaughter of the Passover lambs began around three o'clock as the heads of the household brought their animals to the temple. The priests sprinkled the blood against the base of the altar and offered the fat on the altar. The animals were dressed with the legs unbroken and the head still attached to the carcass and returned to the family, to the worshipers. Because of the great number of people, the slaughter had to be separated from the place of eating. The only stipulation was that the lamb had to be eaten in Jerusalem, Whose borders were expanded to accommodate the crowds. Worshipers returned to their homes or wherever they could find a nook or cranny to spit, that means put over like a stick or something, cook the lamb on a stick for the late evening meal. This took place in the evening after sunset on the 15th. Now, one of the complicated things is we have days different than the Jewish people. In fact, most ancient people count a day ended when the sun went down. Then it began the new day. Okay, so for six o'clock, you know, or whatever time, the sun would go down. Sometimes you see that in scripture, how the way they count days is like, what's going on? It's because of that, which strictly speak was the first day of unleavened bread. Okay, back to our account. Where do you want us to prepare this meal? So he sent two of his disciples telling them, go into the city and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. Say to the owner of the house he enters, the teacher asks, where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there. The disciples left went into the city and found things just as jesus had told them so they prepared the passover one of the things i i love to teach uh The interns and others uh bible we do we're old testament new testament one of the questions you always have to ask is why do you include that like why are you telling me this right just ask that it's okay like why are you telling me? This is interesting, but it's, what does it really mean? Well, I think it tells us one thing real clear, that not only is Jesus sovereign over things, Jesus has, you know, he knows how this is going to work out. It doesn't say, hey, Jesus went and set this up, and then he came back and said, hey, I set this up, and no, no, no. He's just seeing it, and he knows it's going to work, and he tells them to do that. And they found it just that way. But it also says this, that Jesus is setting in motion the rest of this week. Now, obviously, he came into the city of his own accord. But at this point in time, he could have said, where do you want to do the Passover? I don't know, Duluth, Minnesota sounds good. A long way from here, right? He does it. He stays. And he moves towards what he knows he needs to do. In the midst of a horrific situation, that he knows how the outcome is going to be. He is in control of this whole thing. I just want you to land there just for a minute. Just for a minute. Jesus is in complete control of what seems is going to seem like utter chaos, and it is, But he's got this. Now, for me, this is actually one of the highlights here of this passage for me was like, wow, if you got that, then you got whatever I'm going through. You're in control of this. You know what you're doing. I can trust you. Jesus is in control. All right. Plot is going to thicken. First thing that Mark records as they're eating the Passover meal. So he skips a lot of details that take place, what they do, how they go through Passover, all that. It just says when the evening came, Jesus arrived at the 12th. While they were reclining at the table eating. So this is all of Passover rituals and everything would have taken place. He said, he drops a bomb. Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me. One who is eating with me. They were saddened and one by one they said to him, surely you don't mean me. And he replies back, it is one of, it's one of the 12. It's one of you. One who dips bread into the bowl with me. In other words, someone who's eating at this very table right now. The Son of Man will go just as is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man. It would be better for him if he had not been born. It's a harsh warning. And you could see here, Jesus is orchestrating all of this and Judas, of his own free will, decides to do this. Now, how does that work? Sovereignty of God, he's in control of everything. Judas, in his own desire, moves forward like this. I have, this is so far above my pay grade, I have no idea, but it does. He totally does. And Jesus is right at the center of it and the disciples. So when you see the paintings of the Last Supper, gloom kind of is setting in. And like, what is he talking about? They have absolutely no idea that he's talking about later that evening. They don't have that clue, but they're like, what's happening here? In fact, how in the world could one of us who's sitting here right now be that very person? And so I just, I want you to, I know it's a little bit hard to maybe put this again in our theological pipes and smoke, but Jesus Had trusted people around him. He trusted them. He knew what was in the heart of them. And he knew that Judas was gonna betray him. And yet the betrayal was a real betrayal. It was one that was chosen by Judas, and it stung Jesus. It cut deep. Okay, now you're like, how can that? I don't know. I'm not Jesus. Last time I checked, you're not either, right? But it does. And Jesus knows that incredible pain of someone who's very close to him, somebody poured three years into, and he's going to betray him. The account goes on and it says this, while they were eating, so they're enjoying this Passover meal, Jesus took bread and when he gave thanks for it, he broke it and gave it to his disciples saying, take it, this is my body. Now, in the gospel of Mark, you're kind of, at this point you'd go, and you got to kind of, this is a very familiar passage, just for the sake of time, just for the sake of argument here, just pretend you were there at that moment, and you would go, oh, finally. Why? Because in the gospel of Mark, Mark likes bread. Mark's into bread. Bread's kind of a deal. I mean, when we get to the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus, he's teaching, and he tells them, Wait, we got to send these people away because they need something to eat. And Jesus says to them, you give them something to eat. And they said, it would take more than half a year's wages. How are we going to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat? And he says, how many loaves do you have with you? And they said, they come back and they go five. And we also have two fish. And Jesus directed them to have all the people sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties, taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven. He gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all. They all ate and were satisfied. And the disciples picked up 12 basketfuls of broken pieces of bread and fish and The number of men who had eaten was 5,000. All right, so Mark wants to make sure you see this real clear. It's not like they all ate and were satisfied. They had two low-facing, oh, I guess I'm satisfied. You know, no, no, no, no, no. It wants to make it real clear. 12 basketfuls afterwards. So this is a miracle, right? Jesus does this remarkable miracle with five loaves and two fishes, spreads it around, and they're all extremely satisfied. They've all, there's 5,000 of them there. They're all sitting there fat, dumb, and happy afterwards, right? They're all great. It's got the tryptophan thing going, and they're just napping almost, okay? So after that, they get into a boat. The disciples get in a boat, and Jesus says, hey, why don't you go out ahead of me? Okay, so they go out, and then Jesus walks on the water out to them. Well, of course, that freaks them out because that ain't normal, right? And Jesus speaks to them, and he says, take courage it is I don't be afraid then he climbed into the boat with them and the wind died down like what is happening they were completely amazed like what is happening for meaning because they had not understood about the loaves The loaves were the key here. The loaves, he made those loaves. This is not a normal man. This is God himself, for their hearts were hardened. Okay, so then we get to another feeding, and Mark includes another one where there's 4,000 people. Again, they don't have enough to eat. This time he asks, how many loaves do you have? And they said seven, and he told the crowd again to sit down. He'd taken the seven loaves, give thanks. He gave them to the disciples. They distribute them. They had a few small fish as well. And he gave thanks for them also. And the disciples told the disciples to distribute them. And once again, the people ate and were satisfied. Afterward, the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. Around 4,000 were present. And after he'd sent them away, he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalam and Thua. Now, you know, there's one other event that happens too in the gospel of Mark in a boat. Boats and the disciples, it doesn't go well, generally for them, okay? It's not a very good thing when they get into a boat with Jesus and not this time either. They're in this boat and it says the disciples had forgotten to bring bread. It's all this bread, they go in the boat and they don't bring it. Except for one loaf they had with them in the boat. Now, commentators disagree on this. Some just think they actually did bring a loaf with them. But most commentators, and I would tend to agree, think that Mark is being really sarcastic here, and he's talking about this, okay? That they brought Jesus into the boat, and he is the bread, right? Mark's kind of giving it away a little bit, where he's saying, yeah, I'm in the boat, guys. So then, be careful, he warns them, watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod. And they discussed this with one another and said, it's because we don't have any bread. We forgot the bread. Jesus is getting after us. We have no bread. Jesus facepalms and says, why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember? And then he goes into about the lows and saying, all this that happened. Are you not getting who I am? And that brings us back to the, take this, this is my body, right? David Garland says, bread has become a symbol of Jesus' mission. And the disciples do not understand. While they take bread again after Jesus' resurrection, they will remember that they have bread of a most unusual nature. Combined with the statement, this is my blood, which will happen here when Jesus takes a cup, Jesus' presence is made possible by his death. By which God makes a new covenant, okay? So when he says this, he says, this is my body. I'm finally letting you know I am the bread of life. This will be broken. It'll be broken for you. Now, honest, just in real time, they're not thinking what's gonna happen next is gonna happen. We do, because we're very familiar with this passage. We're very familiar with communion. But then it says, then he took a cup and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them and they all drank from it. After they have drank, Jesus then says, this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many, he said to them. So it's kind of significant that they drink first, then he tells them that. All right. Now, He goes into saying, this is my blood of the covenant. This is the blood of the covenant, which is gonna be poured out for many. The author of Hebrews says it this way when he's talking about where this idea came from. It actually comes from the Old Testament. With Moses, it says, this is why even the first covenant was not put into effect without blood. When Moses had proclaimed every command of the law to all the people, he took the blood of calves together with water, scarlet wool and branches of fish up, and sprinkled the scroll and sprinkled the blood on all the people. He said, this is the blood of the covenant which God has commanded you to keep. In the same way, he sprinkled with the blood both the tabernacle and everything used in its ceremonies. In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Okay? And if you're wondering, like, how in the world, why did they do this in the Old Testament? Why do they sprinkle things with blood? That is not clean. Okay? That is not a good way to do things. Well, it's foreshadowing Jesus. Jesus was going to shed his blood. And that actually is a covenant that will work for us. The old covenant, which was all the 613 commands of the Old Testament, all the 613 commands of the Old Testament were in effect, do this and you'll live. Well, we don't do them and therefore we don't live. But this is a different kind of covenant. This is the kind of covenant's talked about in the Old Testament. Isaiah writes about it, he says, On this sharing the cup thing, David Garland says that drinking the cup of someone meant entering into communion relationship with that person to the point that one shared the person's destiny, good or ill, which suggests that, excuse me, going to Psalm 16, four and five, which suggests that the Lord is one's chosen portion, that the Lord is one chosen person and my cup, not other gods. Jesus had asked James and John if they were able to drink the cup that they would drink and they assured him that they would. They would drink that. So this brings us to the blood of the covenant. Jesus says, this is my blood. It's a blood of a new covenant. They drink of it before they know what he's saying so they don't bring anything to the table on this new covenant. Jesus just announces it and says, This is my blood for the shedding of many lives. And then he gives a triumphal thing to say here. He says, truly I tell you, I'll not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. And people go back and forth a little bit on this, what exactly he's talking about here. Believe he's ultimately talking about this festival again, the festival of Passover, the festival. I will not have this again until I drink it one day. In other words, victory is going to come. What's gonna happen in the next 36 hours, not gonna be so good, but you will see that there will be victory. Gloom predominates the Last Supper in Mark, but whenever Jesus speaks of his death, he combines it with a positive note of his vindication. A glimmer of joy emerges when Jesus speaks of drinking the fruit of the vine anew in the kingdom of God. The supper that begins on such a sad note ends on a note of joy. In the face of death, duplicity and desertion, Jesus exudes confidence that ultimately he will be vindicated by God's reign. And our passage ends by the next step. And the next step is when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. And so it's going to get very real, very quick. So as I thought about how to close this sermon, I was like, how do you close this sermon? Well, fortunately, we take communion here every week. So that works out really great. Sometimes things that are familiar, though, you gotta be shaken up by them a little bit. When we celebrate this together, I'm gonna invite the worship team up, sorry. Invite the worship team up as we prepare for this time of response. We're gonna sing a couple songs. And during that time, you can also come down front or go to the back corners to receive communion. Communion is a practice that Christians have done throughout church history. Now, in the account that is in Mark, it seems like, well, maybe this is a one-time event. But it becomes really clear. I'll read a passage in just a second that makes it real clear that this was something that they practiced often, if not every time they met. And what it was is it was bringing you back to that moment. That's what communion is supposed to be. The bread, the little cracker we have here, and we have gluten-free down front if you need that. The bread is the body of Jesus. Bread, he is the loaf. He's the one. But then he breaks it in front of them and said, this loaf, this perfect one, this one who can do miracles like nothing, That's gonna be broken. And it's gonna be broken on your behalf. And then after that, he takes the cup and they drink the cup and he says, This is the cup of the, this is my blood, which is actually going to be poured out for you. Poured out for you. In other words, the punishment that we deserved, we don't get. He takes willingly by the shedding of his own blood, which should have been ours, but he gets it. It is an amazing offer. And that's what this table is every week. It's an invitation. It's an invitation to go back to the Last Supper, to be shocked like they were, and to say, you're gonna break your body and you're going to shed your blood for me? All we ask is that you are a person who has taken on the Lord Jesus. If you've taken Jesus to be yours, this table's for you. In fact, the apostle Paul, when he's saying this, and this is the passage that we often refer to when we look at communion, he says, for I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, last supper, 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. And then Paul adds this. He says this, for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim. Isn't that interesting? Not just you remember, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. And that's what we're going to do. You have an opportunity right now to proclaim the Lord's death by taking this. That's all there is. Jesus does all the work. All you got to do is take it. And we want to invite you to take it. There is nothing magical here. This doesn't do anything to you per se, other than it's a symbol and a remembrance of what Jesus Christ has already done for you and is open to everyone who has trusted Christ. Let's pray together. Lord, I want to thank you for this passage. I want to thank you for communion. God, that we get a chance, you know, in our tradition, we do it every week, but others do it maybe not quite as frequently, and that's not as important. But just that we get a chance to once again be struck in awe that you would do this for us. So, Lord, there are a lot of folks in this room, Lord, that are bringing all kinds of different things into this room. Lord, teach them that you're in control teach them that you understand the pain the relational pain, betrayal pain and God, teach them more than anything that you are a reliable Lord and Savior that they can just lean back into you and you'll take care of them that's why I ask for that, pray for a gift even as we celebrate this communion God, that you would once again quicken our hearts to be in awe of all that you are. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Luke 14 · chapter mention