Scripture: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 Series: 2021
Concluding the ‘One Weird Trick’ series on World Communion Sunday, this sermon takes Paul’s earliest account of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23-26) as the ultimate ‘do this’ that can change a life. Using George Mallory, Hillary, JFK, and climbing films as images of humanity’s drive for the impossible, the preacher argues that the truly unclimbable mountain is the body and blood of Christ, offered freely at the table. He surveys the historical debates over communion (Aristotelian substance/accidents, the Ship of Theseus, transubstantiation at the Fourth Lateran Council, then Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, the 39 Articles, and Wesley’s Duty of Constant Communion) before landing on his own maximalist conviction of Christ’s real presence: the impossible becomes possible at the table, no fortune or Sherpas required.
Illustrations: mallory-everest-because-its-there, hillary-norgay-everest-summit, jfk-moon-race-speech, climbing-films-meru-free-solo, hannibal-elephants-alps, spilled-coffee-accident, altar-chair-substance-accident, ship-of-theseus, jesus-calls-us-oer-the-tumult
October 3
Do this!
“I received a tradition from the Lord, which I also handed on to you: on the night on which he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread. After giving thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this to remember me.” He did the same thing with the cup, after they had eaten, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Every time you drink it, do this to remember me.” Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you broadcast the death of the Lord until he comes.” 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 CEB
George Mallory was an English gentleman born in 1886. And to say he was an English Gentlemen is just to say that he was rich. He went to Winchester College and found there a love of mountaineering, which was a new phenomenon, a new practice. People didn’t climb mountains for the fun of it before. You tried to go around mountains, to find the pass through the mountain. As Hannibal did with his elephants, when he invaded Rome from the north. Mallory was of a new generation that saw a goal in climbing mountains, a goal in doing things that had never been done before. He made three attempts on Everest. After one of the first attempts, he was asked, why are you doing this? Why are you trying to climb it? And he said, famously, “because it’s there.” Mallory failed. He died on the mountain on the third attempt in 1924. His body was found in 1999 by the Mountaineer Conrad Anker. 30 years after Mallory’s death, Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand, summited Everest for the first time with the Nepalese climber, Tenzing Norgay. Hillary repeated Mallory’s line when asked why he did it: “because it’s there. »A few years after that, John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech, launching the moon race, when he said, “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Climbing Mount Everest, flying to the moon, achieving impossible goals, these are hard things. This is part of why I love climbing movies. The amazing camera work of being so present, being on the precipice of a wall, I loved free solo and the Dawn wall. One of my favorites is Meru, by the same director who did free solo , Jimmy Chin, and he’s a climber, as well. Conrad Akers who found Malory’s body. Meru covers the first summit of a Himilayan mountain that had never been climbed before. It has a long ice climbing section followed by a 1,500 foot smooth granite wall, all at elevations over 20,000 ft. In 2008 they turn back 100 meters from the summit. In 2011, they try again. What’s funny about these unclimbable mountains or unreachable stars and achieving the impossible is that the central act of the Christian faith, the Lord’s table, is impossible. The body and blood of Christ, is an unclimbable mountain but it is offered, here, for us. Jesus us calls us to come and do this. My friends, we are concluding our series on one weird trick. On ways that you can change your life by doing something simple that Jesus does. The first week, we looked at come and see how he responds to the disciples of John who come to him and are seeking him. The next week we honed in on the phrase, follow me and the importance of the direction of our life. The next week, we looked at drop your nets, how God offers us deeper purpose than we could ever imagine. Finally, this week, the one weird trick is do this. If you do this, it will change your life. Christianity is based on a weird trick. We find it in the Gospels, but most clearly in the first letter to the Corinthians. The letters of Paul predate the gospels by a few years by most estimations. So the earliest account of communion is here.
There are a lot of ways we could take the words of Jesus in Paul. There’s a lot of ways that Christians have taken the words of Jesus here. One way is to take them as a pure metaphor or as a representation of something. “This is my body. This is kind of like my body. This is kind of like my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” The focus is more on the remembering than the doing. In the Reformation, there were many debates over what goes on in communion. And throughout the middle ages, there were many debates about what goes on in communion. In 1215, at the the fourth Lateran council, the Catholic church declared the dogmatic understanding of communion with the language we now refer to it as transubstantiation. If you grew up Catholic, you were taught about this, whether you remember it or not is another story. What takes place a few years before 1215 is that we have all of Aristotle translated into Latin for the first time. They use the Aristotelian language of substance and accidents. An accident is something that is inessential. In English, an accident is usually an untended mistake. If I trip and spill your coffee, that is accidental to my care for you. I don’t think you deserve to lose your coffee. It doesn’t represent us or our relationship. It isn’t pay back for anything. It was an accident. If you spilled my coffee because you didn’t like my sermon, it would no longer be an accident.
To think about it another way, the brown color of the wood in the altar is not essential to being an altar. We could repaint this altar. You could sand it down and put another finish on it and it would still be an altar. We could make it out of iron, it would still be an altar. The altar does not cease to be if you change these aspects. The same thing happens with the chairs that you are sitting on. You could change the color and it would still be a chair. You could take off the cushion. It would not be comfortable, but it would still be the chair. If you took off all the legs and the back, it loses something substantial to being a chair. Conversations about things like accidents and Substance led, in the ancient world, to a number of debates about what is the substance of something. And there’s a famous story in Heraclitus and Plato and Plutarch about the Ship of Theseus. Here is Plutarch’a version.
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same. — Plutarch, Theseus
So is it the same ship? What is essential to the ship? What is accidental to the ship.
So in 1215, this language of substance and accidents is used to describe what goes on during communion. And what happens in what Catholics call the sacrifice of the mass is that the accident of the bread and the wine remain the same, but the substance changes. And so it looks like bread and wine, but substantially, it is the body and blood of Jesus Christ. This is called transubstantiation. Now, during the Reformation, there is pushback around this term, especially with Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and others. Luther, who always remains the most Catholic of the Reformers, holds on to the real presence in communion, but says that the bread is both bread and Jesus, the wine is both wine and Jesus, it doesn’t cease to be wine. Others have called this consubstantiation, though Luther himself would dispute this term. Luther also taught the ubiquity of Christ, that “the risen Christ was no longer subject to the limitations of space and time and had taken on the divine attribute of omnipresence.” This is how Luther could say that the Risen Christ was present on a thousand altars at the same time. John Calvin was the founder of Reformed theologies like Presbyterians and a lot of Baptist and non-denominational churches. Calvin denied ubiquity and transubstantiation by saying that “the substance of Christ’s humanity was not bones and sinews and veins, but the power and effect of his crucified and risen humanity for salvation. Christ is therefore substantially present wherever the power and effect of his life, death, and resurrection are present.”
Another great reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, gave the position of the Eucharist being a metaphor and a memorial. We are reminded of Jesus here. The Methodist church emerged out of the church of England and in the original 39 articles of the church of England, one of the main articles is that there is no transubstantiation. That being said, communion is super important to the the Church of England. Almost all Episcopal and Anglican church’s have communion weekly. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, recommends communion a lot. He doesn’t recommend a particular theology of communion, but that we should do it. He has a sermon called The Duty of Constant Communion, where it basically says that we should have communion as often as we can, because first of all, Jesus tells us to do it here. As well, Wesley says,
A Second reason why every Christian should do this as often as he can, is, because the benefits of doing it are so great …the forgiveness of our past sins and the present strengthening and refreshing of our souls. In this world we are never free from temptations. Whatever way of life we are in, whatever our condition be, whether we are sick or well, in trouble or at ease, the enemies of our souls are watching to lead us into sin. And too often they prevail over us. Now, when we are convinced of having sinned against God, what surer way have we of procuring pardon from him, than the “showing forth the Lord’s death;” and beseeching him, for the sake of his Son’s sufferings, to blot out all our sins
I personally come back to real presence. I don’t use the categories of Aristotelian metaphysics like transubstantiation, but in communion, Jesus is really present, Jesus is really here. Jesus calls us from wherever we are in life to this table which gives life because the God of all creation is here. If Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus can be fully here in the bread and in the wine. I have a maximalist view of the power of God here. Instead of trying to limit the supernatural that could take place, I try to open myself up to the reality of the supernatural all around me. The reality of God is present, especially at this table where Jesus says “Do this.” The Lord’s table is an act of faith. Every time we come, it is a desire for transformation. Every time we come to the table, it is an encounter with the risen Jesus Christ, who died for us. Every time we come to the table, it is a mountain that is impossible to climb, it is a moon that is impossible to reach, but we don’t need to pay a fortune to climb this mountain and blast off to this moon. We don’t need a team of Sherpas to climb this mountain or invent the next Amazon to go to space. It is offered to us here and now with this one weird trick: do this. We can completely reorient our lives around the God who is revealed to be love. We can realize that the impossible is possible with God right here at this table. That communion is not just a habit or custom or a Memorial or a metaphor, but the reality of the risen Lord, here, offered freely without price. Today is World Communion Sunday. We celebrate the miracle of Christians coming together at the table. No matter the language or culture, Christ is present here.
You don’t need to fly to Nepal to scale impossible mountains. The impossible is possible here. You don’t need to charter the next Space X or Blue Origin flight to prove how awesome you are in going to space, the impossible is possible here. If Jesus can rise from the dead. If Jesus is present at this table, Jesus can change your life. The challenges we all face are little compared to the laws of physics and mortality.
Jesus has already won the victory, and \Jesus calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s wild, restless sea; day by day his sweet voice soundeth, saying “Christian, follow me.”
Saying Christian, Come and See, saying Christian, drop your nets, saying Christian: do this. Here for you. I give myself for you. This is my body. This is my blood here for you. Take. taste and see that the Lord is good.
Let us pray
Heavenly Father, we do so much to prove ourselves to others. Help us to realize that the greatest of mountains have already been conquered by your love, and instead of earning it, you offer yourself to us. May we accept your grace. May we accept your love. May we do what you ask so that we can receive you fully in our lives and share you fully in the world. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.