Holy : To Receive or Not to Receive?

Rev Mike Starkey, St Mark’s Kennington, 19/9/2010

(:17-30)

For 2,000 years have met together to share bread and wine, or bread and grape juice. Some call it Communion, which emphasizes our fellowship with God and each other. Some call it the Lord’s Supper, which underlines the link with Jesus’s . Some call it the , which is simply a Greek word meaning thanksgiving. Different traditions have had slightly different understandings of how it is that God meets with us in Communion. For some people, the bread and wine themselves become somehow infused with the spiritual presence of Jesus. Others believe God comes to us by his Spirit at the moment we receive bread and wine. For others, the bread and wine are symbolic. But however we choose to explain it, the fact remains that Holy Communion is special. We do it because Jesus said it was important for us to do it. But that then raises a number of practical questions. Who can receive Communion? Is it for everybody or only for certain people? And even if I normally receive Communion, are there times when I shouldn’t? What do we make of Paul’s words about people receiv- ing Communion in an ‘unworthy’ manner, and eating and drinking judgement? Well, today I want to look at the very practical questions about Communion. At one level, there’s an easy answer to the question ‘Who should receive Communion?’ It’s the family meal for all believers. It’s a moment where members of God’s family meet around the family table, to deepen their fellowship with God and with each other. It’s a place where we receive God’s grace and welcome. So in its simplest terms, Communion is for believers, it’s fellowship with God and other Christians. Having said that, there have to be some sort of practical guidelines for Communion. St Mark’s is part of the , so let me tell you the C of E guidelines for who can receive Communion. The most basic guideline is that you need to have been baptized. And that makes sense because biblically, baptism is the normal sign of being a Christian and of church membership. Baptism says you’re a full member of the Church. So to receive Communion in the Church of England you need to have been baptized. If you haven’t been baptized but you have a faith in Jesus and you want to receive Com- munion, have a word with me and we’ll talk about getting you baptized! There’s also a traditional expectation that you should also have been confirmed in order to receive Communion. Why? Because most members of the C of E were baptized as babies, and confirmation is an opportunity to own that faith as an adult. So it makes sense for people to have been confirmed as well. Having said that, I don’t insist on that myself. I’m happy for any baptized believer to receive Communion here at St Mark’s. Just a quick note on children and Communion. Some churches have started admit- ting children from age 8 or so to receive Communion. We won’t go into the pros and cons of that debate today. But what you need to know is that we don’t do that at St Mark’s. So here the expectation is still the traditional one that children start receiving Communion af- ter they’ve been confirmed. The normal practice in the Church of England is also to welcome believers of other denominations to share with us in Communion. The view is that it’s not for us to judge who’s a real Christian and who isn’t. The Lord’s Table is a place for people to encounter the warmth of God’s welcome. It’s not a place for one set of Christians to exclude others. So I believe it’s right to err on the side of generosity and welcome rather than judge- ment. So somebody might say: ‘Hang on, that person shouldn’t be receiving Communion, they’re not a real Christian’. But I don’t believe it’s for us to make those judgements. I don’t believe it’s right for us to exclude anybody who feels drawn to God’s table. Because it’s a moment of welcome and grace, not exclusion. But just to underline again, the normal expectation is that to share in Communion, you should have a faith in Jesus and have been baptized. Now, what about these difficult passages in Corinthians, where Paul warns about re- ceiving the bread and wine in an ‘unworthy’ way, and then warns people that they might be eating and drinking judgement on themselves? What’s that all about? Well, let me tell you how some Christians have understood these verses down the centuries. In the old King James it uses the word unworthily here. In the old verse 29 was translated: ‘For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.’ And this word unworthily was applied to three groups of people in particular. Firstly, it was applied to anybody who was considered not to be a real Christian. In other words, a person couldn’t fully appreciate that the bread represented the Lord’s body if they weren’t a Christian. Secondly, it was applied to people from a different denomination who were considered a bit dodgy. Their bad theology meant they were receiving ‘unworthily’. So rules had to be put in place to fence the Communion table, to protect the purity of the Communion from people who thought they were Christians but weren’t really. And thirdly, it was applied to believers who had a besetting sin in their lives, or be- lievers who’d committed particular sins during the previous week. In other words, un- worthily was thought to mean to the person was morally unworthy to receive the bread and wine. They were too immoral to receive Communion. So some churches even issued lists of those sins which meant you shouldn’t receive Communion. The problem is, this is all a misunderstanding of what Paul is saying in this passage. And the results of this misunderstanding have been devastating down the ages. These verses have been used as a threat. And they’ve been used as a test of goodness, to see whether a person is morally worthy to receive Communion. In other words Communion stops being a moment of grace, where God meets with sinners, and it becomes a moment of judgement and condemnation, where people are told they have to become morally good enough to receive Communion. This understanding of Communion is a denial of the Gos- pel of grace. And it’s meant that some Christians have grown up seeing the Lord’s table as a place of judgement and anxiety rather than a place of grace and welcome. Which is tragic. So what is Paul warning against in these verses? Well, this is a good example of how it’s dangerous to pull a verse out of context and say: ‘Look, this is what the Bible says’. If you want to understand what Paul’s saying you need to see what situation he’s actually addressing. All you have to do is look back a few verses in our reading to find out. In the Corinthian church, they shared in an early version of Communion called an feast. It was more than bread and wine, it was more like a big bring-and-share lunch. And the idea was that as they shared their food and wine together, they did it in the name of Jesus, as we do with Communion. But all was not well in Corinth. Corinth was a divided church. There were very wealthy people and very poor people. The was supposed to be a moment where earthy distinctions counted for nothing, where everybody was equal in God’s eyes. But what was happening was that the rich people were keeping all their own food and not sharing it with the poor. Some believ- ers were stuffing themselves silly and getting drunk, while others were left hungry. And even when the food was shared, some people were rushing to get the best food and el- bowing others out of the way. Now, in Ancient Greece this sort of thing would have been quite normal. In a society based on hierarchy and slavery everybody took for granted that your birth dictated your position in life. If you were rich and noble, of course you’d get all the best food first. But what Paul says is that human hierarchies count for nothing around the Lord’s Table. Nor- mal human hierarchies are overturned. And this then explains the language Paul uses. Paul warns about eating and drinking without discerning (or recognizing) the body. But he’s not talking about whether you have enough spiritual insight to discern that Com- munion bread represents the body of Jesus. He’s talking about the ‘’, the Church. In the previous chapter Paul said: ‘we, who are many are one body, for we all share in the one bread’. One of Paul’s favourite ways of talking about the Church is as the Body of Christ. So failing to discern the body means forgetting they’re part of the church. They’re being selfish pigs rather than recognizing that they’re only there as members of the Body of Christ, the Church. And that they’ve got to put others before themselves. Paul says the result of being a greedy selfish pig at an Agape feast, and refusing to consider the needs of others in the body, is that they’re inviting God’s judgement. Because it’s such a contradiction of the what the Agape feast is supposed to be about. Paul talks about eating and drinking ‘in an unworthy manner’. But he’s not saying the person eating and drinking is morally unworthy in themselves. That’s not what Paul’s talk- ing about. When Paul says they shouldn’t eat and drink in an unworthy manner, he’s talk- ing about what they do in their Agape feasts in Corinth, where believers put themselves and their family and friends first, and ignore everybody else. In other words, he’s talking about how they behave at their bring-and-share lunches. He says they’re acting in an un- worthy way, considering it’s a meal around the Lord’s Table. Then at the end of the passage, Paul has a prophetic word for this church where these abuses are taking place. He reveals that some of the current illnesses and even deaths in their fellowship have been expressions of God’s judgement on their outrageous behaviour. This is a prophetic word for that particular church. So this whole passage is about the church in Corinth and the selfishness of its mem- bers. It tells us how God feels about a church that meets supposedly in his name, but what they are actually doing is hurting and ignoring each other and only thinking about them- selves, not about how they treat their fellow-believers. So we shouldn’t lift Paul’s words out of context. This passage is not a justification for excluding people from Communion because we think they’re not Christians, or they’re the wrong sort of Christians. And it’s not telling us we have to be good enough to receive Communion. None of us will ever be good enough under our own steam. That’s why Jesus came to die for our sins. That’s why the centres on grace and not works. It’s true that Paul says we need to examine ourselves before we receive Communion, but he’s referring to something very specific. He’s saying that as we eat the bread, we share in the body of Christ in two senses: we receive the life of Jesus himself into us, but also that we share in the Body of Christ, the Church. He’s saying we need to examine our- selves as a church, to ensure we’re living the way God designed the church to live. As we receive the Body of Christ, are we also being the Body of Christ? The Lord’s Table is a place of welcome and grace, where sinners like you and me can meet with Jesus in a special way. It’s also a place of challenge, where we share the body of Christ in order that together we can be the Body of Christ in this community.