Holy Communion: To Receive or Not to Receive? Rev Mike Starkey, St Mark’s Kennington, 19/9/2010 (1 Corinthians 11:17-30) For 2,000 years Christians 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 Last Supper. Some call it the Eucharist, 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 Church of England, 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 Bible it uses the word unworthily here. In the old Bibles 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 Agape 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 Agape feast 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 ‘Body of Christ’, 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.