Bread of Wholeness

1 Corinthians 11: 17-32

The Corinth Church did not get it.  They came to the Lord’s Table as if it was a party, that would be bad enough, but the party benefited the rich over the poor.  Even though the Gospel should have had them realize there was no longer “slave or free” in the church.  Yet we must be very thankful of the Corinthians’ mistake, for we have Paul’s writing on the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospels have the accounts of the Last Supper, but this is the only full account of the church’s ritual of remembrance.  And we can learn a whole lot from this scripture.

Paul states we must examine ourselves and discern the body prior to partaking in this meaningful feast.  Sometimes this idea of discernment and examining of ourselves is taken so that individuals demand perfection prior to sharing the bread.  This is of course an extreme as the only perfect human is Jesus who is inviting us to the table.  Our General Minister and President, Dr. Rev. Sharon Watkins has preached that there are three discernments of the body we need to be at this meal.  I believe that these three discernments are essential to our approach to and beyond the Table.

The first discernment of the body is that of Jesus’ body.  We need to remember what Jesus’ broken body had done for us, historically and personally.  During the early part of the Restoration Movement (in which our denomination stems from) there was a great emphasis on the Lord’s Supper being an act of remembrance over the idea Jesus’ presence at the Table.  However, it was never that simple, and if you listen to the prayers of Elders and Pastors at the table, you will hear prayers such as written in our book of worship, “May your Spirit transform this bread and cup into signs of Christ’s living presence and engrave upon our hearts the life-transforming image of Christ.”  Not only do we remember what happened at that specific time in history that saved each of us, we feel and know the presence of Jesus in each of our own individual lives.  The word that is used in our scripture for “Remember” is the Greek word anamnesis which means more than to simple recall, like what was written on a grocery list, it includes the idea of re-presentation and thus the real here and now.  Such it is when we smell our favorite comfort food; we do not simply remember when it was prepared but are brought back to all the feelings and reality, for at least an instance. This is what is meant when we break bread in remembrance of Jesus’ body, we recall what he did on the cross and what Jesus’ presence has done in our individual lives.  Barnett Blakemore states it well in The Revival of the Churches (1963)  “The role of remembrance is not that it brings the Lord into our presence, but that remembrance opens our eyes to him into whose presence we have already been brought by faith.”

The second discernment of the body is that of the body of Christ.  It is clear in this scripture that Paul is very concerned with the Body of Christ.  He writes about how the Corinth body, the church, was looking at itself with priority for the rich.  This was the problem that caused Paul to write about the ritual of Communion.  Then we read about how the church is to see herself in chapter 12 verse 12 “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.  For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”  The church is the Body of Christ we must discern as we break bread together.  While we are not at risk of getting drunk at our table with unfermented wine, nor can we eat till we are full with our small pieces of bread, we must understand how important we feel interconnected with the entire church, not simply in the building but beyond the walls and even time.  This is essential to communion as we are called out of society to be Christ’s Body and we need to understand, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored all rejoice together with it.” (1 Cor. 12:26).  This was truly what Paul meant when he asked the Corinthians to discern the body, for that was the body they were not able to see, but one can see the interdependence of people if they understand what Jesus did for them on the cross and how the presence is known now.

The third discernment of the body is that of the body of Jesus the Christ, truly combining the two above.  We recall the scripture Mathew 25 where the righteous ask when they had served Him, hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, etc, and Jesus responded, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  Therefore the last discernment takes on our own personal remembrance of Jesus in our lives as our savior, and the interdependence of our church existence and discerning what we take away from the table.  We must continue discerning the breaking the bread away from the table and see Jesus’ body everywhere we go.  This discernment is how we are Christians, how we are Church.  We go out into the fragmented world inviting people to this discernment, to the Table.  We go out searching for this body thus creating wholeness in individuals and society by serving as we have been served, loving as we have been loved, and welcoming all to the Lord’s Table as God has welcomed us.

(Must give credit also to Michael Kinnamon and his reflections on the new identity statement as printed in Disciples World)