Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 5, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So. It’s Communion Sunday again. Every month, on the first Sunday of the month, and occasionally at other times, we celebrate this sacrament of the Christian faith. Many, probably most, of us have been partaking of the elements of Communion all our lives. Yet whether you come to the table today for a time past counting or whether the holy sacrament is a newer experience for you, surely we all know that the sacrament of Communion, technically called the Eucharist, is a rite distinctive to Christianity. Partaking of Communion is a distinctly Christian act, indeed, together with the sacrament of baptism, it is the distinctly Christian act.

Now, I don’t know about you; but when I was a young person, before I’d had any formal theological training, indeed before I’d done any of my own theological study, I had no idea what Communion was all about. I didn’t know why we do it. I didn’t know what it means. It was for me just a ritual we went through once a month. We did it because it’s what Christians do. I didn’t have any deeper understanding of it than that. I don’t know, but perhaps some of you are in that place of not understanding Communion too, of doing it just because it’s what we do. So let me try this morning to give the sacrament in which we are about to partake a bit more meaning than perhaps it has had for you in the past.

And let me do that by referring to the text we just heard from Deuteronomy. It isn’t, of course, expressly a Communion text. It’s a Jewish text not an exclusively Christian one, so of course it doesn’t mention Communion. But I think it helps us understand Communion nonetheless. The name Deuteronomy means second law, and the book is set up as Moses giving the people the law he has received from God on Mt. Sinai. It’s called the second law because in the Bible Moses has already given the people the law once, in the earlier books of the Torah, especially Exodus and Leviticus. There are significant differences between that first law and Deuteronomy’s second law, but we need not concern ourselves with those differences today. What is important for us is what Deuteronomy’s Moses says about the law and his presentation of it. In our passage Deuteronomy’s Moses says “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curses. Choose life….” Deut. 30:19 Moses is telling the people that the word of God is life and blessing, rejecting the word of God is death and curses. God offers us life and blessings in God’s word. Whether we accept God’s offer is up to us.

Deuteronomy sees God’s offer of life and blessing as coming through the Mosaic law. For God’s Jewish people the Mosaic law has indeed been a source of life and blessing across the millennia, if not quite in the simple mechanical way that Deuteronomy suggests. We Christians, however, see God’s offer of life and blessing as coming to us primarily from a different source. We see that offer coming to us primarily through the person of Jesus Christ. For us Jesus Christ is life and blessing, and that’s where Communion comes in.

Communion is, of course, grounded in the New Testament’s stories of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples before his arrest and execution. In similar accounts in Paul and three of the four Gospels Jesus takes bread, blesses it, and says some variation on “This is my body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Then he takes a cup of wine, blesses it, and says some variation on “This is my blood of the new covenant shed for you and for many. So often as you drink of it, remember me.” Christians understand these words in many different ways. Yet however we understand them, literally or figuratively, factually or symbolically—I of course understand them symbolically—they point to the elements of the communion as places where we encounter Jesus Christ. In eating the bread and drinking the wine—with us grape juice actually, but it doesn’t matter—of Communion we come into intimate contact with Jesus Christ. Symbolically we unite ourselves with Jesus Christ. We meet him in the most intimate way. Any distance between him and us is overcome. We enter into him, and he enters into us. We enter into his grace, and his grace enters into us. We feed on his Spirit, and our spirits are fed. Jesus becomes one with us.

And for us Jesus Christ is life. In him we know God as the source of life and the goal of life. In him God’s wish for abundant life for all people came to us in human form. When we live in Christ we live fully and freely. We find peace, comfort, and solace. We find hope. We find challenge, challenge to be true disciples, challenge to work for the coming of God’s Realm on earth, the Realm that broke into the world in him. When we come to the Communion table we choose life, just as Deuteronomy’s Moses urged us to do. When we come to the Communion table we open ourselves to the blessings of true life, the blessings of life lived with God. When we come to the Communion table we find the fullness of life. We act out our connection with God the source and goal of life, a connection we have in and through Jesus Christ. Moses says choose life. We Christians answer yes, we choose life when we come to the table of life, to the table of the Lord.

So in a few minutes when we pass the trays with the bread and the wine, come to the table of life. Come by partaking of the elements of Communion. And as you do find in them your most intimate connection with God in and through Jesus Christ. Find your most intimate connection to life and blessing. God sets before us life and death. Come to the table, and choose life. Amen.