This is the communion service at my church’s Labor Day singles retreat. This happens on Sunday night, and it is always the last thing we do as part of the retreat.
This has always been the high point of Labor Day (for me, at least). It is always a powerful experience to come together with fellow believers who are my friends, some of whom I know very well and others not so well, in obedience to the command of Christ to eat His body and drink His blood, and remember Him.
At the Lord’s table there are no distinctions of wealth, power, prestige, fame, status, or influence in the community. It doesn’t matter who or what you are in the eyes of others, because we are all on equal footing when we come to the Lord’s table. It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are or what you may have done; all are accepted by Christ and all are a part of the community. Of course, faith in Christ is the bottom line prerequisite for admission to the Lord’s table, but beyond this there are no other distinctions or distinctives at the Lord’s table. Just all of us as fellow believers, coming together as a body and also coming together in a larger sense with all other believers who have gone before us, in obedience to Christ’s command to eat the bread and drink the wine grape juice and remember Him.
(By the way, I could write a full-length diatribe on why we have to use grape juice instead of real wine. But that is a diatribe best left for another day and another post. That is not the question that I wanted to ask now.)
The question that I wanted to ask now is this: Why don’t we do this more often?
I am not asking this of my church, or the leadership thereof. If I were, this blog would not be the proper forum for that. No, I am asking this of the general world of evangelical Protestant-dom at large.
Why don’t we do this more often?
One objection which many evangelical leaders raise to the more frequent celebration of communion is that it takes away from teaching time. So whose Church is it anyway? Is it all about the preacher/teacher? Is it the primary responsibility of the preacher/teacher, through his words, instruction, exhortation, and superior wisdom, to affect life change? I don’t think so. The Church is all about Christ. Christ is the one who changes lives, please let’s trust Him to do that. Christ has commanded us to remember Him through the sacrament of communion, why not obey that? Certainly it will help us to remember that the Church is all about Christ, and not about us.
The objection I hear most often is that frequent celebration of the Lord’s supper diminishes the meaning and power of the sacrament. Everyone knows that if we celebrate the Lord’s supper too frequently, it will become just another common act that we do all the time, devoid of all special meaning or power. And we sure don’t want that to happen, do we?
Now fellas, track with me on this one. Imagine that your wife tells you she will only have sex with you two to three times a year because she doesn’t want to diminish the meaning and power of the sexual act. How would you feel about this? I don’t think you would like that very much.
Now, how do you think Christ feels when His Bride (the Church–that would be us) tells Him that she/it (yes I know it’s weird) does not want to celebrate His supper any more often than two or three times a year, because she/it does not want to diminish the meaning and power of the experience? I don’t think He likes that very much.
I think what it really comes down to is that we don’t want to be like the Catholic Church. We all know that it is nothing but dead, dry religion, just a crass system of Papist-based works-righteousness. Everything they do is wrong, dead set against the Scriptures and the heart of God. They celebrate communion every week, and their celebration is nothing but a dead, dry ritual at best, and at worst an idolatrous affair that flies in the face of everything God is and commands. So if they’re doing it every week, then by God we’re not going to do it every week. In fact we are going to do it as seldom as we can get away with.
Come on, people.
It ought to go without saying that allowing our view of one of the major sacraments of Christianity to be determined by what another branch of the Christian faith does (they are wrong, therefore we are going to do the exact opposite) is a serious mistake.
I don’t think the Bible is clear on how often we are to celebrate communion, so I’m not going to come out and say that we need to do it every week (although that would be nice). But it is clear from the Bible that communion was meant to be celebrated frequently. I don’t know about you, but I think it would take a very serious stretch of the imagination to say that two or three times a year is frequent.
Could we please take a long, hard, honest look at what the Bible has to say about communion, and acknowledge that perhaps we just might have gotten it wrong on this one?
