Sermons
November 24, 2024 (Proper 29/Christ the King)
Open Heart Surgery
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Awhile back when Mike and I were on a road trip somewhere, we passed an old pickup with a rugged-looking bearded guy driving. I took one look at that truck and said, “They’re Disciples.”
Mike asked me, “How do you know that?” I pointed to the red chalice sticker in the back window, just like the one that’s on our bulletin this morning, in the stained glass over the west doors, and on the sign outside.
In modern days, most church denominations have some kind of logo, a symbol we can use on literature—or even stick on the backs of our cars—to identify ourselves. The Methodists have a cross with a flame rising up and around its base. The Presbyterians have a cross with flames at the bottom and a dove descending at the top. And we have a red chalice with a white X—that’s actually a St. Andrew’s Cross, just like on the Scottish flag.
I don’t know the stories behind the others, but in our case the logo came out of a conversation during Restructure, in the 1960s. We wanted a graphic that clearly told of the centrality of Communion in our life as a church, and also paid homage to our Scottish roots.
It turns out, however, that these days people who aren’t part of our church—especially people who aren’t part of any church—have no idea that’s what the red chalice means. The color and the X evidently say “poison” to some folks. That might be something we want to think about as a denomination; but any changes we might ever consider making to our logo will also need to communicate the central importance of the Table for Disciples worship and life.
The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is one of only a few Protestant churches that come to the Table every Sunday. Ideally, our worship is designed so that Communion is the central focus and the climax of every service—I’ve been in Disciples churches where that isn’t the case, but it’s supposed to be.
I do think it’s easy to take Communion for granted, and this is one of the arguments made in churches that don’t observe the Lord’s Supper every week: too much frequency would cause us to forget its meaning. They do have a point, so it’s a good idea now and then to spend a moment why we do what we do and why we consider it so important.
The Words of Institution that I say each Sunday before we come up to receive the elements come straight out of the Bible, you know. The three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) all contain this language, each in a slightly different form—Luke, for instance, actually has two cups, not just the one.[1] And then Paul has a version as well, in 1 Corinthians 11, in which he indicates that he is passing on what has already become a tradition by his time—and keep in mind that Paul wrote his letters about 20 years before the earliest Gospel, Mark, was written.
From Paul’s writing we learn that the early church, including the Gentile churches Paul started, observed Communion. They appear to have done it a bit different from what we do nowadays, though: in Corinth the church gathered for a regular meal, and Communion was part of it. And, it turns out, they were Doing It Wrong.
Think about that: the only reason we know that Paul carried the tradition of the Lord’s Supper out to the Gentile churches he started is because the one in Corinth was making a mess of it. If Corinth wasn’t a church filled with problems, we may well have had no evidence at all that the early church practiced Communion—at least not till the worship and church life manual known as the Didache came into being, but that was a century or so after Paul. Acts tells us that the earliest Christians shared a common meal, but there’s nothing in Acts about remembering the night Jesus died; and again, Acts was written long after 1 Corinthians.
What’s interesting is that all four versions of the words of institution, as we call the story nowadays, in the Bible are very similar in a lot of ways. Some of the details are different, as I mentioned a minute ago with Luke’s two cups, but all of them say something specific about the meaning of the cup: they all use the word covenant, in connection with the shedding of Jesus’ blood. Sometimes they say new covenant, as Paul does in 1 Corinthians. (If you want to look at Paul’s Words of Institution real quick, they’re at 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; or #389 in the Chalice Hymnal.)
The idea of covenant is a very important one in the Jewish faith, and since Christianity was originally a sect within Judaism, it has meaning for us, too. Interestingly enough, if you read the Old Testament (the word testament, by the way, comes from the Latin word for covenant), you discover that there was more than one covenant between God and God’s people. There are actually four, each named after a person, the one with whom it was first made, or who was a representative of the people with whom it was made.
The earliest covenant in the Old Testament is the one made with Noah and his descendants—and, actually, with all of creation. This is the one in which God promises never to destroy the earth with a flood again, and further promises that “as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” God creates a reminder—for God’s self, apparently—of this covenant: the rainbow. The language here tells us that “my bow in the clouds” is actually the kind of bow you’d shoot an arrow with, and since it’s curved upward, if there were an arrow in it, it would be aimed into the heavens—at God, in the cosmology of the Ancient Near East.
The second covenant is the Abrahamic covenant, articulated in the twelfth through fifteenth chapters of Genesis, after God calls Abraham—originally known as Abram—to leave his home and family to travel to an unknown place. God promises Abraham that he will become the ancestor of a multitude—even though, at this point, they had no children and were much older than people typically are when they become parents—and that his descendants will come to possess the land to which he is going. The covenant is repeated, renewed, with Abraham’s grandson Jacob as he dreams of a ladder with angels ascending to and descending from heaven.
I’m going to skip the third covenant for a moment, because it’s the most important one, and the one that most informs the language we use at the Table.
The fourth covenant God makes with God’s people in the Old Testament is the Davidic covenant. In this covenant God promises to put a descendant of David on the throne in Jerusalem forever. As it turns out, history tells us that this covenant ended in 586 bce, when the Babylonian army destroyed Jerusalem and carried its rulers off into exile. That historical reality, coupled with the faith that God keeps promises, eventually led to the expectation that a new Son of David, the Messiah, would one day appear to sit on that throne again and re-establish the reign of his ancestor David.
This covenant does inform the story told in the Gospels, and gives us the title we use for Jesus to this day—Christ, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word messiah, or “anointed one.” Knowing about this covenant and the expectation that it would still be fulfilled, we can understand a little bit more about the way people responded to Jesus in our Gospel stories.
But it’s the third covenant that became the most important for the Jewish people, and eventually for us. That covenant is the Mosaic covenant, the one made with Israel, represented by Moses, when the Israelites were at Mount Sinai after God freed them from slavery in Egypt. This is a two-sided covenant, one that flows out of the reality that the people had been saved from bondage by God’s power and might and were being led to their own land (the one that had been promised to their ancestor Abraham) by God’s own presence.
God, having done this wonderful thing for the people, now expects something in return: God expects them to be God’s people, to put God first in their lives, to become a peculiar[2] nation with God as their ruler. The simplest expression of the covenant, one that appears over and over throughout the Bible—the last time in the closing chapters of Revelation—is, “I will be their God and they shall be my people.”
But it turns out that the people are unable to keep the covenant. They are unfaithful over and over again, even though God had done all these wonderful things for them. They continually run after foreign Gods like the Baals. They demand a human king, which breaks God’s heart because God was to be their only ruler. They oppress and mistreat one another, they are greedy, and they disregard God’s instructions over and over and over again.
Finally their unfaithfulness leads to the destruction of their nation and the exile of most of the population—except for a few poor people Babylon sees as not worth the trouble of forced relocation.
It is into this reality that the prophet Jeremiah speaks: he announces judgment and grieves over the people’s fate; and then, in one section of the book, from which today’s reading comes, even in the midst of the horror of military defeat, destruction, and exile, he proclaims a glimmer of hope.
Even though the people broke the covenant, God promises to make a new covenant with them. You may have noticed as this morning’s Scripture was read, that the content of the new covenant is exactly the same as the old one: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” But there’s an important difference: when the covenant was written on tablets of stone—as at Sinai—it was evidently too far away from the people’s consciousness, and they could not keep it. So God promises this time to perform a little open-heart surgery, to place the law within them, in their hearts, so it wouldn’t even require conscious thought for them to be able to keep it.
This new covenant, same as the old covenant but with this one important difference, is what Paul and the Evangelists tell us Jesus has come to establish, through his life and his death.
To this day the Jewish people have, at several points in their calendar, religious festivals meant to hep them remember and renew the covenant: Passover, Sukkoth (also known as the Festival of Booths), and the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
We Christians also have a festival to help us remember and renew the new covenant, the same one as God made with the Jews but expanded through Jesus to all people. That festival happens in our church, every Sunday, and during the celebration of that festival we re-tell the story that includes these words: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood…”
[1] The Synoptic Gospels all describe the Last Supper as the Passover meal. John does not; in John’s version the meal happens the day before Passover begins, and includes foot-washing rather than bread and cup as representing Jesus’ body and blood.
[2] “Peculiar” in the original sense of the word, of course, not weird but unique and distinctive.