What Really Happens At Communion Isn't What You Were Taught
VideoTranscript
This is the video’s transcript, lightly formatted. Tap a time to jump to that moment.
Communion doesn't mean what most Christians believe it means. We were taught a part of it, but not the most important part. And in my own cult upbringing, it was even worse. I was taught not to partake at all. Every spring, for most of my life, somebody handed me a plate of bread while I sat in the church. I didn't partake. I just passed it to the person next to me.
The same thing happened with a glass of wine. Handed, passed. Handed, passed. That was the ceremony. Almost everybody else in the room did the same thing I did. Millions of people attended the event worldwide, but only a few thousand actually partook of the bread and wine. The bread went down the row and back up the row and back to the front untouched in most congregations.
That service had a name. It was called the memorial. Memorial, as in something you were there to remember. A sermon, a few prayers, the untouched emblems, then it's over. If you grew up in a different faith, you probably did partake of the wine and bread, even if it was missing the point, too. Nobody's church calls it a snack, but that's what it shrinks to in our heads when we don't understand what's actually going on here. But communion is not just a memorial snack.
In my last video, I told you the word Paul chose for the bread comes from the same root Peter uses for sharing in God's own nature. It's a word about partnership, and that means what's happening at that table is much bigger than just remembering something important. And if you're somebody who's heard the warning about eating unworthily so many times that you let the plate pass by because, well, better safe than sorry, stay with me. The answer to that fear is in the same letter that the warning came from. Here's what we're going to cover in this one. First, a father at a Passover table telling his child he's part of a story that happened long before he was born. Second, the two tables Paul says you have to choose from because you can't eat at both.
Third, a famous performer who admitted he couldn't explain how the table works. And finally, the day Jesus said something so shocking that a crowd of his own disciples abandoned him over it. In the cult that I was raised in, what they called the memorial was an annual observance, the most sacred night of the year. A small plate of unleavened bread and a glass of red wine sat on a table at the front of the audience. A brother gave a talk that interpreted the Last Supper and the emblems and was basically meant to convince almost everyone in the room why they should not partake of the bread and wine because it was only meant for a small select group of people and that almost certainly was not you. Everyone else was just there as observers to remember what Christ did for the world. Having been raised in the group, I didn't think anything of it.
It was just what we did. I had no idea how much I was missing. In your church, you probably did take the bread and wine. Maybe every Sunday, maybe just every couple of months. A small piece of bread or a wafer, a little cup, a reminder to search your heart first, and more than a few people who let the tray pass or decline to kneel at the rail because they weren't sure they were good enough that week. The explanation for the event, when you got one, was that it's a symbol. We do it to remember.
Now, remembering is a good thing. Jesus told us to remember him, so that's part of it. But the way we've been taught has the same fundamental problem I point out in the other sermons in this series. It has us think of God as being off somewhere else, Christ somewhere back in history.
Let's start with the part that nobody disagrees with because it's directly written in scripture. Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, "This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." That's where the title memorial comes from for the event I attended most of my life. And if remembering means in the scriptures what we think of it meaning today, sitting still and recalling something far away, well, then that's the end of all this, and I should just stop right here cuz there's nothing more to say about it. But look at what table Jesus was sitting at. Luke says it this way, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you."
In Luke, this is the Passover meal, and the Passover had its own way of remembering going back to the book of Exodus. A father was instructed to tell his son about the night God brought Israel out of Egypt. Exodus 13:8 told fathers to put it this way, "I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt." And that's exactly how Jews came to keep it, generation after generation. The Mishna, the earliest rabbinic guide to the Passover meal written down about 200 years after Christ, puts it this way, "In each and every generation, a person must view himself as though he personally left Egypt." The father, born centuries later, was supposed to tell his child, "I was there." Not our ancestors were there, me.
It was personal. He was part of the story. So, when Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me" at that Passover table, he's not talking about remembering him from a distance in some detached way. At that table, remembering meant stepping into the story yourself.
Paul goes even further, taking it to the next level. When he explains what the bread and cup are, he uses a word that means something very different than remembering somebody you've never met. First Corinthians 10 says this, "Is not the cup of Thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?" Participation, it says. In Greek, the word is koinonia. Paul uses it twice there.
It's often translated fellowship and older Bibles call it communion. The root means to share something in common. It means partnership.
That word is one of many built from that same root. The person who shares in something is a koinonos, a partner. Luke uses it in chapter 5, the morning of the miraculous catch for James and John, who were Simon's partners. They were men in the same boat, pulling the same nets. They were partners. And that same Simon Peter, near the end of his life, reaches for that same word for you. He says we may participate in the divine nature.
Koinonoi, partners. The fisherman who once shared a boat says you share in the life of God. Paul is telling Christians in Corinth to stay away from the sacrificial meals of pagan temples. His reasoning is sound. Consider the people of Israel. Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? And then, the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.
You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons, too. The logic in Paul's argument only works if the meal makes you a part of something real. If the Lord's table was just a memory aid, then eating a sacrificial meal at an idol's temple, well, that would be a bad look and that might confuse or stumble somebody and that would be bad enough. But that's not what Paul says it is. Paul says you become a partner at the altar you worship at, whoever that altar belongs to. You're not just eating a meal, you're joining the host. So Paul's word for the bread is partnership and you eat your way into it.
Now, before we keep going, if this series is helping you, hit subscribe because there's still more practices we got handed backwards and those are coming in future episodes that you don't want to miss. And tell me in the comments cuz I genuinely want to know, what was communion like in the church you grew up in? Every week? Four times a year? Never? Did anybody ever tell you what was happening or what it all meant? And if you want the daily version of all this, that's in my book, The Broken Mirror: Discovering Our True Nature in Christ.
Chapter 22 has a section on this topic where I go into detail about how the Lord's Supper is far more than a mere symbolic remembrance of a past event. It's a profound present tense participation in the very life of Christ. One reader wrote in a review, "I especially recommend this book to any Christians from a background steeped in legalism." That was a lot of us. It was certainly me. The link to the book is in the pinned comment. Now for a historical figure so you know I'm not making this up or following some modern theological trend here.
It's a man who broke with Rome over this, refused to call it an empty symbol. That man is John Calvin. It takes place in Geneva in the 1500s. If you're Presbyterian or reformed, a good deal of your theology runs back through him. He broke with the Catholic Church and rejected the Catholic Mass because he believed Christ was sacrificed once for all and can't be offered again. Given his rejection of transubstantiation and Christ's sacrifice being represented at each Mass, you might expect him to be the one who says the bread is only a reminder, but he doesn't. In Institutes, the book that shaped reformed churches, Calvin spends a long chapter on the Lord's Supper.
He argues that believers truly receive Christ at the table by Holy Spirit. They don't just receive a memory, they receive him. When answering the obvious question about this, how? Well, John Calvin, the man with an argument for everything, writes this. If anyone should ask me how this takes place, I shall not be ashamed to confess that it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And to speak more plainly, I rather experience than understand it. He experienced it more than he understood it.
I love that. He couldn't fully explain how it happened. He just knew that it happened.
Hold on to that because Jesus is about to say something that nobody at the time could explain either. It's in John chapter 6. It's the day after he miraculously fed 5,000 people. The crowd has followed him across the lake hoping to get another meal out of him and he tells them he is the bread. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. When some of his audience objects to that, he doubles down.
Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. And my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Even his own disciples say, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" And John writes one of the saddest sentences in the Gospels. "From this time, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him." What a loss for them.
Can you imagine? Jesus doesn't chase him down, either. He doesn't try to explain so that they'll understand and not leave. Instead, he turns to the 12 and says, "You do not want to leave, too, do you?" And Peter, the fisherman, the partner, says, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Now, Christians have argued for centuries about whether John 6 is about the Lord's Supper at all or about believing in him or both.
But whatever else it's about, here's what he says the eating does. "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them." That word remains is meno. And if it sounds familiar, it's because John uses the same verb nine chapters later on the night of the Last Supper, when Jesus says this, "Remain in me, as I also remain in you." That's where Jesus is the vine and they're the branches. If you've been following my sermon series here, you know what that means, Christ in you. So, when you partake of the bread and the wine, you're not just remembering a far-away Christ.
That table is a meal where Christ, who already lives in you, gives himself to you again. As always, I can hear the objections being typed furiously into the comments. So, let's go through them. Objection one. This sounds Catholic. Are you telling me the bread turns into flesh? No, that's not my argument here.
Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Reformed Christians have disagreed for centuries about how Christ is present at the table. But every tradition agrees on one thing, something real does happen. If you were taught it's only a memory exercise, that nothing is happening at all, that's the one belief none of them share, not even Calvin. Whatever your church calls it and however it explains it, the word Paul chose is partnership.
Objection two, the fear. I've heard what Paul says about eating unworthily. I don't think I'm good enough to take it. That's why I let it pass.
Now to answer that one, let's go back and read what was actually happening in Corinth when Paul wrote about partnership. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul says, "When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat. For when you were eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk." The rich Christians were eating first and the poor ones were going home hungry. That's a big part of what eating in an unworthy manner meant. Treating the body of Christ, including his own people, as if some of them don't count.
Paul wasn't talking about people who felt unworthy. He was talking about people who made other people feel unworthy. And look at what Paul says to do about it in verse 28. "Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup." You see what Paul's saying there? Examine yourself and then eat. The examining leads to eating.
Paul never says to examine yourself and if you find yourself lacking, not to eat. But that's what a lot of us were taught it means. We look inward, find it out our sin, decide we're unworthy, and let the plate pass. But that's not what Paul is saying at all. And then he closes the whole section like this. When you gather to eat, you should all eat together. I passed that plate for 40 years because I believed that table wasn't set for me, that I was unworthy, not because of some sin or doubt in my case, but because I was taught it wasn't my calling.
The end result was the same though. I didn't do what both Christ and Paul said to do. I didn't eat. If you believe something like that, remember that the table was set for the hungry, not for the people who already earned it because nobody has. And with that, here's this week's practice. I call it you in me. The next time the bread comes to you before you eat it, say this either out loud or just inside.
You in me, in me, in you. That's the promise Jesus made in John 6, turned around into a little prayer. Then eat. Don't strain to feel something, just take what you're given from the one who's giving it to you. And if the bread hasn't come to you in years or ever, say that short prayer over the bread at your own table, not because your dinner is communion, it isn't, but because you're already a partner and one day that plate is going to come down the road and you're going to take it. You in me, in me, in you. The table is where Christ comes into you.
But there's one other thing the church does with your body and that's the subject of the next episode in the series, what actually happens at baptism. You were probably taught that baptism is a public testimony, a way of showing people what's already happened inside you. But Paul says something happens to you at baptism and he uses a word that means grown together. At the table, Christ comes into you. In baptism, you go into him. And if you know someone who feels unworthy to eat the bread, send this to them. Not to push them back into church, just to tell them that there's a seat at the table with their name on it, and they are always invited.
Then meet me back here for baptism. And let this be our prayer. Abba Father, you set a table and called us to the meal, yet so many of us declined, passing the plate and feeling unworthy. But you knew about our doubts, and you knew about our failures, but you invited us anyway. Forgive us for the years we thought of you as far away, and the bread is just a memory. Heal everyone who was told they weren't worthy to partake, and remind us that nobody ever was, and that you fed us anyway, because that's what a good father does for his children. Thank you for making us partners in your own life, partakers of the divine nature.
When the bread comes, move us to take it. When the cup comes, move us to drink. You and us, and us in you. We love you, we reflect you, we are yours. In Jesus' name, amen.
