Sermon 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 Psalm 16:5-11 August 2, 2015
Ordinary time
Celebration!
We say on the Sundays when we share the Lord’s Supper that we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Have
you ever wondered what celebrate means? We’re here this Sunday ready to gather
at this Lord’s Table as we do once a month and so I wonder again, ‘How can we
celebrate little pieces of bread and a small taste of juice?’
What does the word mean and how in the world do we do that?
I believe celebration begins with joy.
- Chara which is the Greek which
means: joy, gladness
- the joy received from you
- the cause or occasion of joy
- of persons who are one's joy
(While in Greece this summer I
realized all my seminary training of Baby Bible Greek wasn’t a match for modern
Greek. I had no clue what people were saying and when I thought I understood
something said or read I was way off. I kept hearing people saying, ‘Kaliméra’
as they greeted one
another and I thought they were talking about squid (calamari) not, ‘good
morning.’ Kalos in Greek means good and imera is day. Good morning, good day,
is the greeting people share with each other.)
Joy
is something that God wants us to experience through God’s love for us.
Joy is a song of confidence, a song of wonder and a song of
assurance.
Listen again to the words of the psalmist in Psalm 16, “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup,
you hold my lot…I keep the Lord always before me, because he is at my right
hand I shall not be moved, Therefore my heart is glad and my soul rejoices, my
body rests secure…in your presence there is fullness of joy, in your right hand
are pleasures forever more.” The psalmist reflects on the story of his life
and chooses to praise God for all of his life. He rejoices because of his
confidence in God’s presence and
because he recognizes God’s presence he rejoices.
When
we enter into God’s courts and into worship we enter with praise. We enter to come
to worship God and offer ourselves to God for this one hour a week. In his ‘Wishful Thinking’ book Frederick Buechner says, “To
worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it.
One way is to do things for
him that he needs to have done-run errands for him, carry messages for
him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on.
The other way is to
do things for him that you need to do-sing songs for him,
create beautiful things
for him,
give things up for him,
tell him what’s on your
mind and in your heart,
in general rejoice in him
and make a fool of
yourself for him
the way lovers have always
made fools of themselves for the one they love.”
While
we sing and pray and do foolish things for God something happens to us.
We
become open to the power of the Spirit to change us,
to
fill us
and
to move our hearts
into
new directions.
Our
hearts get that feeling of joy inside,
a
deep sense of confidence that in all things God will be with us
and
somehow that is enough.
I
have just returned from a month of extraordinary joy.
A
dream of visiting the country of Greece has finally been realized.
Taking time to be fully
engaged with the one God gave me in marriage and to be foolish together with
the things we love to do as sailors reminded me again of what it means to give
oneself over to another.
That is what God wants from
us!
God
wants us to be fully engaged with the life God has given us.
God
wants us to be fully wrapped up in the grace poured out upon us through the
love of Jesus Christ.
It
is a love so powerful that it has turned the world upside down and will
continue to do so. Crazy love
is one way to look at our relationship with God. And that is something to celebrate!
·
And when we gather for the Lord’s Supper it is in the spirit of
joy, the spirit of that crazy love for God and that foolishness of the cross of
God’s love for us that we partake.
·
Our taking part in the Lord’s Supper is a proclamation.
It is an
announcement.
It is a
declaration.
We tell the story
of Christ and it is no longer a story of two thousand years ago it is a story
of today.
It is our story of God’s love for us today that we
carry into tomorrow.
Those
little pieces of bread that we break off the loaf or are already cut for us
into nice bite size shapes are our remembering.
Christ
said his body is given for us.
Our
bodies are members of Christ.
In
the Lord’s Supper we receive our identity
as
belonging to Christ and to one another.
In
this identity we live our lives, we live our stories.
We
can live our stories in a way of infectious zeal,
in
way of sound confidence,
in
a way of incredible joy,
in
a way of serious testimony,
in
a way of crazy celebration.
Friends
everything about us is a living testimony,
let
us begin today and celebrate the new life offered to us in Jesus Christ through
the gift of grace as we receive the bread and the cup.
To
God be the glory.
Amen.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the
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