Life for the Journey

[Below you'll find the live stream video of this past week's Maundy Thursday service with the people ad friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, and the text of the message.]



Luke 22:7-20

On Maundy Thursday, we remember two things about the meal Jesus shared with the twelve apostles on the Thursday before His crucifixion.

First, we remember the new commandment, or, as in the Latin from which the word Maundy comes, a new mandatum, a new mandate, that Jesus gives to His Church on Thursday of the first Holy Week. Jesus commands, mandates us to love each other with the same self-sacrifice with which He has loved us. If that commandment doesn’t alarm us and drive us to repent for our sin, asking God to love others through us, we’re living in a state of denial. That’s because none of us can fulfill this commandment in our own power or goodness. We need Jesus, remembering that He tells us the total truth when He says, “apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

The second thing we remember on Maundy Thursday, the topic that will occupy us this evening, is Jesus’ institution of the sacrament of Holy Communion.

Holy Baptism, of course, is the sacrament by which Jesus gives us new life, Holy Communion is the sacrament by which Jesus sustains us in our life with Him. After Jesus was baptized at the Jordan River, He was led by the Spirit to face temptations in the wilderness. After you and I are baptized, until we die and are called from the dead by Jesus to live with Him in a sinless eternity, we still live in this world, wrestling with the temptations and tests thrown at us by the devil, the world, and our own sinful selves. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that after Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, God sent angels to minister to, to take care of, Jesus. (Matthew 4:11) In Holy Communion, Jesus ministers to you and me directly and personally. He gives us His own sinless, eternally triumphant self. “This is my body given for you…,” He says. And, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” (Luke 22:19-20)

Our Gospel lesson for tonight begins with Jesus sending two of His disciples–Peter and John–into Jerusalem to make preparations so that He could celebrate the Passover Seder with His disciples. In sending Peter and John, we see that Jesus is bringing both the fulfillment of the old covenant and instituting the new covenant. Under the old covenant, the one between God and His people, the Jews, it was customary for two men from a family to go to the outer courts of the temple in Jerusalem so that the Passover lamb their families would eat during the Seder dinner could be slaughtered. They would then take the slaughtered lamb back to the homes or inns in which the meal would take place. But, in a break from tradition, Peter and John weren’t sent to do this on behalf of their biological families. Jesus would have this meal with His new family, the family of God called together by His Gospel Word, the Church. You’ll remember Jesus once said, “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” (Luke 8:21) Here are Peter and John putting Jesus’ Word into practice, preparing to celebrate a meal that encompasses not just one’s relatives, but all people who believe in Jesus.

Passover was the central festival of the Jewish calendar. It memorialized that moment when God’s people, then enslaved in Egypt, were set free and sent off to the land God promised them. Before the first Passover, God instructed His people to prepare for the tenth and final plague God brought on Egypt. The angel of death would take the life of the firstborn in every home and barnyard in Egypt unless the blood of a sacrificed lamb was smeared on the doorposts of those places. Blood is the means by which oxygen, the breath of God, gives life to every human being and every vertebrate animal. Blood is the means by which carbon dioxide, the toxic gas produced by respiration, is taken out of the tissues of the body. Blood then is life. When Cain killed his brother Abel in the Old Testament book of Genesis, his blood–his taken life–cried out to God. At the first Passover, the blood of the lambs, whose death was for the people who trusted in God, barred death access to the lives of the firstborn.

Another festival of the Jewish year was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this day, a perfectly unblemished lamb was sacrificed at the temple. The lamb bore the sins of God’s people from the previous year. After it was sacrificed, the priest would sprinkle the people with the blood of this perfect lamb. By this means, the people were covered with life from God and the toxic impurity of their sin was removed from them. The problem was that under the old covenant, the effects of the sacrifice lasted, at the most, only a year. And so year after year, God’s guilt-plagued people were called to offer yet another lamb, to be covered once again by its blood. Even at that, people would often offer sin sacrifices throughout the year.

Friends, we too, would be plagued by sin and uncertainty about our standing with God were it not for one thing: Jesus has instituted a new covenant in which we can rest. John the Baptist talked about this new covenant when, pointing to Jesus, He said, ““Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29) The sin of the world, of the whole world, of every time and every place, including our sin, yours and mine.

Under the old covenant, priests daily, made sacrifices of lambs, doves, and grain to first, purify themselves of their own sin before they then offered sacrifices of people who came to the temple laden with guilt. Nothing but these constant sacrifices could assure people their sins were forgiven or carry them from death to life. But, referring to Jesus as our great high priest, the book of Hebrews tells us, “Unlike the other high priests, [Jesus] does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. [Sinless Himself] He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.” (Hebrews 7:27)

In Holy Communion, we don’t sacrifice Jesus on the cross again. That’s bad theology, intimating that what Jesus did on the cross wasn’t good enough. Controlling the timetable and circumstances ordained by God, Jesus offered the sacrifice of His innocent body and blood on the cross once and for all. This is why when biblically heedless people ask you when you were saved, you can confidently answer, “On a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.” Jesus has already done everything necessary for your sins to be forgiven by God and for you to have life with God. As I’ve said before: When Jesus said before dying on the cross, “It is finished,” He meant it! The apostle Paul wasn’t lying when He said, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) We become Christians not because we’ve made a decision for God, but because God made a decision for us. He decided to die for us! “While we were still sinners,” the Bible says, “Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) So, friends, in Jesus Christ, our sins are already forgiven. The only question is, do we believe in Him?

This is where Holy Communion comes in. While our salvation has already been accomplished and God’s decision for us is unchangeable, even when the Holy Spirit’s Word has convinced us to believe in Jesus, we can get wobbly in our walk with God. The devil, the world, and our sinful selves constantly press us toward unbelief. They lie to us, telling us we’re not good enough, that Jesus didn’t really die and rise, that we’re too bad and the world is too bad for the good news of new and everlasting life with God through faith in Jesus to be true. On top of that, life can batter us with setbacks, tragedies, and difficulties. “Pastor, I believe in Jesus,” someone told me recently, “but my life is so hard right now.” Holy Communion happens when the word of Jesus, along with Jesus’ promises to us, meets the bread and the wine and Jesus tells us, “This is My body and This is My blood. What I accomplished at the cross and tomb was for you. Your sins are forgiven. My good news is for you. I will never leave you nor forsake you. (Hebrews 13:5) Though your sins are like scarlet, I make your life as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18). As far as the east is from the west, so far have I removed your sin from you. (Psalm 103:12) I am with you always, to the close of the age. (Matthew 28:20) All who believe in Me will not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)”

Friends, life in this world is hard. But we are blessed that during our journey through this life, Jesus gives us Himself, body and blood, in, with, and under the bread and the wine, and fills those who receive Him in faith with life that never ends. Amen

Maundy Thursday: Jesus Comes to Us

[This message was shared during Maundy Thursday worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, earlier this evening.]

Luke 22:7-20

Maundy is the Old English word for command. On the Thursday when Jesus was arrested before His crucifixion on Good Friday, Jesus gave His Church a new command: that we love our fellow disciples with the same commitment, passion, and sacrifice that He lived out in His suffering and crucifixion. 

Of the four gospel writers, only John mentions this commandment. But John doesn’t mention what, for the other three--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--is central to this night, the institution of Holy Communion. Are the evangelists--three on one side, one on the other--contradicting one another?

Not at all! John’s entire account of Jesus’ earthly ministry is framed by a consciousness of the centrality of the two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, to the Christian life. And so, John tells us that Jesus’ ministry begins at Cana when He turns water into wine and His ministry ends when, dead on the cross, a Roman soldier pierces His side and sees water and blood emerge from the wound. 

The Christian life is composed of receiving new life as an act of grace through Jesus at our baptisms and continuing to receive new life and the forgiveness of our sins as Jesus gives Himself again in Holy Communion. John doesn’t denigrate Holy Communion; he elevates it.

Similarly, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, by their accounts of Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion don’t denigrate or ignore Jesus’ new commandment. On the contrary, when we receive the body and blood of Jesus in Holy Communion, we are immersed again in the saving love of Jesus. In, with, and under the bread and the wine, the body and blood of Jesus enter us, and as we receive Him by faith, He imparts the power to love our fellow disciples as He loves us. 

So, there is no contradiction among the four gospels about Maundy Thursday, just different perspectives, each reinforcing and underscoring the other.

The gospel of Luke’s account of the first Maundy Thursday and the institution of Holy Communion is our focus tonight. I want to look at just the last seven verses of the lesson, Luke 22:14-20. 

Verse 14: “When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, ‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.’”

The feast of Unleavened Bread was kicked off by Passover, the annual celebration of God’s ancient people, the Jews, of God’s deliverance of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. On the first Passover, the eldest of captive Israel’s children and livestock were spared when the angel of death sent by God passed over because their families smeared the blood of a lamb without blemish on their doorposts. 

On the first Maundy Thursday, Jesus is showing us that He is about to accomplish something even more miraculous and spectacular: The power of sin and death will pass over and not harm those washed clean of the blemish of sin in Holy Baptism and who are covered in the power of His life-giving blood when they trustingly receive Holy Communion. 

This is what Jesus anticipates as He sits with His disciples at this last Passover.

Verse 17: “After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, ‘Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’”

Those of you who were able to attend the Jews for Jesus presentation on Christ in the Passover, will recall that four cups are part of the Passover meal or Seder. The Seder celebrates God’s old covenant or old testament with Israel. Scholars are unclear as to which of the four Passover cups Jesus is sharing in verses 17 and 18. In the end, I don’t think it matters much. The more important thing is that from this old meal commemorating the old covenant, Jesus institutes a new covenant by which all people, Jews and Gentiles, may be saved from death for all eternity. 

In Jesus, Israel’s historic mission of being God’s light of salvation and new life to the nations if fulfilled. A new or renewed Israel comes into being, believing Gentiles grafted into one body with believing Jews. Because God has now shown up in our world in Jesus--the Word made flesh--all people are called to trust in Jesus for life with God. 

As the apostle Peter said of the risen Jesus: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12) In a sense, the cup that Jesus shares with the disciples before instituting Holy Communion is the last act of the old covenant.

Verse 19: “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”

A good rule of thumb when interpreting Scripture is that, unless symbolic or poetic imagery is intended, the Word says precisely what it seems to be saying. That’s true of Jesus’ words here, the words of institution. Jesus does not say, as He shares the bread, “This represents my body” or “This symbolizes my body.” Instead, Jesus makes a simple, declarative sentence, “This is my body.” The same happens with the wine: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood…” As I’ve said before, Jesus knows precisely what the meaning of is is. Through the power of His Word spoken over the elements, the bread and the wine are also His body and His blood. 

Jesus gives Himself to us! The simple elements of the two sacraments--water, bread, wine--are God’s saving Word, the good news of new life for all who turn from sin and trust in Jesus, touching our bodies, our tongues, our bloodstreams, just as surely as the read Word enters us through our eyes and the proclaimed Word enters us through our ears. 

Holy Communion is Christ entering into us, destroying the cancer of sin and raising us up to life with Him!

This means too that when Jesus says that we’re to receive His body “in remembrance” of Him, it doesn’t mean that receiving Holy Communion is a tour through musty history. Jesus means that when we receive this sacrament with faith that He always tells us the truth, we are re-membered to Him and to His people, reconnected to Christ and the eternal Church of every time and every place, on earth and in heaven. 

We feast with Abraham as he received the bread and wine from Melchizedek. 

We feast with departed loved ones who, heaving trusted in Christ, today enjoy the messianic banquet with Jesus in eternity. 

We feast with every believer in the world, from Amir, the Iranian I met and talked with for forty-five minutes at Aldi’s the other day, who left Islam and came to faith in Jesus back in 2005, to Miriam, Daniel, and Francoise, Jews who trust in Jesus for their salvation, who we met last week. 

We feast with the members of the black churches in Alabama that were recently destroyed by a racist arsonist. 

We are re-membered to Christ and to each other and eternity invades are sin-darkened, time-bound world. 

Holy Communion is a miracle wrought by Jesus by which He lets us have and savor a foretaste of the feast that He has in store for all His people. 

In Holy Communion, heaven comes to earth.

When I was a boy, my parents liked to start our vacations at night based on the mistaken idea that we five kids would fall asleep on the way and dad could drive in peace. That never happened, of course. We always had a big meal before we left home and, since there were no snacks in the car, would only eat when we stopped along the way for a meal. I guess you could say that, through those pre-vacation meals, we were fortified for the journey. 

For the baptized believer in Jesus, life on this earth is a journey. First Peter tells us that we’re foreigners in a strange land. But along the way, God fortifies us with the living bread from heaven, Jesus.

Tonight, we enter a different journey, one that Christians have historically called the Easter Triduum, the Three Days--Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday. It’s a journey through Christ’s betrayal, His death and burial, and finally His resurrection. 

For the first disciples, the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection was a long, grief-filled journey, the way our lives in this world can sometimes be. Their lives weren't perfect or easy even after they came to know that Jesus is risen from the dead.

So, how powerfully loving it was of Jesus to fortify those first disciples for all of their journeys and to fortify us for our own journeys through our own Good Fridays until we reach the believer's final destination, that Easter when we will one day, beyond the gates of death, awaken in His presence. Jesus does that by giving us not just a memory, but Himself, His body and blood in this sacrament, bread and life for our journey. 

Receive this sacrament again tonight and always, friends, with gratitude and faith and awe, remembering that in it, Jesus is coming to you again. Forgiveness is coming to you again. Life is coming to you again. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Present-Tense Presence

[This was prepared for presentation during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio on Maundy Thursday 2016, March 24. You can listen to this message here.]

Luke 22:7-20
Maundy Thursday commemorates events that happened on the night of Jesus’ betrayal and arrest. The word Maundy is derived from the Latin word mandatum, from which we get words like mandate and commandment. That’s because in his Gospel, John tells us that on the first Maundy Thursday, Jesus said this to His disciples: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:34-35).

Previously in the Old Testament, of course, God had commanded that we love Him and love our neighbor as we love ourselves, commands that Jesus underscored in what we call the Great Commandment.

But in His new commandment, Jesus tells His disciples that we must love our fellow disciples just as Christ has loved us. Jesus’ command is non-negotiable: No matter how much we Christians may drive each other crazy, no matter how much we may disagree with one another, we are to love one another with the same self-sacrificing passion Jesus has for us. This command is even more demanding and rigorous than the great commandment! Absent constant humble prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit, absent Jesus Christ living in us, we cannot hope to fulfill it.

But it’s hard for we human beings to rely on the God you can’t see. That’s why something else that transpired on the first Maundy Thursday, something not recorded in John’s Gospel, is so important. Unlike John, Luke records how Jesus and the twelve apostles celebrated the Passover together that night.

At the table, Jesus told the twelve how eager He had been to partake of Passover with them. He wanted to have it with them before He suffered, Jesus said. Undoubtedly, these words were jarring and made the twelve uneasy. But Jesus went on to explain that He would not be enjoying a feast of this kind again until He had ushered in the Kingdom of God.

Bringing the Kingdom of God--the reign of God, the freedom of eternal forgiveness and new life--to human beings otherwise lost and shackled to sin and death, was Jesus’ entire mission. It was the whole point of His entering our world. It was why He had come to Jerusalem, where He would die on Good Friday, lie dead in a tomb on Holy Saturday, and rise on Easter Sunday.

It’s why in Luke 9:51, we’re told that “Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” (Another translation says that Jesus "set His face" for Jerusalem.)

And it’s why in Luke 13:33, Jesus said, “I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem!”

Jesus would die and rise to bring His eternal kingdom to those who dare to repent and believe in Him.

Of course, Jesus’ disciples were always lost when He told them that He would be rejected by the priests and elders, be crucified by the Romans, and rise from the dead.

The expectations of pious Jews like Jesus' first disciples were that the Messiah would be a popular leader who brought greatness to Judea, kicked out foreign interlopers, and make sure everyone was prosperous. The disciples were horrified whenever Jesus spoke of unpopularity and being executed. “That’s not what happens with Messiah,” they thought. Peter even once told Jesus, “Never, Lord...This shall never happen to you!” [Matthew 16:22]

And when Jesus said that, after dying, He would be resurrected, it didn’t register with the disciples. Jews who believed in a resurrection thought that there would be a general resurrection of all believers at some point. They didn’t know what to do with the idea that one Man--in this case, Jesus--would rise first as, in a phrase Saint Paul would later use, “the first fruits" of the dead.

In any case, Jesus’ talk on that first Maundy Thursday must have frightened the disciples. The hopes that Jesus had raised through His preaching, teaching, healing, exorcisms, and raising of the dead were going to be dashed? Jesus was going to leave them alone? Had they come this far, the disciples must have wondered, only to be abandoned by Jesus?

It was to allay the fears of those first disciples--and of we present-day disciples who have our own fears--that Jesus did what He did next. Verse 17: “After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, ‘Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”

The celebration of Passover involved the drinking of four cups of wine. Jesus instituted Holy Communion between the third and fourth cups of His celebration with the disciples. In doing so, Jesus spoke words that were strange to the disciples and, if we allow ourselves to truly listen to them and not treat them like church words that wash over us, can seem strange to us too.

To disciples who worry that God is far away, distant, detached, Jesus says, “You are not alone. I will not leave those who trust in Me orphaned. This is My body. Here’s My blood, poured out for you.”

The God we can’t see comes to us “in, with, and under” the bread and the wine, the God of flesh and blood Who says that whenever His Word, the words of institution meet the bread and the wine among His believing people, He is there!

Now, there are some Christians who believe that when they take Holy Communion, they’re remembering what Jesus has done for them, or remembering Maundy Thursday, like friends reminiscing about days gone by or like historians rummaging through the archives of history for cogent lessons. Remembering is nice. It can even be helpful, even, when it comes to the study of history, essential. But none of this is what Holy Communion is about!

Jesus says, “This is My body...This is the new covenant in My blood.” Holy Communion isn’t about remembering a past event. It’s experiencing the present-tense presence of Jesus as we receive His body and blood with believing hearts.

When we receive the sacrament trustingly, Jesus is here, now, as close as the person sitting next to us, as close as the hearts beating in our chests.

Just this past Saturday, I was able to share Holy Communion with Phyllis at the hospital, just three days before she died. I can assure you that she wasn’t focused on the past when she received the sacrament. She was focused on the Lord Who was with her at that moment and the future heavenly banquet that this feast foreshadows for all who trustingly surrender to Jesus and His Lordship over their lives.

Yes, people say, but didn’t Jesus say that we are to do the sacrament “in remembrance of Him”? He did. But we must understand two things here.

First, Holy Communion isn’t something we do. Without Jesus and His powerful word, bread and wine are still just bread and wine. We don’t do the sacrament; Jesus gives it, He gives Himself, to us! Holy Communion is something that Jesus does; we are its recipients.

Second, the word Jesus uses which we translate as remembrance is, in the original Greek of the New Testament, a form of the word anamnesis. This word tells us that Holy Communion isn’t something for us to remember Jesus by, like a souvenir from Disney World or the lock from a deceased loved one’s hair. Instead, Holy Communion is the means by which Jesus re-members us to Him and re-members us to the Church on earth and in heaven, re-members us to the body of Christ made up of saints below and saints above.

I don’t know about you, but in my everyday life, I get so caught up in everyday life, that I sometimes start to fall apart at the seams. I fragment. I worry. I get upset. Sometimes I get angry. I sin.

When we humbly and unrepentantly come to Jesus as He offers His body and blood to us in Holy Communion, He pulls the fragments of our souls together. He makes us whole. He heals our souls. Feeding us on one holy food, Jesus makes us one with Him, one with our sisters and brothers in Christ, one with our true and best selves.

And in this way, Jesus holds us close and assures us that we are not alone. Holy Communion is the visible means on this earth by which He enacts the truth of God’s promise, given both in Deuteronomy of the Old Testament and Hebrews of the New Testament: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” No matter what happens to us, even on the brink of our deaths, Holy Communion proves that that promise is true, which is why Phyllis received the sacrament so gratefully this past Saturday.

On Sunday, eight Living Water young people will receive the sacrament for the first time. They will tell you that there are three big things that Jesus gives us in Holy Communion: forgiveness, new life, and communion with God’s family, the Church, on earth and in heaven. But all of that happens for one simple reason: In this sacrament, Jesus comes to us. In times of joy and times of sadness, and in all the times of our lives, through Holy Communion, Jesus’ gives us His body and blood to assure us that He is always with those who trust in Him. Always. Amen