Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from
Exodus 12:1-14 & 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
on Maundy Thursday, April 5, 2007
at Batesville Presbyterian Church
We call it the Last Supper although it was not the last supper. Yes, it was the last supper Jesus had with his disciples before his death on the cross. But he would have other suppers with them after his resurrection. He broke bread with them at Emmaus on Easter evening. He broke bread with doubting Thomas one week after his resurrection. He ate a broiled fish breakfast which he prepared for them on the beach in Galilee.
Over the course of time the so-called Last Supper became memorialized in the ritual we now call The Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper has now become the most practiced religious ritual in the history of humanity. We gather to share the bread and wine in Jesus' name and in his memory. "Do this, in remembrance of me," the celebrant says, quoting Jesus. The Lord's Supper has become thick in the variety of meanings it is able to hold and carry. Most of all, we are grateful that this Lord's Supper ritual is able to carry us, our bodies, souls and spirits, from where we are right now toward more proximate union with God.
The Lord's Supper is flexible enough to handle any tense we throw at it: Past, present or future. The Lord's Supper is not limited to service in the past tense as a memorial of an event that happened on that first Maundy Thursday. Rather, the Lord's Supper also celebrates a future event when God's purpose will be fulfilled in heaven and on earth. Jesus taught us to pray in the present tense saying,"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it in heaven." The Lord's Supper touches us where we are in the present moment and propels us into God's future. In the future tense, the Lord's Supper is a feast of victory that celebrates God's final triumph over the age old nemesis' of humanity: Sin and death. Sin in the sense of separation from God and death understood as the termination of life and subsequent corruption of our physical bodies. The promise of the Lord's Supper in the future tense is that one day we will sit down at a feast of victory in the kingdom of heaven. At the head table will sit the holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. When it's time to serve the dinner, Christ himself will serve heavenly bread and wine. That cosmic celebration of the Lord's Supper will be a feast of victory.
The theme of "a feast of victory" is common to both the Lord's Supper and the Jewish Seder. Both the Lord's Supper and the Seder have roots in the Jewish Passover. Our Christian heritage intersects with the Passover. Jesus, himself a Jew, came to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem on the week that we Christians now call Holy Week. The Last Supper occurred during Passover and both the Last Supper and the Passover commemorate a past event when God broke into human history to achieve salvation for God's people. Passover celebrates God breaking into history to save the Jewish people from their slavery in Pharaoh's Egypt. The Lord's Supper celebrates God breaking into human history to achieve salvation for all people.
Whereas our Lord's Supper has roots in the Passover, our Jewish friends have another religious ritual that originated in the Passover. It is called a Seder. The Jewish Seder uses liturgy, food and music to retell the Passover story of how God sent Moses and saved the people of Israel from slavery in Pharaoh's Egypt. Some of our older members have experienced a Seder meal with a Jewish family that once lived in this community. I have participated in two Seders. I once celebrated a seder at the home of a Jewish friend. Most recently, I attended a Seder at Temple Israel synagogue in Memphis last Tuesday night. It was a powerful service in a beautiful setting in their newly remodeled Fellowship Hall. I was surprised to learn Temple Israel has 1850 families who are members of their synagogue. That means there are over 5,000 members of Temple Israel, making it one of the largest Reformed Jewish congregations in the nation. The Xyz group and I had heard the Rabbi of Temple Israel preach at the Lenten Noonday Preaching Service at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis. I enjoyed visiting Rabbi Greenstein's temple for the seder and was surprised when he introduced me as an honored guest to the Jewish celebrants at the seder.
As I sat at table at the seder with a minister friend and several Jewish folks I noticed the name of the bottle of wine sitting on the table. Thus I said: "Mogen David, named after King David, what an appropriate name for the wine at your Seder!" One of the Jewish men at my table responded, "Yes, mogen means star, so Mogen David means Star of David." My minister friend told me the Mogen David brand of wine had been created by a Jewish man. He named his wine "Mogen David," meaning "Star of David," which is the emblem on the flag of the nation of Israel. So even the brand of wine used at the seder is laden with special significance. Of course, our sacramental wine has a history as well. The so-called wine we use for the Lord's Supper is good old Welch's grape juice. According to the Welch's website, in 1869 Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a physician and dentist by profession, successfully pasteurized Concord grape juice to produce an "unfermented sacramental wine" for fellow parishioners at his church in Vineland, New Jersey, where he served as communion steward. His achievement marked the beginning of the processed fruit juice industry.
We use Hawaain bread for the Lord's Supper and it reminds us of the Last Supper when Jesus broke a piece of bread and passed it to his disciples, saying: "This is my body broken for you." In comparison, Jewish celebrants of the Seder use unleavened bread to remind them of the way their ancestors left Egypt so fast they didn't even have time to add leaven their bread.
One tasty item we enjoyed at the Seder was lamb brisket. A year-old male lamb without blemish is the chief food at the Passover meal. According to the Old Testament, the people are to eat the lamb with their loins girded, sandals on their feet, and their staff in their hand. To gird your loins means to pull up your robes and tuck them into the belt around your waist the way you would if you were about to start walking somewhere. In other words, the people are to eat the Passover fully prepared for a long and arduous journey such as the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness that followed the liberation of the Jews from Egypt.
Every year on the day before the Passover begins, a lamb was slaughtered for each Jewish household. At the time of Jesus, in a land where virtually everyone was Jewish, thousands of innocent lambs were killed in preparation for this great and solemn festival. The Gospel according to John reports that Jesus died on the same day when the lambs were butchered. John is the only gospel writer who says early on that when John the Baptizer saw Jesus coming toward him, he said, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." Clearly, John's Gospel means to portray Jesus as the Lamb of God who is slaughtered at the time of the Passover, who offers the whole world a new kind of deliverance from slavery to sin and death, a slavery far worse than anything the Israelites experienced in ancient Egypt.
Like God's ancient people in Egypt, we gather at this quickly eaten meal, and know that death has passed us by; its fangs have been removed, its venom neutralized, its bite endured in our place. The story didn't end in Eden, nor in Egypt, nor in the upper room nor at the cross nor in the rock-hewn tomb. This is the feast of victory for our God! Tonight we celebrate it to the sound of chariot wheels clogging in the mud, the sound of water crashing back when it had been divided, and the sound of saints in light dancing on the other side of the river Jordan, celebrating victory.
My wife, Jana, and I were married in her home church, Ascension Lutheran Church in Jackson, Mississippi. Almost every time I worshiped at Ascension Lutheran Church they were serving communion. And every time they served communion they sang a service hymn called This is the Feast of Victory. We are going to sing that hymn after the affirmation of faith. The lyrics of the hymn bring together many elements of the Lord's Supper. The hymn reminds us of connection between the Jewish Passover and our own Lord's Supper's by its reference to Christ as the Lamb that was slain. The last verse of the hymn puts it well: "For the Lamb who was slain has begun His reign."
This is the feast of victory for our God. Christianity is an optimistic religion. We join the Jews in celebrating how God acted in history in saving God's people from slavery in Egypt. Furthermore, our Christian religion is founded on God's action in history in the person of Jesus and the saving work of Christ. The seminal moments of our past give us courage in the present and hope for the future. Finally, we have a vision of the future in which everything that is wrong about the world is ultimately made right. At the feast of victory of our God justice will be served to all creation. God's kingdom will finally come on earth as it is in heaven.
