Sermon Tone Analysis

There is a story about me that has become legendary among many of my friends that I want to share with you today, though I recognize that after hearing it many of you will henceforth be wary of ever eating anything that I bring to share with you.

I was a bachelor for the first 35 years of my life.

And for the last 15 or so of those years, I lived on my own, which meant that I never saw much need to learn how to cook.

I could fry an egg, and I could make tea with my Mr. Coffee Iced Tea maker.

And, since I lived in Portsmouth for much of that time, I could order delivery from pizza joints, Chinese from several different restaurants and even Greek food from Orapax across the river in Norfolk.

And one of the things that this boss never really had was a

Many of you have special dishes that your friends — or maybe your pastor — ask you to make.

My friends all knew better.

They would look for the delivery menus in my kitchen, and sometimes they would find them beneath a stack of dishes that had been waiting for way too long to be washed.

So when Annette and I got together and moved into our first house, she wondered how in the world I could have lived with the few dishes she had helped me pack from my apartment before the move.

But then I brought a box inside that she had not seen before.

Now, the box is the very core of this legend.

It was in all regards nondescript.

I’m not even sure that it was labeled, but as soon as I had seen it I knew what was inside, and I have to tell you that I had paused for a few moments before deciding that I would allow her to see its contents.

Finally, I decided that there really should be no secrets between us, so I brought it in and set it on the kitchen counter.

“What’s this?” she asked as she opened it.

And then, “Oh, my gosh!

Are you kidding me?!”

The secret was out.

I had had other dishes all along.

They’d just been packed up from another move.

But it wasn’t so much the revelation that I had actual dishes that got her.

The REAL surprise was that the dishes were still dirty, having been hurriedly packed up years before in a move for which I had been ill-prepared.

Now, I tell you that story to tell you this one: As we were unpacking other boxes in that house, we came across another mysterious one.

By now, I think Annette had been desensitized to the surprises she might find in these boxes, and she tore right into it.

This one was filled with Hallmark birthday cards and sympathy cards and “thinking of you cards,” all of them brand new, none of them addressed.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Were you planning to open a Hallmark store?”

They were cards that I had bought for friends and family for various occasions throughout the years, but had never sent.

I’d like to tell you that it’s the thought that counts, but the simple fact is that if you buy a birthday card — or, especially, a sympathy card — for a friend and never send it, then the thought doesn’t count for much at all.

You see, there is a connection that should not be broken between remembering and doing.

And today, we’re going to explore that connection as we turn our attention once again to the Lord’s Supper.

Turn with me, please, to , and let’s take a look at this Gospel’s account of the sacrament that Jesus instituted during His last Passover feast with His disciples in the Upper Room of a home just outside of Jerusalem.

It was Thursday, the day we now know as Maundy Thursday, the day on which Jesus would give His disciples a new commandment, to love one another as He had loved them.

This mandate — the Latin word mandatum is where we get the word Maundy — would sum up much of His teaching during this evening discourse.

It was also the first day of Passover for the Jewish people.

Passover, you may recall, celebrates the rescue of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.

It marks the night that the angel of death went throughout the land and killed all the firstborn of Egypt, both man and beast, while passing over the homes of the Jewish people who had spread the blood of a lamb on their doorposts.

It was the last straw for the Pharoah, who had hardened his heart against the previous nine plagues sent upon the land by God.

Now, he just wanted the Jewish people out of Egypt.

Passover is a time of celebration and a time of remembrance.

They celebrate the grace of the God who saved them from their slavery, and they remember the covenant that He made with them to be their God and they His people, a covenant that was sealed with the blood of lambs.

In the upper room, amongst 11 men who loved Him and one who would betray Him, Jesus would now institute a new memorial, one that would mark the New Covenant with mankind that would be sealed with the blood of God Himself, in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Read .

“This do in remembrance of Me.”

Notice that this is an imperative statement.

It calls for an action.

The idea here is the same as that which God had when He directed the people of Israel to establish the Passover feast as a continuing memorial to what He had done for them.

But why did they need the Passover to remind them of such a great deliverance?

Let me ask you something: How do you know how old you are?

Your birthdate is on your driver’s license, so that’s easy, right?

But where did the DMV get that information?

Maybe they got it from the Social Security Administration.

Perhaps it came from your birth certificate.

And, failing all of those things, we here in America tend to celebrate birthdays, so it’s not likely that you’d ever forget the date.

But this is not so in all parts of the world.

One of the things I was most surprised to discover during my time in Haiti last year was how many people do not know their age.

There is no Social Security Administration, and most Haitians do not have driver’s licenses, so official birth records are pretty much nonexistent for most folks.

And birthday celebrations are not all that common.

So many Haitians don’t know how old they are, and many do not even know their birthdates.

They haven’t kept track of the date with the memorial celebrations that we know of as birthdays.

If God had not commanded that His people should celebrate their deliverance from Egypt every year, I wonder how many would remember it today.

But even if they remembered it, how many would consider it to be significant?

One thing that nearly everybody in this room will recognize is that birthdays kind of lose their significance as we get older.

And I think that has something to do with how we mark them.

When we’re young, our parents tend to make a big deal out of birthdays.

And we mark some specific years with special celebrations.

The first one.

Sweet Sixteen.

The quinceañera for Latin American girls.

The 18th and the 21st and, perhaps, the 30th and 40th and then, if you make it that long, the 100th.

But I’ll bet that everyone here has experienced at least one birthday, if not many, that came and went just like any other day.

Even if we remember the day, it is in the DOING of a celebration that we are reminded of its significance.

“This DO in remembrance of Me.”

Jesus could have simply said to His disciples: “Hey, don’t forget what I’m about to do for you,” and they surely would not have forgotten His sacrifice on the cross as payment for the debt incurred because of our sins.

But He gave them something to DO to help them — and us — remember the significance, the unutterable beauty of what He did for us.

Paul used the same word twice when he described to the church in Corinth what Jesus had revealed to him about the Lord’s Supper.

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And then Paul gave a brief explanation about WHY we are to remember Christ’s sacrifice in this way.

Looking back at the Old Testament covenant between God and the people of Israel, the idea of remembering has three perspectives: one that looks back at the inauguration of the covenant, one that looks at the present to see whether both sides are fulfilling their obligations under the covenant, and one that looks forward to the end times, when the blessings God has promised, but not yet fulfilled, will finally take place.

So, as we eat the bread that represents the body of Christ, broken on our behalf, and as we drink the fruit of the vine that represents the blood of Christ, shed for our sins, we are looking back, we are looking at the present and we are looking toward the future.

As we look back, we see that God’s Son, the very incarnated image of God Himself, came to live as a man — to show us the image of God and to show we who were made as that image how we are to live within His kingdom as His image-bearers.

As we look forward, we see the promise that we who have followed the resurrected Jesus as Savior and Lord will be raised with him into eternal life with Him in heaven.

This promise of eternal life includes a promise of another supper, the wedding feast of the Lamb, where Jesus and his bride, the church, will celebrate a perfect union.

But what of that present perspective?

That’s the perspective Paul has in the next part of his letter to the Corinthians.

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What does he mean when he writes that we should examine ourselves?

To answer that, we can consider the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.

During this encounter, Jesus told the woman something He could only have known supernaturally — that she had had five husbands and now lived with a man to whom she was not married.

She thought He must have been a prophet, so she brought up a spiritual matter that had apparently bothered her for some time.

Where should she worship God?

On the mountain where her forefathers had done or in Jerusalem, where the temple had been built and where God had established His presence in Israel during the time of King Solomon?

And Jesus said that the time had come when worship would no longer be limited to either of those places.

What would be important now would be internal, rather than external.

“Worship the Father in spirit and truth.”

“Truth” here suggests worship with a true knowledge of God and presented in the manner in which He has prescribed.

“In spirit” here is not a reference to the Holy Spirit, but rather a call for those who worship God to do so with integrity and with full engagement.

So Jesus is telling her that true worship must be done according to what God has revealed and in a way that moves beyond the simply ritualistic.

If we participate in the Lord’s Table simply as a ritual, we are no better than the people of Israel when their prophets relayed the word of God, who said:

They were worshiping in truth — they were making the sacrifices that the law prescribed, and they were holding the religious festivals God had ordained.