Blogging Backwards towards
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Communion as the Freedom Party

Last Sunday at our church we began a month long sermon series on Communion - not just talking about it but experiencing it as the sacramental act that is foundational (along with baptism) in terms of what Christian worship, community and service is built upon.

Our texts were Exodus 12:1-14 (the story of the first Passover and the institution of the celebration) and Matthew 2:1-14 (the story of Epiphany or the coming of the Magi who as scientist/philosophers of the ancient world seemed to better know what the Messiah would be then the people to whom the Messiah came).

Communion is based upon the celebration of the Passover. It's what Jesus was doing with his dearest friends when he instituted the lord's supper or communion for the first time. The Passover is meant to be celebrated - it's a meal that you have to eat as you tell the story, and a re-telling of the story that you have to do as you eat the meal. There is a foundational connection between story-telling, experience and participation. It's the way in which you enter into the story of the Passover and Exodus so that you can claim the story as your own, no matter what age in which you live. That night is different than all other nights (as the Haggadah affirms) because we remember that we too have been (and maybe still are) slaves in Egypt under Pharoah. It's about freedom, remembering what it is, what it cost in the past so that we might live it, seize it and use it in the present.

Communion is the re-interpretation of that Passover Freedom Meal by Jesus, pointing to a new, or different experiential articulation of what freedom is, costs and empowers us to be. When we eat the bread and drink from the cup we remember what freedom cost, what Jesus did, where we come from, so that we might more fully live in the moment as free people, followers of Jesus, participants in the ongoing fight for justice, freedom and shalom-living.

How have you experienced communion as the freedom meal in the past? How might you need to do so today?