9 April 2020
Text: 1 Cor 11:23-32
In the name of +
Jesus. Amen.
“For
I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.”
Dear
brothers and sisters, Maundy Thursday begins the Triduum, the three-day
pinnacle of Holy Week leading to Easter Sunday. We reconnect with our Lord’s passion, death,
and resurrection beginning with this annual remembrance in which He gave us His
body and blood to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of sins, the
strengthening of our faith, and to bring us into a physical communion with God.
The
Lord authorized the apostles – those who were “sent” (that is what the word “apostle”
means in Greek) – to preach and to administer the sacraments. And this is why the Church focuses on mission
work, for the Lord works through His Word, and as St. Paul teaches us, “faith
comes by hearing… the Word of Christ.” And
people can’t believe unless they hear, and they can’t hear without someone preaching
to them, and they can’t have preachers unless they are “sent.”
St.
Paul came to things very late. Jesus
ordained him into the ministry after His resurrection and ascension into heaven,
appearing to him on the road to Damascus. St. Paul became the 13th apostle,
but he certainly was one of the sent ones who preached the Gospel to the ends
of the known world, and left us the Word of God in half of the New Testament of
which he is the human author.
St.
Paul was called to preach and administer the sacraments in the churches he
established, and through Holy Communion, our Lord Jesus Christ remains
physically present with His people, whether they are gathering in Corinth, Philippi,
Antioch, or even Gretna. The Church has the
commission from Jesus to call pastors, men who are called by the Holy Spirit
and ordained by other pastors, so that they too may hear the Word of Christ and
believe, so they too may partake of the Holy Supper.
But
how easy it is, dear friends, to take this gift for granted. In normal circumstances, we can take communion
any time. Our church offers the
sacrament every Sunday and every Wednesday. And if you are laid up at home or in the
hospital, the pastor can typically visit you with the Holy Scriptures and the
body and blood of Jesus. He can absolve
you with the authority of one who has been sent. Jesus is generous in making these gifts
available, and it is easy to cheapen them in our sinful flesh – even to the
point of skipping church if we have something more interesting to do.
Sadly,
not just in our parish, but all across our country and even in Europe – where
most of us have our roots, where most of our ancestors became Christians, where
St. Paul was the first to bring the Gospel – we see the churches emptying and
closing. The old die off, and the young
have better things to do than to worship, than to hear the Word, than to
receive Christ’s body and blood. And it
isn’t only the young. The faith is just
not that important to many people anymore, especially when they can turn on the
TV and attend “St. Mattress,” watching a TV preacher say who knows what? We can today stay at home and “read our Bibles”
(which we should in addition to attending the Divine Service), we can worship God
on the golf course or while sleeping in, because God is everywhere, right?
God
is everywhere, but He is there for you, dear friends, where He has promised to
be there for you: in the preached Word and in the Holy Sacraments. And that is why He established the Church –
which means, the “assembly.” Christianity
is not a hobby or a spectator sport. Christianity
is the people of God who gather week after week around a Christian pulpit to
hear one of those who has been sent to preach the saving Word; who gather
around the Christian font to be reminded that they have been baptized and set
apart from the world; and the Christian altar to receive what one of the early Christian
bishops and preachers, St. Ignatius of Antioch, called “the medicine of
immortality.”
And
indeed, now more than ever, dear friends, the world understands that we need
medicine, and the world must come to grips with every person’s mortality.
We
are still in a state of shock to have nearly every Christian church on the
planet shuttered – even in this holy season of Lent, and even extending to the
annual worldwide celebration of our Lord’s resurrection. We are like the children of Israel wandering
in the wilderness and later exiled to Babylon. This is a time of self-examination, even as we
should be doing each week before receiving communion, as St. Paul says, “Let a
person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without
discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.”
Have
we been too lax in our self-examination?
Have we taken the assembling of the saints together around Word and Sacrament
for granted? Has the Christian Church
around the world become complacent? We
cannot look into the hidden will of God, but for whatever reason, our Lord has
allowed this horrific situation to come to pass – both upon the unbeliever and
the believer. The blessings that we have
come to accept as normal –24-hour access to grocery stores, the freedom to
travel and enjoy wealth that kings of 200 years ago would envy, the simple
pleasure of a sit-down meal in a restaurant, the ability to greet our loved
ones, or even the opportunity to attend a Divine Service and hear the Word
preached, and to partake of Holy Communion – have been temporarily revoked from
us.
St.
Paul tells us – under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit – that lax self-examination
in our communion practices can make us “weak and ill” and that as a result, “some
have died.”
We
would do well to examine ourselves and reassess our priorities. We would do well to repent.
Bishop
Vsevolod Lytkin heard about a small group of Lutherans of Polish descent who
had been exiled to a remote Siberian village in the 1930s under Stalin’s purge.
Their pastor had been shot. Their church – and all Lutheran church
buildings – were closed and permanently destroyed. This little flock had no pastor. They only had emergency baptisms and parents
teaching the Catechism to the younger people who were born and who grew up
under government persecution. No pastor
meant no communion – for decades.
The
Bishop met an elderly woman from this village who told him that she had waited
her entire life to meet a pastor. She
had never had the opportunity to take Holy Communion. She knew the Catechism. She confessed that Christ was truly present
in the Sacrament of the Altar. The Bishop
was able to give her the body and blood of Christ. She was then ready to depart in peace.
Again,
we don’t know why this severe judgment is taking place at this time. We must examine ourselves. We must repent. But we do know that we think we have all the
answers. We put our trust in our
technology and our “can-do” American spirit. Some are even taking it upon themselves to say
the words of institution over bread and wine at home – sometimes with the help
of livestreaming technology – as a way to resist this judgment. Rather than submit to the temporary chastening
of the Lord, they are looking for workarounds. And shamefully, there are a few pastors
participating in this fraud. Ironically,
these congregations typically downplay the importance of Holy Communion, even
to the point of celebrating it in a casual way, celebrating it infrequently,
even taking it upon themselves to use chemically altered grape juice instead of
what our Lord instructs us to use: wine.
Rebellious mankind always thinks he knows better than God. This goes back to the tower of Babel, and
even further back to the Fall in Eden. Will
we ever learn, dear friends?
Our
doctors tell us that we will not get through this crisis without “social
distancing.” And in a sense, we have
been “social distanced” from receiving what St. Paul received from the Lord and
delivered to us.
Dear
brothers and sisters, this is a time of judgment. And so let us humbly repent. Let us turn to the Lord in search of
forgiveness and restoration, and the eradication of this virus.
Let
us take to heart the Lord’s word given by St. Paul who was sent to preach the Word
to us: “If we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are
disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.”
Let
us receive this discipline with gratitude for what our Lord has done for us at
the cross, and with faith in His promise to save us and to once more send the “sent”
ones to us – whether we are in a remote village in Siberia or on the outskirts
of a prosperous American city. Let us
repent, and let us look to our restoration – even as we celebrate this coming Sunday
– whether with Holy Communion or not – our Lord’s resurrection from the dead; His
triumph over sin, death, and the devil; and His promise to be with us always
even to the end of the world.
Amen.
In the name of the Father
and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
