Category: sacraments

A call to restore the Lord’s Table to our weekly worship

Part 1

Here I continue to present my argument that our churches should adopt the practice of participating in communion at least weekly.  I have given a case from precedent or the pattern that God has laid down in Scripture.  Here I present an argument from the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. 

An argument from meaning

The Lord’s Supper pictures Christ’s gift of himself to us for the sake of our life in him. It’s helpful here to see the connection between the two sacraments, one applied externally (I speak physically here) and the other applied internally.  In Baptism, Christ washes us, declaring us clean before God. The sign is applied externally because it demonstrates the promise of Christ’s covering. It is the declaration of the forgiveness of our sins and the promise of the Holy Spirit. Baptism is an initiatory rite.  It marks the beginning of our relationship with God.  The Lord’s Supper keeps the bonds of that union tight.  Through the Lord’s Supper, God continues to confirm our faith in our hearts through the promise of union with Christ. 

The Lord’s Supper pictures a taking in of Christ.  An image that, through the Spirit, becomes a reality. In the Lord’s Supper, we internalize the promises of Christ.  It declares to us that Christ is our only spiritual sustenance. In the words of Belgic Confession Art. 35, we receive nothing less than Christ himself in the Lord’s Supper, “who nourishes, and sustains the spiritual life of the believers, when he is eaten by them, that is, spiritually appropriated and received by faith.”  All our salvation is from Christ.  We cannot justify ourselves, and we cannot sanctify ourselves. The Lord’s Supper reminds us that everything we have comes from God’s grace.  We receive grace through the constant application of the Spirit in crucifying the old man and bringing the new man to life.  God declares to us that he is transforming us into the image of Christ.

This work of transformation happens over the entire life of the Christians. We are not presumptive about this work of salvation, but seek to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.  We need that constant reminder that this is not of our strength, but it is the Spirit who is working in us so that we have the strength, the energy, and the freedom to work this out.  It is the Spirit who works in us to work and to will.  The Christian life is a working out of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Weekly communion is a constant reminder that of the central truths of the gospel.  It is not I who live, but Christ, who lives in me.  I must put my flesh to death on the cross of Christ.  I must find life in Jesus.  Of course, we hear that in the word, but we also need that confirmed to our hearts every week.  The breaking of the bread and the pouring out of the wine are integral to the life of the church because they so clearly demonstrate our union with Christ and his righteousness.  Through faith, The Lord’s Supper is effectual in bringing that union about.   We want to be fat with the gospel of Jesus, not always on a diet.

The whole point is assurance.  I learn through the word.  God assures me of the truth of that word through the sacrament.  All Christians struggle with the assurance of their new reality in Christ.  God gives us the gift of the Lord’s Supper to strengthen that assurance.  Use it!  I now taste and see that the Lord is good.

The question remains how do we avoid the mistake of the Roman church and turn our focus on the earthly elements rather than heavenly sustenance?  The gospel that we have a living king in the flesh at the right hand of God must continue to come out clearly in all our teaching.  We must also emphasize that that king is accomplishing our transformation through the Spirit, who comes from his side.  If we continue to set our participation in the Supper in the context of a risen Christ and a mighty Spirit, we will avoid looking to the earthly elements in the Supper for sustenance.  Regardless of our practice, that realization is what we need for a healthy church.  It is our union with the once dead and risen Christ that is fundamental to living out our salvation. 

I sometimes wonder if the reason our churches struggle working through the connection between justification and sanctification is found in that we do not live out those doctrines in weekly communion. We know that sanctification flows from justification in our minds, but do we have a “from the gut” understanding of this truth.  The connection, of course, flows from our union with Christ.  The Lord’s Supper is all about union with Christ.  In Christ, we no longer belong to this world, but we are citizens of heaven. 

What greater way to live that out, than to physically live out that union with Christ? That is what the Lord’s Supper is. We boldly come before the throne of grace, clean in Christ, and there we find what we need to live in Christ. Christ is the seed that is taken into ourselves so that good works flow from our hearts as naturally as from a spring.  Both our status as Christians who may eat with Jesus and our need to receive spiritual sustenance are deeply entwined together in this holy meal.

We can flesh this out with the doctrine of Christ’s three-fold office.  As a priest, I eat with Christ, and so I demonstrate that I share in his death and resurrection.  Therefore, I declare in the Lord’s Supper my willingness to offer myself as a living sacrifice to him.  I am a priest offering myself to God in gratitude for what Christ has done.  We also see our kingly office.  We declare the righteousness of God that is found on the cross and offer the reconciliation of God to all men through the body of Christ. God is righting the wrongs of history at this table. 

Finally, we see our prophetic office.  We follow Christ in declaring the coming of the kingdom of God.  We declare the forgiveness of sins, equally and freely offered to all. So we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.  Here is the table! Come and see that the Lord is good! 

We might object:  weekly communion isn’t necessary for a positive Christian life. Neither are churches who practice weekly communion shining examples of God’s goodness.  Of course not. On the one hand, churches without weekly communion have lived out the gospel.  On the other hand, churches with weekly communion have not.  In these, communion was used for its own sake and was not used to point the congregation to Christ.

Weekly communion does not magically make us better Christians, but then again, neither does the practice of having two services every Sunday. The point is that weekly communion will strengthen those churches who do have the gospel.  In the same way, churches are more greatly edified by having both a morning and an afternoon service. 

We can also bring up the example of those churches that lack infant baptism.  Many Baptist churches do have the gospel, but if we believe that the practice of infant baptism is good, we must also say that they weaken themselves through withholding the gift of infant baptism to their children.  Even though a given church that baptizes their infants may be weaker than a given church, that does not make the practice itself unhealthy.  Like the Baptist, who chooses not to baptize their infant, we choose spiritual weakness by offering Christ’s self-gift in communion so infrequently.

A call to restore the Lord’s Table to our weekly worship

(This article will hopefully be published (a much shorter version) in the Clarion, the magazine associated with the Canadian Reformed Churches).  I write to my federation, but all faithful churches should hear the call to restore to the communion table to its proper place in the life of the congregation.)

The churches ought to receive the nourishment of Christ at the Lord’s Table at least weekly.  Calvin wrote, later in life, of the practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper four times a year, “I have taken care to record publicly that our custom is defective so that those who come after me may correct it the more freely and easily.”  In my experience, though Scripture is clear on this question, the correction of this defect has not been as free and easy as one would hope. 

As Canadian Reformed Churches, we have an opportunity to correct this oversight on the part of our fathers.  Within our tradition, we have, from the past, the voice of Van Rongen, who has called on us to reconsider the frequency of communion among ourselves.

I am arguing that the church ought to celebrate communion at least weekly.  At least: there is room to do it more often.  Preaching was never limited to Sundays in the history of the church. Neither should communion.  We may celebrate the Lord’s Supper at any assembly of the saints.

In the same way, that we desire to preach at least once a week, so we ought to want communion at least once a week. The word and sacrament belong together. Weekly preaching without the supper should be as inconceivable to us as a weekly celebration of the supper with monthly preaching.

I do not intend to make an argument from the history of weekly communion.  There are many excellent resources out there that demonstrate the respectability of this practice.   A simple google search of “Michael Horton, weekly communion,” will bring you to an excellent article on the history of it, which he wrote for the Mid-America Reformed Journal.  Robert Godfrey has also done excellent work on the history of weekly communion.   I can also recommend Paul Aasman and Theo Lodder’s works.  Each of those men wrote a short series of articles for the Clarion. Paul Aasman in 1997 and Theo Lodder in 2008-9.  These also form a good historical and theological background for what I will argue in this series. 

I would like to focus on the argument from Scripture.  I will give seven arguments: “an argument from precedent, an argument from meaning, an argument from presence, an argument from order, an argument from the week, an argument from Holy War, and an argument from the call of the gospel.  In my first article, I take up the first argument.

The argument from precedent

The New Testament church practiced weekly communion.  We can note three places in the New Testament, where we see this practice implied.  We see it most clearly in Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11. 1 Corinthians 11-14 contains Paul’s warnings about how the Corinthians meet with each other for worship.  In 1 Corinthians 11: 20, Paul assumes that the Corinthians celebrate communion whenever they come together. If the pattern of weekly gatherings holds, they also had weekly communion. 

We see weekly communion in Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers.”  The breaking of bread here is a reference to the Lord’s Supper. In his article, defending more frequent communion, Paul Aasman (Clarion, March 7, 1997) argues that this is not a sound argument for weekly communion because of the regular use of the phrase “breaking of bread” for a fellowship meal.  He fails to fully see how the whole story of Luke-Acts presents the development of the fellowship meal into a sacramental meal.  The connection of the breaking of bread to the worship of the church in Acts 2:42 underscores that point.

This is the way things develop in Scripture.  Common phrases take on new meaning in light of new events.  The Lord’s Table is closely tied with and is a transformation of the fellowship meals that Christ has with his disciples in the gospel.  Now the kingdom has come and the Promised Spirit, which allows the disciples to eat with Christ.  What better way to do that than through the way of the breaking of bread. This breaking of bread, the pattern Christ established on the day of his death. 

In verse 46 of the same chapter, we see a daily breaking of bread, which I understand again as a reference to communion.  God tells us this to demonstrate the devotion of the early Christians.  They are excited about the new kingdom that God has established and wish to celebrate it daily.  We can also gather from this that the Lord’s Supper is certainly not limited to Sunday celebration. 

As time went on for the New Testament church, it seems that communion was more closely tied to the first day of the week. In Acts 20:7, we see this beginning to take shape: “On the first day of the week, we came together to break bread.”   We see an implication that the practice of gathering together had become a weekly practice.  There was a natural connection between coming together and breaking bread.

Like the practice of infant baptism, the frequency of communion is implied rather than directly commanded.  We infer infant baptism from the continuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.  It is the same with weekly communion. This is not surprising when we consider Old Testament worship.  Eating was part of one’s worship before God in the temple.  We can particularly think of something like the peace offering, where worshippers would partake of the animal that they had offered to God.   To worship God was to participate in the festival of God. 

To early believers, the gathering of believers is temple worship. We can think of Christ’s conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4.  Christ says that a day is coming where all men will worship in Spirit and Truth.  Through the Holy Spirit, God now permits sacramental worship wherever one lives.  We see this in Hebrews 11, where the people of God approach Mt. Zion to hear the word of Christ.   In Deuteronomy 16:16, Moses tells the Israelites that when they come to worship God in the temple, they should not come empty-handed.  Neither should we.  Now that churches can have temple worship wherever they worship God, eating becomes a part of that worship. Weekly communion naturally flows from the new order that Christ has established.

Now we may respond by noting that we do not have a direct command in the New Testament to practice communion weekly.  We only have the phrase “as often as you do it.”  We need to be careful with such an argument. As we know well from our Baptist brothers, there is no direct command to baptize babies either.  We imply that.   

We can also note that the New Testament does not directly command the weekly preaching of the word. It does not give commands regarding the frequency of either the Lord’s Supper or the Preaching of the Word, other than the call do it regularly. Strictly speaking, even the call to meet together in Hebrews 10 is not a warning against neglect of preaching and the Lord’s Supper, but the neglect of meeting together. I do not agree with this interpretation.  I merely note that we should be consistent in the way we follow God’s teaching for worship.

In terms of worship, the church has always worked from the assumption that the pattern laid down in Scripture is there for our benefit.  We should have an excellent reason to depart from that pattern.  And there are exceptions to every rule.  The recent lockdown is a good example. It kept the church from gathering together to worship God, which is never ideal. Apart from these exceptions, there is no good reason to depart from the pattern of weekly communion.   

Besides, these are the means of grace.  These are the primary ways in which our Lord has ordained to show his love to us, to comfort us, and to assure us in our faith. When we, in our pride, make excuse after excuse, and so allow ourselves to depart from the pattern laid down for us, we are undermining God’s self-revelation to us.

In the matter of proclaiming the gospel, we rightly follow the example that the Spirit laid down for us in the New Testament.  We are suspicious of those who try to minimize the importance of this example. Whether they argue for one service a week, sermons that do not find their primary source in Scripture, or those who promote the ten-minute sermon.

Why do we question the presented patterns of communion?  If we bring this kind of suspicion to the text of Scripture, we may lose the strength of the argument for a weekly half-hour sermon, much less two half-hour sermons.   To argue that the frequency of communion is an example we can take or leave is a self-defeating argument.  We should approach the scriptures with a desire for maximal obedience, not minimal obedience.

We know that the Lord’s Supper is a remembrance.  We often narrow it down to the cross of Christ.  We should be focussed on union with Christ.  I like how J. Todd Billings puts it in his recent book, “Remembrance, Communion, and Hope: Rediscovering the Gospel at the Lord’s Table.”  You’ll notice he uses the language of “drama.”  This can be used well or not so well. If we understand by this that we are called to apply the lessons of Biblical history to our lives and so continue to apply the work of the Cross of Christ in the World, we are on a good path and that is where Billings is leading us.  The person he got this from, N.T. Wright, doesn’t always use the idea of drama so well.  He ends up using it in a way that undermines the truth of scripture.  Billings, however, is careful to use what is useful in Wright’s understanding of the drama of scripture. Here is the quote.:

“If our identity is to be transformed in the triune drama of salvation [Billings means by this that we desire to move from the family of Satan to the family of God, which is accomplished with ever greater union with the church of history and the God of history, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit], then we need a robust and multifaceted remembrance of God’s promises.  This will be inseparably connected with a present communion with our Lord Jesus Christ mediated by the Spirit.  This will also involve a hope for the return of the same Christ, and the final consummation of creation giving way to the promised kingdom.  Though all this, dwelling upon and receiving God’s word in Scripture, we are given words of life to direct our path, reveal our script in the drama, and show us the identity to which the Spirit is conforming us in Christ.

Why is this threefold approach necessary?  N.T. Wright claims that the story of Jesus is incomplete without the story of Israel in the past, and also without the story of God’s future, which frames the church in the present.  In parallel to this, Wright speaks about the Lord’s Supper as a place where “past and present come together.  Events from long ago are fused with the meal we are sharing here and now.” Moreover, if the bread-breaking is one of the key moments when the thin partition between heaven and earth becomes transparent, it is also one of the key moments when God’s future comes rushing into the present.”  For “Jesus—the real Jesus, the living Jesus, the Jesus who dwells in heaven and rules over the earth as well, the Jesus who has brought God’s future in the present—wants no just to influence us, but to rescue us; not just to inform us, but to heal us; not just to give us something to think about, but to feed us, and to feed us himself.  That’s what this meal is all about.”  The Supper—like the gospel itself—involves a convergence of God’s mighty acts and promises in the past, the in-breaking and anticipation of God’s future, and nourishment upon Christ in the present.  Anything less is a reduction, something other  than living before the face of the triune God.”

One more thing should be explained.  What does Wright mean about bringing the future into the present?  He is talking about justification.  God takes something that he would give us at the end of time, and by the righteousness of Christ allows us to share in his justification.  Because Christ lived a righteous life, we too may share in that righteousness.  Wright has some suspect thoughts on justification, but on this he is absolutely right.