Not Worthy, But Welcome

“Not Worthy, But Welcome”
World Communion Sunday – October 3, 2010
TEXT: Luke 7:1-10; 1 Corinthians 11:17-26

There is a hymn I remember from childhood that we often sang before communion.
The words of the first verse are also a prayer that we were taught to remember and pray every time we got ready to receive Holy Communion.

“O Lord, I am not worthy that Thou should come to me;
but speak the words of comfort, my spirit healed shall be.”

Taken from Luke’s gospel, the words of this prayer express the humility with which we should approach the altar AND the faith that allows us to come to the altar in spite of our sin.

We are NOT worthy, but we ARE welcome!

Let us pray:

O Lord, I am not worthy
that Thou should come to me;
but speak the words of comfort,
my spirit healed shall be.

O Jesus, we adore Thee,
our Victim and our Priest,
whose precious Blood and Body
becomes our sacred Feast.

Lord, we come to you now seeking to better understand this Holy Mystery.

Guide our meditation; lead us in our learning,
help us to approach your altar with reverence, humility, and faith.

We are here in the Name of Jesus the Christ.

Amen.

“The story is told of a little girl whose parents had taken her forward to receive Holy Communion.

Disappointed with the small piece of bread she was given to dip in the cup, the child cried loudly, "I want more! I want more!"

While embarrassing to her parents and amusing to the pastor and congregation,
this little girl's cry accurately expresses the feelings of many contemporary United Methodist people.

We want more! We want more than we are receiving from the sacrament of Holy Communion
as it is practiced in our churches. “

This story is the opening of a document that was adopted by the 2004 General Conference of the United Methodist Church entitled, “This Holy Mystery.”

This document contains the official United Methodist position on Holy Communion.

It is based on a survey taken in 2000, which revealed that there is a strong sense of the importance of Holy Communion in the life of Christians;

Unfortunately, there is an equally strong sense of any meaningful understanding of Eucharistic theology and practice in our churches.

Clergy and laity alike recognize that grace and spiritual power are available through the sacrament, but they do not feel enabled to receive these gifts and apply them in their lives.

For me, this represents a frustrating disconnect between the contemporary church and
the early New Testament church…

How can we profess to be “followers of Jesus Christ,” and yet not understand one of his most fundamental commands to us: “Do this in remembrance of me”?

We know that people have a deep hunger for the riches of divine grace,
for real communion with our Lord and Savior;

Yet, we fail to recognize that Holy Communion is the most concrete way we have of satisfying this hunger by remembering and encountering the Living Christ.

We have lost the passion for Holy Communion that inspired the early church to gather in secret, fearing for their lives, just so they could celebrate the Sacrament and remember what Jesus had done for them.

“It was a dark, foggy five o’clock in the morning and a thousand people were anxiously waiting for the doors of the cathedral to open.

Who were they?

Why were they there?

What were they anticipating?

The crowd was composed of a variety of people –
primarily working class people, but standing shoulder to shoulder with them were the educated and wealthy, the lords and ladies.

In a few moments they would be kneeling side by side at the Table of the Lord –
laborer and squire, uneducated and educated, maid and mistress –
recognizing that at this table all were equal.

It was the early Methodists flocking to receive the Sacrament of Jesus at their nearest Anglican Church.

The priests inside were overwhelmed at the size of the crowd and were hurriedly preparing more Communion elements.

What was it that the early Methodist people, like the people of the early Church, experienced in the sacrament that caused them on occasion, due to the crowds, to wait five or six hours to receive it?

History tells us that the eighteenth-century Methodist revival was a Eucharistic revival,” as was the revival prompted by Jesus in the First Century.

You see, John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Movement, taught that Holy Communion should be received every day, if possible.

Holy Communion is a means of receiving God’s grace and we ought to avail ourselves of every possible opportunity to participate in the sacrament.

So how did we come to the practice of celebrating Holy Communion once a month or,
worse yet, once a quarter?

What has led so far astray from Christ’s command?

The story is told of a man who goes to the store to buy a ham for a large family gathering.

He wants to have plenty of food so he seeks out the largest and most beautiful ham he can find at the butcher shop.

He takes it home, proud of his purchase, and watches in horror as his wife promptly cuts off the end of this beautiful ham.

“Why did you do that?” he asks.

“Well, because my mother always did it that way,” the wife answered.

So, to solve this mystery, the wife calls her mother to ask why she always cut the end off of the ham. Her mother told her because her mother always did it that way.

So, the woman called her grandmother and asked her why it was necessary to cut the end off of the ham.

Grandma replied, “Well, I don’t know why you girls do it, but that was the only way I could get it to fit in my pan.”

Too often, we continue to do things the way they’ve always been done without bothering to find out why they’ve always been done a particular way.

So it is with our practice of quarterly or monthly communion…

When the early Methodists gathered, they believed that The Eucharist and preaching were inseparable.

They viewed Holy Communion as the central act of worship and celebrated the sacrament at every gathering.

They saw Holy Communion as an opportunity for persons to encounter Jesus and be converted to the faith; in fact, Susanna Wesley, John’s mother, was converted at The Lord’s Table.

John Wesley wrote that the Sacrament was “the grand channel whereby the grace of the Holy Spirit was conveyed to the souls of all the children of God.”

So, what happened to change all of this?

The Methodist Movement came to America and the ways of doing church changed…

In England there was always an Anglican priest available to bless and distribute the communion elements.

In America there was a shortage of clergy and the Circuit Rider system was born.

Clergy travelled from town to town, outpost to outpost, and many congregations would go for several weeks or months without an ordained clergy person in their midst.

These congregations continued to meet for worship and study, but they could not celebrate the Sacraments.

When the circuit riding preacher did come to town, he celebrated communion, baptized new converts, and performed weddings. These were tasks that only the clergy could perform and there simply weren’t enough clergy to be in all the places where Methodists were meeting.

One hundred years passed as this country grew and the Methodist Church began to put down roots in communities across the land.

Clergy began to be appointed to these churches and the need for the circuit riders diminished. However, too much time had passed and people didn’t remember the days of celebrating communion at every worship service.

Ultimately, the practice of the church became to celebrate monthly or quarterly communion simply because that’s the way we’ve always done it…

Trouble is, in the twenty-first century, nobody realized that the real reason for this practice was that the pan was too small.

The 2004 General Conference of the United Methodist Church urged us to reclaim This Holy Mystery and restore it to its rightful place as the center of our worship.

The problem is that there is still a lot of misunderstanding about our sacramental theology and a resistance to changing our practice.

On this World Communion Sunday I am challenging you to open your hearts and minds to a renewed discussion of our sacramental heritage and to the possibility that we can re-discover an exciting means of receiving God’s grace in our lives.

That is why I began our discussion this morning with the “I am not worthy” text…

I believe that none of us is ever worthy of being in the presence of God;
we are all sinners – we all fall short of God’s glory.

That’s what makes communion so special for me…
It doesn’t matter how unworthy I am, Christ still invites me to His table.

I am welcome to encounter the presence of God in Holy Communion, no matter how unworthy I may feel, because God forgives me and His forgiving words heal my broken spirit…That’s a very special gift.

We need to look at Holy Communion within the larger context of United Methodist theology.

According to biblical and Christian teaching, we believe that we are sinners, constantly in need of God’s grace.

We believe that God is gracious and loving, always making available the grace we need.

Grace is God’s love toward us, God’s free and undeserved gift to us.

The grace of God is made available to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and it works in our lives through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

John Wesley described “means of grace” whereby God conveys Prevenient, Justifying, and Sanctifying grace to us…

These “means of grace” are:
the public worship of God
the ministry of the Word, either read or preached
Holy Communion
both public and private prayer

These means are not to be understood as ways of earning salvation;
rather, they are ways to receive, live in, and grow in divine grace.

Our Wesleyan tradition continues to emphasize the practice of these means of grace throughout our salvation process.

This morning I ask that you consider Holy Communion and what it truly means in the life of the church…This is the beginning of our re-awakening the Sacramental Mystery…

Holy Communion is an act of thanksgiving…
It is a way for us to praise God and express our thanks for His mighty acts throughout history…creation, covenant, redemption, and sanctification…
”Give thanks to the Lord for He is good; His love endures forever!”

Holy Communion is the communion of the church…
It is a celebration of the gathered community of believers, both here in our local church and throughout the world wherever Christians gather to celebrate the Eucharist, Christ is there also. “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”

Holy Communion is a remembrance, a memorial…
This is a dynamic re-presentation of God’s past acts of salvation. It is also a celebration of the fact that Christ is risen, and is alive here and now, and is present in the Sacrament. This is not simply a remembrance of some past event.

Holy Communion has to do with the outcome of God’s purpose for the world…
“Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” brings us into communion, not only with those present at the table with us today, but also with the saints who have gone before us. When we participate in Holy Communion we get a foretaste of God’s future Kingdom, a promise made clear in the words, “until Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.”

In the midst of the personal and cultural brokenness in which we live,
we experience everlasting fellowship with Christ through Holy Communion.

Nourished by sacramental grace, we strive to be formed into the image of Christ
and to be made instruments for transformation in the world.

My friends, none of us is worthy to receive Christ, but all of us are welcome at His table…

I encourage you to receive Holy Communion at every opportunity.

For now, we will continue the once a month tradition at our morning worship service;

We will also continue to offer the Sacrament every Sunday evening at worship;

In this way we all have the chance to experience this means of grace every week.

I long for a time when the United Methodist Church enthusiastically embraces its rich heritage and returns to the practice of celebrating Holy Communion at every worship service.

I truly believe that this is one way that we can renew the heart of our church and revive the spirit that once motivated our church.

Like the little girl who was disappointed in the amount of bread she received, I believe that United Methodists are looking for more in the life of the church…

I believe that we all want more grace, more love, more Jesus…

I believe we can all cry out, “I don’t want much, I just want more!”

O Lord, I know I am not worthy to receive You,
but I also know that I am welcome at Your table because You invited me here.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit...Amen