Jeremy Duncan: The table is where we're called to ask to let go of a lot. And I think this is why maybe theologically the table has always been complicated. There's something very primitive and unvarnished in our encounter here, then I can see why Jesus uses such evocative language here. Last week, I ended our time by saying that Easter Sunday is about celebrating that tomorrow is a new Monday morning. A new morning when you can wake up more honest with yourself than ever before, more free from whatever it was that has felt like it had you trapped before, more motivated to the good than you have ever possibly imagined before, perhaps even believing for the very first time that whatever death you've experienced or encountered in your life was not the end.
Because resurrection is somehow the natural state of the cosmos. However, if all that is true, and I absolutely believe it is, then Easter has to be more than just a celebration. It has to become for us a launching point into a strange new world where so many of our prior assumptions about the world are replaced with new fascinations. And this is why I think in the wisdom of the church, Easter is more than just a day. Easter is an entry point into fifty days of Eastertide.
And so this year, we've chosen to enter into that season with a series where we are gonna focus on how resurrection changes our postures toward some of the most basic and fundamental practices of the church. Today, we're gonna talk about the Eucharist table. Our mission and missions next week, baptism after that, then partnership and marriage, and finally, we'll talk about death to close this series. But this is all about how Easter shapes and reshapes, guides our vision for the community of Christ. Now, as I said, we're gonna talk about death at the end of this series, five weeks from now.
But I do want to mention this today. Many of us will know that Brandon Healy passed away on Good Friday. Brandon was a young dad who had been part of this community since day one. I had the privilege of being his pastor for the better part of fifteen years, and I was actually able to visit him in the hospital on Friday before he passed. Brandon's son, Walter, is just four months old.
His wife, Julian, is obviously dealing with the shock of all this. Everything happened so quickly, after his cancer returned only about a month ago. But a GoFundMe was established just this week to help Walter and Julianne. You can find a link on my Facebook page, but I need you to know this already. All of you, the community that has surrounded Brandon and Julianne for years, you have exceeded all expectations.
Your generosity has been remarkable. And in my last conversation with Brandon on Friday, he was even then in those moments expressing his deep gratitude and peace. Knowing that there were so many people surrounding and supporting, caring for Walter and for Julianne. I need you to keep all of that energy now for years to come, and I know you will. We need to surround Walter as he grows, Julianne as she processes all of this.
So, thank you for all of that. The funeral will be held on May 19. It's gonna be at Rock Point Bears Point Church just outside the city on the way to Cochrane. We will post the details on the community discord for anyone who needs them. But please, I'm asking you to keep Walter and Julianne and everyone that knew and loved Brandon in your prayers, especially for this Eastertide season.
Of course, we also know that Pope Francis passed away this week, and so we also want to continue to pray for all of our Catholic siblings as they move toward the election of a new leader who will guide the church. So let's pray together. Gracious and risen Jesus, we gather in the light of your resurrection. Hearts still echoing the joy of Easter morning, hearts still heavy with the news of tragedy in our midst, and yet we live in the trust that you have conquered death, shattered our tombs, breathe new peace into rooms that we have locked through our fear. And today, are reminded that Easter is not just a single moment, but a season and a way of being, a rhythm of life marked by hope and renewal.
Yes, death, but also resurrection. And so just as you appear to your friends in their doubt and their fear, We trust that you are with us in all of our uncertainties today. Speak peace over the places that still tremble within us, and awaken faith where our struggles still linger. Breathe once again into your people and let our lives be filled with resurrection wonder. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Amen. Today is a strange new world as we wake in the light of resurrection. And today, we wanna talk about the table of Christ. So, we will cover all of our symbols. Jesus' ask, Jesus' intent, and finally Jesus' presence with us.
At first, a thought. One of my favorite things about our rhythms here at Commons through Easter and Holy Week is all the work that gets put into the stage and the decor, the way we decorate the room. We have four, we call them tent pole events across the year here at Commons. That's the Stampede Breakfast, which is up next in July. Our fall launch every year in September, Christmas Eve in December, and of course Easter in the spring each year.
And we wanna make those weekends fun, but we also want to get creative about how we tell the story each time. And so for Easter this year, we were thinking about resurrection and new life, and this year we had the image of the sun coming up over a valley, if that is the image we had in mind. And so if you notice we had those sun rays behind the cross in front of that lush green valley on the screens behind it, We had streaks of sunlight coming up from behind our green meadow covered in flowers over on the other side in the gym. And it's actually a lot of fun to think about these things. It's fun to pull together all the staff and all the volunteers that it takes to make that happen each year.
But one of my favorite things every year across Holy Week is when we bring out the cross on the stage. We have this beautiful slab cross, just these wonderful solid wood beams. By the way, quite heavy if you have to set this up. If you ever gotten up close to it though, you also might have noticed there's these wonderful bow tie inserts holding together the natural cracks and splits in the wood. I love it.
And I love seeing it change from Palm Sunday to Good Friday to Easter each year. The colors and the flowers on the cross reflecting the colors that we wear on stage during Holy Week. All of that tells a story in itself. But it is interesting to me that one of our most cherished and beloved symbols within Christianity, the cross, is not an image that Jesus chose for himself. Now get get me wrong.
The cross is beautiful. I know sometimes people will say it's like wearing an electric chair around your neck, and it is. The cross was a method of execution. And there's something shocking about turning that into an everyday symbol in our lives. At the same time though, something profoundly subversive in that.
Right? Like, to take an image that was meant for death and transform it into a symbol for life is resistance. It's a pushback against everything that promotes and wants everything that manufactures death in our world. So, put me on record here. We should keep the cross and it will be back next Easter.
But, when Jesus told us what he wanted to be remembered by, it was not a cross. It was something very different. And that's okay. We have a lot of symbols in Christianity, and the diversity of those symbols itself is quite beautiful. For example, we have something called the chairo.
Sort of looks like a p and an x combined together. Sometimes we'll have what looks to be an a and an upside down u beside it. Looks something like this. Well, in Greek, that x makes a sound, and what looks to be a p there makes an r sound. So these are actually the first two letters of the word Christ.
And beside it are the alpha and the omega. That's the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. They symbolize Christ as the beginning and the ending of all things. Now, this is sort of a stylized version of the Cairo, but in really old illuminated manuscripts of the Bible. You would often find illustrations at the top of the page that looked something like this with that x and p decorated, inviting you to then look for Christ as you read through the text.
We also have something called the ichthus. That's those Jesus fishes you find on the back of your cars. Personally, no chance I would ever put that on my car. Not because I'm ashamed of my faith, because I am ashamed of my driving, and I would never want that to be associated with my Lord. Please, if you have one, keep it clean.
Okay? But this symbol actually comes from the acronym I x o y e or better said here, I o d x I theta upsilon sigma. Because those are the first letters of the phrase, Jesus Christ, son of God, savior. And in Greek, those letters just happen to spell the word ichthus, which is the word for fish. So the legend goes that early Christians would use this symbol as a way to identify themselves to one another.
And if you drew a swoop of the fish and the other person talking to came along and completed the second half to make the image, you could trust that they were then part of that same community of Christ. Now during times when the church was persecuted, that Jesus fish became more than a symbol. It actually became a valuable tool that was used. Just for fun, there is another version of the ichthus, that may actually have been older than the fish. It was actually discovered in some graffiti uncovered in Ephesus, and it looked like this.
You'll see the same letters, but it's a different symbol here. It's not a fish this time, but a wheel. However, if you notice, in that eight spoked wheel, you can actually draw out all five letters. Now if you're having trouble seeing it here, this might help. Here they are highlighted here.
Eotexi, theta, upsilon, and sigma. That eight spoked wheel is yet another way to spell out Jesus Christ, son of God, savior. Except this time encompassed in the circle that represents all things held together and sustained in Christ. Look, pretty cool. And all of this is kind of fun.
More than that though, I think it's actually quite beautiful to understand our symbols. Where they come from, what they were trying to express, And yet still, as I said earlier, none of these are actually the symbol that Jesus asked to be remembered by. Because that was the table. Specifically, in Luke 22, at the last supper, right on the verge of Good Friday, we hear Jesus saying, this is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.
And both a symbol and a practice, an image of community gathered, instituted directly by Jesus, who then tells us specifically that this is how I want to be remembered. Now what's interesting here is that this is actually one of the earliest sayings of Jesus that is corroborated for us outside of the gospels. We have four gospels in our bible. They're all written in the second half of the first century. Mark is probably the earliest, possibly written in the mid fifties.
The last of them, which we tend to believe is John, written probably in the late first century. Although all that is speculation. We don't know for sure, of course. But if you remember a few weeks ago, I talked about a document called the Didache or the teachings of the apostles. And you can go back to the last week in our how to pray series if you want to hear some of the history about that text.
But the Didache was an early church manual circulating in the second half of the first century. Essentially, was guiding church planters in how to start Christian communities, how to conduct the practices of the church. And the Didache was already teaching the Lord's Supper in the seventies right around the time that Luke and Matthew were being written down. However, maybe even more interesting is that this line we read from Jesus in Luke 22 actually shows up in one of Paul's earliest letters. In fact, this line from Jesus about how he wants to be remembered is the only direct quote of Jesus that Paul records anywhere in all of his writings.
First Corinthians 11, he writes, for I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. The Lord Jesus on the night that he was betrayed took bread. And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Now, understand that even the most skeptical of scholars would acknowledge that Paul was writing in the late forties through the fifties and the early sixties.
And that first Corinthians is one of Paul's first undisputed letters. It would have been written very early in the fifties of the first century. Probably likely before any of the gospels had even been written. And what this means is that not only was the table the symbol by which Jesus asked to be remembered by, not only was that request circulating in the writings of Paul and the teachings of the apostles, but this was indeed one of the very first rituals that the Jesus community adopted. In other words, we actually did what Jesus asked for once, and honestly good for us.
Just think about it. We don't even have gospels yet. And yet, here's Paul passing on to his friends in Corinth what even earlier Christians had passed on to him. Practices that would later be recorded in the Didache, narratives that would later be recorded in the gospels. What all this means is that the Eucharist table is the most primitive experience of Christianity that we have available to us.
And I mean that primitive in the best possible sense here. The table comes from before our bible. Even before our gospels, it traces its roots all the way back to the very first followers of the way. The Christians who were teaching Paul about what it meant to follow Jesus. And for me, there's something quite profound about realizing that before we had even begun to figure out our theology, even as we were still working to make sense of what the Jesus story meant and what it was all about, before we even wrote any of it down, we knew from day one that gathering together around a table.
Rich and poor, slave and free, Greek and Jew, barbarian and Roman, everyone offered a seat together. This was somehow the very heart of Jesus' message, the very expression of Jesus' life now resurrected within us. And so for two thousand years now, the church has continued in various forms with different approaches and understandings, and granted sometimes with a lot of disagreement about how exactly it should be done. But for two thousand years now, Christians have continued to gather around a table simply because Jesus asked us to. And low key, I kinda love that.
Now, depending on the tradition that you're familiar with, you might be more comfortable referring to the table as the Eucharist or perhaps as communion, maybe even the Lord's Supper. All of those are fine, by the way. They're all acceptable. They all point to the same thing. Eucharist is a Greek word that means good gift.
Communion points to our shared experience together and with Christ at this meal, and the Lord's Supper points us all the way back to where Jesus instituted this practice at the last supper. But even with those different names, they point us back to the surplus of meaning embedded here in this simple meal, which makes me want to return to Jesus' choice. Like, why did Jesus want to be remembered this way? Now, sure. A meal is nice.
And when I go, I would like a small group of my friends to get together and share a meal in my memory. But this particular meal strikes me as a uniquely painful moment in Jesus' story to be remembered by. If you think back through the events of Holy Week, events that we just moved through, events that culminated as we shared at the Eucharist table on resurrection Sunday seven days ago, then you'll remember that the last supper is not Jesus' last meal with his friends in a nice get together kind of way, reunion. It was his last moment before one of those friends invited to that very meal would betray him even to his death. It's also the table at which he told his perhaps best friend Peter that he would deny him three times.
It's also the table at which his friends, presumably those who understood his teachings the best, get into an argument about who would be considered the greatest in his kingdom. I mean, imagine that. You gather your friends for one last meal. You tell them you're gonna die. You pour out your heart before them asking them to remember you, and they're so off in their own world, caught up in their own ambitions that they brush off your warnings and proceed to argue about their own self importance.
Sure, Jesus. We're busy here. The last supper is not a particularly friendly, cozy, cuddly moment. It's not the kind of moment I would hope my friends would commemorate to remember me. Remember that time we kinda ignored you, Jeremy?
The last supper is profoundly raw. Again, here's Jesus, anxious about the path in front of him, misunderstood by his closest friends, ignored for the warnings he offers, and then almost immediately sold out to his enemies. And maybe that's the point. There's something about Jesus' disdain for personal marketing here that really challenges me. You know what I mean by personal marketing.
Right? Like, I've talked about this lots of times before, but the me that you see on the stage right now is not who I really am. This is me with enough preparation to be at least 18% more eloquent than I am in real time. Of course, it's more than that though. We all have very curated Instagrams and managed LinkedIns, and that's not a bad thing by the way.
You should not be putting everything, every story online. I have lots of stories I'll share with you on a Sunday, but I have even more that I absolutely will not. Still, we all struggle with this dissonance between ourselves, who we really are, and how we want to be remembered. Jesus, though, he seems to invite us into all of it. And I mean, think about it.
He could have pointed us back to that meal on the beach with his friends after his resurrection. I mean, that's a great meal story. And conveniently, it's only two chapters later in Luke 24. Why not go with that one? He could have got all the juice out of that image there without all the smoke that surrounds this one here.
And again, I think that's the point. Let me come at this from a different angle. A number of years ago, someone who was really important in my life, very instrumental in my career, someone who'd been a mentor to me really, had a very public downfall. And at first, it was all very painful for me. Like somehow this was a betrayal of me.
Like, they had let me down. Like, I had lost something very important in all this. Over time though, in that process of grief and forgiveness and even reconciliation, part of what I had to realize was the only thing that I had lost were my own illusions. My friend didn't change that day. He was still the same person that I cared about, still the same person that had taken a lot of time to invest in me, didn't all of a sudden become flawed.
The truth was he always was. And so at least part of what I was mourning in that moment wasn't really the loss of my friend. It was the loss of some artificially manufactured persona that I had bought into. And sure, some of that was created and projected by my friend, but if I'm honest, at least as much of it was constructed and projected by me onto him. Everything I wanted to see in him, everything I wanted in a friend, everything that I thought I deserved in a mentor.
I had built him up into something that he wasn't, and it came back to burn me. Jesus seems to want to go out of his way to destroy all of the illusions we build for ourselves about him. And that's not because Jesus is flawed. It's not because Jesus is gonna let us down. It's not what I'm saying here.
What I'm saying is that our illusions about Jesus, those inevitably will. The ways that we want him to be fearless and untouchable, or the ways we want him to be the perfect leader, never misunderstood by anyone, always getting the best out of those around him. Those fantasies inevitably will fail us. And so Jesus decides instead to call us back to Jesus at his most vulnerable, opening up about all his fears, To Jesus at his most misunderstood, even by his closest friends, to Jesus at his most graceful, inviting even his own betrayer to come and sit and eat with him. I think Jesus calls us back to this moment so that we might, just like the disciples were forced to that night, let go of all of our illusions about Jesus.
Perhaps even so that we might be forced to let go of our illusions that we could ever police who was worthy of being invited to sit at the table with Jesus. I mean, trust me, if Judas was welcome there, I promise you are as well. The table is where we're called to ask to let go of a lot. And I think this is why maybe theologically, the table has always been complicated. I mean, if we are really stripping away our illusions here for meeting directly with Jesus here, if there's something very primitive and unvarnished in our encounter here, then I can see why Jesus uses such evocative language here.
This is my body broken for you. This is my blood poured out. We are taking in something of Jesus in a very real way here. Now, in church history, that's been interpreted in a lot of different ways. Our Catholic friends will believe in something they call transubstantiation.
It's a very big word to say that the bread and the wine in some real but undetectable way actually becomes the very body and blood of Jesus. On the other side of the aisle, our Baptist friends will say, well, no, this meal is a sign of something important, a central and a vital symbol, but it's just a symbol nonetheless, a remembrance that points us back to the very body and blood of Jesus. Now, for what it's worth, I think all of that is fair game. It's all acceptable. I have less than no interest in policing the boundaries of the Eucharist.
As I said earlier, the table predates even our theological speculations about it, and I think at some level it probably should stay that way. But for my money, and for the tradition that commons roots itself in, there is also a middle ground. And this approach often falls under the larger category called real presence. In this specific language we use in our tradition, the table is a means of grace. And what we're saying here in broad terms along with the Lutherans and the Anglicans and even the Eastern Orthodox traditions is that Christ is somehow mysteriously actually really present every time we gather at the table to eat.
Now maybe that sounds like a kapo to you. And to be fair, anytime we use the word mystery in our theology, that's sort of our shorthand of way of saying, I don't know. But I think this time it really is the best that we've got. Because last week, as we all of us stood in line to receive, trusting or maybe even just wanting to trust in resurrection. My belief, my trust is that Christ was really there with us.
That you and I, we can actually taste the spirit of Jesus every time we eat at his table. You see, you in your bedroom with crackers and grapes, that is not the good gift of God. But all of us here together, all of us together anywhere, having our illusions dispelled over and again, knowing that we're welcome every time we fail, seated and standing between those that we know are struggling to believe the same things that we are, that resurrection really has been set loose in the world. That is grace we can taste. And it's what makes the Eucharist more than just a belief, more than just a theological statement that we give our mental assent to.
It is an encounter with the spirit that animates all things in the light of that first Easter morning. It is an experience of grace that invades our world in order to reshape how we choose to live in it. The Eucharist is the sign of a strange new world where bread and grape smack of the kingdom of God. And that is real grace come to find us. Let's pray.
God, we are so grateful for that first Easter morning and for the ways that that resurrection has reverberated out through history to find us in every new encounter, every reconciliation, every first bud of spring. This slow, small, growing conviction that resurrection is the natural state of the cosmos. All around us, all the time, just waiting for us to notice. And now, God, we recognize this table that you have offered us, a symbol and an image, an encounter, an experience with grace where we get to taste something of your kingdom. As we stand with each other, as we wait in line, as we jockey for position and find our seat around your table, as we wait for one another to eat, all of this community helps us to experience grace in new and profound ways.
When we doubt, we're surrounded by trust. When we trust, we offer that to the person beside us. When we gather together, we embody something of your spirit here in the world. And we trust that in that, we are encountering the goodness, the grace that sits at the founding of the universe. And so, we're grateful for the table.
And we're grateful for each other. And we trust that your spirit will slowly help us encounter you in new and deeper ways each time we come to fellowship with you. May the table guide us out into the world with grace that defies our expectations even for ourselves and transforms the relationships around us. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.