Sermon – April 04, 2010: Table, Tomb, Table
Sermon for Easter, April 4, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Table, Tomb, Table
(A Table in Three Acts)
Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29; Acts 10: 34-43; John 20: 1-8
In our tradition we have no altar. An altar is a place where a sacrifice is offered.
Those traditions which teach the physical presence of Christ in the communion elements
have him there by reenacting the crucifixion. But we discern the Lord’s Table as a memorial
meal, and we have a table. This is a place where a meal is served. But what meal is it?
Thursday night, Maundy Thursday, the evening before Good Friday–was the one
time each year that we have communion in the context where it usually is located in our
minds, that what we’re doing is reenacting The Last Supper. That solemn reference to the
establishment of communion at the Last Supper came very early in the life of Christians, in
one of Paul’s letters to that incorrigible crowd at Corinth. They were celebrating their love
feast too much like a pagan party, with the greedy leaving nothing for the more timid and
some getting drunk. Whatever motive the Corinthians had to treat the meal as a fun,
liberating, celebratory shared experience had gone too far, and the apostle pointed out
their faults and reminded them where the ritual got its start–with Jesus redefining the
meaning of symbolic, saving foods at the Passover table.
Theologians who have defined communion call Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians,
beginning with “the same night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread…” “The Words of
institution.”. Some traditions, like the Lutherans, only require that those few verses from
First Corinthians be part of a communion ritual for a Lutheran to take it in good conscience.
To “institute” means “officially to establish,” and that’s what these lines from this letter to the
Corinthians have done. Paul’s authority is so great that this is how Christianity has
conceived its central table ceremony ever since.
We’ll get to a different way of regarding it, and the probable posture of those rowdy
Corinthians, at the end of these remarks. But the first of the three acts for which this table is
stage is the one we performed Thursday night, The Last Supper. Disciples are included in
a meal in the context of a time of great religious meaning and particular drama about what
Jesus will achieve. He tells them that the foods represent his body and blood, his life–and
the topic of betrayal arises. All of them, invited, included, instructed and fed, are quick to say
they would never betray their Lord.
End of Act One.
I had thought of naming this message “A Table in Three Acts” but as Act Two opens
we don’t have a table on stage. It’s more of a shelf. It’s the place where the body lay, a flat
platform long enough to lay out a dead man.
After the crucifixion, at the last minute, the story goes, a wealthy man donated his
garden tomb and he and a friend put Jesus in it, too late for any of the customary funerary
honors to be done.
No work could be done on the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week. So on the
First Day of the Week women came to the tomb. Here’s the garden, the lilies at the
margins, here’s the opening, center stage, to those who have come. There’s no body, just
the white cloths left behind.
In John’s gospel Mary stands for all whose devotion compels them to come to the
tomb, to do what remains for the Lord they have loved. And here, in the obscurity of
earliest day, amid the scent of the garden–an echo of Eden, a hint that something new is
happening–Christ is met as the one so newly reborn as the resurrected Savior that he’s not
quite ready to be handled.
She’s been weeping the pain of being a person, the weeping Jesus did at the
tomb of his friend Lazarus, and Jesus, at first hidden by events, reveals himself by
speaking her name. Their vulnerabilities meet in that moment.
End of Act Two.
The table is set again for Act Three. Jesus, at that Passover meal before his
betrayal, had said, “I will not eat it again until I eat it anew in the kingdom (?)” and each of the
gospels concludes with Jesus eating again with his disciples after his resurrection. John’s
gospel puts it a little later; the others on Easter Day, and Luke crystalizes it in the joyous
revelatory meal shared by the two disciples who meet the Risen but at first unrecognized
Christ on the road to Emmaus.
Scholars think this is the memory which first had the ascendancy, before the
piggishness of the converts at Corinth made Paul reform their practice by tying it back to the
Last Supper. For the earliest Christians the meal on the First Day of the Week was the
miraculous one between a Risen Christ and his astonished disciples. It was not Maundy
Thursday over again, it was Easter Day over again. Jesus was present as Host, not to say
farewell, but to say, “Here I am–I am with you always, even to the end of the Age.”
The Corinthians got too carried away with it, too above themselves. They were so
excited by the story of a Lord who’d been earthly and conquered death on his way to
being heavenly, and what that meant for who they were–what horizons that gave them–
that they forgot to show regard for the people right there beside them. The apostle
sobered them up by reminding them where the promise came from, in terms of Christ’s
own self-sacrifice for others. But for all its excess, their approach to the table of the Lord
had something we should have, too–the assurance that it is not only a place of impending
doom and potential betrayal, like the Last Supper, and not only a place to show regard for
the beloved dead; like a monument, but a place to be surprised and transformed by the
presence of a Resurrected Lord; to eat it anew in a kingdom where it is always Easter.
To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”
button, and then hit the “Archives” link in the sentence at the top of the page presenting
recent sermons.