Do This In Remembrance

If we've not met before, my name is Dylan. I serve on staff as one of our pastors. Hello to everybody tuning in, joining from other locations as well. So glad to have you with us wherever you're at. And how are you guys doing today? Are you doing as good as you look today in the room? (congregation applauding) Because you look, I mean, you look really good. Pastor Chancellor could tell without his glasses, that's how good you look. (congregation laughing) Why don't you tell somebody next to you, hey, you look incredible today. Yeah. Now, now to the other person who you didn't say that to, you just let them know, you look so good, I was intimidated, and I'm sorry I let that hold me back, but you look great today. Oh man, it's just so, I get so full of joy just being with the church, being with the people of God. I'm so grateful that we get to do this. And everyone would take that for granted. And even on that thought, I wanna kind of riff off of the connect group video and just give one more encouragement that this would be such a gift to you if you're not already in a smaller community, community within the community of the church,

that you should find your people. And I'm someone who experienced the total life change because of the community I was surrounded by when I became a young adult and really formative years of my life. And what's true for every one of us is that I need to experience the presence of Christ in me, but I also need to experience the presence of Christ in others and through others. And we're designed to be connected to the body of Christ and to be in relationship. And I wanna just even give a little bit of context to a few of the types of groups we have as we get ready to launch. If you're trying to figure out, what is the right one for me? I wanna take that step. It is a little bit uncomfortable. How do I make that easier? I wanna let you know of a few of the focuses and types of groups. And this might help you find the right one for you, but one of our kind of core focuses is something called alpha. I absolutely love alpha. It's something that really explores the foundations of the Christian faith, which that might mean for you. If you're trying to figure out what you believe, alpha would be a great place for you.

If you wanna learn more of why you believe what you believe, I think it would be an awesome experience. I went through it for the first time as a pastor and it was such a gift to me. Or if you've just never been in a group and you are saying, "Where can I start?" Alpha is probably one of the best answers for you. We're also having some groups launching with a new marriage curriculum called Reengage. And if you feel like your marriage is maybe weak in areas and you want it to be strengthened or your relationship is great and we wanna keep it that way or we wanna grow it even stronger, that would be a great opportunity for you. Transform is another type of group that we do, which is really a one year deep dive into the New Testament. I love being with our transform groups, for transform nights. And it's really a high commitment, high reward. You commit for a little bit longer of a period of time. You dive deep into scripture and you become more like Jesus as you walk together. We also have a lot of groups that offer support that are kind of focused on specific life challenges or situations that people may be walking through that you can walk through them together with others who are experiencing some of the same things that you are. And whatever the case, you can filter through on the groups page.

Or if you have the church center app, you can filter through groups by age, kind of stage of life, day of the week. Lots of things that can help narrow down the selection so you don't feel like you're at the cheesecake factory and you're like, there's just so much good stuff. I don't know what to order. We'll help you find your order. And we know that there's a group for you. And I would just say you don't need to do everything. In fact, you shouldn't, but you should do something. And so figure out what that next step is for you into your community. But with that, I wanna draw our attention to what we're kind of gonna focus on in the message today, which is not a community, but it is a practice of the Christian community that began with Jesus and his disciples. It's what we call the Lord's Supper or Communion or what some streams of Christianity call the Eucharist, which is derived from the Greek term meaning Thanksgiving, which I think is just a beautiful way to express it. And I'm gonna kind of use the language of Communion as what's most common to us in our kind of church context as we talk about it today. But we see the institution of Communion recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Mark and Luke in their telling of the Last Supper. And in his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul also recounts and summarizes it

as he's really reminding Christians And he's also correcting their sometimes poor practicing of it that had come out as a divisive thing rather than a unifying thing as it should be for the body of Christ. And so I wanna read to you what he writes in 1 Corinthians 11 starting in verse 23. Are you ready? We're ready to dive into scripture together. It says this, "For I pass on to you "what I receive from the Lord himself. "On the night when he was betrayed, "the Lord Jesus took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. "Then he broke it in pieces and said, "'This is my body, which is given for you. "Do this in remembrance of me.'" In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant between God "and his people, an agreement confirmed with my blood. "Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it. "For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, "you are announcing the Lord's death until he comes again." Now I wanna say my goal today as we talk about this is not to hash out the theological debate about the metaphysical nature of communion, how Christ is present in the elements, either physically or spiritually, or is it merely a symbolic thing? Different Christian traditions have different takes and there's a lot of nuance involved in the conversation,

but what I actually want to do is to key in on this invitation, which is also the title of the message, which is, "Do this in remembrance." There's room for great theological discussion around whether communion is more than a symbol, but what we can certainly be sure of is that it is not less than a symbol, that in the Lord's supper our attention is not fixed on the bread and the wine, or in our case, unfermented wine, aka great juice, but what we eat and drink guide the meditation of our minds and hearts and even our bodies to something far greater. And there is a problem though that arises when we're talking about symbols. And the problem is that things lose their symbolic potency when the greater meaning that they point to is forgotten, or when we fail to remember what is the true meaning behind it, they lose their symbolic potency. And I just want to ask you, kind of from the crowd, what are some common Christian symbols that you think of? You can go ahead and shout some out. What are some Christian symbols? Fish, I heard a cross, I heard, was there another? A white dove? There was another one too. (laughing) Did someone say peacock? Did you hear the first message? You know, it's funny, the first message,

nobody said peacock, we got a peacock 'cause I'm getting people on the bandwagon. I'm bringing it back because there are some maybe common Christian symbols you heard like the cross, a dove, the ichthis, which is the Jesus fish, or in all of branch, the symbolizing the peace of God, but for a long time, the peacock was a strong Christian symbol that if you were actually to go back and look through Christian art from the early church, or through the medieval period, perhaps beyond, you would often see peacocks depicted in Christian art, oftentimes associated with funeral imagery or catacombs, things related to death. And the reason for that is that many people in antiquity believe that the flesh of peacocks didn't decay after they died, which is interesting. So it was adopted within Christian art as a symbol of eternal life, the peacock being a symbol for eternal life. And I have to tell you, when I go to the Bismarck Zoo and I see the male peacock strutting his stuff, I don't really think about eternal life. (laughing) I have more think of like pride and mating. You know, when he's out there shaking his tail feathers, all I really think of is this guy's really feeling himself. He's got like a little bit of Marvin Gaye going on in his head and he wants to get it on with a lady peacock. (laughing) And you feel bad for him 'cause there's all these people standing around watching,

and like my three-year-old calling him a chicken or something, it's just totally demeaning. I mean, it would take it out of a guy. I feel bad for the peacock and it's just the furthest thing from my mind being drawn to this beautiful picture of eternal life, right? the Christian symbol of the peacock has not endured. It's not something that's really been maintained within our modern context. And I say that just—it's kind of a bit of a silly example, but I say that to give an example of the way in which what was once a strong symbol could lose some of its meaning when that perspective gets lost, and so I'm not advocating for a renaissance in pondering peacocks. I'm not saying we need to bring it back, you know? We're going to put a peacock on the screen behind me, and we're going to be reminded of eternal life. But you even take something like a far more prominent Christian symbol, such as the cross, and you'll see people today who maybe wear it around their neck, or they even have one tattooed on their body, but they care little about the person who hung on it. And I say that not as a slam dunk, but I say that because it highlights the way in which for them, it's really a popular symbol in culture rather than a powerful symbol pointing to Christ, the true meaning behind the cross. And the reason for that is that we often take for granted what we become familiar with, that we can become numb to what we have become accustomed to. It's why we don't marvel at a Bible sitting on a bookshelf, because we don't live in a time when its printing would have been an impossibility, or we don't live in a place where its simple presence would be the cause for our persecution. It's just become so common because we're so blessed with access. And so when we share in this practice of communion regularly as the Church, we have to be aware that with regularity we must also maintain its symbolic potency, its symbolic power. And we've already read the key to doing so, that we not only do this, we not only eat

the bread and drink the cup, but that we do this in remembrance, that we not only go through the motions, but that we meditate on the meaning as we do it. And we're going to end our time today, as Pastor Chancellor said, with receiving communion together, but first I want to draw our minds and our hearts to remembrance of some things. And the first one is this, that in communion we remember Jesus' incarnation. And if incarnation is an unfamiliar word to you, it's really what we use to describe God becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ in his birth, and we're going to parse out a little bit of what that means or how that works. But we start here because without the incarnation, there is no body to be broken and there is no blood to be shed. So communion points us to what we read in John 1 where it says, "In the beginning was the Word, talking about Jesus, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning, through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made that has been made. And then jumping ahead to verse 14, the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father full of grace and truth." So Jesus came to us fully God and fully man, one person with two natures, His divine nature and His human nature. The theological term used to describe this is the hypostatic union. You can add that to your book, to your notes, the hypostatic union. And wrapped up in this term is the idea that the human and the divine natures of Jesus are united, they're unified, and that they come together in one person, in Jesus Christ, God the Son, but also that those natures are distinct from one another. And why does this matter? Why am I even talking about this? Because Jesus didn't take on a superhuman nature, something that was different than our own. He had come like a demigod with some divine and some human attributes sort of blended up together.

He wasn't like Superman sent on a ship to our planet, who was like a Kryptonian only looking like us earthlings, but really being something different. No, he was born of a virgin, taking on the fullness of human nature, all of the while maintaining the fullness of his divine nature, meaning there's never a time when Jesus ceases to be God. But the word who was with God and was God became flesh and made his dwelling among us. part of the theological underpinnings that we have as Christians. There are so many implications that flow from the incarnation of Christ, and I think that part of the beauty of the incarnation is that in His coming to us, Jesus didn't reject our humanity, but Jesus embraced our humanity. He embraced our humanness, and so, too, in following Jesus, we don't reject, but rather we embrace our humanity. And the caveat with this is that Jesus shows us a new way to be human. In receiving Christ, we are born again as a new creation made spiritually alive in Christ. It's the embrace of a true humanity of which Jesus Himself is the forerunner. And this is actually where a lot of people mis-stepped and where some correction needed to come in the early centuries following Jesus' ascension as Christianity was spreading. We saw the rise of Gnosticism, which is known as the Mother of All Heresies, which led many people into a dualistic perspective, which saw the physical world as being inherently evil, and the spiritual as good. And with this then also came the dominoes fall down the line, and with it came the rejection of the body, which was perceived to be a physical prison, which the spirit needed to escape. We needed to escape from the body, escape from our humanity. And Jesus, on the other hand, did not despise the body. The incarnation is a story of embodiment. The word becoming flesh, the word becoming flesh. And so in following Jesus, too, we do not disregard or cast aside the body. We discipline the body. We bring the body under submission to Christ, but we do not reject the body. We fast, and we feast. We work, and we rest.

The spirit of God dwells in us. As people in Christ, Christ is in us, that your body has become a dwelling place of the spirit of God. What an incredible thing to consider that He would desire to dwell within us. The body matters in our Christian spirituality. What we do with our bodies matters, and we need to remember this. And there are many ideas and perspectives today which reflect something very opposite. There are still Christians today whose belief is colored with one shade or another of kind of gnostic thought operating through a lens of spiritual as good and physical as bad, from which then you get byproducts like a shameful view of the body rather than a sacred view of the body. Or you get people who lack any sense of stewardship even over the physical environment that we live in as stewards of God's creation. People can develop an apathy because it's material, it's physical, it's bad. In culture today, we see things like transgender ideology which silences the body. It says your body doesn't get a say in who you are or what you can or cannot be. It's a low view of the body. The rise of transhumanism which is the ideal of transcending our human limitations which is something that I'm coming across even this term more and more with the current rise with artificial intelligence, it's rapidly developing other technologies along with it. And when you take this kind of ideal to the most extreme degree which many people are in fact doing. Many people are funding technology with this type of a vision in mind is that they would say something to the effect of the goal is to get to the point where we can upload our consciousness to the cloud and live forever. We'll leave our bodies behind and escape our humanity. Let's ditch the flesh and the blood for silicon and titanium in effect will become gods made in our own image. But when God first created humanity in his own image, he breathed life into an earthy form and he declared it was very good.

God created humanity by his design as he intended and he said it was very good. And while humanity subsequently then strayed from and rebelled against God, Jesus came and human form to restore the good vision that was lost. And now God being born a human, like that was kind of a shocking thing that Almighty, all powerful God would take on the human form. That was shocking enough, surprising enough. But even so, with that in mind, you could hypothetically envision very different pictures of how God incarnate could have lived. Some human beings, even today, live in palaces, have access to nearly all that the world has to offer. They're weighted on hand and foot by servants, and they're not even God, right? In fact, this is kind of what would naturally seem most fitting. The concept of God-Kings is not foreign to different ancient cultures. You can take the Egyptian pharaohs, for example, who were believed to be deified leaders. They were gods sitting on the thrones. But Jesus comes onto the scene. He's born a baby in a humble place, and he took on a life entirely opposite of this. He did not live a life of fame or fortune, or ease, or comfort. He came not to be served, but to serve, and ultimately to give up his life on the cross. And so in receiving communion, we also remember Jesus' suffering. I think of the words of Isaiah 53, which, verses 3 to 5, it's part of a prophecy in the Old Testament pointing to the person of Jesus, the Messiah who was coming, and the prophet writes, "He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hid their faces, he was despised, and we held him in the lowest steam. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed." In the past few weeks, I've had moments where I've just felt my heart grieving really deeply with different people in our church community, people in my life. Just a number of situations, challenges as people have walked through loss, or a diagnosis, difficult things. And I was sitting in my office one day, and I had music playing, and this song had come on that I hadn't heard in a while. It's called "The Road, The Rocks, and the Weeds" by an artist named John Mark McMillan. And maybe if you've been walking through challenge or difficulty, if you've been experiencing pain, maybe listening to that would be a blessing to you. I don't know, but I was listening to the lyrics of the song, and I just began to feel like the tears kind of begin to well in my eyes. It's like they were building behind my eyeballs.

And it was one of those moments where, as I thought about these different people and situations, Jesus bears the weight for us. He gives us a burden that is light, and yet there are also moments where it's like you just sense the gravity of things, and you sense the gravity of maybe something you're walking through or what someone else is. It was just one of those days where I was feeling the gravity and I was feeling emotional about it. And in following Jesus, and if you've been following Jesus for any period of time, you know it's not that we walk through a life without troubles, or that we walk through a life where we're not going to face challenges. We expect troubles in this world. They're going to come no doubt. How many of you have experienced any degree of trouble in your life? We expect troubles. And that being said, how many of you also know that getting hit by a car doesn't hurt less because you expected it, unless you were expecting like a bus and you got a Prius instead and you think that that wasn't so bad. You know, we expect trouble. We walk through the challenges of life as people of hope. It doesn't mean we don't experience any degree of pain in the midst of it. And I even think about Jesus as we read about him and this moment, this story about his dear friend Lazarus, who he loved deeply. Lazarus dies. And we read now looking back and it's like this is such a great story because we know that Lazarus, Jesus calls him out of the grave that he's resurrected in that moment. He's And Jesus knows that he's about to tell Lazarus to walk out of the grave. And yet he weeps. It's like the shortest verse in all the scripture. Jesus wept. He knows that he's about to bring him back to life. And yet Jesus weeps. And it's not because he was being performative. Like, oh man, I should probably shed a tear. Even though I know it's coming. No, like Jesus wept. Jesus shed tears not because he was being performative but because even still, even knowing the hope of what was to come, what was literally just about to happen,

even still he was sharing in the same pain that was felt by Mary and others who also loved Lazarus. It was a moment of pain. Although hope was about to be displayed. And it's not uncommon in our human experience to encounter things like incredible grief or gut-wrenching loss, we have disappointment, heartbreaks, suffering that feels suffocating at times or to read another headline in the news into achingly wonder where is God in this pain? Maybe you've found yourself in a moment in your life wondering where is God in this pain, in my pain? I found out in my news feed earlier this week that Wendell Berry, an influential American poet and writer had died at the age of 92. He lived a good long life, not a tragic death, but death is never easy. And he authored one of my favorite poems, The Piece of Wild Things. He was a farmer. You can't talk about him as a writer without also talking about him as a farmer because it influenced so much of his writing. And he had what I would describe as a very incarnational perspective. He had a deep respect for God's creation. And I think about often these lines, these, this thought that he articulated in another poem elsewhere where he says, there are no unsacred places,

there are only sacred places and desecrated places. So when he saw the sacredness of God's work and God's creation, just a really unique and gifted mind. And I was reading back, you know, after this news through a book of his, and I came across these lines that I'd previously highlighted in his poem, The Way of Pain, where he writes, "I read of Christ crucified, "the only begotten son sacrificed flesh and time "in all our woe. "He died and rose, but who does not tremble for his pain, "his loneliness and the darkness of the sixth hour?" As you may wonder at times, "Where is God in my pain?" It's in looking to the cross that I think we find the answer. We discover that he in fact is with us in the middle of it. We find the hands that wipe our tears have been pierced with nails. We are comforted in the company of the man of suffering who is familiar with our pain. We're met with the reality that we do not serve a God who sits far off upon the mountaintop, away from our pain, separate from our experience, a foreigner to what we walk through, but we look and we see a God who has come to us in the person of Jesus Christ who has taken on our nature, who has felt our suffering. And now he walks with us, even in the midst of the ups and downs, the highs and the lows of life. And how many of you have followed Jesus and have known what it is to walk through the valley

of the shadow of death, to walk through the darkest place and yet to know the comfort of the good shepherd. To know his comfort, the peace of his presence, the joy of his voice as he speaks to you. To follow him and to lay down in green pastures, to drink from quiet waters, to have your soul refreshed, even in the presence of enemies, even in the midst of darkness, because he is not only with you, but he is the one whose light has pierced through that shadow, that Jesus himself overcame death. And this is what we're reminded of also in communion that we remember Jesus' resurrection. There's this unique kind of solemn joy, I would call it, that rises out of communion because the sorrow of the occupied cross is always followed by the victory of the empty tomb. That is the hope of the Christian faith that Jesus died. How many of you know that Jesus died, but Jesus also rose? How many of you know that Jesus' heel was struck, but the serpent's head was crushed? How many of us know that on Friday, there was a temporary victory that death had, but then Sunday came around and death was swallowed up by life. What a beautiful thing. What a hope that we hold onto. What a powerful savior that we serve. This is who Jesus is. This is the hope that we have. We remember what has been accomplished

and what we've received through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And now we share in his resurrection life that we are recipients of the promises that we heard all about last week, that because you're in Christ, we are forgiven, cleansed, justified, reconciled, adopted, delivered, made alive, raised with Christ, that you are a new creation in Jesus. Jesus rose and we share in that resurrection life and hope. And so we remember all of these things were reminded of them. We reflect upon them and also at the same time, we hold fast to the promise of what is to come. And this is my last thought for you that we talked about these things. In communion, we are reminded. We remember Jesus' incarnation. We remember Jesus' suffering. We remember his resurrection, but also in communion, we anticipate Jesus' return. In 1 Corinthians 11, 26, which we read at the beginning of this message, it says, for every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until he comes again. And that is over and over. The common refrain that is the echo of communion until he comes again. Eat this bread and drink this cup until he comes again. Do this in remembrance of him until he comes again because Jesus is coming again. Jesus will come again and God's justice will put an end

to all evil, finally, completely, unequivocally. He will put an end to it. And it's a sobering thought for a world guilty of sin. But for sinners who have been forgiven and washed into saints by the blood of Jesus, it is the fulfillment of our ultimate hope when Jesus comes back. And that hope is not a disembodied, ethereal, spiritual existence kind of floating off in the clouds with the chubby babies and diapers. It is not that. It's an embodied reality that we see a picture of in Revelation 21 where it says, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared us a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people and he will dwell with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away." So today is we wait for all things to be made new. Jesus is with us, both in our joys and in our moments of pain.

But one day we will be with him where there will be no more pain. Death or mourning or crying, no more tears to wipe. And he who testifies to these things says, "Yes, I am coming soon." And so we say, "Hey men, come Lord Jesus. Come Lord Jesus." Until he comes again, we will remember and we will hold on to hope. And so you can begin to grab those communion elements that you received on the way in. Before we take communion, I just wanna say, if you've not yet received the hope of Jesus by accepting him as Lord and Savior, that's an invitation that you can respond to today. Jesus is standing at your door knocking and you can let him in. Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you will be saved is what the Bible tells us. So you can make that declaration. You can hold on to that belief. And if that's your step today, your next step is to get water baptized to make a public declaration of that decision that you've made to put your faith, your hope, your trust in Jesus. And we would love to celebrate that with you so we celebrate the new life that you've received in Christ. But now also for those who, moment for you, an opportunity to share in with the church, with God's people.

We do this together in remembrance of Him. If you're not surrendered and submitted to Jesus, please don't take the elements. Please don't do this. But for anyone who has surrendered to Christ, this is a beautiful moment for us to share in. And you can peel back the first layer where you find the bread, that small wafer. And I don't want you to look at me. I just want you to look at what you hold in your hands as you receive today. Look at what Jesus has placed in your hands in the bread and in the cup. As you hold the bread, as you eat this bread, do so in remembrance of Jesus, who took on our human form, whose body endured the suffering of the cross as it was broken for you, who rose and will return again, give thanks as you eat together in remembrance. And you can open the cup, and please do the same with this. As you drink this cup, do so in remembrance of Jesus, whose blood was shed for the forgiveness of your sins, the blood of a new covenant through which you now share in His kingdom that has come and is coming. Give thanks as you drink together in remembrance. And now if you're grateful, would you stand up and we're going to pray, we're going to respond one more time and just praising the Lord. But Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for your body that was broken, for your blood that was shed, for the hope, the promise, the new life that we've received in you, only in you, only from you, no other source, no one else, and we thank you that we are reminded of all these things as we eat together and as we drink together, as we remember your goodness, your kindness to us. Help us to carry that with us far beyond this moment that we would bear you in mind, that we would keep you in our hearts, that we would be centered upon you, Jesus. You've been so good to us. Thank you for loving us first. We love you. We praise you.

We give you thanks, and it's in your name that we pray all of these things. If that's your prayer, can we say amen? And can we tell God one more time how worthy He is as we sing together. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]