“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3)

These are great words of praise from Peter’s first letter and echo the point in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians of the importance of Jesus’ resurrection and the truth of it (1 Corinthians 15:3-6a).

“For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)

At the Last Supper Jesus explains that his death is for the forgiveness of our sins and to create a new covenant – a new relationship between us and God.

The Lord’s Supper

The Lord’s Supper or as it is often know, Holy Communion or the Eucharist or even the Mass, has been and is a key part of the life of the church. In verse 23 of our passage, Paul shows that it was one of the key things he introduced when he set up the church at Corinth, a way that he says was given by Christ.

At the start of the letter, Paul said that Christ crucified is the foundation of the church. The Lord’s Supper is the Christ given way to root the church in the foundation, to keep it focussed on its origins and purpose.

But, you may have noticed from the reading from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, that he was not happy with the way the Corinthians were carrying out the Lord’s Supper in their meetings. He says their meetings which were meant to involve the Lord’s supper were doing more harm than good!

Even more shocking, Paul adds a series of warnings in verses 27-30, that are quite worrying:

If you eat the bread and the wine in an unworthy manner, you sin against the body and blood of Christ.

If you don’t discern the body of Christ when you do so you will bring judgement on yourselves.

He even suggests that some of the illnesses and even deaths – that is what he means by ‘fallen asleep’ – are a result of carrying out the communion in this unworthy way.

The Lord’s Supper gone wrong

These are shocking warnings and many of the questions from our small groups this week arose around these. If we are to take these warnings seriously, then we need to ask ourselves,

In what ways can we eat and drink the bread and wine unworthily?

So, what did Paul mean when he warned about doing things in an unworthy manner. Looking at Paul’s letter, three possibilities suggest themselves:

1. Unfaithful to Christ – 10:14-21

Firstly, Paul could be referring back to what he said in the previous chapter. There in a section where he warns people to flee from idolatry, he warns that you cannot both drink the cup of idols and the cup of the Lord.

The reason Paul brings communion into this, is because in a way the Lord’s Supper is the Christian parallel to the idol sacrifices in the pagan temples. The worship of the idols often involved sacrificing an animal to the god, then eating the cooked meat from this animal as part of a ritual meal. In this way, you identified with the idol god through in a sense sharing  a meal with them.

For Christians, animal sacrifice is no longer needed, because Jesus’ death on the cross is the once for all sacrifice. The way we identify with Jesus and this sacrifice is not by making a new sacrifice, but by sharing in the Lord’s supper and remembering his sacrifice on the cross as we eat the bread and drink the wine.

Paul warns the Corinthians that you cannot do both. You cannot identify with idols in this way as well as with Christ. The God of the Old Testament and the New demands our faithfulness.

Indeed, the Old Testament often compared the worship of idols by the Israelites to an act of adultery. God is one and there are to be no gods beside him. Paul says, the same is true of Jesus. He demands exclusive loyalty. You cannot treat him as one god among many, just as a husband cannot treat his wife as one woman to sleep with among many.

So, to eat the bread and the wine is to express our loyalty to Christ. We cannot do that as well as being involved in idol worship. To do so would certainly be to eat and drink the bread in an unworthy manner, to reduce Jesus to one god among many.

This is an important teaching to grasp, but because Paul made this point in the previous chapter, it is probably not the main thing he is referring to in chapter 11.

1. Uncaring of the Church – 11:17-22

Secondly, to eat in an unworthy manner, could be linked to what Paul says in the first part of the reading, where the problem is very much a lack of care for all members of the church.

It is not clear exactly what is happening at their meetings, but it seems some are enjoying their own lavish feasts, while others have nothing. Some get drunk, whilst others watch on hungry. The rich seem to live it up in a great party, whilst the poor are humiliated.

Perhaps the Corinthians are modelling their feasting on the feasts in the idol temples. Where perhaps there is a ‘High Table’ for the rich and important, and poor tables for everyone else. Or maybe, the wealthy just can’t bring themselves to share a meal with slaves.

This criticism of the Corinthians ties in with the the general thrust of these chapters, where Paul is stressing the importance of love in the Christian community, a love that values and builds up the other, no matter who they are, a love that is fundamentally modelled on the cross of Christ.

In behaving in ways that belittle and ignore others, the wealthy in the church were acting in contradiction to the example of the cross. They may have thought that they were celebrating the Lord’s Supper, but Paul says they had completely missed the point – their meetings were doing more harm than good.

This certainly, could then be the way in which the Corinthians were eating the bread in an unworthy manner. It may be that when Paul says they were failing to recognise or discern the body, the ‘body’ he is referring to is the church as the ‘body of Christ.’ Certainly, that is also suggested in chapter 10, where Paul says:

“Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body,

for we all share in one bread.” (10:17)

These days I am not aware of churches where the Lord’s Supper is done in a way that humiliates the poor as was happening in Corinth. Yet, there are many today, who claim to be Christian, but don’t want to have anything to do with church or to meet with other believers.

My daughter, said she has a friend at university who says they’re a Christian, but hates the church. This attitude is a growing trend amongst all ages. Certainly, there are a lot of reasons to hate the church. There are numerous examples of abusive leaders and many have been in churches marked more by arguments, division and backbiting than the love of Christ. Churches are full of sinners. Although, we may long that all Christians become more Christ-like, we are all still a work in progress, far from the finished product!

Yet, Jesus did not die to save individuals, he died to create a community of saved individuals. He told us to remember his death in a shared meal, a meal that by necessity means coming together with others in community. In our increasingly individualised internet world, meeting in person with others in community on a regular basis is becoming rarer. But as Christians, if we believe in a cross that breaks down barriers and forms community, we need to live as though we buck that trend!

So, a failure to care for the wider church, may be what Paul means by eating the bread and wine in an unworthy manner and the body in verse 29 may refer to the church as the body of Christ. However, the more immediate context is the body of Christ as in his body given on the cross.

1. Unconcerned about the Cross  – 11:29

That leads to the third possibility of what it means to eat and drink in an unworthy manner. It may be a failure to be concerned for the cross as the fundamental and foundational saving act of God.

For the Corinthians, the Lord’s Supper seems to have become just something they did as a church, without much concern for how it was done or what it was about. They had lost the heart of its meaning. They failed to recognise that it was pointing to the sacrificial body of Christ given for them on the cross.

They had forgotten that it was only by Jesus’ death on the cross, that they could have the New Covenant relationship with God. It was only by God’s amazing grace in sending Jesus, that they could have forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life. The Lord’s Supper was meant to keep them rooted in these facts, but for them it had become about something else.

Fundamentally to eat the bread and drink the wine in an unworthy manner, is to do so without identifying yourself with the crucified Christ.

The other possibilities flow from this. If we are saved by Jesus’ ultimate act of love, in giving up everything for the sake of our salvation, then we need to live for the sake of our brothers and sisters in Christ, forgoing our rights for the sake of building them up and not tearing them down. To identify with the crucified Christ pushes us to care for the church, the family of other Christians around us.

And if we believe that we are saved only through Jesus’ death on the cross, then how can we treat him as one god among many. How can we in any way identify with other idols?

Why does Paul talk about judgement for doing so?

When we see that the Lord’s Supper plays an essential and formational part in the life of the church and it is about rooting us in the foundational moment of Christ’s death on the cross. Then we see that to carry it out in an unworthy way, may be to mock, ridicule or belittle the cross. Such behaviour surely demands God’s judgement?

But there is still God’s grace. Paul is not talking about God’s ultimate judgement here. Rather he calls it God’s discipline. Sometimes when things go wrong for us in life, perhaps we get ill or something else bad happens, God is using such things to shake us up and make us take him more seriously. That seems to be what was happening to the Corinthians because of their behaviour around the Lord’s Supper.

Not that every illness, death or bad thing in life is God saying to us we are getting something wrong. But sometimes God uses such things as a way of shaking us up and calling us back to him.

How should we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper ‘worthily’?

So, how should we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper ‘worthily’? Paul says we should examine ourselves. We need to ask ourself questions such as:

Do we look to the cross as God’s gracious act that brings us salvation or are we beginning to think that we can get to God by our own goodness, that we don’t need the cross. Is pride in our accomplishments replacing gratitude for the cross?

Do I seek to forego my rights to build up other Christians and the church community in love, as Christ gave up his rights and died on the cross to enable me to become one of his people?

Are there people in the church, that I need to offer reconciliation to as Christ offered me reconciliation through the cross?

Are there idols, that are competing for my loyalty to Christ, whose love and sacrifice demand my total love?

In short is my life and relationship with God shaped by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross?

Does it matter how often we receive the Lord’s Supper?

The Lord’s Supper is an important part of what it means to be church. It regularly reconnects us with the cross as the foundation of our faith. But how often should we receive it?

In one sense this is a silly question. It is like my children asking, “How often should we visit you?” I would be upset if they never visited me or only rarely. But the actual number of times that are appropriate depend on all kinds of factors.

In the same way the Bible does not set a clear number of times we should take the bread and wine, but if we are serious about the faith, then we will want to do so relatively regularly. At St. George’s we offer it almost every week and at St. Luke’s once a month. Probably for most Christians, to aim to do so at least once a month is good, but everyone’s circumstances are different and we should not want to be legalistic about it.

What is more important is that we encourage people to take it as the Christ given means of rooting us in the cross as his once and for all saving act, that brings us into our life giving and saving relationship with God.

“The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.” (1 Corinthians 12:12)

As we reflect on this passage, we need to ask ourselves how we are enabling every church member to play their part in growing the church, the body of Christ?

Questions, questions! – 12:1

As you probably know, through Lent we have been experimenting with our study groups looking at the Bible passage we preach on in advance and submitting questions about the passage to me as the preacher. I’ve then tried to answer the questions as part of the sermon each week. This is now the fourth week doing this and there is one week to go.

In a way the letter we have been studying has been appropriate for this process, not only because this part of 1 Corinthians is talking about church life at a time when we are having a year of discernment, but because some of 1 Corinthians is probably Paul answering some questions from the Corinthians.

What about Spiritual gifts?

We see that at the start of our passage, where Paul introduces the topic of ‘Spiritual gifts’ probably in a response to a question about them. The response probably continues all the way through to the end of chapter 14 and includes the chapter on love that we looked at last week.

We are not sure what the question, Paul was answering was, but in these chapters, although he talks about a variety of gifts that different people have, in chapter 12 he emphasises the equal value of all believers and in chapter 14 he emphasises the importance of using the gifts to build the church up. The chapter on love helps to underpin both these points, for love both values the other and wants to build them up.

These ideas remind us of Paul’s point in chapter 8:

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”

It seems that some in the church were being made to seem ‘spiritual’ because of their ‘spiritual gifts’ and so given greater value than others in the church. Perhaps people were saying things like:

• “Maximus is so spiritual, he speaks in tongues all the time”
• “Julius is so spiritual, he prayed for his slave who had a fever and she was healed!”
• “Agrippina is so spiritual, she spoke words in church that really spoke to me last week.”

The problem here is that some in the church were becoming puffed up by their spiritual prowess, whilst others were feeling unimportant or unspiritual in comparison – that they did not matter to the life of the church. The church was becoming divided between the so called spiritual and unspiritual.

Equality of all believers

Paul’s response is to emphasise that all Christians are spiritual. He does that in four ways in our reading.

1. Same Spiritual Confession – vs. 2-3

First, Paul emphasises that conversion itself, is a sign that someone has the Holy Spirit powerfully at work in them.

No-one he says, can say, “Jesus is Lord!” unless the Holy Spirit makes that possible. That by itself shows that you are spiritual in the most important and fundamental way.

It is only by the Spirit at work in someone that people can change their heart attitude from rejecting Christ to submitting to Christ. To be a Christian at all is a powerful act of the Spirit. So all Christians are equally spiritual and so valuable members of the church.

1. Same Spiritual Source: vs. 4-11

Secondly in verse 4 to 11, the constant stress is on the source of the Spiritual gifts: the Spirit, Christ and God. Whatever your gift, Paul is saying, no matter how impressive or unimpressive it seems, no matter how natural or supernatural it appears, it’s source is the same: the Spirit.

Some people may seem more ‘spiritual’ than others. But their abilities, the things they do are a gift of the spirit to them. Not a reward or payment, not because they are any more special or valuable than anyone else, but simply because the Holy Spirit chose to give them that gift.

Again, Paul’s emphasis on the source of the gifts underlines the equal value of all Christian followers.

1. Same Spiritual Goal: vs. 5,7, chapter 14

Thirdly, all gifts are meant to have the same spiritual goal – and it is not to make one person look more impressive than another.

Rather they are to be used to serve others, as verse 5 says and for the common good as verse 7 says. Chapter 14, emphasises as well that the point of the gifts is to build up the church.

The building up of the church as a community of Christians is not the work of just apostles and prophets, or vicars and preachers, it is the responsibility of the whole church using their various gifts.

We are all gifted, in order that we can all be gifts to the wider community.

1. Same Spiritual Body: – vs. 12-26

The fourth, argument Paul makes is that as Christians we are all part of the same spiritual body. This argument starts in verse 12 and goes on for most of the rest of the chapter.

Paul compares the community of Christians, the church with a human body. Just as a human body has many different parts, hands, feet, eyes, ears, nose, liver and heart, each distinct and with their own role, so the same is true of the church with its members having distinct parts and roles to play.

Your role may be important, but you still need others in the body to play their roles. They matter just as much. As Paul jokingly says,

“The eye cannot say to the hand, I don’t need you!”

The seemingly more spiritual cannot look down on the seemingly unspiritual and say I do not need you. Everyone is an important and valued part of the body of Christ.

So Paul’s response to the Corinthians question about Spiritual gifts, emphasises the equal spiritual value of every Christian, but he also talks about the variety of gifts. It is this variety that tends to raise questions for us. Indeed, the questions submitted this week, were mainly about the variety of gifts.

Variety of gifts

So, let’s look at the four questions about the Spiritual gifts.

• Is this an exhaustive list of all spiritual gifts?

The simple answer is ‘No’.

Even chapter 12 contains another list at the end.

The list in verse 7-10 has 9 gifts, but at the end of the chapter in verses 28-30, there is another list of 8 items, four of which are repeated from this list: prophecy, miracles, healing and tongues and four are new: apostleship, teachers, helps and administrators.

One of the groups were concerned that the list in verses 7-11 is a bit limited, because of its focus on gifts to do with speech and the miraculous – what about the need for people to carry out the necessary practical and administrative tasks of church life. Well the ‘helpers’ and ‘administrators’ of the later list show that the gap is plugged! Not all gifts look ‘supernatural’ or ‘spiritual’, seemingly practical gifts are just a much of the Spirit as the others.

There are also other different lists that Paul gives in Romans 12, Ephesians 4 and in 1 Peter 4, there is a very simple lists two broad gifts: those who speak for God and those who serve.

Since they are all different, the lists seem to be illustrative only, giving examples of the variety of gifts that Christians might have. We don’t need to try and fit with one of the gifts on any list or feel upset that gifts we might feel we have aren’t on any of these lists!

Nonetheless, it is helpful to consider what gift you might have, so that you can more effectively play your part in building up the church. This leads us to our second question:

• How do we discern who has what gift?

This is a harder question to answer, because it is not one that is addressed directly in this passage or any other.

The lack of detailed answer to the question may suggest that in some ways the discernment process is obvious. We just need to get on with the Christian life and it will become clear.

If we are all people of the Spirit and seek to serve one another as part of the community of believers, then as you try different roles out, pray for people, share thoughts and ideas in groups and Bible studies and help out in practical ways, you will begin to discern the roles and gifts that God has given you in particular.

Having said that, I think this is also something that needs to be done with the help of the Christian community. In Acts when the apostles needed some more leaders, they asked the church community to suggest names.

We need to get better at spotting where others seem to be particularly gifted and encouraging them to make more of that gift.

So, you may notice that in a Bible study, someone is particularly good at understanding scripture and explaining it to others. That may be a sign that they have the gift of teaching. Perhaps if you spot that in someone you should tell them and maybe also tell the church leadership.

You may spot that someone has a growing passion for prayer, and notice some amazing answers to their prayers. Again, it would be good to tell them and encourage them to pray more for others.

You may spot that someone is particularly good at organising an event and you might want to encourage or suggest them to help with one of the church committees.

Let’s be more pro-active and deliberate at spotting gifts in others and encouraging them to make greater use of them.

But, if just giving things a go and being helped by the wider community to discern gifts is important, this leads on to the next question:

• How can we give room for the gifts to be expressed to build up the body?

I think the best answer is to see the importance of both big church and small church.

In big church, we can be encouraged by being part of something big, with the more established preachers, music leaders and so on.

Small church, however, can be much more about one another. Everyone can pray for everyone else. We can all share what we think God is saying to us through the Bible or by the Spirit, we can organise small scale events, and help each other out in practical ways.

In both contexts as one of the groups suggested we need to value everyone equally and encourage people especially when they are trying things out for the first time.

As part of our Year of Discernment, maybe we need to think radically how we can do small church better and encourage more to be involved in small church.

• How do all matter equally (vs. 25), while some gifts are greater (vs. 31)?

Our last question takes us back to the thrust of Paul’s message. Paul seems to be emphasising that all Christians are equally spiritually valuable in the church.

But at the end of chapter 12 his list suggests that some gifts are greater than others. How can we hold these together?

Paul does want to say that all are equally spiritually valuable, but that there is also a good ambition to want to become more effective as a Christian. Not to become more puffed up, but to be better at building the church up.

Throughout these chapters, Paul lists a number of gifts, but the two that appear consistently are tongues and prophecy. Interestingly, tongues do not appear in any of the lists outside 1 Corinthians. Probably this shows that this was an issue in the church in Corinth and if you read through chapter 14, the suggestion is that some seemed to want to use the gift of tongues in church services. This may be because they felt it made them look more ‘spiritual’, because it came across as more ‘supernatural.’

But back in 12:2, Paul reminds them, that although they used to follow the example of dumb idols, where perhaps ecstatic spiritual experiences were highly valued, we now follow the God who speaks clearly to us. So, in chapter 14, Paul emphasises that the church is built up primarily through the sharing of intelligible words. Tongues may encourage the individual spiritually, but they are no good at building the rest of the church up, whereas prophecy – speaking the words of God – will build up the church powerfully. So, prophecy is near the top of Paul’s list of spiritual gifts and tongues is at the bottom, because what matters is not looking spiritual, but building up the body of Christ with the word of God.

So, let’s value all Christians as equally spiritually valuable, but also pray for, discern and encourage gifts in ourselves and  others that will enable the effective building of Christ’s community here in Ramsgate.