Enter and Eat
The Disney placemats are set. Then come the purple and green polypropylene plates (try saying that three times fast). There are still hands to wash, bibs to put on, utensils to grab, and sippy cups to search for throughout the house. Oh yeah, and Mom and Dad still need some food, too. But, in due time, the table is finally set, hands are joined, a prayer is said, and we begin.
This is the current daily routine for Hannah and I when dinnertime rolls around. Every day leading up to that hour looks a little different. I sometimes imagine our kids huddling up in the morning to dole out which of them (if not all of them) will be the one to not take a nap, or which one will volunteer as the day’s distinguished Button Pusher.
Despite how the variables of the day have played out, it is this evening rhythm that gets us in the same room, around the same table, to share the same meal. There is something about that tiny window of time between the “Amen” and those first bites of dinner that is sacred, perhaps even sacramental. It’s my favorite part of the meal. In that brief pause, each of us are daily brought back to reality, and reminded of what we cannot afford to forget: we belong to God and to one another.
There is another space of life where you and I get in on this moment. Here, there are no bibs to disperse or placemats to set. But we find ourselves again at a table. His table. We pause, clutching the bread, carefully holding the cup. We confess, we pray, we praise. All around the table, as we take the bread and the cup, we remember and proclaim: we belong to God, and to one another.
Trouble in Corinth
The Church at Corinth needed a wake-up call. Badly. They earned the longest two letters Paul wrote in the New Testament. In his first letter to Corinth, Paul addresses a host of issues: sexual immorality, selfishness, lawsuits against one another, and other divisions in the church. But Paul spends a great deal of time rebuking their treatment of the Lord’s Supper.
Prior to this, it seemed that some from the Corinthian church were eating meals within pagan temples. These temples would make animal sacrifices to false gods but would also be the spot used for hosting various dinner parties and banquets. The people felt it was their “right” to eat wherever they desired; but Paul disagrees. He tells them that it is inappropriate to eat such food in such places, as it seems to be sympathetic toward the world’s idols and could cause a fellow brother or sister in Christ to stumble in their conscience. This contributed to rifts being formed among certain factions of believers in Corinth.
Paul is aware of the troubles and addresses them in his first letter to Corinth. “Therefore, my beloved,” Paul writes, “flee from idolatry!” (1 Cor. 10:14). Paul then uses the observance of the Lord’s Supper to make his point: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16)
It’s the word “participation” that’s key here. When we take communion, we are participating in communion with Christ. We are not experiencing a physical participation with Christ, as if his actual body or actual blood are present with us in communion. It’s a spiritual, theological participation. The point Paul is making here is that this meal is meant to say something about whose house we truly belong to. If we belong to Christ, then in taking the Lord’s Supper, we are aligning ourselves and conforming ourselves with Christ. It is, in a way, meant to be our adamant rejection of communion with idols.
But Communion is meant to do more than display our communion with Christ. It’s also meant to display our communion with one another. Paul goes on to argue, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17).
Paul’s point here is that by participating in the act of taking of the one bread (Christ), there is a direct implication: “we who are many are one body.” In other words, Communion not only signals our belonging to Christ; it forms our belonging to one another. It makes us a people. In partaking of Communion together, we are proclaiming that once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people.
The House and the Table
The observance of the sacraments—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—is one of the key distinguishing features of the local church. Their presence helps constitute a body of believers to be a church, and their absence indicates that a body of believers is actually not a church. The New City Catechism explains the sacraments as “visible signs and seals that we are bound together as a community of faith by his death and resurrection.” Tethered to the very essence of the sacraments is the notion that they involve a community of faith in which we observe them.
“Their presence helps constitute a body of believers to be a church, and their absence indicates that a body of believers is actually not a church. ”
As I’ve grown up in America and spent much of that time in the Baptist church, I believe this challenges how we often view the sacraments. What’s often portrayed, both in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, is something very individual taking place. For many years after being baptized as a young boy, I thought of that event as something that happened to me alone, that everyone out in the pews were mere spectators to what I was going through. Similarly with the Supper: as the plate of wafers and the cups were passed, I felt like it was prime one-on-one time with God.
“I was not only remembering and proclaiming the Lord’s death for my own heart, but I was doing so alongside my blood-bought brothers and sisters.”
Of course, the sacraments do have an inward component. But they are by no means individual practices. What I failed to realize early on in my baptism and the Supper was that I was not only being “raised to walk in newness of life,” but to do so in the community of believers to which I belonged. I was not only remembering and proclaiming the Lord’s death for my own heart, but I was doing so alongside my blood-bought brothers and sisters.
Bobby Jamieson’s analogy is helpful: “Baptism is the front door of the house, and the Lord’s Supper is the family meal. All who belong to the family identify themselves by ‘showing up’ in baptism, and their unity as a family is both displayed and sealed as they sit down to eat together” (Going Public, 109).
In a culture swimming in hyper-individualism, political division, and chronic loneliness, the sacraments jolt us back to the inextricable reality of our new family in Christ. They affirm not only that we individually belong to Christ, but that we corporately belong to one another. In coming to the table, we choose to set aside what makes us different, what views separate us, and we instead take the same bread, the same cup, and remember the same Savior that unites us together.
Zach Barnhart currently serves as Student Pastor of Fountain City Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and M.Div. student at SBTS. He is married to Hannah, and they have three children. You can follow Zach on Twitter or check out his personal blog, Cultivated.