In the name of God, the Father, God,
the Son and God, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
May be seated.
Today is number seven in our series called
Why?
And it's the the second part of our
reflection on the Eucharist, these holy mysteries, which
is taken from the second sending that we
shall do again today.
It's a beautiful sending and it speaks of
the sacraments as these holy mysteries.
And so last week we began to contemplate
the Jewish roots of the sacred meal Jesus
inaugurated in the upper room, commonly called the
Lord's Supper.
That tells me that Southern style, because in
the South you have breakfast, what?
Dinner and supper.
Right.
OK, good.
Makes me feel at home.
It can also be called communion, which emphasizes
the aftermath of consuming spiritual union with God
and humanity.
Or if you're Roman Catholic, it can be
called the mass.
You know what the mass means?
You Latin guys, Misa comes from Misa.
What does Misa mean?
Go.
I know it's not a language test.
I'm sorry.
But, you know, these are common things.
I think if we connect the dots, they'll
make more sense.
But Misa means go like dismiss.
Right.
Misa.
And so the mass for Roman Catholics is
is how to get out of there, how
to go.
Right.
No, no, it's basically the sending out, having
partaken of word and sacrament.
The emphasis is on now you're ready to
go.
That's the mass.
And so the priest would say the mass
has ended.
That's one of the last things he says.
Right.
Well, if you're Eastern Orthodox or Anglican, it
describes the sacred meal as the Holy Eucharist.
It can be called other things.
That's speaking about the fulfillment of the Passover
Passover meal.
Now, here's something to just remember, because I
think it just speaks so much.
The Orthodox call the actual bread and wine
that's mingled together in a in a chalice.
You know, in the Orthodox Church, you're fed
communion with a spoon.
So when you come up, the priest feeds
you with a little spoon.
Right.
And that comes out of Isaiah six.
OK.
And it's the mingled bread and wine is
called the lamb.
It's a beautiful picture of the lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the
world.
Beautiful pictures.
All of these are describing the meal in
various ways.
They're all valid and they carry different angles
of meaning.
Last week, we began looking at how the
Lord's Supper pointed to the one and final
sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
And Paul makes this connection in First Corinthians
five, seven and following Christ.
Our paschal lamb has been sacrificed.
Therefore, let us keep the feast.
Not with the old leaven of malice and
evil, but with the bread of sincerity and
truth.
We're looking at the Eucharist as meal, as
sacrifice and as real presence.
And we sort of halted right in the
middle of sacrifice.
So that's we're going to pick up today.
The Eucharist is a specific sacrifice each time
it is offered a sacrifice of praise and
thanksgiving for the once and for all sacrifice
we read about today in Hebrews nine.
It's a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for
the once and for all sacrifice made by
Jesus Christ, never to be repeated.
Amen.
Hebrews nine.
And so when at the altar we pray,
we celebrate the memorial of our redemption.
Oh, Father, in this.
Sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, recalling his say
it with me, death, resurrection and ascension, we
offer you.
There's the sacrifice we offer you.
It's an offering.
We offer you these gifts.
What are we offering back to God in
terms of the basic fundamental nature of what
we're offering?
We're offering the wheat and the grapes that
he's given us creative power to transform into
bread and wine.
That's as good as we can do.
We can transform wheat into bread, but we
can't transform it into the body of Christ.
It takes the Holy Spirit to do that,
right?
It takes the words of Jesus and his
institution to do that because they're effective signs
because why Jesus said it.
OK, everything he says has created power because
it's divine logos and fleshed in human form.
The one who called the world into existence
by his word holds all things together by
the word of his power.
And so therefore, we using that delegated authority
that he gives us, he says, go in
all the world and do what I told
you to do.
Do this in remembrance of me is one
of the things that we do almost every
day.
Praise the Lord.
So that's why it has power.
That's why it has effectual power to become
the body and blood of the Lord, because
we offer you these gifts and then we
pray this, sanctify them by your Holy Spirit,
set them apart.
This common bread and this common wine is
port, but it's cheap port.
All right.
But it tastes good, right, especially after we
pray over it.
And so, yeah, sanctify them by your Holy
Spirit.
We're asked.
This is all prayer.
We're just saying Holy Spirit, come and set
these elements apart to be for your people,
the body and blood of your son, the
holy food and drink of new and unending
life in him.
And then the reason why we do this
is because every time we need to be
set apart to receive it, to sanctify us
also that we may faithfully receive this holy
sacrament and serve you in unity, constancy and
peace.
And at the last day, bring us all
with your saints into the joy of your
eternal kingdom.
All this we ask through your son, Jesus
Christ, and we offer it back up to
him by him, with him and in him
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all
honor and glory is yours, almighty father, now
and forever.
And then the church says the big man.
Yes, it's the big amen, because there we
have the sacrament.
All right.
Well, I'm excited about this.
It's great.
There's nothing more powerful than the sacrifice of
Jesus.
And so how is this mystery accomplished?
We call it the epic places and the
epic places is the calling down of the
invocation of the Holy Spirit.
It's setting apart, it's consecrating the elements.
It's an ancient Eucharistic prayer and we're asking
God, the Holy Spirit, to set apart the
matter, the physical gifts of his creation.
Amen.
That's called the epic places.
The Holy Spirit can transform normal bread and
wine into the promise of life.
Why the entire work of God in making
and saving the world is accomplished by God,
the father, God, the son of God, the
Holy Spirit.
But that entire work is carried out by
the power and presence of the Holy Spirit
sent to the world to be God with
us.
Emmanuel, I will be with you always, even
until the end of the age.
This is the promise of Christ sending his
spirit on the day of Pentecost so that
he could be with us without measure, without,
you know, without any kind of locational issues.
He can he can be there.
He is here.
God is present.
Amen.
And so it's by the power of the
Holy Spirit, he is the one who dwelt
in Jesus, making him in a sense, the
Christ Messiah means the anointed one.
Isaiah 61 said, The spirit of the Lord
is upon me to preach good news to
the poor, etc., etc.
At his baptism, we see the epiphany of
the Holy Spirit coming down upon him and
anointing him and sending him into ministry.
And we see the voice of the father
rending the heavens open, saying, This is my
beloved son, God, the father, God, the son,
God, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
So he is the one who dwelt in
Jesus, anointing him as the Christ.
It's not his last name.
It's titled Jesus Christ.
He is the one by whom Christ was
conceived, the Holy Spirit.
Incarnate of the Virgin Mary.
He is the one who led Christ to
the cross as we saw that today in
the reading of Hebrews nine, the innocent victim,
the one who raised him, the spirit raised
him from the dead as the triumphant victor.
Therefore, the Holy Spirit makes the Eucharist his
real presence.
It's the Holy Spirit that makes the Eucharist
his real presence, his super substantial bread, his
risen presence, filling all things.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of Christ
who universalizes Christ's promise to be with us
always until the end of the age.
So, number three, we're into real presence.
Let's consider real presence now.
We've considered meal.
We've considered sacrifice, which is a sacrifice of
praise and thanksgiving, offering back to God what
he's given us as a gift.
And then we present that as the gifts
of God for the people of God.
Take them in remembrance that Christ died for
you and feed on him in your hearts
by faith with Eucharistic thanksgiving.
So the gospel today is a powerful section
on the Eucharist, and if Jesus wanted to
get out of a lot of trouble, he
could have after people started him hauling around
about, gosh, you mean that we have to
literally eat your flesh and drink your blood?
He could have toned that down and he
said he could have said, no, I'm just
I'm just speaking in symbols.
I'm just speaking in metaphors.
But he didn't say that.
In fact, he drove it home even more.
And many left because of that.
So when they protest, he just drives it
in deeper and deeper.
No, this is what I'm talking about, even
though you didn't have the capacity to understand
it.
Now, in a sense, later on in that
same book, when the Holy Spirit comes, he
will reveal to you what I'm saying.
OK, so it's going to take the Holy
Spirit for his disciples to get this, for
the church to get this.
But he's laying it out beforehand.
Now, there's two common words in the Greek
for eating, there's one for chewing and there's
one for gnawing.
OK, and Jesus even uses the word for
gnawing like an animal, unless you gnaw on
my flesh.
He doesn't say unless you just chew my
flesh with your mouth closed, prim and proper.
But he uses the word for now, like
an animal, unless you gnaw on the flesh
of the Son of Man and drink his
blood, you will have no life in you.
Many of that day left him and after
fifteen hundred years of church history, the meaning
of the Eucharist became a dividing point within
the Protestant reformers for the first fifteen hundred
years.
It was never disputed that this is the
real presence of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
And so Jesus says to his disciples, do
you want to go to?
You can always do that.
And Peter gets it and says, no, you
have the words of eternal life.
Let's follow Peter, many of his disciples left
him over his interpretation of the sacred meal.
Real presence, how let's connect the dots here,
he says this in verse 60 of John
six, when many of his disciples heard it,
they said, this is a hard saying who
can listen to it.
But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples
were grumbling, his disciples were grumbling.
Disciples don't grumble, do they?
His disciples were grumbling about this, said to
them, do you take offense at this?
Then what if you were to see the
Son of Man ascending where he was before?
Here's the key.
It is the spirit who gives life.
The flesh is no help at all.
The words that I have spoken to your
spirit in life, Jesus is giving the interpretive
key, which they couldn't understand at that moment.
But he's saying that it is going to
be my risen and ascended body and blood
that you shall partake of my risen and
ascended body and blood that is shared to
us in the Eucharist.
This is how that the bread and the
wine become the body and blood of Christ.
It's not the Christ on the cross because
of his death, resurrection and ascension.
We can offer him these gifts.
You see, he's not limited anymore to Palestine.
This is the key to understand what occurs
at the altar.
Many of our words in life are just
merely descriptive, descriptive words.
They don't change reality.
They merely describe reality.
However, there are types of speech that's transformative.
If an officer comes up and tells you
you're under arrest, whether you like it or
not, you can resist arrest, but you're under
arrest because the officer has the effective power
and authority to arrest you.
There's authorization behind the words you're under arrest
or when an umpire says you're out or
you're safe either way.
I caught myself there.
My wife would have told me that if
I did.
Yeah, OK.
She's the baseball fanatic.
That's great.
Got to have one.
If the umpire says anything, it can be
contested, but it generally does no good.
And how many games have you walked away
from going like that was wrong?
But it didn't change because he has the
authority to say you're out.
And this is why confession with our lips
carries such power.
When it comes to confessing Jesus Christ, if
you confess Jesus Christ with your lips and
believe on him in your heart that God
raised him from the dead, what happens?
Something creative happens inside of you, you shall
be saved.
There's effective power by the confession of your
lips because God has told us this is
the way in through confession and it's the
way on through confession as well.
Isaiah sums this up as rain comes down
from heaven and waters the earth, so my
word comes and accomplishes its purpose.
It accomplishes its purpose for which it was
sent, Isaiah says.
And so I go back to the very
first verse in the beginning, let there be
light.
God creates through his creative power.
He creates through that eternal logos and it
comes into existence.
Therefore, through the redemptive act of God becoming
a human being.
All creation is now headed towards renewal.
And the word of Jesus, the word of
the gospel.
Matter matters because the creator, God has joined
himself with his creation in the body of
Jesus Christ, in the person of Jesus Christ
and heaven and earth are being reunited from
the split.
And so the words of Jesus have effectual
creative power.
Therefore, when he says this is my body
given for you, it carries that same created
power as let there be light.
Let us eat this bread and drink this
wine as the promise of Christ to feed
and nourish us on his body and his
blood.
John 635, I am the bread that came
down from heaven, that new manna that we
read about today, if anyone eats of this
bread, he will live forever.
This bread is my flesh, which I will
give for the life of the world.