We believe in the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. We do not believe that these elements are transubstantiated into Christ’s physical flesh and blood, but we do believe that as we partake in faith together, the Holy Spirit really and truly feeds us with Christ.
One of the things this meal should teach us then is that good metaphors are true and communicate truth. Often times today, you will hear pastors and theologians talking a lot about poetry and metaphor right before they begin talking about why they don’t believe certain things in the Bible. “The creation narrative is a poem” is often a set up for explaining why someone doesn’t believe that God created the world in six days or Adam and Eve weren’t real, historical people. But what that means is that lots of people don’t believe in metaphors. They don’t believe in poetry. They don’t believe they are really true.
Now it’s certainly true that some metaphors are not true and some poetry really is bad and false. But here at this table we have poetry in action, edible metaphors. We are eating and drinking signs and seals of our salvation in Christ. We baptize with water because the blood of Jesus really does wash us clean.
But the reason these metaphors are true is because God really created the world in six days around six thousand years ago, because He really was born of a virgin, because He walked and talked in this world, because He was betrayed by a friend and crucified on a wooden, Roman cross, where He hung until He died and was laid in a tomb. And very early on the third morning, the stone was rolled away, and He rose from the dead, in this world. There’s a place in this world where you could stand which was the last place Jesus was standing just before He ascended into Heaven. And because all of this really happened in history, and only because it really happened in history, can we believe in Jesus, have our sins washed away, and celebrate this salvation in this meal.
This is poetry, and this is wonderfully true. So Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.
Photo by Pooja Chaudhary on Unsplash
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