the whole body and blood thing

Exodus 12:21-28
Mark 14:12-25


There has been so much emphasis in the last thirty years or so on making church 'more palatable' and less churchy. We have stripped the robes off the priests, stripped the pulpits away from the front of the sanctuary, even taken out candles and offering plates, and sometimes even crosses. All in an attempt to make church somewhere people want to be. And, honestly, for the life of me I can't figure out why. If people want to do something that isn't church why would they come to church to do that?

I read a book a while back called Bad Religion and it set me off on a course of thinking about church and why we do or don't do what we do in this place we call our sanctuary.  Not too much later I heard a story about a group of teens who said they didn't want to go to church where everything feels like their everyday life, they liked their church because it's weird.  I loved the thought of that. They like ti because it's weird.

So, this month, we are going to look at Keeping Church Weird. A look at the weird stuff do we do in this sanctuary space of ours and why we do it, where it started, and why it might be important after all.

This week we look at the sacrament of Holy Communion. To a total outsider looking in this whole imagery of "this is my body" and "this is my blood given to you" is a little more than weird. Why does Jesus, at the last supper with the disciples, decide to take the bread and call it his broken body? Why does he take the cup of wine and say it is his blood, the blood of the new covenant? What relevance do those terms have to the faith of those gathered in the Upper Room and what relevance do they still have today?  What is it about that event that is so significant that it has carried over into the life of every Christian congregation since as one of their most important sacraments of the faith?

It dates back to a time when animal sacrifice, the spilling of the blood of a lamb, was a normal part of a worship service. You brought in an animal and sacrificed it as a burnt offering to the Lord. It continues in the institution of the Passover ritual, a time established by Moses to set aside for remembering the time when the Israelites were spared by God and allowed to leave their slavery in Egypt and head for a land promised to them by God.

But why does body and blood matter? Why do we clean it up and not call it body and blood in our progressive churches? And is there a difference in what we mean today when we talk about the sacrament of Holy Communion and what it might have meant in the years shortly after Jesus' death and resurrection?

Join us this month as we educate ourselves a little on why we are who we are and how we might just want to 'keep church weird' after all.

Thoughts? Comments? Email me or comment below.