Eucharist—a good word for a grateful life

Friends, you have come to expect nothing but honesty from me. That is as it should be. According to a 2007 Leger Marketing “Profession Barometer”, only 61% of Canadians trust representatives of the church, down by 12% from 2002. Your expectations then of clergy in general may not be too high, but after seven plus years of a relationship you expect me to tell you the truth, and not just 61% of the time.
Today I am beginning a month long series of sermons dealing with stewardship. Those of you who were at this year's annual budget meeting in March know the leadership of the church has been taking a serious look at the costs of maintaining this building and what financial support can be reasonably expected from the Blythwood family. We looked at the property owned by the congregation, wondering if it might be time to turn that asset into cash that could be invested in ministry.
There is a complicating factor to take into consideration. As far as Revenue Canada is concerned we are one of thousands of charities raising money. However, this is a church and so we talk not about money raising but about stewardship. (Some of you are thinking, "Oh ya—tomato tomato, same thing. But it isn't.) Stewardship is a spiritual matter, it has to do with our response to God. So let me tell you what we're up to in the next couple of months. Stewardship is the topic for Sundays and Wednesdays in October. In November you will be invited to an after-worship luncheon or a dessert evening. There are three reasons for getting together. Fellowship around the food is one. An opportunity for you to express concerns you have about the church is number two. And here is number three: we want to ask you how important the ministry of this church is to you and what sort of support  the church can count on receiving.
Today I want to set the stage by talking about the call of the church to eucharist. This is not a familiar word to most Baptists. In a 1989 survey by the Research Services Department of the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, only 1.2% of Baptist congregations referred to this special meal as “Eucharist.” In that same survey, it was reported that 81% of Baptist churches referred to this meal as “The Lord’s Supper.” Interestingly, 10.5% of Baptists referred to this sacred meal with the combination title, “Communion and the Lord’s Supper.” Do you know the term the earliest church used to refer to this meal? The Early Church referred to this meal not as Communion, or the Lord’s Supper. They called it Eucharist. The Greek word eucharist means “thanksgiving.” When those first believers gathered in Jesus’ name for a communion meal, they gathered with a sense of thanksgiving.
That seems a bit strange to us Baptists. We tend to think of this as a memorial meal. The words, “Do this in remembrance of me” stick in our minds and are carved on the front of many communion tables as they are on this one. But perhaps what’s going on here is we have a narrow and insufficient understanding of what it means to remember.
The gospels are clear that the meal Jesus ate with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion was Passover. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it” (Luke 22:8). The focus of Passover is remembering the mighty acts of God in bringing the Jews out of slavery in Egypt. But this is not the sort of remembering that one might do in order to win at a game of Trivial Pursuit. This is remembering in order to make the past alive in the present. And when the gift and power of God are displayed and become real for his people, the response is thanksgiving—eucharist. 

In the prologue to a wonderful book, Hands of my Father, Myron Uhlberg writes about the idea of remembering as it is expressed in sign language.
“In the language of the deaf, the sign for remember begins with the sign for know: the fingertips of the right hand touch the forehead.
“But merely to know is not enough, so the sign for remain follows: the thumbs of each hand touch and, in this joined position, move steadily forward, into the future, Thus a knowing that remains, never lost, forever: memory.”
Friends, this gives us an insight into what the first Christians experienced when they gathered to celebrate the supper Jesus had given them. They experienced the sharing of bread and the cup, those bits of common life that Jesus said were signs of heavenly nourishment and the knowledge of that reality carried them into tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. And they said to themselves and to one another, with such a living memory, such a present reality, what else can we be  but thankful? The only thing it makes sense to call this is eucharist, the meal of remembering gratitude.
Let’s think this through in the time we have remaining. What we know of the early church is that while it appealed to a wide variety of people, it was the poor and those on the fringes of the culture that most readily welcomed the call to become citizens of the Kingdom of God which had come near to them in the ministry of Jesus and which had been confirmed in his death and resurrection.
These, then, were people who knew hardship, who knew what it meant to be dispossessed. For the most part they did not live in anything we would recognize as luxury. But when they came together to bring to mind what Jesus had done for them, they called it eucharist, the meal of remembering gratitude. Not in spite of circumstance but within circumstance.
Friends, this is where the call of God upon us today begins. I will not pretend otherwise—I enjoy the comforts of my life. This being the first weekend of October, I know an evening is soon coming when I will flip a switch and the heat will come on, just like that. I do not seek out discomfort. I know the cliche, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and I still make it a point to stay out of the line of fire. 
Here’s what I’m getting at—the call to gratitude is not just for the days of sunshine and gladness. The call to gratitude comes everyday, because it is within any circumstance that the Christian calls to mind this table, calls to mind Christ giving his body and blood, calls to mind the empty tomb and the joy of Easter and says all of that happened for me. Eucharist is not just word for the church, eucharist is a word for life.
Those of you who know me well know that for any number of reasons my Baptist heart beats a little faster in the midst of familiar liturgy and the habits of centuries. On one of my vacation Sundays this summer Chris and I were in Haliburton, as she finished off this year’s course at the Fleming School of the Arts. I walked the short distance to St. George’s Church for the Eucharist. Worshippers went to the rail of the altar as is the usual practice in an Anglican church. The person serving the wafer said to me, “the body of Christ given because he loves you.” A tingle went up my spine and my eyes glistened with tears as I sipped from the cup. For that moment at least I was filled with gratitude for all that Jesus had done for me. That’s eucharist! That’s how a Christian lives! 

B