On the first Sunday of October in 1936 Presbyterian churches all across the nation and around the world celebrated the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper together. The Sunday was called World Wide Communion Sunday, and was an effort to demonstrate the essential unity of the church. The idea caught on, and so today many other churches of other denominations are celebrating the sacrament with us, in a growing movement that signifies our basic oneness as the body of Jesus Christ in the world. I am thankful that—at least for this one Sunday of the year—we put aside all the things that divide Christians from each other and instead we highlight the things that unite us. Indeed, those things that unite us are much more important and much stronger than the ones that tend to fragment us into so many different pieces.

You and I have been learning from one of the original documents of Christianity about these most important realities of our faith. Written in a time when there was just one church and not thousands of denominations, we have been going back to the comprehensive expression of the basic Christian faith that Paul wrote to the Ephesian church and, by extension, to all the churches of his day. In the process, we have been relearning old lessons about a subject that is nevertheless fresh and new and challenging for us every day: the subject of how we can have the best possible life as we follow Jesus.

We have already learned that God has given us the possibility of having this good life through his grace, a grace that leads us toward peace with him and with each other. By grace, God is blessing us with all the resources that God has to offer, blessings like hope and patience and faith and forgiveness. The reality of the good life that we can enjoy in the present moment is not a mere fantasy or dream. We know that these things are ours because we have experienced the confirmation by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

To put all of this another way, we can say that the very power of God himself has been at work on our behalf, helping us accept and then grasp the promise of the good life. In the few verses of Paul’s thought that we have for today, Paul goes on to show us how this power of God has taken definite shape and form and substance in the person of Jesus, who is the Christ. We know God’s grace and peace and blessing only because we know Jesus, the Christ. He is the central figure, the pivotal player, in the whole story of how God enfolds us in the reality of his love. There is no better day, then, than on the day that Christians around the world celebrate Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the giving of his body and blood, for us to return to the thing that makes us Christian in the first place, the reality of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Paul wants us to know that the same power that delivers grace and peace and blessing into our lives, the same power by which we can be spiritually certain of these things, is the power that was at work in Jesus. By this power, Jesus was raised from death, elevated into the presence of God, placed above all other spiritual realities, given jurisdiction over all things for all times, and placed at the head of a worldwide fellowship of believers which is the church. In the realm of the entire cosmos, Jesus Christ is supreme. Why? Because he defeated our worst enemy, death. Because he really and truly is God. Because there is no power on earth or in the heavens that is higher than him. Because he holds this special place yesterday and today and tomorrow, and forever. Because he is at the head of the special group of people whom God has commissioned with a special task in the world, the task of bringing the good news of God’s love to everyone else so that someday, all things and all people will once again be at peace with God and with each other.

There is no way, in other words, to overstate the importance and the impact of Jesus Christ. The ancient church theologian Marius Victorinus wrote, “All these statements about the magnificence and power of Christ have this purpose: To prove that nothing further is to be received, no other thought required to complete the revelation.”ⁱ Paul said that Jesus “fills all in all.” In other words, Jesus is the complete and total revelation from God. God had revealed himself in the past and God continues to reveal himself in the future, but all of this revelation is subsumed in the person and work of Jesus. Jesus is the full revelation of the divine will and intention. We can and we must always talk more of Jesus, but beyond Jesus there is nothing more to say.

By this focus on Jesus, the Christ, I do not mean to say that God and the Holy Spirit are unimportant. Of course they are. What I do mean to say, however, is that Christians believe that God the Father is most fully revealed in the person of God the Son, Jesus the Christ. And I do mean to say that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Risen and Living Christ. We cannot talk about God or Spirit without talking about Jesus, and as we talk about Jesus we must necessarily talk about God and Spirit.

By this focus on Jesus, the Christ, I also mean for us to realize that sometimes we lose our focus on him, and that is a dangerous thing. If people do not know Jesus, they need to meet him. If people do know Jesus, they need to keep their focus on him and not subtly replace him with something else. That is the great challenge for people who already are Christian, the challenge not to replace Jesus. We do replace Jesus sometimes by our loyalty to a particular denomination, by our insistence on a certain style of worship, by our propensity to try to boil the Christian life down to a few simple rules. Mostly we replace Jesus by other things in life, by our focus on careers, family, friends, health, or just trying to have a good time. There are many good things in life, to be sure, but none of them replaces the best thing, and that is Jesus.

The Lord’s Supper helps us to shift our focus back on Jesus. As we do that we begin to realize something profoundly encouraging but also profoundly challenging: Jesus continues to live among us today through the church and you and I are the church. In the rest of his letter Paul will explain in greater depth just how you and I embody the continuing presence of the Christ in the world, but for now, we need simply to absorb the basic truth that the full revelation of God is known in Jesus and that revelation continues to happen in and through the life of the church. So I’ll say it again: you and I are the church. Jesus the Christ means for his work to carry on through our work. Jesus is the head, but he is only the head. His hands and feet and heart and voice are you and I. And so we have become part of God’s continuing revelation of himself, part of God’s plan for how he is going to make things right in the world again, part of the process of spreading grace and peace to the whole world. The thought that you and I are such an integral part of what God is doing should drive us to our knees in prayer and then it should lead us to this table, because we need so many resources to do our job well. At this table, we meet Jesus himself, the One who “fills all in all.” We have an immense task, but we have an even larger God, a God who broke himself on the cross and then raised himself from the dead so that we could be forgiven and renewed and then remade into his image, remade to be just like him, so that we could do his work.

Living the good life is about living a God life. Living a God life is about following Jesus, learning from him how to live like him. The first lesson we learn is that he loves us enough to die for us. Because he loves us so much, we trust him to lead us into the ways of the good life, the God life. We come to this table empty, but we leave it filled with his fullness, the fullness of blessings and spiritual power that day by day are making us to be like him, so that we can spread his love to others whom he would welcome into the God life, too.

Amen.

ⁱ Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Volume VIII, Mark J. Edwards, Editor, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 1999, p. 126.

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