Forty years ago this past July, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two human beings to walk on the surface of the moon. Though it was kept a secret then, we later learned that Astronaut Aldrin became the first person to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper on the moon. At the time, Aldrin was an elder in the Webster, Texas, Presbyterian Church, and his Session had authorized him to take communion as an extension of that local church’s own communion celebration earlier. Every year, on the Sunday closest to July 20, the Webster Presbyterian Church takes communion and uses the chalice that Aldrin had with him on the moon. And I’ve been thinking about that fact as we have come to World Communion Sunday. Four decades ago, communion was something that literally was out of this world! I’m sure some folks might have a different opinion, but personally I’m glad that our Christian brother Buzz took the sacrament “up” there, because it is, of course, one of the most important symbols of the most important truth we can ever know: the truth about Jesus.

These last few weeks we’ve been on a journey of re-discovery of the essential story and message of Christian faith. We’ve looked at the fact that there are many clues in the nature of our existence that hint to us about the reality and presence of God: clues like our hunger for justice and spirituality and our yearning for relationships and beauty. We’ve seen that people throughout history—especially the history recorded in the Bible—have had direct experiences with an Entity that is outside our own realm of existence, someone we call “God.” We’ve seen that this God is actually the Creator and Redeemer and Sustainer of all reality, the One in whom we “live and move and have our being.” We’ve seen how God has acted to rescue his creation—us included—from futility, sin, and decay, by coming to Abraham and Sarah and through them creating the nation of Israel as a sign and agent of putting the world back together again. And it is in that context that we come to today, World Communion Sunday, when Christians celebrate the sacrament that Jesus gave us so long ago. It is in that context that we come, finally, to Jesus himself. What was Jesus really all about? Who was he? What did he do? Why do we care about him? Why does an astronaut take the time and trouble to remember Jesus on the surface of the moon, and why do we join with millions of Christians today to do the same?

One of the best ways we have of understanding Jesus is by looking closely at the sacrament that he commanded us to celebrate. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper originates from a different celebration, one that Jesus’ himself observed and then transformed as he gathered with his disciples on the night before his death. As good Jews, Jesus and the Twelve celebrated Passover together, and in the process, Jesus told them and he told us, who he was and what he was all about. And so we have to know what Passover is before we can understand who Jesus was. God told Abraham and Sarah that he would bless the world through the nation that would come from them. Indeed, through their twelve great-grandsons, a nation was born. But the twelve Hebrew tribes found themselves enslaved in Egypt and the dream of God’s blessing seemed dead. God rescued his plan by working through Moses to set the people free. God had to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh, however, and that was not an easy selling job. It finally took the destruction of the first-born male children of Egypt to soften Pharaoh’s heart. In order to distinguish between the Hebrew sons and the Egyptian sons, God had the people of the twelve tribes mark the doors of their houses with lamb’s blood. The angel of death visited the Egyptian households, but it passed over the Hebrew homes, thus, the celebration of Passover, the beginning of the great Exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt, a journey that would take the tribes into the Promised Land where they would continue God’s great project in the desert as they became the nation of Israel.

Jesus chose certain elements and themes of the Passover meal, the bread and the wine, to make a point to the twelve disciples he had called three years earlier to journey with him. When he broke the bread he said, “This is my body.” When he poured the wine he said, “This is my blood.” He said it was all about a covenant, a promise, echoing the promise God had made to Abraham and Sarah, and had promised again and again throughout Israel’s history. He said it was about forgiveness of sins, calling to mind the reason for God’s great desert project, which was about forgiving sin and restoring the world that had gone wrong when the first Man and Woman had decided to go against God and go it on their own. And Jesus said it was about more than just the past, it was also about the future, when he and his disciples would celebrate again in the Father’s kingdom.

The first Passover was all about the founding of the Kingdom of Israel. And the second Passover, the meal that we Christians call “The Lord’s Supper,” was not about a human kingdom, a kingdom of this world, but about God’s Kingdom, a spiritual kingdom that envelopes and encompasses all the kingdoms of this world. When Jesus arrived on the scene in Galilee, his first and his continual message was, “The Kingdom of God is here and it is now, in me.” What God was doing in and through Israel to rescue the world was now finally completed in the person and the work of Jesus. That night when Jesus gathered with his disciples he knew that the next day he would be killed, and he knew that 3 days later he would come out of the grave and enter into eternal life. He knew that his death and resurrection would be God’s supreme act of salvation of the creation, the decisive act of joining heaven and earth together again, reuniting that which had been separated by sin, that which was never meant to be apart.

The Lord’s Supper is, therefore, a supreme act of sacrifice, of love, and of joy. It is a banquet meal, a huge party. It is a festival which, like the first Passover festival that God commanded the nation of Israel to celebrate every year, we Christians celebrate all the time, in order to remind us that we are now living in a new age, a new reality, a new context, nothing less than that place where heaven and earth are one, in the Kingdom of God.

One of the huge mistakes that we Christian folk have sometimes made in our past, and one that some of our faith family still make, is to think that this business of being Christian is a somber, joyless, colorless, drab, lifeless kind of thing. We think being Christian is about giving up the good stuff of this life, about wearing only black and never smiling and divorcing ourselves from this “evil” world so that we can just get ready to die and go to heaven. But nothing could be further from the truth. Christians should be the happiest, most joyful, most fun people around! We are the ones who know how life really works, how God made it all to be good, and how we can escape the ignorance and defeat of a life without God and start living a life with God in it every moment, in that place where heaven and earth meet, in Jesus. We are the ones who know that even in the midst of the pain, the uncertainty, the challenge, the junk of this life, that God still invites us to his party, where we can join in the great exodus from slavery to a past life of sin and into a promised land where we are healed, restored, renewed and forgiven.

On Friday, when my email went out to the congregation about this morning’s message, I got a reply back from one of you about a conversation you had just had a few days earlier with a person who said they never wanted to be a Christian because for them, being Christian had meant never celebrating Christmas or Easter, never celebrating birthdays, never smiling or laughing very much because all of life was meant to be just serious and somber and grave. Well, if that is Christianity, then I want no part of it either! The Christianity that I think Jesus came to bless us with, the Christianity that I believe God had in mind when he started his work with us back in the day of Abraham and Sarah, is about the deep joy that sustains us even in grief, the deep joy that helps us see the beauty that is always around us, the deep joy that keeps us working hard and long to make this world into what we know God wants it to be: a joy-filled blessing for all his creatures. That is what we celebrate in the supper that Jesus gave us.

There is a song that is almost always sung at the wedding receptions Helen and I attend. It is an old piece by Kool and the Gang, and it starts with a great theological term: “Woohoo!” It goes, “Woohoo, it’s a celebration, celebrate good times, come on, there’s a party going on right here, a celebration that’ll last throughout the year, shall bring you good times and good laughter too, we gonna celebrate your party with you. It’s time to come together, it’s up to you, what’s your pleasure, everyone around the world come on, celebrate good times, come on, celebrate good times.” People around the world today are celebrating the fact that Jesus came into our world and is still here, inviting each one of us to walk with him in that place where heaven and earth come together. So come, let us celebrate!

Amen.