The Church, Preaching and the Lord’s Supper

I’m sorry. I got in my car and started thinking about things. Allowed the car to do the driving and it went to Abbeville. So it thought that’s where it was supposed to go. When we start that way, that for three and a half years was where we were going. And I am very sorry to leave you waiting. And I’m just going to find the 4, Chapter 10 of the Institutes here. I’m sorry. Well, shall we pray? Lord, our God, we thank you for the good day that you’ve made and for the rain that is watering the earth. And we thank you for the witness of your child and servant, John Calvin. We thank you for the privilege of being here together tonight and pray that by your Holy Spirit you will teach us. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. Well, I couldn’t think of anything to make a picture of, so I told Chris we just won’t worry with the screen and the computer because we’re talking about, I guess, some fairly conceptual things tonight, not so much things that one takes a picture of and looks at.

I thought tonight we’d talk about the church and the preaching and the sacraments and how those things look to Calvin. There are some important things that are there. And then next time I thought we’d talk about look at Calvin as a Christian and as a pastor. So when I moved to Mobile, Alabama, I was sort of met at the train station, so to speak, by one of the grand gentleman ministers of that presbytery, a sort of old southern Presbyterian minister. Some of you may at some point on vacation or something have encountered Howard Eddington, or in Hilton Head more recently. Howard’s father was a member of our presbytery and was one of the patriarchs, I suppose you’d say. And when I arrived in Mobile, he told me that in Mobile, if you’re going to do anything for Jesus, you’ve got to do it during Lent because it’s the only time when people aren’t thinking about something else.

You know, before Lent you have Mardi Gras and after that everyone’s fishing or playing golf. So we, you know, six weeks of the year we had church. and and to a large extent he was he was right there was an awful lot of playing golf and an awful lot of fishing and therefore an awful lot of excuse making about why people weren’t in worship and I heard probably as much during the that period of my ministry as I have in all the rest of the time put together more I expect than the rest of the time put together that old saw about how you can be just as good a Christian on the golf course or on the bay as you can in church, that you can pray there. Well, my answer to that was that I’m not nearly as good a Christian on the golf course. I’ve got my hands full just trying to play golf to spend time praying.

But John Calvin would really have a better answer to that saw, that excuse, really. And that is that anyone who has God for their father has the church for their mother. Now, in our world, we’re used to people who talk about mother church being what? Where do you hear that? Church of England? Okay, yeah. Or Catholic? um we’ll talk about holy mother church this was a piece of calvin of christian well calvin’s uh upbringing in the in the bosom of rome if you like that he did not reject and he continued to insist all through his life that all those who have to have god for their father had the church for their mother and uh in a more contemporary i suppose way you might say that is that those who belong to Jesus Christ belong to those who belong to him.

And so it’s in the nature of Christian faith that Christians gather together and are united in public worship. Certainly pray, maybe if I prayed more on the golf course it would help, but that’s not what golf courses are about. And it is what public worship is about. The public worship for Calvin is about what later would come, not much later, but a little while later, would come to be called the ordinary means of grace. Anybody learn the catechism? Any lifelong Presbyterians that know the catechism? What are the ordinary means of grace? Do you remember? The ordinary means of grace are preaching, prayer, and the sacraments. And these are things that happen, prayer, of course, happens in a personal way at other times, but the ordinary, in the sense in which the Catechism and the other Westminster standards speak of the ordinary means of grace, they mean something that we do together, corporately, as Christ’s body.

So being absent from public worship was not something that Calvin was prepared to excuse. now it happened a great deal in Calvin’s Geneva we may have this picture of Calvin’s Geneva as this pure place and in many ways it was a remarkable place as I said before John Knox called it the most uh I don’t remember what the adjective he used was but the the greatest that’s probably what it was the greatest school of Christ that ever was remarkable place in many many ways but there was a big problem with people being absent from from worship i’ve been teaching calvin a good bit lately and i must say i’m not quite sure what i’ve said to you and what i’ve said to others but i’ll and i know i’ve said this in the last week but so well so it must not have been to you because we weren’t together last week uh when when calvin returned from geneva um i mean pardon me returned to geneva from strasbourg you remember that three years he was away.

In his preaching, he always had preached continuously through books of the Bible. And at one point, not terribly long after his return, well, it may have been a few years, he said, he’s preaching through Deuteronomy and Christmas Day comes, December 25th, and He’s in the middle of Deuteronomy and St. Pierre is full and he remarks on this and the scribes just write down everything that Calvin says. And so they just write it, whatever came out of his mouth went down on the paper and so we have it after 1549. and what Calvin said was I know why you all are here instead of haunting the taverns as you usually do but I’m preaching through Deuteronomy you know and this is where he was and he just wasn’t going to stop for that there were other there were times when he would stop for that and Christmas was one of the four what he called evangelical what were called evangelical feast days that you might stop for, but he didn’t on that occasion.

Church was not about special occasions. It was not about, it wasn’t something you did once in a while, but it was where Christians belonged. And so you see the contrast. If Calvin can notice the difference in worship attendance on Christmas Day, clearly there are people who are not showing up for public worship even then. And Calvin, interestingly, we know from his letters, already knows of that excuse that you can pray elsewhere. This is not so far from being something that’s distinct of Mobile, Alabama, or Greenwood, South Carolina, or anywhere. Or even America. This is something Calvin is already heard by 1549. And he doesn’t have much patience with it because worship is too important. It’s not something you do by yourself, it’s something you do with the people of God.

Well, how do you know if you’re in the right place? How do you know if the place where you are attending uh worship is really a church of jesus christ and not some funny splinter group this is an especially pressing question at the time of the reformation and catholics are able to use this with great effect these protestants you know who have separated themselves from Mother Church. It’s a bit of a trick to prove that you are really a true Christian church. So if you’re not in communion with the Bishop of Rome in Calvin’s world, that’s a real problem. They had lots of criticisms. They had their hands full just trying to have church where they were. It was tough to send missionaries. The Roman church was able to use this to great effect this was a telling argument Calvin himself felt the the prick of that criticism deeply uh the where is Geneva sending missionaries well they sent an enormous number of missionaries into into France but they also sent missionaries during Calvin’s lifetime to Brazil in part to and there are still reformed Christians in Brazil today I didn’t know this But I was having lunch, I don’t know, six months ago with Eddie Soto, who’s on the staff of Charleston Atlantic Presbytery in the PCUSA.

And Eddie is Brazilian. And he said he told me on that occasion there are still Presbyterians, Reformed Christians in Brazil to this day who trace their lineage in Christ to the mission from Geneva in the 16th century. Remarkable. But there wasn’t a lot of that. They had their hands full. And they couldn’t afford to do a great deal of mission sending or other things that might have marked them as true Christians. Well, we talked last time about how the whole incident with Servetus was really tied up with trying to prove that they’re really good Christians in Geneva. So we need something that doesn’t cost us money or lives, right? How are you going to show that it’s a real Christian church? Well, Calvin comes up with two marks of the church, two things that he thinks are markers.

If you find them present in a local congregation, then you can have confidence in it. Later on, John Knox, his protege who went to Scotland and sort of through whom we trace our lineage as Presbyterians back to Calvin. Knox thought there were three Marks. Calvin really was kind of stuck at calling the third one a real Mark, although he thought it was important. And the two things, according to Calvin, that you look for if you want to find a real church are that the Word of God is rightly preached. Listen to the preaching. Is the preaching an explication and application of Holy Scripture? Or is it, as Martin Luther worried, it might well degenerate into, is the preacher talking about blue ducks? If the preacher’s up there talking about blue ducks, then you might have occasion to worry about this. if the preacher is talking about being morally good without showing you why you ought to do that or how that might be grounded in Holy Scripture.

You know, you can preach ethics all day long. Anybody can preach ethics and tell you how to be a good person, right? The ancient world was full of people who did that, even before the coming of Christ. Socrates could try to tell you how to be a good person. So is the preacher preaching ethics? Is the preacher… I mean, in our world, the problem so often is a preacher telling idle jokes and stories about his grandchildren, whatever. Or is what’s being preached arising out of the scriptures? That’s one test. Is the word of God rightly preached? And the other test, are the sacraments rightly, or the word God truly preached, I suppose, is the word that you get, veritas. And are the sacraments rightly administered? That is to say, are they administered in the simplicity with which one finds them in Scripture?

In Calvin’s world, if you went to a baptism, all kinds of things might have been, it might be adorned with a lot of other things. um the uh a child being baptized being baptized in a in a um in the old way pre-reformation way might not only find have water placed on their head but they might have oil smeared on their forehead they might have um salt placed on their tongue there were all kinds of things that were added to baptism. If you’re looking for the sacraments truly administered, are they administered simply? You take a child, you seek to know the faith of the, or an adult, seek to know the faith of either the person being presented for baptism or their parents, and apply water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And he says this about baptism. Baptism is the sign of the initiation by which we are received into the society of the church in order that, engrafted in Christ, we may be reckoned among God’s children. So it’s not about trying to preserve the child’s life or the adult’s, for that matter. It’s not about trying to protect them from disease or from sin. It’s about engrafting into Christ. It’s about their adoption as children of God. So if you find baptism administered in that kind of simplicity, then you can have confidence in the place where it’s going on. And likewise with the Lord’s Supper, that really is the crux of the matter in Calvin’s world. Is it being done with simplicity? Once again, you think of the places where Christ serves or partakes in food and wine with his disciples.

Perhaps most notably in the Last Supper. But also on the road to Emmaus, which is very significant, very important for the theology of the Lord’s Supper. When Jesus is with the two disciples who were on Easter afternoon, you know that story, and they’re walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus. And the two are very discouraged because Jesus was dead. and he it says he opened the scriptures to them and taught them all that was there concerning himself but then later on it’s only when they arrive you know in Emmaus and he breaks bread then it says Luke says and acts that they’re pardon me it’s still in the gospel of Luke that that their eyes are opened and they recognize him in the breaking of bread very significant for the Lord’s Supper? Well, is it all about breaking bread, pouring wine, sharing those among the community of Christ?

Or is it sort of a show? And are all kinds of other things going on as well? Is it about the preparations? Do the preparations seem ostentatious? Are the, is there too much equipment, you know? Are the, do the prayers seem to expect that something magical is taking place? Calvin wants to know the answers to all of these kinds of questions. And above all, there’s the question, is there language of sacrifice? Is Christ being sacrificed again on the altar? Or is this a meal that’s being shared among the family of God, the family in which God is the Father and Christ is our brother and our host? If it looks like a sacrifice rather than a meal, Calvin’s going to have questions about whether this really is a true church. Let’s say a word about preaching.

These two things go together. Word and sacrament. So we’ve kind of said, here’s a church. It’s important. The church is the mother of believers. And here’s how you know if you found one, rather than what, you know, in the ancient church, they would have called a conventicle of heretics. So you’ve shown up. You’ve found a community. You’ve decided it’s an important place to be. You figured out that this is a true church. What are you going to experience there? Well, in Geneva, we don’t know how Calvin preached in the early days. We don’t have a single sermon that we know of. Well, I mean, we don’t have one. If any have survived, they’re remarkable stories. Some of those amazing stories of discovering manuscripts in libraries. I had a wonderful experience over a meal hearing one of those firsthand from someone who discovered some sermons of Calvin’s in England.

But none have been identified that have survived from Calvin’s first period in Geneva, from 1536 to 1539. We really don’t know what he preached about or how that was all arranged during that time. But we do know that when he returned in 1539, he came to a pulpit at St. Pierre, and the place is packed again. You know, you’ve got a lot of pictures like that Christmas. There’s a lot of people there. and Calvin remarks in a letter to Bucer about this and says, but he said, I didn’t talk about what they expected me to talk about. In other words, how he had been vindicated, basically. He thought that they thought that he was going to say, I told you so, or kind of thumb his nose at him. He didn’t do that. He just basically said it was good to be back.

That was about the long and short of it. And then he just took right up where he had left off when he left. Once again, preaching continuously through books of the Bible. There’s a Latin term we use, and I try to encourage people to do this in my teaching, when I teach preaching at the seminary, preaching Lectio Continua. In other words, by continuous reading. You just take a passage of scripture and preach a sermon about it. And the next Sunday, you’re just going to take the next passage. Next passage. Calvin’s doing this in a very forthright way when he returns. It really is just verse by verse. It’s not even so much passage by passage. It just goes so far. And other Reformation era preachers did this as well. Martin Luther did it. And Luther is so artless about it that in many, many of Luther’s sermons, you get to the end of the sermon and Luther just says, well, that’s about enough for today.

And that’s the end of it. No artful, cleverly crafted conclusions to his sermons. That’s enough for today and you’re done. well this is basically how Calvin’s doing it as well he does try to end a little more artfully than Luther does but he’ll just go for about an hour and tie it up in a bow and then next time you pick up at the next passage and so this is what he does when he returns he just I don’t know what book it was he did no one knows it has he didn’t he didn’t write that one down for us it’s not in the letter we don’t know those sermons haven’t survived so we don’t know it was just the next verse wherever he had left off in 1536 is the next place that’s where he took up again just as if he had never been gone it was just as if it was the next Sunday so preaching is very very biblical and I’ve got to tell you that I had I think in the south we expect probably not to have that so much because we have the bible all the time we have bible studies and we you know we live in this world in which people speak bible and we we know that we know those stories and But when I was in the suburbs of Philadelphia, it was remarkable how curious people were.

Anybody from anywhere around there? Northeast? It was just, I was, when I was in graduate school, did two interims in churches up there. And the first of those was at First Presbyterian Church in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, which is in the Philadelphia suburbs on the New Jersey side. And it was just so secular. But people were curious about the Bible, and so I would preach these little sermons that were almost little Sunday school lessons. It was just, this is the Bible, you know, it has two parts, and we’re going to look at this part today. Well, we had about a 25% over the course of that year of growth in worship attendance, because people, you know, they were just so curious about it. And the 10th Presbyterian Church is a PCA church, in downtown Philadelphia, they just pack them in because in an impossible location with just very simple biblical preaching.

Well, I went to Mobile from there, and I was in the habit of helping people. You know, they didn’t know Bible, so I would help them. I would say, well, we’re looking at the Gospel of John, and so start at your Bible about a third of the way through I mean two-thirds of the way through there’s Matthew find Matthew okay that’s that’s the first of the second part and you go Matthew Mark Luke John okay John now we need chapter three whatever it was you know and I when I went to Mobile I started in like that with the uh with the church there and on my first Sunday trying to help them find the passage and And it was a voice kind of over there. Now I think I know who it was, but I didn’t at the time. It said, we know where it is. But that’s the kind of, I mean, Calvin’s Geneva, when he begins to preach there, is really very much more like Haddon Heights than it is Mobile.

People need a lot of help. And so he’s preaching in a very simple way, straight through the scriptures. Others had done this, certainly. Martin Luther did it, Huldrych Zwingli, we talked about him two weeks ago, you remember, who was the reformer of Zurich a little earlier than Calvin, started in 1519. The Reformation of Zurich really began, and you could say the Swiss Reformation, the Reformed Reformation really begins when Huldrych Zwingli is called to Zurich as the people’s priest. Remember we talked about how you’ve got so many clergy, more than a thousand, between one and two thousand in calvin in geneva before the reformation and it goes from there to 14 sometimes as low as nine well the same situation in in zurich they’ve got all these clergy nobody paying attention to the people so there’s a an office the people’s priest special office in the cathedral church the people’s priest actual pastor you know To the people.

And this was Zwingli’s job before the Reformation, to be the people’s priest. And he just throws out the lectionary that the Roman church said was required. Just lays it aside. Started preaching straight through Matthew, verse by verse. And with that, the Reformation really begins in Switzerland. Crucially, crucially important, I think, if you’re going to have Christians who are growing in their faith. Somehow, if it’s not Lectio Continua preaching or biblical preaching, you know, they’ve got to have biblical preaching. It may not always, I mean, Chris, I know, is not a Lectio Continua preacher, and I’m not criticizing. But you’ve got to have biblical preaching. and it’s so important that calvin says if you’re not having biblical preaching then you can be pretty confident that that’s not even a real christian church that you’re in so this is what this is the kind of thing you experience and if you are experiencing biblical preaching Calvin is confident that the Lord will honor that and will bless that and not only you won’t just be hearing in the in the in the preachers speaking the preacher but you will be hearing the very word of God not script I mean that’s that I mean scripture is also the word of God Jesus Christ is the word of God.

There’s three forms of the word of God in Calvin’s view. He didn’t quite express it as clearly as later theologians would come to do, but the seed of the idea is already there in Calvin. That Jesus Christ is the word of God living on earth. The scripture is the word of God written, but when the scriptures are rightly and truly preached by a minister who’s lawfully called to the office and who doesn’t talk about blue ducks, then the sermon itself is the word of God. And that’s what you hear. You receive the word of God in the sermon. No promise that the story, the great story the preacher looked up on the internet is going to be the word of God. But the explication and application of the scriptures is the very word of God. A remarkably high view.

You could almost say a sacramental view, very nearly, in the sense of rendering Christ present. Very, very significant to attend to preaching, to biblical preaching in Calvin’s view. Of course, the third element, we’ve said a word or two about baptism, a little bit about preaching. The controversial subject is the Lord’s Supper. That’s what causes such an uproar in Reformation-era Europe. And so I want to spend a little time thinking a little bit about the Lord’s Supper. The problem in the Lord’s Supper, after you cut through, all the Protestants agree that you need to get rid of the ostentation. You know, all the gold-plated stuff needs to go away, and almost all the candles and all the vestments that are based on Old Testament models, the clothes, the fancy dress of the clergy, any of that that’s based on Old Testament models needs to go away because of the problem of sacrifice and re-sacrificing Christ every Sunday.

Christ died once, you see, once for all. And so you’re not going to redo the sacrifice of Christ every Sunday. So all those vestments that attend that all need to go away. The foreign elements, anything that’s not bread and wine, you don’t need any water, you don’t need any oil, none of that stuff, it’ll all go away. Anything that would suggest that you’re worshiping the elements of the Lord’s Supper needs to go away. I used to think, in fact, that that was why we had a cloth so often over the communion table on communion Sundays. I don’t even remember if y’all use one at Westminster. Yeah, I always thought that that was to keep people from adoring or worshiping or venerating the communion elements. And so I asked my good friend of old, who’s now my colleague at Erskine, Scotty Old, he was old, if he thought that’s what that was about.

He said, no, I think it’s just to keep the flies off. But nevertheless, you know, that was the kind of thought they would have had during the Reformation. Anything that would suggest that you should venerate these things, or that there’s something other than the bread that’s common to the culture, wine that’s common to the culture, or that anything magical has happened to them, that needs to be stripped away. All the Protestants agree on that. But there’s a further problem that the Protestants don’t agree on. And really, if we could overcome that one issue, it’s still perplexing us after 500 years or 400 and some years, there really wouldn’t be that much else causing barriers to to protestant union a few other things perhaps but the big issue is how do you understand the presence of christ is christ present in the lord’s supper and if so what is the nature of his presence what’s his presence like how is he present where is he present the old church had a theory of this uh called that the ten dollar word for is transubstantiation all right so i’ll put that one up here as well so the the trans is like you know translate or um oh i don’t know you know the care is it’s it’s a cross basically that’s the meaning of trans, it’s across or over, and the substance, the substantia, the substance.

So it’s to change the substance, and this depends on a distinction that goes back to Aristotle. So stay with me here for just a minute, I know this is heavy sledding in a way, but Aristotle wanted to distinguish between the substance of a thing, what it really is, in its truest being and its accidents, which is just like, you know, crashing a car, but they didn’t mean anything like that by it. The accidents of a thing are its outward properties, the way it looks, tastes, feels, smells, how it interacts with your senses are the accidents of a thing. And that, in Aristotle’s mind, is separable from what it really is. And so what Thomas Aquinas really comes up with in the old church in the 13th century is that the substance has been changed of the bread and the wine.

What it really is, during the course of the communion prayers, changes. So that now it’s no longer really bread and wine, even though it still looks like bread and wine. It’s really the flesh and blood of Jesus. It still looks like bread and wine, but don’t be looks or deceiving, says Thomas. tastes like bread tastes like wine you know looks taste feels all all the accidents are still bread and wine but you shouldn’t be deceived by this what it really is is the flesh and blood of Jesus well the reformers of course take a look at this and think well that’s just crazy this is just a bunch of hocus in fact hocus pocus I’m about to say that literally is where the word the term hocus pocus comes from because the moment of transubstantiation is when in the Latin liturgy the priest says, is repeating the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper and the priest says, quoting Jesus, but though in Latin, hocus meum corpus.

You can kind of hear how if you say it fast it can turn into hocus pocus, hocus meum corpus, this is my body uh and the the uh well the reformers say pish posh uh that’s not um that’s not what’s happening here at all and they and they the protestants fall into three different camps what if we all agree that this is this bit of magic is not happening this really isn’t the flesh and blood of Jesus despite appearances. What is it? What’s really happening here? Well, Martin Luther is the most conservative of the reformers in the sense that he wants to stay as close to the faith of Rome as he can. And so he says, well, it’s not transubstantiation. What happens is he says con-substantiation, and con means with in Latin. The substance of the flesh and blood of Jesus are received with the bread and wine.

The test case for Luther is, when he’s talking to someone else, is if an unbeliever takes the Lord’s Supper and eats and drinks to their condemnation, as the scripture says, what do they receive? And the right answer in Luther’s mind is the flesh and blood of Jesus. They receive the body and blood of Christ. Now, other Protestants say the unbeliever receives bread and wine. Luther says if you think that, then you don’t really believe that Jesus is spiritual, is really that there’s any real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. He’s either got to be received with the bread and wine, or he’s not really there. But the problem is that Luther has to resort to a kind of crazy theory to make this work out. He really wants to hang on to the transubstantiation, but, I mean, he does, and he knows that doesn’t work, but he wants to hang on to the real physical presence of Jesus in the Lord’s Supper.

And that’s the, you know, that’s a key term, the physical presence. Luther has got to come up with a physical presence of Christ that does not involve magic, hocus-pocus. And so he says that the human nature of Jesus, the human nature of Christ, can be present anywhere. And I’m not even going to go into the old ancient. I mean, he’s reaching back into the ancient church and picking up a particular theory about how language works. I’m not even going to go there. But he finds something in the tradition of the church that he can use by tweaking it a little bit to teach that the human nature of Christ, you know what we say is he’s fully human and fully divine in a single person, right? You’ve heard that before. And so they say that fully human part partakes in, because he’s one person with the divine nature, that the divine nature’s ability to be everywhere sort of scoots over and takes in the human nature too.

And the human nature can be anywhere and everywhere too, because of the union of the two natures in Christ. Well, all the other Protestants say, that’s just as crazy as the other thing. First of all, being able to be anywhere and everywhere is not a characteristic of human nature. We can’t do that. So they say, really, Luther, Brother Martin, you’re denying that Jesus is really human. If he can be anywhere and everywhere, well, that’s not even real humanity. So they say, nope, that’s no better than wrong. On the far other extreme, there’s the people in Zurich, Zwingli, that we’ve talked about a couple of times. And Zwingli, he reads this line on the front of all our communion tables, do this in remembrance of me. And he says, oh, this is the key term here, remembrance.

Jesus isn’t present here at all. We’re just reconstructing him mentally. It’s a mental action. His presence is in our minds. We remember him so he’s here, you know, in the way that you remember your grandfather and he’s here. He says no real presence at all. It’s just a mental action. We do this in Christ’s memory. But, you know, you do still have to deal with that problem where Jesus takes the bread and says, this is my body. And Luther actually at one point writes this in chalk across the table in a discussion. Hoc est corpus meum. This is my body. So Zwingli hasn’t really been just to that piece of scripture. So what Calvin comes up with, that I really believe, I’ll be very open with you. You may think this sounds, I mean as Luther did, thought it sounded crazy and excuse me.

But I really believe it. And I think it’s right. Is what is called spiritual real presence. And that is, Christ is really there. You have him at the Lord’s Supper. He’s really there. He’s present where the church is celebrating this. But he’s present not physically in the way that Luther wants it to be. But he is present by his spirit. The body of Christ is in heaven. Right? The human body, this is his answer to Luther. The human body of Christ is not on the communion table. It’s in heaven. But in the Lord’s Supper, we are lifted up to him, to Christ. Christ doesn’t come down to us and sit on the table. We’re lifted up to him. And here’s what Calvin says, just reading straight from the Institutes. To them, Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us.

As though if he should lift us to himself, we should not just as much enjoy his presence. The question is therefore only of the manner, for they place Christ in the bread. While we do not think it lawful for us to drag him from heaven, let our readers decide which is more correct. Only away with that calumny that Christ is removed from his supper unless he lies hidden under the covering of the bread. Since the whole Christ is everywhere, our mediator is ever present with his own people, and in the supper reveals himself in a special way. Yet in such a way that the whole Christ is present, but not in his wholeness. For as has been said, in his flesh he is contained in heaven until he appears in judgment. uh he’s all christ is always with the believer he acknowledges that right he’s ever present with his own people but in the supper reveals himself in a special way and when people want to challenge calvin on this and say how can this really be so he says how do you define that what’s the difference between the presence of christ with his people all the time and the presence of christ that you experienced in the Lord’s Supper, he says, well, I can’t define it, but I know it when I experience it.

And you perhaps know how that is. I think that’s the way it is. This is why it’s such a significant thing that we should be together for that event. That the word should be sealed by the presence of Christ in this way that he promises when his people are gathered around this table and don’t engage in hocus-pocus. Really there, not in the bread. The bread doesn’t turn into him. And he’s not kind of under and with the bread and wine, but he’s here in the room. He’s not on the table. He’s in the room uniting his people together and lifting us up into his presence. And I always, when I celebrate the Lord’s Supper, Mary Ann’s heard me do it a hundred times, pray that we would be lifted up into his presence where we can discern his body. This is what we need the Holy Spirit to do.

Where you hear this is toward the end of the prayer before the elements are distributed. what there should always be in that prayer a prayer for what for the holy spirit to do whatever it is that you believe the holy spirit’s going to do in that situation and it may i’ve heard of course you go to the episcopal church that prayer will say pour out your holy spirit upon us and upon these your gifts of bread and wine that well there’s no need for a reformed church to say pour out the holy spirit upon these your gifts of bread and wine because that’s not where the action is the actions in the room so you you might pray something like pour out your holy spirit upon us that these your gifts of bread and wine may be for us the body and blood of christ and lift us up into his presence so that we can discern his body and eat with him where he is in heaven that’s what we’re after and chris has given me the watch signal that says it’s time to stop and so we’ll stop. Next time we’ll come back together and talk about Calvin as a Christian and as a pastor and kind of about the humanity of Calvin. All right. Go in peace.