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Give attention now to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Gospel according to Luke, the 22nd chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. "Now the feast of unleavened bread drew near, which is called the Passover, and the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to

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death, for they feared the people. Then Satan entered into Judas, called Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve. He went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers how he might betray him to them, and they were glad and engaged to give him money. So he agreed and sought an opportunity to betray him

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to them in the absence of the multitude. Then came the day of unleavened bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John saying, 'Go and prepare the Passover for us that we may eat it.' They said to him, 'Where will you have us prepare it?' He said to them, 'Behold, when you have

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entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house which he enters, and tell the householder, 'The teacher says to you, "Where is the guest room where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?" And he will show you a large upper room furnished. There make ready.' And they went

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and found it as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover. And when the hour came, he sat at table and the Apostles with him, and he said to them, 'I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.' And he

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took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, 'Take this and divide it among yourselves, for I tell you that from now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.' And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body which is given

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for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' And likewise the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. But behold the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table. For the Son of Man goes, as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.' And they

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began to question one another, which of them it was that would do this. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Amen. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. He was only six years old, and he went to the grocer and said, 'I would like

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to buy the smallest box of Tide which I can purchase.' And the grocer said, 'Why do you want the smallest box of Tide you can purchase?' And he said, 'It's because I only want enough to wash my dog.' And the grocer said, 'Tide is not the kind of soap you use to wash your dog.' And the boy said, 'My mother told me that Tide is the

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best soap of all, so that is the kind that I want.' And the grocer said, 'I don't think it's a good idea, but if that's what you want, that's what you shall have.' And the young man left the store with the soap. About two weeks later, the grocer saw the boy again. He said, 'How's your dog?' The boy said, 'He's dead.' The

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grocer said, 'Aha, you see, I told you that was not the right soap.' The boy said, 'No, I don't think it was the soap. I think it was the rinse cycle that got it.' Well, sometimes we get caught up in cycles that get us. And one of the cycles that's been getting me presently is the complication cycle. You know what I mean.

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You turn on the weather to hear the weather report. You want to know what it's going to be like tomorrow. And a man tells you about cold fronts and warm fronts, about warm air cold columns and cold air columns. He tells you about high and low pressure areas, isobars, barometric pressure corrected to sea

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level, whatever that means, satellite pictures, radar scans. And after he's gone through this for two or three minutes, he says, 'So it will be a nice day tomorrow with temperatures in the 70s.' Altogether too complicated. I went to the movies to see A Good Mystery. I found myself caught up in the story of psychotics who were

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in deep conflict with one another. There were all kinds of esoteric symbolisms crammed into the motion picture. There were unusual segues. I found myself a nervous wreck by the time it was over. And insofar as its meaning is concerned, I am still in the dark. The curse of the complicated. I just went to see a good

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movie. A teacher in the fourth grade showed me a definition written recently by one of her students. The student was supposed to define a nut and a bolt. This is what the youngster wrote. 'A bolt is a thing like a stick of hard metal with a square bunch on one end and lots of wrinkles wrapped around the other end. A

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nut is like a bolt, only opposite. It's a hole within a bunch of iron, sawed off short, with the wrinkles going around inside the hole.' Only fourth grade, and that's complicated. You know, when the Duke of Wellington died, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, 'He was rich in saving common sense and as the greatest only

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are in his simplicity sublime.' That's what I'm longing for, the sublimity of simplicity. And that is one of the reasons why I love to come to this table. Because in spite of all the theological use and abuse which has been dumped upon this table across the centuries, and in spite of all the ecumenical

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acrimony which has occurred about it, the sacrament remains uncomplicated. And I would ask you to think with me of the simplicity of the sacrament today. Notice this. It is simple, first of all, because Jesus was a simple man. Not too long ago, a fellow by the name of Phipps wrote a book entitled, 'Was Jesus Married?' This

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book actually concerns sexual distortions in thinking within the history of the Christian Church, but he knew that title would sell books, and it did. It was not a good book, I wouldn't recommend that you give it shelf room, but the book offended many people, many in fact who never read it. The very title

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was, 'Jesus Married Raised Possibilities to Them Which They Couldn't Bear,' and that's very sad. For they forget, you see, that Jesus was altogether human, and as a man, thoughts of marriage must have occurred to him at one time or another. Let's remember that he talked like we talk. He went fishing in the early

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morning. He took naps under palm trees. He let kids play in his lap and swing from his arms. He blew his nose just like we do, except he probably did not use a handkerchief. He washed his face. Sometimes the wine ran down into his beard. He was not a beautiful man or a handsome man. The scriptures specifically

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describe some people as being beautiful and well-formed. It says that, for example, of Sarah and Rachel. It says it of Tamar. It says it of Esther. It says it of Joseph and David. It also says it of Absalom, but what does it say about Jesus? It says he had no form or comeliness that we should desire him. You've heard

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much of the conversation about this shroud of Turin, as to whether it has upon it a representation of the face of Jesus or not. If it is the face of Jesus, then he was a remarkably homely man, and the picture would suggest that at one time or another his nose was broken. He was not a general. He was not an admiral.

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He commanded only a group of twelve, and they grumbled most of the time. He was not a poet. He was not an artist. He was not a scientist. He was a carpenter. Now I do not belittle the trade of carpentry. It is a real talent to be one with the wood, but it is a talent that is not particularly sophisticated. Look at his

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speech. It was very plain speech. The speech which represents him most actively to us is parables, and if you translate his parables over into the idiom of our day, you find they are very commonplace. He talked about finding a diamond ring that you thought you would never find. He talked about winning the

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Irish sweepstakes. He said it would be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than to drive a Mercedes through a revolving door. He said if your child comes to you and asks for a goldfish, would you give him a black widow spider, or if she came pleading for a Klondike, would you knock

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out her two front teeth? He used very, very simple, earthly figures. He was a very simple man. Solomon says he was the Rose of Sharon. Isaiah says he was a wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Daniel called him the Messiah. Haggai called him the Desire of Nations. Malachi

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calls him the Son of Righteousness. The Gospels refer to him as the Dayspring from on high. Acts calls him the Cornerstone. Hebrews says he is our great High Priest. John says he is the Lamb of God. He is the Alpha and the Omega. He is the Lion of Judah. He is the Bright and Morning Star. He is the King of Kings. He

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is the Root of David. He is the Word of God, and he is the Great Amen, and he is every one of these things and more. But as much as he is any of these things, he is also a plain and simple man. That's one reason that the sacrament is simple. Another reason that the sacrament is simple is that he instituted it for

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simple people. There was a priest who was invited on one occasion to preach to a group of cloistered nuns. Now you know what cloistered nuns are. They live in an enclosure. They never see anyone outside. No one outside ever sees them. And this priest was told that when he went to speak there, he would be standing behind

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a screen so that the nuns could not see him and he could not see them. One nun took him in, seated him behind the screen, and said, "You may begin in a moment." So he waited for a minute or two, and then he got up and he began to preach. Now he recognized that they couldn't see him. He had to communicate everything with his

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voice, and so he really poured himself into his preaching, just exhausted himself. And when he was done, he fell back into the chair, having done his best to communicate with these holy women. He rested there in the chair for about five minutes, and then the nun who had brought him in in the first place appeared once

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more at his side, and she said, "The last nuns are entering now, Father. You may begin in a moment." Well, he missed his opportunity. I am not so sure it would be a good thing to live in a cloister. If all Christians lived in cloisters, the Christian faith would never grow. As a matter of fact, people who live in

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cloisters can only live there because most Christians do not live there, and there's a fundamental contradiction there which makes me very unhappy. But the point I wish to make now is this. The gospel is not just for people who live in cloisters, just for individuals who live a life that is separated from the

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course of daily living. As a matter of fact, the gospel, the sacrament, is spread for people who walk on common everyday pathways just as we do. People who admit that they have a deep need for God. People who understand that that need can be met only by the gift of God, and people who know further that that gift

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of God comes only through Jesus Christ. Now, whenever I say to someone that our access to God is only through Jesus Christ, there are always those who respond by saying, "Isn't that rather narrow? I mean, aren't you ruling everybody else out? Don't you find that rather prejudiced and severe?" And I say

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to those people, "A Muslim believes that in order to get to God, you must say your prayers five times every day, you must observe the month-long feast of Ramadan each year, you must make a trip to Mecca, you must give alms, and you must study the Koran. A Hindu believes that in order to reach spiritual bliss, you must

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observe certain very strict social taboos, you must eat certain foods and not eat certain other foods, you must practice bodily privations, and if you want to be especially holy, painful privations, and you must enter into mental disciplines which do nothing less than alter your personality. The Buddhist

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says that in order to achieve oneness with the great all, you must cancel all bodily desires, you must take to yourself vows of poverty, you must seek to eliminate everything that has to do with your body, and to become instead pure spirit and pure mind. Now over against these complicated, involved requirements

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and legalisms of other faiths comes the Christian faith, and it says, "Whatsoever you ask in Jesus' name will be done for you." It could not be more simple, it could not be more broad, it could not be more uncomplicated. The Bible again and again calls the people of God sheep. I hope this doesn't come as a great news flash

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to you, but sheep are rather smelly creatures. They also have a tendency to be stubborn and mean-spirited, they are very easily frightened, and they will follow anyone who leads them into darkness as well as into light. They are troublesome, they make the same mistakes over and over again, and they're hard to

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get along with. You can see why God's people are called sheep, and God understands the nature of his people, so he sends to the sheep something very simple, a shepherd, with a rod and a staff that comforts and a cup that overflows, and a promise that if you follow him he will take you to the Lord's house

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forevermore. And one of the reasons that shepherd gave us a simple sacrament is because he knows the sheep are simple also. This sacrament is also simple because it was instituted in a very simple way. Jesus simply used the elements of a common meal. It is very likely that every day the disciples with

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the Lord would end the day with a common meal, sitting out under the sky or on the roof of a housetop. They would enjoy the simple fare which was theirs, spend some time reviewing the events of the day, perhaps laughing and crying together, and then a word of prayer before they went to bed. That was the mix out of which

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Jesus chose to make his perpetual memorial. Now suppose he had given us that task. Suppose he had said, "I would like you to design for me some memorial by which I might be remembered for as long as history itself exists." I have a tendency to believe that we would have not done anything so simple. We would

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have come up with some far more spectacular ceremony, something with a lot more pomp and circumstance to it. As a matter of fact, we've already done that. Look at how he served this sacrament. The people marching down the aisles, the special dignity, the chairs arranged, the linen and the silver. Now we

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have to do that in order to be able to share with a great number in a short time. But there is no doubt that this distorts the simplicity of the essential meal and message. I had a lady say to me in this room last year, "I was deeply touched by the dignity and formality with which you serve the Lord's Supper

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here." And I thanked her for that. But I also thought to myself, "I wonder if the meal got ahead of the message." Jesus, you see, was very careful to make this thing simple. If we mimic today what he did then, we'd celebrate the Lord's Supper with Ritz crackers and Coca-Cola. Now we're up against the very crucial

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question here. There are times when folks come to me, well-meaning, deeply dedicated folks, and they say to me, "I wish that from the pulpit you would explore the higher and more lofty aspects of the faith, that you would explore some of the more profound theological doctrines and some of the

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more advanced practices of our believing." And they are motivated by the very finest intentions in this. But I cannot accede to it. For the pulpit, you see, is for the feeding of sheep and not for giraffes. The fact of the matter is there is to be something of a didactic nature in every sermon. You should go away with

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something that you did not know before. But the sermon is to be principally a hortatory exercise. Let me put it this way. In 1924, there was a team of British mountain climbers trying to get to the top of Mount Everest, and the two who were leading the team died in the last ascent. There was a man named Odell who

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went with them until they made that last ascent. He stayed behind. He saw them disappear toward the summit, and he wrote later of it, and he said that the reason he did not go on was because of the conditions and the time. He said they saw the summit. Just then, the winds blew away the clouds, and they saw it, and he said

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they were fascinated by it. They were charmed by it. It was right there before them. And so they went upward and onward until they died. Now there are a lot of people who suggested in the act of worship we should be going upward and onward, and that the Sunday sermon should be concerned with the Everest of the

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Spirit. No. That way is death. The sermon is not about Mount Everest. The sermon is to shine the light of God's Word into the valley, into the valley of the shadow where the sheep are. The goal of Everest is a grand goal. That's the reason we have classes and special studies and fellowship groups and all of the like.

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But this is not the right condition, and this is not the right time. The sermon is not for people in the cloister. It's for the crowd. And Jesus is our model in this. This is why in all of his teaching and in this meal, he chose that which above and beyond all other things is simple. Did you hear about that little mouse in New

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York City that was trying to escape from a cat? And he ran behind some garbage cans, and the cat went there too, and he went over a fence, and the cat went there too, and he went down an alley, and the cat went there too, and he thought it was all over with him. Then he saw a little hole, and he slipped into the hole. And

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the cat couldn't get in after him. He was safe. And he heard the cat meowing outside, and his little heart was beating, but he became more calm. And then he heard a dog bark, and the cat screeched, and he thought, "I'm saved." And he waited a minute, and then he stepped out of the hole, and the cat grabbed him and gobbled

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him all up. And as the cat turned and walked away, the cat was heard to say, "If you want to survive in the city, you have to be bilingual." Well, that's true of any church in the city, or any church anywhere else. We've got to be thinking about the things of the Spirit, and speaking of them too, and

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there are places for that. But here, the accent is on the simple. That's the reason Jesus just used bread and wine for his memorial, the simplicity of the sacrament. And finally, notice this, that the message of the sacrament is simple also. It's summed up in our text for this morning, "For as often as ye do this, ye

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do show forth the Lord's death till he come." What we are to do, and we're told in this single sentence, is to show forth Jesus dying until he comes. The reference "until he comes" speaks also of his resurrection. He could not come had he not risen from the dead. So the message that comes to us out of the sacrament is

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the message of his dying, and of his rising, and of his coming again. That's the reason this is such a joyous feast. In Acts chapter 2, we read that the meal was always entered into with great joy, and the reason for that was this, that the accent was not just upon the dying, but also on the rising and coming again.

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If every time the disciples got together to eat this holy meal, all they thought about was the heartbreaking death of Jesus, that would have been a negative experience had it ended there. But the message of the table is not only that he died, but that he rose again. And notice what we are told in this verse to do

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about that. The accent is on doing. It doesn't say that we are to think about it, though thought is part of our faith, and it doesn't say that we are to be involved in feeling it, though emotions are part of our faith. It says, "For as often as ye" - not think or feel - "but for as often as ye do this, ye show forth the

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Lord's death until he come." In other words, we are to be taking the message of his living and dying and rising out into the world, aggressively. Suppose that tomorrow morning when Gimbel's department store opened, all the sales people entered, and then as soon as they were inside, they locked all the doors,

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and they spent the whole day selling things to each other. You would have a model of most churches. I sell something to you, you sell something to me, the sale goes on inside, while all the time Jesus is outside in the world, which is where we are to be. Where we are to be taking the sacramental commission. I sat one

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cold Saturday afternoon in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, and I was studying the great painting of Salvatore d'Ali, Christ of St. John of the Cross. It's a representation of Christ on the cross, but as he was viewed by the great Spanish mystic, Christ of St. John of the Cross, high and lifted up. There's a

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resurrection glory about it, even though it's a depiction of the crucifixion. And as I looked at this picture, I noticed the people who went by. There were sailors, there were teenagers chewing on their gum, there were groups of children, there were some clergy people, there were business people, at least they look like

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business people, there were tourists, there were poor people who I'm sure were in the gallery simply because it was too cold outside. And every one of these individuals or groups as they walked past that picture stopped and contemplated it. Now why? Not because it was the biggest picture in the room, there

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were other pictures in the room which were larger. Not because it was the finest picture in the room, there were other pictures in the room that were finer. Not because of the placement of the picture, there were other pictures in the room that were placed just as significantly. The people stopped because

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when the world confronts the loving death of Jesus and the reality of his resurrection, the world stops and takes notice. And our task is to take him out into the world and to take his story out into the world so that it will stop and notice. And this table calls us to that. It has been said that life is a war,

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perhaps undeclared but nonetheless real. Our lives are very much like the lives of nations, caught up in tumult. Sometimes we advance, sometimes we retreat, sometimes we're in truce, sometimes we're fighting a delaying action. I am this pulpit this morning have come forward with my tattered banner trying to

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advance the cause to which I am committed. And you, you carry your banners and your flags into the places where you fight out your battles, your fields of conflict. What this sacrament says to all of us is that as we go forth into the war, we go forth in the name of a simple Savior, trying to reach very simple folks

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in a very simple way, with a very simple message, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. That is our communion commission. It may cost us something, but that person is no fool who gives what she cannot keep to gain what

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she can never lose. Let us pray. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]