Proclamation, blessing or benediction, participation or communion and anticipation.

We've been looking at these big words this week because they're all used in connection

with the Lord's Supper. They help us both

to understand it better, but also, I think, to enjoy it more. I suspect we might be shocked

if someone handed us the bread and the wine at the Lord's Supper and then said what the waiter

might say in a restaurant. Enjoy. In the church I was in at one time, the

tradition was that at communion the elders would sit around the Lord's table and serve the congregation

from it. And on my left hand sat one of the elders who was usually the senior elder, who had

served longest in the congregation.

I remember coming home one day and my wife saying to me, it is wonderful to see a man sitting

beside you at the Lord's table who looks naturally so happy to be there. She didn't mean he was flippant and superficial,

just that there was a sense that he belonged there with Jesus.

John Knox's successor, Robert Bruce, not Robert the Bruce. Robert Bruce used to say,

we don't get a better Christ at the Lord's Supper than the

Christ we get in the preaching of the word, but we do sometimes get the same Christ better.

But we can only do that when we remember another word that helps us to understand the

supper. It's not actually used by Paul,

but it's obviously implied in what he tells the Corinthians. He says, you can't be going to

feasts where the food has been consecrated to idols, and then coming to the Lord's supper in

which you're consecrating yourself to him andew. So today's word is consecration.

The Lord's Supper-like baptism has often been described since at least the time of St. Augustine

as a visible word, a sermon in dramatic form.

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