This sermon is the subject of the Sermon Clinic series by Jeff Arthurs and Kent Edwards. For the first installments in the series, see, Sermon Chooses Good Expository Path but Stumbles and Sermon Aims to Be Biblical but Uses Wrong Text.

Well, picnic season is just about over. Those wasps can just about drive you nuts, right? Pretty soon the air is going to get chilly, and then we're going to move into a church season that is not necessarily recognized on the liturgical church calendar, but I call it the potluck season, when we go indoors and we start to eat together. Potlucks have a long and rather checkered history within the church. We're going to talk about that this morning a little bit.

I was part of a church that actually went into great turmoil over this issue of potlucks. Doesn't sound like it would be a controversial issue, but it was because all of a sudden somebody decided the word luck was not Christian, that believers did not believe in luck. They believed in providence and the divine will of God. It got pretty hot. They debated it thoroughly, did an exposition of Scripture, and came out with the idea that they would now be called Pot Blessings.

This worked well until the mid-seventies when the word pot took on a new meaning. Some of you've been there. That word pot caused quite a stir, and there were those who said, "We've got to hang onto this word because if we let the world define every term we use it's a slippery slope." They went back into heavy debate on this. One poor sister wondered if she could even mow her grass anymore since that word had taken on a whole new meaning. They decided they would totally revamp everything, and they came out with Covered Dish dinners.

I thought Scandinavian Lutherans were the ones who came up with potluck, but I was wrong. Actually it was the church at Corinth that came up with potlucks. If you have your Bible, I want you to open to 1 Corinthians 11. Here is the definitive word, the biblical, theological basis for our potlucks. It's all right here.

First Corinthians 11:17. I'm reading from Eugene Peterson's The Message because he puts a wonderful twist on this. It's true to the text.

Regarding this next item I'm not at all pleased. I'm getting the picture that when you meet together it brings out your worst side instead of your best. First, I get this report on your divisiveness competing within, criticizing each other. I'm reluctant to believe it, but there it is. The best that can be said for it is that the testing process will bring truth into the open and confirm it.

And then I find that you bring your divisions to worship. You come together and instead of eating the Lord's Supper you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. You bring in so much, and then on top of that the hungry are left out and they go home hungry. Others have to be carried out too drunk to walk. I just can't believe it.

Don't you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God's church? Why would you actually shame God's poor? I never would have believed you would have stooped to this, and I'm not going to stand by and not say anything.

Let me go over with you again exactly what goes on at the Lord's Supper and why it is so centrally important. I received my instructions from the Master himself and passed them on to you. The Master Jesus on the night of his betrayal took bread, having given thanks he broke it and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this to remember me." After supper he did the same thing with the cup. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Each time you drink this cup remember me."

What you must solemnly realize is that every time you eat this bread and every time you drink this cup you reenact, in words, the actions and death of Jesus. You will be drawn back to this meal time and again until the Master returns. You must never let familiarity breed contempt. Anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Master in an unworthy manner shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. Is that the kind of remembrance you want to be a part of?

So examine your motives. Test your heart. Come to the meal in holy awe. And if you give no thought, or worse don't care about the broken body of the Master when you eat and drink, you're running the risk of serious consequences. That's why so many of you even now are listless and sick and others have gone to an early grave. If we get this straight now, we won't have to be straightened out later on. Better to be confronted by the Master now than to face a fiery confrontation later.

So, my friends, when you come together to the Lord's Table be reverent, courteous with one another. If you're so hungry that you can't wait to be served, go home and get a sandwich. But by no means risk turning this meal into an eating and drinking binge or a family squabble. It's a spiritual meal. It's a love feast.

There are few texts that deal directly with communion, and then to have one like this you think, Where is this taking us? Every potluck I've attended at our church has been a wonderful time. We've eaten a lot of food. We maybe ate like hogs, but we always had enough to go around, and we've always left some for people who would come late. Some of us have left on a sugar high because we hit the dessert table first, but I've never seen anyone leave in a drunken stupor. We approach this table reverently. As I approached this weekend, I began to dig through this text and decided there's got to be a timeless truth here for us, and that's what we are going to open, hopefully, this morning.

In my thoughts, I went back to the table where I sat at home as a child. I started to discover the timeless truth there. My family table was one of those yellow chrome jobs. It had a chrome strip around the side, and ours had four yellow chairs. It was a great place. Our kitchen was standard fare: stove, refrigerator, ironing board that never came down except on special occasions. That is where we'd eat every meal. That was our dining room.

With a degree of regularity my mother would come to me and give me these exciting little words: "We need to add a leaf to the table." That was my clue to go to the front closet, rummage behind the coats, and pull out that leaf that would go in the table. I would bring it, and they'd pull that table apart, put it in there, and push it together. That leaf made our table a whopping 12 inches longer. At an appointed time the doorbell would ring. I'd be sent as an ambassador, and the guest or guests would walk in.

Add a leaf to the table, and sometimes people would come to our table who had far more than we had. Like Claude. Claude was a wealthy realtor, but he was a widower. Every time he sat at the table he would rave about the home cooked food. I think what he really enjoyed most was the lively conversation that took place around that table, which broke the silence of his world.

Add a leaf to the table, and Mom and Pop Ozzie would show up. That's what we called them affectionately. Mom Ozzie had only one hand. She was an obsessive/compulsive cleaner, and she was a hypochondriac. There was no disease she had not had. At the meal we would always get news of an exploratory surgery. She would tell us about needles this big that were stuck into her body and how tubes came out of every orifice of her body. She was amazingly hard to please, but every prayer request she gave at that table was taken seriously and prayed for.

Add a leaf to the table, and Harry Pennington would come. Harry was a missionary who had served in what was then called the Belgian Congo. He laid his wife in a grave in that country and brought home an infant child. He would join us at the table and be reminded by believers who felt as he did that the Lord's loving kindness was better than life.

Add a leaf to the table, and Norma Jean would show up. She wore thick glasses that gave her, at best, minimal eyesight. She had to be engaged in conversation; it was painful just to keep her talking. She would always come with a little gift, one of those miniature pocketknives for me, a little flashlight, one of those coin purses you squeeze to open that you can stick on your nose and look like a clown. At our table she found that her love language was accepted, those little gifts were accepted.

Add a leaf to the table, and Darryl and Dorothy, a childless couple, would show up, and their deep pain would find a form of comfort as encouragement was poured in like a bottomless cup of coffee.

Add a leaf to the table, and Bob, who struggled with alcoholism, would come and find tough love.

Add a leaf to the table, and Mrs. Piper, who had a special-needs child, would come. She had to bring elderly women into her home to take care of the child. She would have love and concern poured into her at the table.

Add a leaf to the table, and Amos and his wife would show up. Amos was the poorest person I ever knew growing up. He only wore one suit. I never saw him in anything else. He had this nervous twitch. His wife had no teeth and wore itty-bitty spectacles. I never heard her speak a word. I don't even know if she spoke English, but they would always leave our table loaded with food sent home with them.

The rich, the poor, the sick, the healthy, the aged, college students looking for a surrogate mom and dad, young couples lost in love, ex-offenders—you name it, they were all at the table when we would add a leaf. When we added that leaf, life was shared.

The custom was simple. At the table you might have had roast or macaroni and cheese or macaroni and tomatoes. It could have been bacon and corn. It wasn't anything special. Sometimes those people would come to the meal and bring a pint of homemade canned beans, bean pickles. (I really love those—just a hint.) They would come with Jell-O. They would come with cookies. They would add their food to the table, and something interesting happened at that table because of it.

My parents never looked at that table and said, "Well, because you only brought beans, that's what you can eat. The rest of us are going to eat the rest of the food." Everything was shared. There was only one rule: the thoughtful rule of sharing. We would look around that table and see how many were there, and we would calibrate the portion of food we took so that all could be served. Everyone was served.

Unfortunately the church at Corinth did not have an "add a leaf to the table" mentality. Corinth knew nothing about the Jewish custom of the Sabbath. Everything was new to them, so they did not have any day they necessarily blocked out. So they just took this first day of the week and called it their time to get together for a great big potluck, Lord's Supper celebration.

It's interesting, though, meeting in a house as they had to do, that they brought with them a custom totally true to Corinth, a part of their old life that hadn't been changed. It was even part of their architecture. Their dining rooms would comfortably seat 10 people lying on couches. There was an atrium area on the outside, and 30 to 40 people could actually stand there and eat. So the host would invite in his friends. They would go into the dining room, and they would enjoy great food served in that wonderful setting, while those who were coming later would have to stand out in the atrium and be lucky if they wound up with anything.

We experience that today in a way. In the airlines, it's hot-towel, good-food, champagne, first-class service versus pack-them-into-coach, throw-a-bag-of-peanuts-at-them, and hope-they-have-a-good-trip service. The airlines are Corinthians at heart.

Anyway the wealthier in Corinth, setting their own work hours, could come, bring the food, and eat. The slaves had to wait till the workday was done, and it would be too late for them when they would come. The food would be consumed. Some couldn't even bring anything to share. Or what had been brought to share would have already been consumed. So potent was this issue that Paul says, "If you can't wait for others, for crying out loud, eat a sandwich at home. Take the edge off your hunger and wait for one another."

There was no common supper here. Some of the poorer members went away hungry. Some of the wealthy ones went away drunk. This is the way Corinthians did life. There was nothing unusual about that. The old lifestyle carried over into the new.

Paul doesn't come down on them for gluttony or drunkenness. If it had been me, it would have been a wonderful opportunity to address that issue, but he didn't. Paul immediately deals with their selfish indifference and focuses on the idea of their selfish consumption and the fact that they were not recognizing that they were truly a family, a community bound together, and that they were to come together and share.

To illustrate his point, he jumps from his little diatribe, "I can't believe you've come to this" to "By the way, take note of this: what I received from the Lord I am giving to you."

Why does Paul make this big jump? Because in Paul's way of thinking, the present abuses came from failing to enter into the practice of the Master. The One who at the threshold of death met with his friends, broke the bread, and gave it to them, shared even to the point of saying, "I will give my life away for you."

And notice something important here. Paul does not use the familiar words repeated every time we get together: "This is my body which is broken for you." Paul does not say that. He simply says, "This is my body which is for you." Paul sees those who are joining at the meal as becoming a new entity. They become the living manifestation of the body of Christ. While Christ was once physically present on this earth, he now dwells among his people, and when they come and join together as a community, they become the body of Christ. This is my body which is for you.

Paul is so caught in this that from that point forward in Corinthians he hammers away on the body, the body, the body. Chapter 12: "You all come with special gifts. Every one of you have something to offer. There are gifts that dwell in you. Give those gifts away. We are fit and joined together." Throughout Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Paul keeps talking about the body of believers being the body of Christ.

Then he goes to the cup, and he does use those familiar words. The cup, in Paul's way of thinking, is the means by which the body receives the covenant through the blood of Jesus Christ. This is where they're bound together in that mystical union. This is where the destiny of their lives comes together as they enter into the New Covenant. So we have a body of believers, we who partake in a meal together who are bound together through the covenant relationship of the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

So what does "eating and drinking in an unworthy manner" refer to? That's part of the mystery of this text. Eating and drinking in an unworthy manner simply means the possibility exists for me to mistreat a person in the body of Christ. Paul was saying, "Do you realize how you're treating these people? When you treat them this way, when you shut them outside, when you keep them distanced from your life, when you don't share with them, you're really splitting the body of Christ. You're mistreating Jesus. You're acting like consumers rather than a community of believers."

Thinking only of yourself is contrary to the Table in the New Covenant. Corinthian people were used to "I did it my way" and watching out for number one. I get what I need; let everybody else fend for themselves.

That's why self-examination was encouraged. Paul says, Look at yourself, not in a morose introspection that says, "Am I worthy?" but rather, "Am I discerning the body of Christ sitting in the row next to me? Am I in accord? Do I feel like I'm one with these people?" Do you recognize who is with you? Do you see Jesus here?

The Corinthians' selfish attitude hampered the redemptive life that could have taken place, that they could have shared with others. They needed to add another leaf to the table.

So what does this mean to our church? We are a community called of God to represent Jesus Christ. We are joined one to another. We are joint heirs with Jesus Christ through the covenant. We are not consumer Christians, but we are called to be a community of Christians. And so we need to examine ourselves carefully. Do I come thinking, Okay, what's in it for me? I sure hope they sing my favorite song. I really don't want to spend time with these people. I have to check my heart. I have to be careful about how I respect and how I look at the other people who are members of the body of Christ.

In other words, we need to get our eyes off the food. We need to get our eyes off of what's in it for me. We need to look across the table and see others who are sitting with us and how we can share what we have. It may be a simple gift, but I can share what I have.

If we received word that somebody was going hungry in our church, we as a congregation instantly would respond. They'd have piles of food in their living room. But this is a deeper issue than food. It goes to our attitude. It goes to our motive.

When we come to this place, do we bring our spiritual picnic cooler and just stock up for ourselves? Or do we share? Our attitude should be that of Christ, who gave himself away, who poured himself out to others.

That isn't a natural attitude. That is a supernatural attitude. For that to happen in me means my heart needs to be transformed. I can't muster that on my own. I bring a lot of my old life into this place, and so it needs the supernatural touch of Christ, and it needs to take place in a transforming way. When that transformation starts to take place in us, there's a willingness to be a communal community, to share our lives around the table.

What do you and I have to share? Whom are you connected with? Do you recognize the body of Christ? You say, "I don't know what I've got to share." Let me give you a few suggestions.

It could be simply befriending a person that walks in and out of here every week all alone. It could be caring for a sick person, running a meal over to his or her house. (Sabbath is a day for good deeds, going over and doing something for somebody.) It could be comforting the grieving or helping a person ensnared in sin. You come alongside them and say, "I'm going to walk with you. I know it's tough, but I'm going to cheerlead you on. You're going to overcome this."

It could mean reaching into your pocket and taking out some Kleenex for a person who has tears streaming down his face. It could be calling people by name, identifying them as real persons, looking into their eyes, smiling.

While I was out of town, I had the privilege of going to a church that had a nursing home attached to it. People who had grown old in that community of faith were able to live in that nursing home, and they were never separated. They didn't feel like there was a wall between them because they could still participate in the worship that had been a part of their lives for many years.

We went into the church's worship service. They served communion that day. Stewards came forward and then moved out among the people. Some of the stewards walked up a stairway that led to a balcony area where there were hospital beds and wheelchairs that had been pushed in from the nursing home. I thought, What a beautiful picture of the body of Christ.

But long after we were done receiving communion on the main floor, the stewards were still moving among the people from the nursing home, lifting heads, tipping the glass, putting the bread into people's mouths. This went on and on and on. I found myself starting to get antsy. My attitude was "Come on. Get on with it. We're here for a service. What are we waiting for? Why isn't there something here going on for me?"

And then I started to inspect my heart. Not a pretty picture. I found that a Corinthian was living inside me, saying, "So, what's in it for me?" I'm not the only one. I've been in churches where, when communion is served, people walk to the front, and after they're served they bolt for the door, they can't even wait.

The attitude of the believer is never one of a consumer, but rather a communal saint ready to share life, and that's what this table speaks to us about. Here at the table I'm reminded that my identity is rooted in a gift. It's always grace. Here at the table I am reminded I am grafted together with other people. I stand shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters who are a representation of the body of Christ. We are equally needed and equally blessed. It's level ground in front of the Table. We are a community of communion saints, not consumers, willing to share our lives together. We are the body of Christ, caring and encouraging one another, teaching and learning together.

It's here within this unique body that my prayer life is challenged because I get to bear your burden. It's here that I find companions for the journey who walk me through some of the challenging places of my life. It's here I am challenged to look at the resources of God's grace both to give away and to receive. This is where I am known. This is where I belong. And this is a place to see if I really believe what I say is true. This is the laboratory.

There are times when I feel I could manage my Christian life really well if it weren't for other people. Ever been there? No selfishness would ever be shown. No discourteous attitude. No prejudice. I could live my life really well in a box by myself. But here's the laboratory to find out if I'm truly a Christian.

So we look around this table, and we give the call, "Add a leaf to the table. Come one. Come all."

When we would have those pack-'em-in meals at our house, those four yellow chairs would be there at the table. The two folding chairs would come out of the closet. The piano bench would be set on the other side, and we'd even drag that round vanity stool that was in front of my mom's vanity. My mom would sit down, and she'd take her apron and wipe her face and look around and say, "Is anyone missing?"

Is anyone missing? Maybe sometimes that missing comes in the form of an estrangement. Maybe that missing comes in the sense of feeling isolated or alone, walking in, walking out, wondering if anyone cares. That's not what the body is about. That's not the community of God.

Jeffrey Arthurs is dean of the chapel and professor of preaching and communication at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and author of Preaching with Variety (Kregel). Kent Edwards is professor of preaching and leadership, and director of the doctor of ministry program at Biola University in La Mirada, California, and author of Deep Preaching (B&H).