The Lord's Supper

Old Man Thanks God for a Solitary Lunch

This week we’re in our second week of our communion series, and before I get into the sermon today, I just want to go ahead and encourage you to grab the elements if you haven’t yet. We’re going to take communion today as part of the message, so if you need to grab those, please feel free to go ahead and do that now.

So as you’re grabbing those, I’d like to start out today with a question for all of you. How many of you know this picture?

It’s a pretty popular piece of American artwork. And I don’t know about you, but when I see this picture – it kind of gives me the feels. Always has. And one of the things that I can sometimes find myself doing when I look at artwork, especially photographs/paintings depicting people is I just make up stories about what is going on, before ever really learning the intention/meaning behind it. So what do we see here? In my head I see an old man – maybe he’s newly-retired. Maybe all of his kids are grown up and they’ve moved out. And his wife is out of town for a few days, visiting her brother or sister somewhere. And so this man is praying and thanking God for peace and quiet. And look at that, a whole loaf of bread for himself. Score.

And when he’s done with lunch, he’s going to finally finish reading that giant book on the table. Maybe he started reading it years ago. So what could we title this artwork? Maybe something like: Old man thanks God for a solitary lunch. Well, the true story behind this famous picture is that it turns out that it’s not called, “Old man thanks God for a solitary lunch” – but I think the name is so much better: it’s simply called: “Grace.”

And originally, it as a black-and-white photograph, taken in Minnesota by a photographer named Eric Enstrom. The old man was a peddler who came to visit Enstrom at his studio to sell him some boot-scrapers. Instead, Enstrom paid the gentleman five dollars to pose for the picture, and afterwards never really heard from him again. But years later, Enstrom’s daughter Rhoda started colorizing some of his artwork by hand, using oil paints – and now we have this version that most of us are familiar with.

I think the story I made up for it is better than what actually happened.

But you know, I think that made up story still, basically, fits with the story that Eric Enstrom was trying to tell with it. This man is having a private moment with God. And I would suspect that’s along the lines of the story that many of us have been told about what we’re doing during communion. That it’s only a quiet, private moment between you and God, or Jesus. But what if we’re missing part of the story? Kind of like I did with this picture – I didn’t know the story, so I just made one up. It made sense, right? It addressed all of the elements in the picture – the lonely old man in prayer, the food on the table, I even had the book in there.

But was that the real story?

And maybe at some point along the way, we dropped or forgot, or maybe for some of us, really never knew the story that our passage today is telling about the Lord’s Supper.

The Church of Corinth

So here’s the story on our reading today, we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. The Church of Corinth was a church that had some problems. And Paul, well, he’s problem-solving. And I’ve just got to say that as I was preparing for this week, I just had a moment where I thanked God that I live in the time I do, and the place I do – because that means that I wasn’t called to be a pastor at the church in Corinth. Dodged a bullet, there.

Ray Stedman, a pastor who, before he died in 1992, was a pastor in Palo Alto, California, he would jokingly refer to 1 Corinthians as 1 Californians. You know, I’ve heard people say things like, “I wish we could just get back to the church of the New Testament” and my response is usually, “Okay, which one?” There’s so many that had so many problems. And I’ve made the joke before that church will never be perfect, because all of us go to church. But I’d like to add on to that, sure the church will never be perfect because it’s filled with imperfect people, but you know where it is perfect? With its position in Christ. So here’s a different perspective for us this morning when looking at this passage, keep this in your mind: the problems in Corinth actually made it possible for Paul to respond and correct them.