The other day, a friend of mine posted a photo of a sumptuous breakfast feast on her Instagram account. And I do mean sumptuous: we’re talking steak and eggs, home fries, avocado toast, English muffins, coffee and fresh orange juice, sides of bacon, berries, and more avocado; it was a feast. But this breakfast extravaganza was posted not as a celebration, but as a bitter complaint. “This is a breakfast of spite,” she declared.
“First, our flight out of Salt Lake City last night was 
delayed for hours because of a maintenance issue that they never specified. Then the pilots timed out and had to leave, and there wasn’t another crew available, so we were stranded overnight. They texted us hotel and meal vouchers, so we got up extra early so we could spend our entire vouchers on breakfast before boarding our new flight just because we refused to let Delta save a single dollar. If we’d thought of it, we would have booked a second hotel room with the spare voucher!” Spite, unlike revenge, is apparently a dish best served hot, with home fries on the side and unlimited refills.
That scene came back to my mind when I starting about the Third Great End of the Church, our subject for today as we continue this series on the Six Great Ends of the Church, six essential tasks or purposes identified by the Presbyterian Church over a century ago that every congregation should be pursuing.
We’ve already considered “The Proclamation of the Gospel for the Salvation of Humankind,” and “The Shelter, Nurture, and Spiritual Fellowship of the Children of God.” Those are both pretty grand-sounded statements, if a bit wordy. This week, though, we are looking at the Third Great End, which is “The Maintenance of Divine Worship.” That feels like a real drop-off in terms of power and intensity, and I think it’s because of the word “maintenance.”
It is rarely a good thing when we’re talking about maintenance. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the airline regrets to inform you that your airplane is experiencing a maintenance issue and we are working to resolve it.” The only thing worse than hearing that while sitting in the airport is hearing it while you’re already sitting on the plane waiting to take off. (Though I suppose it would be worse still if you heard that while the plane is in the air, so maybe there’s a small opportunity for gratitude in there.)
But think about it: maintenance is almost always used for something that is at best a necessary evil, like “I have to take my car in for maintenance.” Often it’s something that is actively frustrating: “Oh, John? Yeah, be careful, he’s pretty high-maintenance.” Even the reverse of that, calling someone “low-maintenance,” is a compliment precisely because less maintenance is automatically more preferable.
So when we start talking about “The Maintenance of Divine Worship,” it’s hard not to automatically feel some level of aversion because of that word. On the surface, it sounds like it means that one of the essential purposes of the church is to keep worship going exactly the way it has always been. At a quick glance, that sense might be exacerbated by the beginning of our lesson today, in which Paul is writing to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, a bustling, wealthy, and cosmopolitan port city due west of Athens.
One of the great strengths of the Corinthian church is also one of its great challenges, which is often the case with both congregations and people. The Corinthian church is large and dynamic, with a very diverse membership in terms of spiritual gifts, social status, and economic wealth. That means they have a significant breadth and depth to their resources for ministry, but it also means they have a lot of friction points in their communities that can easily be inflamed.
They are, to put it bluntly, pretty high-maintenance. Throughout this letter, Paul is addressing both those dynamics, but at this particular point, he’s focusing in on their worship life, and particularly their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which we also call Communion or the Eucharist.
And, as is typical of Paul, the point of his letter is to try and sort out the mistakes and conflicts that are threatening the community of the church to whom he is writing; in this case, the Corinthians. And one of the big problems is that worship, and particularly the Lord’s Supper, is become a flashpoint of heated conflict in the church. “When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper,” he declares.
“For when the time comes to eat, each of you proceeds to eat your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have households to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!”
Paul, approaching the Corinthians with the same kind of finesse and subtlety that one might associate with a furious rhinoceros, is charging into the core of the conflict, which is that the Corinthians are allowing social and economic inequities to poison their celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
That’s not immediately obvious to us, but that’s because we celebrate the Lord’s Supper differently from the early Church. The early Church celebrated the Lord’s Supper as part of a full and shared meal, generally in the evenings; it would be like us integrating Communion into a potluck supper every week rather than as an element of formal, stand-alone worship, as we will later in this service.
But instead of waiting on the whole church to gather and both eat and worship together, the first arrivals are laying into the buffet with gusto, while those who come later arrive to find that all the real food is gone, and the only things left are some scrapings of the third-best potato salad and some green jello mold. And to pour salt on the wounds, the people who would have been able to come earlier would be the wealthy members of the church who have control of their own time and can turn up whenever, whereas the later arrivals would have been tradespeople and laborers who can only get there when the working day had ended.
So it is the poor members who are getting the least amount of food, while the wealthy are gorging themselves at the expense of others. And Paul is appalled (pun intended): “What should I say to you?” he roars. “Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!”
And then he reminds them what the whole point of the Lord’s Supper is. “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” he continues, “that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
This paragraph from our reading today is known throughout the Christian Church as the Words of Institution, meaning these are the words that Jesus himself used to institute the practice of the Lord’s Supper as an essential act of Christian worship; you’ll hear them later in this service again when we celebrate Communion. The important thing to notice here is the profound shift in focus.
The Corinthians are not simply “doing it wrong” when it comes to the Lord’s Supper; they are doing it wrong, but because they’re violating the fundamental purpose and focus of the Lord’s Supper: to orient us towards God and, specifically, the real presence of Jesus Christ; to bring us into communion with the living Christ, and not as individuals, but as a community of disciples sharing in a common meal.
So often we think that “maintaining” worship means doing particular things, or doing them in certain ways. The so-called “worship wars” of the last thirty-to-forty years in mainline Protestant churches have all been about what constitutes “real” worship, and almost every contest in those debates has been about the wrong things, generally through the broad lenses of “traditional” vs. “contemporary” worship. You’ve almost certainly heard them, if not gotten pulled into them yourselves.
Traditional worship is stale and irrelevant. Contemporary worship is shallow entertainment. Contemporary worship music is just repetition with bad theology or no real theology at all. Traditional worship is like listening to someone trying to set a theological treatise into a boring tune. Contemporary worship is too much of an emotional performance. Traditional worship is too much of an unemotional performance. The truth is that all of those accusations are true sometimes, and all of them are false sometimes.
More pointedly, almost everything that people tend to disparage as the fatal flaw of the style they dislike is also routinely found in the style they prefer, as well. The failure to recognize that is mostly because we often prefer one particular style, and so we simply focus on the best parts of the style we like, and the worst parts of the style we don’t like.
The irony is, all of that is missing the point, which is also what Paul warns the Corinthians about in the concluding section of our reading today. If worship in general or Communion in particular becomes focused on fulfilling our own personal preferences or desires, especially at the expense of others, we are doing so in “an unworthy manner…without discerning the body,” as Paul puts it, because the whole point of worship is to direct our attention and engagement as a community towards God, not to direct God towards us.
The maintenance of divine worship, then, is not about maintaining certain practices or styles over others; it is about maintaining worship as an activity that is focused on the divine. Maintaining divine worship is not about giving us the experience we prefer, whatever that might be; it is about consistently bringing us into God’s presence to express our praise and gratitude, to hear God’s Word for us in a particular place and time, and to be reoriented, fortified, and sent out into the world to engage in our own lives of ministry more faithfully.
It is a maintenance of focus rather than style, of purpose rather than preference, and that kind of maintenance is utterly life-giving, in the same way that maintaining the practice of breathing in and out is. It is such worship that maintains us through all the challenges of life and faith, through every stage of our lives, through whatever style helps us do that more faithfully.
So, with a focus on truly maintaining divine worship, I invite you once more to come into God’s presence with singing; come to the table that Christ has prepared; come and be fed together on the bread of life and the cup of salvation, so that you can be filled with the sustenance that Christ offers, and prepared and enabled to share it with everyone you meet.