Dear Family at Christ Community,

     On Sunday, we will celebrate the beginning of our Advent Series in Revelation 1-7 and our commitment to grow as servants of Christ by coming to the Lord’s Table. The elements of the table will help nourish our faith as we live between the comings of Christ as His kingdom of priests for God’s use and glory in a fallen world. While the table presents what appears to the untrained eye to be merely broken bread and a common cup of the fruit of the vine, we see so much more in the Holy Spirit who reveals the person and work of Christ on our behalf as signified in the feast. The broken bread pronounces our eternal forgiveness in the body given by Christ for us. This frees us from shame, guilt, and the fear of God’s wrath both now and in the judgment to come. The cup lavishly filled declares our freedom in newness of life to join the redemptive work of God in the world through the shed blood of Christ. This grants eternal meaning to our words and deeds between the now and the not yet. Though we struggle to remember and live out these truths, Jesus was not ashamed to save and promise to be with us to the end of the age. Eugene H. Peterson beautifully captures the situation in  which Christ dwells in his Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination:

God deliberately set Jesus among the common and the flawed—the historical situation just as it was. Jesus is never known in any other context. The revelation of Christ is not embarrassed by association with the church; quite the contrary, it insists on this context.

     Pray for the Holy Spirit to grant you the eyes and imagination to behold the wondrous mystery displayed in the ordinary elements of our liturgy and in the Lord’s Table! Give thanks for God’s willingness to condescend to us in so many ways while at the same time opening our eyes and ears to the greater reality at work and to come in His gracious sovereignty. Ask to be blessed by the Word read, confessed, prayed, sung, exposited, made visible, heard, and lived out. Seek to offer forgiveness in the name of Christ as a servant and priest in His service. Expect Christ’s presence in worship in through God’s Word and the working of the Holy Spirit!

In Christ,
Cameron