By Nancy Karpenske
One little typing error. Instead of Communion meditation, if you hit one wrong key, you type Communion medication. Medication: a substance used to treat, to heal, or cure a disease. Meditation: a process used to focus one’s thought on a particular idea. Communion is a time where we stop to meditate, to focus our thoughts.
The Communion emblems, the bread and the juice, are not medicines. Consuming them doesn’t heal you. They do, however, have a therapeutic effect. Touching and tasting the bread and the juice provide a visible reminder to refocus our minds and hearts past the emblems to what they represent: the body and blood of Jesus, our Great Physician, our Healer, our Savior.
We are all contaminated. We are all infected with sin. The prognosis would be terminal, no cure. But 1 Peter 2:24 says Jesus bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that by his wounds we have been healed. The act that caused Jesus such terrible suffering is the same act that saves us from our terminal condition.
In dictionaries, the word remedy is followed immediately by remember. Communion is a time designed by God himself so we who were once desperately ill with the sickness of sin can remember that the remedy for our sin problem is already prescribed for us. We don’t need to search for just the right medicine. We don’t need to experiment to see what will get results. The Great Physician has chosen the best treatment available. The price is very high—insurance companies would never agree to cover it—but no need to worry. The Doctor has donated his services.
“Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed” (Jeremiah 17:14). As you receive the emblems, remember the remedy for your sin sickness. Look into the face of your Doctor and thank him for his personal investment in your cure.
Nancy Karpenske serves with the staff of LifeBridge Christian Church, Longmont, Colorado.