Preaching and the Eucharist

I don’t think it’s helpful to think of preaching and Eucharist as in competition for the center of the worship service. They go together, as Doug Wilson says, like cooking and eating. The Word makes us hungry for the meal. The Word and Eucharist work together as inseparable aspects of covenant renewal. Each is incomplete without the other. Weekly preaching followed by weekly communion should be the norm.

We should definitely not minimize the preaching of the Word. People need as much Bible as their pastors can give them. Sermons don’t need to be rhetorically fancy, but they do need to bring the congregation into deep interaction with the Word. Interfacing with Scripture is interfacing with the God who authored it. Congregations need pastors to skillfully and wisely apply the Word to their lives instead of leaving them to figure out application for themselves.

But God’s people should not be left hungry either. The Word rightly preached is table talk. It gives us a desire for what the table offers. The same Christ is present in the Word and Eucharist, but he is present in different ways. The Supper is special, not redundant. It is not even (as Calvin sometimes unfortunately put it) an “appendix” to the Word. The Supper is communion with Jesus in his body and blood – a gift we do not and cannot get anywhere else.

We could say the Supper is the culmination of the service, in that the whole service is moving towards the communion with God we experience at the table, but that doesn’t make it more important than preaching. The Supper is just another ordinary meal unless it’s surrounded by and grounded in the preaching of the Word. Word and sacrament are designed to work together in God’s economy of salvation.

Here’s another way of thinking about this: In the old covenant, teaching of the Word was done primarily in local synagogues (think of Jesus in Luke 4 reading and then teaching from Isaiah). Sacramental worship, like Passover and other peace offerings, where the worshippers got to eat a meal in God’s presence, took place at the temple. The temple and synagogue were not in a hierarchy, but related as part of one system of worship. Indeed, the Jews seemed to have treated their synagogues as mini-temples, or extensions of the temple.

The church is the fusion of temple and synagogue so it includes both Word and table/altar. In the church, Word-worship and table-worship coalesce. The church is called both “temple” and “synagogue” in the NT.

I was never totally satisfied with this essay but it deals with the relationship of the Word to the sacraments and might be helpful to those pondering these questions: http://hornes.org/theologia/rich-lusk/some-thoughts-on-the-means-of-grace…

This is includes a defense of weekly communion: https://trinity-pres.net/essays/wine-and-weekly.pdf