Package from Home

Writing in Leadership journal, Pastor Martin Thielen of Honolulu wrote about a service in which he had presided over the observance of the Lord’s Supper. He said ���◊��� The Cross and the Crown The link between the cross and the crown is the Table afthe Lord. -A. T. PIERSON ===◊=== that a few weeks earlier, he had read a Lord’s Supper sermon by John Claypool in which he told the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant young pastor and seminary teacher who opposed Hitler’s policies in the 1930s.

On April 5, 1943, the Germans arrested Bonhoeffer and put him in prison. Two years later the Nazis executed him, hanging him on the gallows just days before the Allies swept in to liberate Germany.

About ten weeks after his arrest, Bonhoeffer ended a letter to his parents with these words: “It is Monday, and I was just sitting down to a dinner of turnips and potatoes when a parcel you sent me by Ruth arrived. Such things give me greater joy than I can say. Although I am utterly convinced that nothing can break the bonds between us, I seem to need some outward token or sign to reassure me. In this way, material things become the vehicles of spiritual realities.

I suppose it is rather like the felt need in our religion for sacraments.” Bonhoeffer knew his parents loved him. Yet he still hungered for that love to be reaffirmed. He needed to be reminded of their love in a tangible way.

His package from home served that purpose, and Bonhoeffer saw the Lord’s Supper doing the same. “I decided to use Bonhoeffer’s analogy,” Thielen wrote, “along with some of John Claypool’s insights, in my Lord’s Supper sermon. I did not preach an informational, three-point message on the meaning of the Supper. Instead I told stories.

“I began by recounting how much I enjoyed receiving packages from home during my college years-especially if they included a check! I told my congregation that the contents of the package-cookies, socks, money, whatever-served as powerful reminders that my parents loved and were thinking of me. “I then told the story about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his package from home.

With the help of some biblical passages, I drove home the point that the Lord’s Supper is a package from our heavenly home, a tangible expression of God’s love for us. “I concluded the sermon by walking to the Communion table and saying, ‘Come, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us partake. A package from home has arrived. Let us eat and drink and be reminded of God’s awesome love for his children: “After the service,” concluded Pastor Thielen, “people didn’t say, ‘Nice service, Pastor.’ Several commented, ‘That was the most moving Lord’s Supper service I have ever experienced.’ “1 1 Martin Thielen, Leadership journal, Winter 1994, 39-40.