If you want to find Jesus, come to church. Brad East already said it better, but it’s as simple as that. Still, it begs a few more words to clarify things. What is a church? It’s a local expression of what the Creed calls “one holy, catholic, and apostolic” Church. The Church is a single and universal entity that carries on message of Jesus as received by his apostles. It is holy – set apart and indwelled by God the Holy Spirit.

How do we know when we find it? For John Calvin, this was fairly simple. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he said,

“Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’ (Mt. 18:20).”

Word and sacrament. That’s our medicine each week. That is the care of our souls. Everything else in the Sunday morning galaxy revolves around that bright binary star of grace. And God is firmly omnipresent. Everywhere is in his presence. But the preached word and the rightly administered sacraments are the golden channels under which we receive him.

But how do we receive him? He left orbit millennia ago. If he is seat at the right hand of the Father, as our faith teaches, how can we say that we find him in church?

As St. John’s Gospel tells us, Jesus promised to send a Helper when he left. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth…I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” (John 14)

That Spirit is later called the Spirit of Christ (Romans 8). The Spirit mediates Jesus to us spiritually. Spiritually, but no less actually. Everyone who believes in God the Father and in Jesus Christ his Son has the Son because of the Spirit.

But through the word and sacrament his grace is in us is increased. Our faith in him is strengthened. And that is, in part, because Jesus is really and spiritually present in the Lord’s Supper.

Just as the taste of stale cracker and grape juice (or what have you) is as real as can be, my soul is “no less assuredly fed to everlasting life with his Body, which was crucified for me, and His blood, which was shed for me.” That’s how 17^th century Baptist, Hercules Collins, put it in his An Orthodox Catechism. As real as what your tongue tastes is the grace that comes into your soul by faith when you take communion.

The Spirit of Christ unites us “more and more” to Jesus’s body even though our Lord is physically not where we are. “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (John 6:56). That’s what Jesus said. Paul later calls the Lord’s Supper a “communion” or “participating” in the body and blood of Jesus (1 Corinthians 10:16-17).

That’s why we call it communion. We have a common union with Jesus, and it’s applied and strengthened in the signs (bread and wine) and what they signify (Jesus’ body and blood). Reformed Baptist scholar Richard Barcellos says as much in his excellent book, The Lord’s Supper as a Means of Grace:

“This is present communion with the living and exalted Lord of glory. The communion must be with the present benefits procured by his broken body and shed blood, for his body is no longer broken (it is glorified) and his blood has finished its shedding.”

Bread remains bread. The fruit of the vine (fermented or unfermented) stays what it is. But Jesus calls them his body and blood because he was teaching us that just as bread and wine can sustain our physical life, his broken body and poured out blood nourish our souls all the way to eternal life. But the grace Jesus bought for us through his death becomes more and more ours through the Lord’s Supper.

That’s why it’s so vital. Like bringing treasure out of a heavenly vault, the Spirit brings the benefits of Jesus’ death for us in simple things like flatbread and fruit juice. Far from incidental or something churches get to if it fits the schedule, the Eucharist is where the broken body and shed blood of Jesus strengthen our faith in the broken body and shed blood of Jesus.

Though I’ve thudded into Baptist land after a seven-year-long flirtation with Anglicanism, I still find so much daily brightness in the Book of Common Prayer (cherished throughout the Anglican communion). As its 1652 liturgy for the Lord’s Supper says, “take and eat this in remembrance that Christ dyed for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.” So, when one of my elders stood up a couple weeks ago on Sunday morning, held up the elements of the Eucharist before us, and said, “Let’s feed on Jesus”, he was absolutely correct.

Remembering what Jesus did, being thankful for his sacrifice – that is beautiful and appropriate as a response when we take communion. But something is actually happening to us. It’s more than a memory. We are being pressed closer and closer into Christ as we receive the bread and the cup. As St. Augustine said so long ago, we eat by believing. The bread is a symbol, but it’s not an empty symbol. Calvin gives us a helpful reminder:

“The rule which the pious ought always to observe is, whenever they see the symbols instituted by the Lord, to think and feel surely persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is also present.”

His body is signified by the bread. His body is present. His blood is signified in the wine. His blood is present. In baptism, his death and resurrection are signified in the water. His death and resurrection are present. That’s the power of the Spirit. He brings Jesus’ bloody sacrifice to us, applying it like salve to a burn or protein to the muscle, food to the hungry.

But these things are present inwardly in us, not in the physical items themselves. That’s why the Archbishop Cranmer can encourage us to feed on him in our hearts by faith. The 19^th century Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, says the same when he reminded his London church that “at this table, Jesus feeds us with his body and blood.”

So, look forward to church this Sunday. For all the chaos and cacophony that can erupt when getting kids out of the door, look forward to communion. Let it be a feast of faith for the hungry soul and a homeward call to the prone-to-wander heart.