Sermon text: 1 Corinthians 11:17-34
The church at Corinth was a mess in many ways, which makes it an unusually instructive case study for what not to do in church life. Paul had already addressed divisions over leadership loyalties and spiritual gifts, but here he confronts something more fundamental: how the church handled its shared fellowship meal, connected to their observance of the Lord’s Supper.
Understanding first-century church culture matters here. Churches met in homes, and homes large enough to host a gathering belonged to the wealthy. The custom appears to have been an agape meal—a shared love feast—paired with the Lord’s Supper, following the same model the Jerusalem church had practiced: those who had more brought enough to feed everyone, including the poor. Over time in Corinth, though, it seems the wealthier members grew tired of this arrangement, possibly resentful of mixing with slaves and the poor who also attended. They began arriving early, eating and drinking their fill before the poorer members—often working people who couldn’t arrive early—even got there. By the time everyone gathered, some were drunk while others went hungry.
Paul’s rebuke is sharp: “when you come together in one place, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper” (verse 20)—meaning nothing about their behavior reflected what the meal was actually meant to represent. From its very beginning, the Lord’s Supper centered on fellowship, both with Christ and with fellow believers. The Greek word for communion, koinonia, is the same word translated elsewhere as fellowship. As Paul writes just one chapter earlier, believers who share the one bread are joined together as one body. To disregard fellow believers at the Lord’s table, then, is to dishonor the very thing the meal represents.
This principle extends naturally into present-day church life, even without the specific dynamics Corinth faced. Churches today still fracture along lines of favoritism, cliques, and unwelcoming behavior toward newcomers. A spirit of complaint and criticism—something Paul addresses directly elsewhere in Philippians 2:14-15—corrodes fellowship from within, often becoming the outlet for people who feel unheard elsewhere in life. Isolation cuts the other direction just as sharply; some withdraw from fellowship entirely, mistaking passive consumption of church content for actual participation in the body, when Hebrews 10:24-25 calls believers to actively consider and encourage one another, something that requires real presence. And simple neglect—failing to check in on people, letting others drift to the margins—quietly damages the same unity Paul is calling for.
Paul then turns to the heart of the passage: the earliest written account of the Lord’s Supper in Scripture, predating even the Gospel accounts, since 1 Corinthians is typically dated to the mid-50s AD. Paul recounts Jesus’s words at the Last Supper—the bread as his body, the cup as the new covenant in his blood—concluding that every observance of this meal proclaims Christ’s death until his return. This is the central, enduring message: not a ritual for its own sake, but a continual pointing back to what Christ accomplished on the cross.
From there, Paul makes clear that sin and the Lord’s Supper are fundamentally incompatible. Coming to the table “in an unworthy manner” brings judgment, not because anyone could ever be worthy in themselves, but because approaching the table carelessly—without regard for sin or fractured relationships—treats Christ’s sacrifice and his church as unimportant. Paul connects this directly to sickness and even death among the Corinthians, though this shouldn’t be read as a universal formula that all illness stems from personal sin; rather, this describes a specific pattern of God’s chastening in this particular situation. That chastening isn’t condemnation but correction, evidence of genuine relationship with God rather than abandonment.
The remedy Paul offers is self-examination: “let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.” This isn’t about achieving worthiness, which is never possible in the flesh, but about honest, humble openness before the Holy Spirit—asking God to reveal blind spots rather than approaching him with pre-packaged confessions that avoid the deeper issue. Often this self-examination surfaces relational repair that needs to happen—a conversation to have, forgiveness to extend or seek, even when the other person may not respond in kind. Scripture is clear that forgiving others isn’t contingent on their willingness to reconcile, though forgiveness doesn’t always require restored closeness, especially where continued contact isn’t safe.
Paul’s closing instruction—”when you come together, wait for one another”—makes the practical application unmistakable: getting hearts right with one another is inseparable from getting right with God before approaching the Lord’s table. This is a call to genuine, unhurried self-examination before observing communion, not a mechanical ritual moved through without reflection, but a deliberate pause to confess, forgive, and prepare the heart before remembering what Christ’s sacrifice actually accomplished.