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Sunday, August 01, 2010
Come to the Table
By Rev. Cindy Bates
Mark 14:22-25
22While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” 23Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. 24He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. 25Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
I Corinthians 12:12-13; 27
12For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
27Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
In her memoir, Take This Bread, author Sara Miles begins her story like this, “One early, cloudy morning when I was 46, I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans – except that up until that moment I had led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalists crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.” Her story goes on to talk about how being served communion, being fed spiritual food, caused her to think about how we all need to be fed and her experience led her to change her life course and to dedicate her life to feeding others. Taking communion changed her life.
As I was preparing my sermon for today, and realizing it was a “Communion Sunday”, I began to reflect on my experience of Holy Communion and how it has been a very significant element in my faith journey. And then, forgive me, but I began to think about all of you and wondering how meaningful this sacrament has been for you. So this week I began asking persons, in this congregation and in the community in order to discover what people really felt and experienced regarding Holy Communion. As United Methodists, as participants in this faith community, we share communion as one of our two sacraments, and practice it as a vital part of our worship together and yet, we may have a very different understanding of why or how we celebrate this sacrament as we do. My fear is that we in the Church often make assumptions because “we have always done it that way” without thinking of persons who haven’t always done it that way or maybe even not experienced it at all. Our worship of God should never be because someone told us this is how it needs to be but because we want to do it as it has meaning for our lives. When I began to ask persons the meaning of communion for them, I heard everything from: “It has become a meaningless ritual” or “I have never understood the whole eating Jesus’ body and drinking Jesus’ blood,” to “It is the most humbling and life-giving of experiences, especially when I can serve others. ” Or, ”When we break bread together anytime it is made so clear to me that we are all connected and we belong to this one community as the body of Christ.” Wherever you are on that spectrum, my prayer is that communion will never be something you do because someone else says you should, but because through your understanding, your own experience and the grace of God, it has become a meaningful experience for your life.
Author and teacher, Parker Palmer in his insightful book, The Active Life: Wisdom for Work, Creativity and Caring, said, “Too many of us consent or are forced to spend time doing things for which we have no heartfelt reason. If we were asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’, we would not know how to answer.” As people of faith who participate in sacraments as acts of worship, I believe we need to know why we do what we do!
Now, for all of you today who already know “why” I ask that you bear with me. And for all of you who have graduated from more than one Disciple Bible study and already know what I am going to say, think of it as a rehearsal of what you might say to someone who is not familiar with our faith and would be questioning you as to why you practice such a sacrament.
First, we practice communion because our scriptures inform us that Jesus said, “Do this.” The last night he spent with his disciples he celebrated a Jewish tradition of the Passover Meal and turned it in to a great teaching moment. He was trying to get them to understand how important it was to remember all that they had shared together and he used the very earthy, simple gifts of bread and wine and said, “Whenever you eat this or drink this, remember me.”
So simple and practical and yet so profound! He said this is something you can do to remember me and in remembering him and their time together he believed they would know how to live. So from the earliest accounts, whenever Christ’s followers gathered for worship they “re- in- acted” this meal, this supper, symbolically sharing in Christ’s life, by eating together and giving thanks. We know Jesus gave thanks when he ate this meal and so this part of our worship became known as the “Eucharist” which is from the Greek language, the language of the New Testament, and it means “in gratitude” or “giving thanks.” Communion was a way of giving thanks to God for God’s love incarnated and demonstrated in the life of Jesus. We still refer to our communion liturgy as “The Great Thanksgiving.”
Nearly all Christians practice communion but depending on the denomination, there are differences in how this sacrament is observed. Many of you who came from the Roman Catholic tradition were taught that when the bread and wine was blessed by the priest, it was no longer bread and wine but it was transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. That is called transubstantiation and explains why in the Catholic Church the elements are treated with such reverence. Several years ago I had an opportunity to serve communion to a Roman Catholic nun. It was the first time that she received communion in a Protestant worship service. I was moved by her willingness to allow me to serve her, but even more moving for me was the way in which she knelt after the service to pick up the crumbs that had fallen to the floor. In our United Methodist tradition we believe that the bread and wine are symbols not the “actual body and blood”. But I still remember what was meaningful for my sister in the faith and I will always want to honor what this sacrament means for others.
We United Methodists believe that the love of God, the presence of Christ, the blessing of the Holy Spirit, is very real in the sacrament but not in the literal transformation of the bread and wine. As symbols the bread and wine can represent a whole host of meanings for us…the body of Christ as the whole community of Christians, past and present who stand firm in the faith…..the brokenness we all experience in life and yet the wholeness of the bread, the one body….the cup of life that is full and at times overflowing and at times a cup of suffering, and we all share in it together….the simple elements of bread and wine that have come from the abundance of God’s creation to help us understand that we are dependent upon God for sustenance. Within the sacrament, there are so many symbols that represent and illustrate why there is meaning there for us to grasp and understand. The symbols are not as important as what they represent. Believe me over time I have seen communion celebrated with many symbols other than actual bread and wine. One Saturday afternoon I was in the kitchen of the church I was serving in Indianapolis. All of a sudden my mentor and senior pastor, Carver McGriff came flying in wearing his robe and immediately started going through the refrigerator as though he hadn’t eaten for days. When I asked what he was looking for he said, “Oh, Cindy help! I am in the middle of a wedding and realized the couple had asked me to serve them communion as part of the service and I forgot to get the bread and wine.” That day the couple celebrated their first communion in their marriage with two Pop Tarts and some Hawaiian punch, but I don’t think God minded.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed very strongly in the practice of communion because he believed it was something Jesus asked us to do and he saw it as a powerful “means of grace” which is religious language for “a way to receive God’s love.” Wesley wanted Christians to understand communion as something “refreshing and uplifting to the soul” and thought followers should receive communion at least weekly. But when Methodism spread from England to America there was a logistical problem. The Methodist movement spread so rapidly that there were not enough ordained clergy to pastor all of the churches that were established so the clergy became “circuit riders” traveling on horseback to minister to several churches on a particular route or circuit. The churches were so far apart that the minister could only get to the same church each quarter or every three months and it was when the ordained clergy showed up that communion was celebrated. And until just a couple of decades ago, most Methodist churches had communion only four times a year…during Advent, Maundy Thursday before Easter, World-wide Communion Sunday in October and usually one other time, that I can’t even remember. It was only in the mid 70’s that the United Methodist Church began to study and question whether we should be more clear in understanding what we believed and practiced regarding the sacrament. We had become more diverse as a denomination, and as persons were coming to us from other faith traditions, the question that was asked over and over was, “Why don’t we celebrate communion more often?” So, here at St. Andrew, every Sunday in the 7:45 chapel service, we celebrate communion and every first Sunday of the month in all of or services, we celebrate communion. And then there are those special services in our liturgical calendar that say this is a good time to help people remember by serving communion. We serve communion when people are going off on mission trips or ending a year long study like Disciple or Confirmation classes. It is the most tangible way in our worship we can say we want to remember Jesus and “do this” in order that we not forget.
I have shared communion in homes and cathedrals, prisons and gardens, restaurants and bars, at weddings and in hospices and the experience is always different because the persons present, the circumstances are always different. What is constant is the “act of remembering” so we will not forget the life and teachings of Jesus and we give thanks for that life, because it has so impacted our life.
The illustration of Sara Miles experience of taking communion was an incredibly powerful experience, but it was the first time she had received that spiritual food. Whenever we do something for the first time, we seem to pay more attention, to see things in a new and fresh way. Sometimes, because the sacrament is not new for us anymore, it can become rote, something our body does, but the rest of us doesn’t show up. What if we really did receive communion each time as a new experience of receiving God’s love?
Communion has always been a “thin place” for me, what the Celtic Christians and Markus Borg refers to as that place where the barriers fall away and you can experience God in a very real way. So much of the experience is what I bring to it. Sometimes I come needing forgiveness, but there are other times when I need healing in a different way. Sometimes I come in gratitude and joy more than anything else. Sometimes I come feeling lost or needing help finding my spiritual path. I don’t think God demands that we come to the table with anything more than who we are and our desire or need to show up.
This past week I had an opportunity to hear Mary Chapin Carpenter in concert at the Botanical Gardens. She has been one of my favorite musicians and songwriters over the years. I can mark some milestones in my life by what Mary Chapin Carpenter song I was listening to at the time. An all time favorite song of hers is called Jubilee. Jubilee in the Old Testament times was marking a period (usually every 50 years) when debts were forgiven, slaves were liberated, refugees and displaced persons were able to return home. It was a time of celebration. Her lyrics talk about a individual’s life that needs “Jubilee”. She says,
“I can tell by the way you’re searching for something you can’t even name, that you haven’t been able to come to the table, simply glad that you came. And when you feel like this try to imagine that we’re all frail boats on the sea, just scanning the night for that great guiding light, announcing the jubilee.”
For me, communion will always be a call to come home, to come to the table, whoever I am, wherever I am in life, to come and know I am welcome and whatever comes to me through those symbols will be what I need, and I will be so glad that I came.