Communion Capri Sun Style

Communion is often romanticized. It’s been practiced different ways by different churches over the years, but on a whole we tend to think of it as a unifying force between divergent traditions. Which it is, the act anyway. The actual celebration of communion is not so much a multi-cultural ritual as it is a specific cultural artifact, showing distinction between cultures over time.

These thoughts came to me as I was walking through The Cloisters looking at medieval religious ware. I was giddy and kind of geeking out. I love this stuff. Anyway, I stumbled upon a 13th century set of communion ware that was three pieces, not the tradition goblet for wine and plate for bread. The third piece was a straw for sipping the wine from the goblet during communion, something the placard explained came into vogue during the 1200s (see picture).

This taking of communion is foreign to us. I don’t really like the idea of drinking communion from a straw. It would remind me too much of Capri Sun. Yet, the “in vogue” nature of the 13th century straw raises questions about how our communion preferences and styles are influenced by our larger culture:

Hows do our communion preferences and styles look different?

How do we begin to think of communion that is something that changes over time?

What does it mean for us as a church that the practice of communion is in flux?

In the end, I think these are important questions to entertain. Thinking about the answers to these questions point us to the overwhelming inadequacy we have as humans to sustain and support the sacraments, practices, and disciplines of the church without the power of the Spirit to guide us through the trends, tests, and trials of time. Most importantly, no matter the answers to these questions, the act of taking communion may change, but the spiritual gift of communion is the same: community with God, with our local church and with all followers of Christ.

A Prayer for Communion

I’ve started to read Job again, and since many consider it to be the earliest recorded book of the Old Testament I have been thinking about the great narrative of God. This prayer for communion is a testimony to the long arc of God’s story:

May the God who was slow to anger with our forefathers: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and slow to anger with the children of Israel, be slow to anger with us, the church:
that in our collective weakness, and our collective sin, God would look to the death
and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ unto the forgiveness of our transgressions,
and fill us with new life by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Does Our Communion Table Need Work?

Today’s post is written by Elizabeth Sands Wise:

Jon Stock, author of Inhabiting the Church, writes: “If we are going to resist the popularized version of Eucharist as some sort of ‘magic’ transaction between the individual and God, then we are going to have to allow our imaginations to be inspired by the ways that stability and hospitality must be tied to our Eucharistic practices” (109). This thought raises two questions: Can we work through what takes place at communion together? What is stability and hospitality going to look like for our community?

Maybe other Christians (in particular “low-church” Protestants, since that’s my background) are content with the way communion is practiced in the life of their congregations. Maybe they have great community. But my church moved communion from Easter Sunday (the 1st Sunday of the month this year, which is when we always do communion) to the following week because there was just too much going on during the Easter service. Too much going on to squeeze in a little bit of Eucharist. Let me say clearly that none of the intentions here are bad ones, and I respect staff who had to make tough calls on this matter, but what this does to community has me a bit concerned. (Then again, at this church, for the last six months, we’ve practiced “flumunion” because of flu season, which meant our Communion elements came to us in shrink-wrapped, foil-capped containers, similar to taking DayQuil caplets and just as hard to open. Again, good intentions—nobody wants the flu—but disconcerting nonetheless.)

So my church’s communion table, needless to say, could use a little bit of work. How about yours?

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Elizabeth just recently started a blog called Texas Schmexas.  Elizabeth previously wrote a poem for The Everyday Journal 2.1, “A Simple Prayer.”

Do We Experience the Best at Communion?

Today’s post is written by Elizabeth Sands Wise:

Jon Stock describes the connections between community, Eucharist, and hospitality in his chapter, “Stability,” from Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2007). Stock points to the difficulty of welcoming the stranger to the Communion table when we can’t identify who she is: “Even in those places that are willing to undertake the weekly practice of Eucharist, it is frequently a Eucharist of strangers. . . . How can a place offer authentic welcome to the stranger and the pilgrim if all are strangers to one another? Christian hospitality suffers in the absence of stability” (109).

There’s certainly a lot of talk these days about community. In the myriad protestant congregations of which I’ve been a part, the Communion table has always been to some degree or another “open.” The bulletins—if we had bulletins—would say something like this: “All who profess faith in Jesus Christ are welcome at this table….” Or this: “All baptized persons are welcome at this table….” Or, occasionally: “All are welcome at this table….” At its best, this has the potential to be hospitality in its finest hour, welcoming the stranger into the heart of our communal life, dining with Christ during his final hours, being a servant to one another as he was a Servant.

But we don’t often experience this “best” of the open Eucharist, this place of potential community and healing. Rather than a welcoming table, it is a lonely one. (Most of us don’t even approach a “table” while practicing Communion; we sit in our pews and pass the elements without making eye contact.) But here’s the truth: We don’t welcome the stranger because we can’t. We can’t tell who she is in our midst. We are a table of strangers.

I’ve been wondering whether the Eucharist can open our eyes to the brokenness in our church communities if we allow it to. The good news, of course, is that it can also show us the wholeness of our communities. So the question, I suppose, is how can it be a conduit of healing for our communities?

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Elizabeth just recently started a blog called Texas Schmexas.  Elizabeth previously wrote a poem for The Everyday Journal 2.1, “A Simple Prayer.”

Breaking Bread is Love

A thought: We learn how to love one another by breaking bread together and letting the healing power of the Spirit work.

Your response?

There is Resurrection in the Bread

Pentecost is the catalyst for charismatic expression within all forms of the church.  It stands as the paramount example of how the Spirit of Christ is at work in the world today.  Through prophecy, preaching, baptism, and spiritual gifts, the Spirit remains our source of comfort and Christ’s continuing presence in our lives.

But what does this have to do with the communion?  Communion is a remembrance of Christ’s death, right? Well, yes and no.  What I have been interested in, and what I think is so important to our understanding of communion in a post-Pentecost world, is the tension of death and resurrection in the Lord’s Supper.

When Christ institutes communion he instructs us all to do this in remembrance of him until he comes again.  His second coming is the culmination of his resurrection, and a rightful declaration of the power he received at his resurrection and ascension when he conquered sin and death.  Clearly, we must remember more than death.

So then what is in the bread and cup that we remember?  It is done in remembrance of Christ, so then who is Christ?  He is the resurrected one, the ascended one, the one who is now present through his Spirit.  It follows then that Christ’s presence in communion, evidence more so in his presence in our daily lives, is the presence of not a dead but a resurrected Lord.  It is in the bread, in Christ’s body, that we find a symbol of the power of resurrection and the conquering of sin and death.

This leads us to healing.  If death has been conquered, has not illness, disease, and decay?  Has not Christ conquered all?  Yes indeed!   Christ’s body conquered death.  Furthermore, in Christ’s body, his spiritual body and his body at communion, we are invited into the conquering of death.  In other words, there is resurrection in the bread.  It is broken for us, but it makes us whole.  As Christ gives us living water he promises us living bodies: whole bodies, bodies without illness, disease, or decay.