The Wonder of Communion
Proverbs 9:1-6
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
6 October 2024
Often when I’ve been in a group of clergy persons who are relaxing and enjoying each other’s company, we’ll get to laughing about our experiences in church and sooner or later we’ll get around to the genre of the funny communion stories. Because for every minister something funny has happened to them during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
One of my staple stories in this genre comes from a youth Sunday in the first church I served. Four middle schoolers were helping with communion, holding the elements. Derek had one of the half loaves of bread. In this congregation actual loaves were used and when people came forward they were to rip their own piece of bread off of the loaf and then dip it in the cup for intinction.
Now, Derek was at that point in a middle school boy’s life where everything adult and serious was amusing. But he was trying his best to do this job well. Which is relevant to the story.
That’s when one of our older gentlemen, Bill, came forward. Now, Bill was a retired math teacher. He was often very serious and very proper. Which is also relevant to the story.
Bill reached for the loaf of bread, and when he tried to tear a piece of the crust, he failed to do so, at which point he muttered, “Damn!”
And that’s when I knew poor Derek was going to lose it. He turned beet red as he exerted all his will power and focus to contain the giggle that was trying to burst forth from him. To Derek’s credit, he held it in, never erupting in laughter.
Another of my funny communion stories is from here, my very first Sunday. I was standing here in the center aisle serving the bread to everyone as they came by. And for many folks, it was the first time they’d met me. Which was the case for John and Dorothy Hill. Dorothy was a retired minister, using a walker to get around at that time. And John, her husband, was and is a character (he’s our oldest living member).
Dorothy was hurrying down the aisle toward me as fast as a person in a walker can move, clearly excited to meet me, her face beaming with that broad and bright smile she had.
And, then, suddenly, John, who was behind her, started chanting. You know how someone who is losing their hearing often speaks far louder than they realize they are? That seemed to be what was happening in the moment.
And what John was chanting was “Boomer Sooner,” the University of Oklahoma fight song. Loud enough for pretty much everyone to hear. And then, when he got even closer, he kinda hollered, “We are Sooners too!”
There’s another genre of communion story besides the funny one. There’s the profound and moving kind.
One time, while pastoring my church in Oklahoma City, I received an email from someone who had visited the church the day before. With overwhelming gratitude they expressed their thanks to me that their daughter had been able to receive communion at our church the day before.
Of course she had. We were a UCC church and practiced an inclusive and open communion. For our part, such a thing seemed routine and normal.
But not for that family. Their daughter had a severe disability and was unable to speak. This parent explained to me how in their previous church the pastor had forbidden the daughter from taking communion because she was incapable of professing Jesus as her Lord and Savior. Because she couldn’t actually say those words out loud for another person to hear, she wasn’t welcome in the full communion of the Christian church according to that pastor.
After my candidating weekend here at First Central in May of 2010, my weekly clergy group back in Oklahoma City asked me about this congregation. I said, “Let me tell you this one thing, and it will reveal all you need to know.”
And I told them about how Grant Switzer, who was then just a kid, not even quite in the youth group yet, brought forward a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to place on the communion table as an expression of this congregation’s food pantry and ministries to feed the hungry in the wider community. And that was (and still is) Grant’s role every month.
My colleagues all agreed that that alone revealed this place to be a real good church.
“Communion is concerned with the ethics of our shared life and always has been,” wrote the longtime UCC pastor and educator Mary Luti. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper is “a practice that produces just and courageous lives.” She continues, “By the power of the Spirit, participation in the sacrament is meant to shape us collectively into a body that behaves in a distinctive way in the world: a body that looks, sounds, thinks, speaks, and acts like Communion, doing in the world what we do at our tables whenever we ‘do this.’”
Mary Luti currently seems to be on a quest to get us in the UCC to think more deeply about how and why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. She has a new book published by our denomination’s press entitled Do This: Communion for Just and Courageous Living, and she’s speaking about the topic. I got to hear her in January when she was the keynote speaker for the UCC Senior Minister’s annual gathering. And her topic was the ethical imperatives embedded in the sacraments of baptism and communion.
She began her talk on communion exploring what has recently become dogma within the progressive wing of the American church—an open communion at which everyone is welcome.
She said, our “invitations to communion . . . make it emphatically clear that everyone is
welcome, and no one will be turned away. As you know, these welcomes are not warm fuzzies,
but acts of justice, extended takedowns of every possible barrier that sin and shame construct:
Come if you’re this; come even if you’re that. Jesus welcomed everyone to his table; even
deniers, betrayers, and abandoners. You come, too.”
She explains why we have done this: “the unfencing of the table stems from our current intuition about the profound difference it makes to human wholeness to have a seat there. We’ve reached a consensus that communion is the sacrament of inclusion. Christ’s love is a great feast, abundant, unconditional, and for all.”
But then Mary Luti pointed out that this is a recent development and wildly at odds with the longstanding practice of Christianity. She said,
It wasn’t long ago that every church fenced the table—you had to belong to this denomination, or this congregation, or at least be baptized. You couldn’t be a notorious sinner or hold incorrect theological beliefs. You had to be old enough to understand what it’s all about. To extend a fully un-boundaried welcome is a complete break with past ecclesial norms. The universal church has never witnessed, much less countenanced, the kind of openness that is now characteristic of many progressive Protestant churches in the West.
She doesn’t point this out in order to judge our current practice. In fact, she’s quite clear that our current practice is working, that we’ve hit upon something vitally important She said, “Unfencing the table is in part a response to the weaponizing of past sacramental practice, perceived to separate, subordinate, punish, correct, and demean. And it’s proving itself by its fruits: we all know someone who’s been healed by graceful and emphatic invitations from the table.”
Yes, like the family with the young disabled woman I told you about. Or Judy, who was one of my church members in Oklahoma City. A lesbian who had long felt ostracized by Christianity before finding Cathedral of Hope. Judy, despite having been in that church for years by the time I pastored there, still cried every Sunday during communion. They were tears of joy that she had found a place where she was welcomed and accepted just as she was.
What Mary Luti wants us to remember and to think deeply about is how new and radical our open and inclusive communion is. She also warns us not to get consumed with righteous indignation and moral self-satisfaction about it. Not to become the mirror image of what we are reacting to.
She also had a few points of critique of much current practice, and she used those to illuminate further some of the ethical implications of communion.
For example, so often in our liturgies we talk about Jesus welcoming everyone to the table and so we do too. I’ve used language like that. Probably most UCC pastors have. But here’s something Mary Luti points out:
I find only three instances in scripture when Jesus could be said to host a meal—the improvised feeding of the multitudes; the for-members only Last Supper at a borrowed table; and the post-resurrection breakfast on the beach for a handful of his dearest disciples. Other than those instances, Jesus doesn’t host, and he never does so at his own table. He doesn’t have a table. He’s always at someone else’s. Pharisees and tax collectors throw dinners for him. Peter’s mother feeds him. And Martha in Bethany. Jesus doesn’t invite: he gets invited.
What might it mean if we remind ourselves that Jesus isn’t a host, but a guest?
Mary Luti thinks it will remind us of the same. We aren’t the hosts of this meal, this table. We are also all guests.
These are her words:
So when we say we welcome everyone to our table because Jesus welcomed everyone to his, we’re on shaky evidentiary ground. Which isn’t meant to be clever, pedantic, or picky; much less is it to argue for exclusion or undercut the practice of radical welcome. But it does suggest that the ethical challenge communion poses may not lie so much in Jesus having been such an all-inclusive host, but in his having been such a willing, modest guest.
If our churches are not yet as inclusive as we hope, it’s not for lack of inviting. But it might be, at least in part, because we’ve mistaken ourselves for the Giver of the Feast. We’ve embraced the host’s role. But we’re not hosts. We’re guests among guests. We may have arrived earlier than the others, but that doesn’t give us proprietary rights over the hall. And if we think or act as if it does, we haven’t yet pondered deeply enough the Mercy by which we all got in here in the first place.
So, if we aren’t the hosts at the communion table, but only the guests who arrived before others have, then how does that realization shape us differently?
She answers, “One of the ethical imperatives embedded in the act of eucharistic welcome is to relinquish any sense of entitlement we might have to be welcomers; to cease welcoming others as if there’s such a thing as ‘others;’ and to learn to be good guests, amazed as good guests always are at how generous and good the Giver of the Feast is to us, and to all.”
She continues, “If we take seriously Communion’s ethics of guesthood, it could shape not only what we do in the church, but also our posture in the world. A communionized Body would gratefully accept the invitation of others, find comfort and strength at other people’s tables, respect their manners, sample their food, nourish itself with their fellowship, and cherish their gifts and graces. And when such a communionized Body does welcome the world to its own table, it would do so in amazement, in thanksgiving, on its knees.”
One of my clergy friends, who was also at this same event where Mary Luti reminded us of the ethical imperatives of baptism, was traveling this last week from Chicago, where she had spent the weekend preaching and teaching at another friend’s church, to Cleveland for a meeting of the Stillspeaking Writer’s Group at the UCC national headquarters. She realized that her drive would take her through Springfield, Ohio around lunchtime. So, she made sure to go to a Haitian restaurant. And in her broken French she ordered her lunch. That’s an example of living out the ethical imperatives that we Christians learn at the communion table.
Mary Luti taught us that the ethical imperatives of the Eucharist are many. She only covered a few and I’ve got even less time today than she did at our conference. So I’ve only highlighted a couple. We could talk also of the truth-telling we learn from this ritual, what it teaches us about remembering, the hope and perseverance that sustain us in this meal, how we learn to share and to feed others, and what resilience and joy we draw from it (some of which was captured in today’s contemporary reading).
Communion should evoke our wonder and inspire our imaginations to think and feel more deeply about what God is doing in this moment. What God is showing us. What we are to learn and how we are to be shaped so that we might more fully live God’s goodness in the world.
As Holy Wisdom declares in today’s scripture lesson:
Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”