| Since the pandemic, our church stopped serving communion through intinction. That’s when you take a piece of bread offered to you as the body of Christ and dip it into the juice (or wine) as the blood of Christ. For obvious reasons, we wanted to limit the number of people handling the elements. So, for now, we use little all-in-one communion kits. These are small plastic cups prepackaged with juice. They also come with a wafer. The body and blood of Christ on the go. I wasn’t a fan of using these kits at first. But they served a purpose. After a while, my attitude softened. Normally, people line up to receive communion. Someone offers the elements for everyone to receive. One by one, each person shared. Lord help you if you were one of the first ones in line. That meant you had to sit there and wait for the next ten minutes for everyone else in line. Yes, you could pray while you wait. I’m not sure many people do. I’ve come to appreciate the kits a little more for one reason. They allow us to share communion together. We pass them out to everyone at the same time. I present the body and blood of Christ before all to see together. Then we share Holy Communion at once. At some point, we’ll go back to intinction. There’s a powerful symbol in that practice. For now, though, I want to dwell on what this new practice allows us to do. Turns out it does remind us of a biblical lesson. Like so many other practices of faith, most of us think of communion in personal terms. There are people who only attend worship on Communion Sundays. Indeed, there is great joy in knowing Christ’s love for yourself. Receiving communion is a personal means of grace. But not only a personal means of grace. Christ did not bring in his disciples one by one into private communion. They shared their meal together. I imagine they had some strange looks for each other as they did. The early church we read of in the New Testament also knew communion as a corporate act. Not just that you had communion at the same time as other Christians. It was a way in which the body of Christ shared in the joyous sacrifice of Jesus together. And just as Holy Communion can be celebrated together, it can also be abused. This was a reality for the Corinthian church. How can Christians take a joyous act of grace and transform it into a way to humiliate other Christians? I say by over-emphasizing the personal aspect of the act. Forgetting that what we do matters to the rest of the body. Not caring about how your actions impact others. The apostle offers an obvious way to begin to broaden our sense of communion: Wait for one another. Do our logistics make room for that kind of attitude? How can we make sure we share communion with the attitude of a Christian community that waits for each other? Stay blessed…john |
John Fletcher
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