Growing up, I always dreaded Communion Sundays – the first Sunday of the month for the church my family attended. As a kid, I hated that it made the service take what seemed like so much longer than usual. Later, as an adolescent just starting to understand what it really meant to be a Christian, I had to awkwardly sit alone while the rest of the congregation went up to the front of the sanctuary – you had to be baptized to take communion, and I hadn’t been. I would just stare intently at my bulletin, riding out the awkward moment.
Later, when we moved to another church, communion plates were passed down the pews, so I didn’t feel nearly as self-conscious when I couldn’t participate. Eventually, sometime between when I accepted Christ at 14 and got baptized at 17, my parents allowed me to take communion for the first time, when they were confident I was ready.
Now in the near decade that’s passed, I’ve always held communion in high regard and participated with reverence – I will always be grateful for my Presbyterian upbringing and the appreciation it gave me for church liturgy, tradition, and hymns. Still, I can’t deny that more often than not, I find myself going through the motions. That’s the trouble with tradition – you have to be careful not to let the repetition become rote and mindless.
But the church I go to here in Gainesville is a little different. They observe communion every week, and in some ways it’s familiar – we walk up to the table, take a piece of bread, dip it in the cup, and so on and so forth… But there’s another piece of it that was entirely new to me.
As you’re handed the piece of bread, the server says to each person, “The body of Christ, broken for you.”
Then, when you dip the piece of bread into the grape juice, “The blood of Christ, shed for you.”
There’s a certain intimacy to walking up there, hearing those two sentences, and eating the bread. In a time when it’s so easy to sit back and watch – to attend church as nothing more than a consumer – this practice forces your hand to become an active participant in something that’s been part of the church since the final days of Jesus himself. After all, the word “communion” quite literally means to share or exchange.
Today, I happened to know the guy who was serving for the line I was in. As he handed me the piece of bread, a chill went up my spine as he said “The body of Christ, broken for you, Sarah.”
It wasn’t much, but those two extra syllables held all the weight in the world – a reminder of the age-old truth, that I have a place in the kingdom as someone who Jesus died to save. How can life be routine or ordinary when you know that?
Christ invites us to the table – he extends the invitation, he stands waiting for us no matter our condition. All we have to do is say yes.
