Why Take Communion?

Tomorrow is World Communion Sunday, and Christians from across the globe will be coming to the table in celebration.    In response to this day of observance, the Patheos Website has asked a number of its contributors to share why they take communion.  One of the contributors is Bruce Epperly, who is a regular contributor to this blog as well as to Patheos.  I thought I'd include his response and then offer some comments of my own.

Communion is about connection and embodiment. I take communion to join with my brothers and sisters in Christ across the globe, and then to embrace strangers and persons of other faiths. Communion reminds me that God is present in the ordinary media of bread and wine, but communion also inspires me to experience God in sharing meals with friends and family. Communion is, as the Celts say, a "thin place," which helps us discover what is: God's everlasting life in our ever-changing world. So, when I share communion, I affirm "the bread of life" and "the cup of healing."

Like me, Bruce is Disciple, but he and his pastor-spouse Kate, are also UCC, and they pastor a joint UCC-Disciples congregation, so I don't know what their pattern is. 

For me, and most Disciples, the Lord's Supper is a weekly observance (at the very minimum).  It defines who were are as a community of faith.  Our denominational symbol, after all, is a chalice.  And we come to the table because Jesus called us to remember him at the table -- As Paul puts it in recounting the Last Supper: 

"For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Cor. 11:26). 

We come to the Lord's Table because that's what the early Christians did:

"They devoted themselves to the apostle's teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42)

So, there is a sense here that I take communion because it is a central, even essential practice of my tradition.  But, I also come to the table because it is, as Bruce puts it, a "thin place," a place to encounter the living Christ.  It's a place to remember that God has come into our midst and revealed God's self to humanity, and in doing so has participated in human life experience, even experiencing rejection leading to death.  It is a place to remember that Jesus sat with people at table, and in doing so offered a welcome presence.  It is a place to remember that however we define the future, there is a table waiting for us, where we will sit down as children of God to share in the messianic banquet.  And yes, it is a place to come and be fed with the living bread of God.   And yes, I come because by participating in the meal, I become part of the greater community that makes up the body of Christ -- for as Paul writes:  "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we partake of the one bread" (1 Cor. 10:17).   

If I may be so bold, let me ask:  why do you take communion?

The Lord’s Table: A Place of Community

On Saturday our Elders will gather for a retreat and I'll be leading a conversation about the Eucharist or Lord's Table -- as a Christian communion, the Disciples are fairly unique in that lay elders offer the prayer(s) of consecration for the Supper. As I'm preparing for this, I'm putting together a few pieces or reflections.  Since the Table can easily become a very "private" affair between me and Jesus, it's important to remember the communal context.

There is, of course, a place for meditation and reflection at the Table, but the Table was instituted in a communal setting. Until the middle ages, when Transubstantiation fully took hold in the Western Church, the Lord’s Supper was always taken in the context of a community. If we are to truly understand the meaning and value of the Supper, we must remember this context.

Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall provides good insight into this communal element:

The community enacts its unity with its head its members with one another. Partaking of the one cup and the one loaf, the members, “though man,” as Paul says, affirm and are confirmed in their oneness.”

This interpretation of the Eucharist calls in question all privatistic practices of the sacrament. The communion is a corporate act, and even when it must be administered apart from the worshiping community, the latter as in the case of baptism, ought certainly to be represented. This corporateness seems to me more important than whether one regards th Eucharist from the vantage point o of the tradition of transubstantiation, the mediating position of consubstantiation, or the Zwinglian symbolic or memorial conception. The critical question is not the substantialistic one (whether the bread becomes body, where the wine becomes blood); it is, rather, the relational question: How does the Sacramental function sustain the community? (Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context, Fortress Press, 1996, pp. 114-115).

Thus, the point of the Eucharist isn’t creating pieces of Jesus in the form of bread (forgive the crudity of my statement), but creating community, which reflects and embodies the person of Jesus in the world.

If the Table is a communal act, it requires the presence of community. Even when we take the Supper to the shut-in, we do so understanding that in taking the bread and cup in the home or the hospital, we gather as an extension of the larger body.

This concern for the community is reflected in Paul’s discussion of the celebration of the Supper in 1 Corinthians 11. It is in this chapter that Paul lays out the words of institution – for the first time.  Paul writes:

This is why those who eat the bread or drink the cup of the Lord inappropriately will be guilty of the Lord’s body and blood. Each individual should test himself or herself, and eat from the bread and drink from the cup in that way. Those who eat and drink without correctly understanding the body are eating and drinking their own judgment. Because of this, many of you are weak and sick, and quite a few have died. . . . If some of you are hungry, they should eat at home so that getting together doesn’t lead to judgment. (1 Corinthians 11:27-34a Common English Bible).

Paul has been, traditionally, interpreted here as referring to the mystical body of Christ in the elements – thus giving rise to the doctrine of real presence and then transubstantiation. But, I think that the Common English Bible makes it as clear as possible, that the point is understanding the body of Christ as the congregation. By acting in a way that dishonors the community, leading to drunkenness and hunger, the community had dishonored the one who called them to the table. There is little of the mystical here, but much that is concerned about the behavior of those who gather at the table.

Becoming Christ's Body in the Eucharist

There are Christian traditions that believe that when consecrated the elements of bread and wine/juice become the body and blood of Christ.  There are other traditions that believe that the bread and wine are merely memorials of Christ's death and burial.  For those of us who are Disciples of Christ, there is a tendency to take a memorialistic perspective, one that emerged largely in reaction to the more literalist understandings of the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements.

There is another way of looking at the eucharist, one that holds on to the idea of presence without locating that presence in the elements themselves.  The idea here is that the presence of Christ is found in the body -- that is the congregation.  And the congregation isn't simply the institution of the church, but the gathering of the body of Christ around the Table. 

In a book published nearly 20 years ago, Keith Watkins explored in some detail the patterns of prayer at the Table.  He did this so as to challenge Disciples to examine their practice so that the meaning of the meal can be understood and lived out.  Too often our time at the table is sloppy and irreverent, but more importantly our practice often has little theological grounding. 

Among the implications that Keith notes in his connection of the eucharist to the doctrine of the church as body of Christ is that "in the celebration of the eucharist, the congregation becomes what it already is:  Christ's body."

He goes on to define what this means (I'm including a rather extended quotation from Keith's book Celebrate with Thanksgiving):

The way that the Sunday service is structured and the contents of its several parts are the means by which this realization takes place.  Congregants assemble from their separated lives in the world.  The order of worship focuses their attention upon God and upon God's love and justice.  Despite the distractions and sins that have accumulated during the week, worshipers are drawn once again into the orbit of God's redeeming love in Jesus Christ.  They listen to readings from scripture that tell the stories of God's work long ago.  They hear a sermon showing how God continues to work in these same ways in life today.  By now, the people have been welded together again into a strong and unified assembly.  They are now ready to bring their life in the world more directly into God's presence.  In the prayers of thanksgiving, confession, and intercession the people remember what has taken place as they have tried to live faithfully through the week.  All is offered God with the entreaty that God's will for creation and all it's creatures will be fulfilled.

The intentions of these prayers are also expressed in the the physical elements that now become the focus of the service.  Offerings of money and the bread and communion-wine for the eucharist are brought to the table.  Together these emblems depict the natural world of "blood, sweat, and tears," and of wheat and grapes, now converted into new forms.  The labors of natural life become the substance of purposeful life in families and communities.  The foods of the earth are converted into bread and wine, manufactured products that increase their nourishing properties and our joy in using them.  All of these meanings are compressed into the procession that brings these elements to their place upon the holy table.

At this point, the congregation and its leaders approach God in prayer.  They tell the story of God's creative and redeeming work, the story that reaches its climax in Jesus' death upon the cross and everlasting life wit God.  They express in words their sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that the entire service seeks to present to God.  They ask that Christ's life in them be renewed and that they be strengthened to be the body of Christ in the world.  They they receive back the bread and communion-wine as sure signs that God has heard their prayer and will answer it.  At this point, the eucharist is complete and the church has once again become what it already is:  the body of Christ.  (Keith Watkins, Celebrate with Thanksgiving, Chalice Press, 1991, pp. 38-39). 

As you can see it's not just the prayers or the elements, but the way that the service itself is formed that helps provide the context for the congregation to become the body of Christ at the table.  As I read this, I realize that our practice at CWCC doesn't mirror everything that is present in Keith's discussion.  We don't have the procession of the elements nor do we have prayers of confession or of the people.  After the sermon I offer a Pastoral Prayer, something that has emerged over time and has largely replaced the other forms of prayer.  We have a prayer at the offering and we have a prayer for the elements.  But the basic order is present, as we move toward a climax at the Table, for it is there that community gathers to receive a sign that Christ is present in their midst.  I'd like to invite a conversation about ways in which we can strengthen our practice at the Table so that we might become more fully the body of Christ on earth.

Eucharistic Presence -- Bringing the Future into the Present

Many Protestants, including my own tradition, tend to understand the Lord's Supper or Eucharist in terms of remembrance.  We take quite literally, Jesus' statement, as Paul recounts it, at the institution of the Lord's supper:  "This is my body that is for you.  Do this in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:24).  We treat it as a meal of memorial, with reverence often turning into sober solemnity, as if the one we remember is long dead and buried.  This position emerged in response to overblown doctrines of "real presence" that dominated medieval Catholicism. 

But what if we understood Eucharistic presence differently?  In wrestling with N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope, I've made the discovery that Wright is very focused on the resurrection -- and an embodied physical resurrection at that.  Although I wouldn't follow Wright in all of his positions on the resurrection, I do think he's on to something.  And, if he is correct that we should see heaven and earth as overlapping, so that future overlaps with the present, then this might have some implications for how we experience the Lord's Supper/Eucharist.

Wright points out that if we stop with remembrance, simply emulating the gathering of the Disciples as they shared in a last with meal, then we miss out on much of the meaning of the supper.  He writes:

To make any headway in understanding the Eucharist, we must see it as the arrival of God's future in the present, not just the extension of God's past (or of Jesus's past) into our present.  We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord.  And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself its prototype.  The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God's new world.  At communion we are like the children of Israel in the the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land.  It is the future coming to meet us in the present.  (p. 274).

I find this idea of tasting the future promise in the present intriguing.  As one who embraces the idea of presence at the table, this is quite helpful.  When we gather at the table, sharing in bread and cup, we do so in the hope of the new creation.  The question then is this:  how does this happen in our celebrations.  Can we create the experience, or do we simply allow God to make this presence known to us?  Indeed, how do we know when we have tasted the fruit of the promised land of the new creation?  And finally, what should this lead to in our lives?