Communion. It’s not always the most exciting part of church. Especially when it comes in a tiny plastic cup with some sort of cardboard infused wafer plastic-wrapped on top. Yum.
Sometimes you’ll get lucky, and a church will serve loaves of bread and a chalice filled with wine or grape juice. But mostly, at face value, it’s a lackluster affair at best.
Except, it isn’t.
I’ve been thinking about communion a lot lately, and mostly how it all began thousands of years ago. How Jesus sat at the table with his closest circle of friends, the air thick with grief of things yet to come. How he broke bread with his betrayer, and served wine to his most loyal twelve and how they ate together.
It wasn’t plastic cups and solitude, it was a meal amongst friends, where they, perhaps unknowingly but all the same, shared bread and grief and wine and remembrance together.
The day Poppy died started and ended in the dark. And when it was over, my grief was thick. In my family, our communal grief was palpable and pervasive.
It probably would’ve been easier in some ways to isolate ourselves and shut out the difficult stuff. But, my family is not the isolating type. And so we sat together, in the grief and in the remembrance, eating our cornbread and drinking our wine.
It may have been a non-traditional communion, but I think it was closer to the original communion than anything I had experienced before.
There are many days where this world brings us darkness and grief. Not just in death, but in brokenness and injustice and pain. And I think a lot of times we tend to isolate, to stuff the feelings deep down into boxes and put them away where no one else will ever find them.
I think in those moments, Jesus is calling us to deeper love for each other, and deeper community as well. Because even in our brokenness, we can sit down together with our bread and wine and remember the One who holds all things together. Because Jesus knew grief and betrayal and that just-got-the-wind-knocked-out-of-me feeling, and his response was to sit and break bread.
Take advantage of the darkness and turn them into moments of light. And above all else, do it in remembrance of our Jesus.
留言