When your ten-year old granddaughter asks if we take have communion with our Easter dinner, the only reasonable answer is, “Of course!”
I love that she’s had it enough here to think about it. I love that her mom and her had discussed Jesus serving it to his disciples as they were working through the events of Easter week. This is a child who has never been in a Sunday school or attended a Sunday morning service. She has grown up with Jesus as a part of her daily life and in the community of friends and family who are seeking to follow him.
So after the meal, we took bread and broke it. We took grape choice and toasted the One who have up so much so that we could have life and freedom in him. And we focused on Jesus and that we would one day be re-united in eternity with some special people we’ve lost recently to this age. It was the high point of the day!
Later I was reading an article someone sent me that only an approved clergy member can “sanctify” the bread and juice and only in approved locations, where people truly worship. Yes, my Yuck Meter pegged. Jesus celebrated a meal with his disciples and told us to remember him every time we partake of that meal. We did a horrible thing when our “religious leaders” made the meal something that could only be celebrated when the “right person” consecrated it. That made the Lord’s Supper a contest of power to decide who can serve it and who can take it, and have argued for centuries argued over its meaning and substance.
Such is what man does when he takes a simple gift of Jesus and turns it into a religious ritual fraught with fear. Contrast that with the early church, who for the first 300 years of its existence would not have conceived of celebrating the Lord’s Supper at any place other than the family dining room table. Imagine what it did for that woman who made the bread and poured the wine as Jesus made himself known at her table that evening as the church gathered to celebrate his life in them.
Isn’t it time to reclaim the simple things Jesus gave to his church and celebrate them in the midst of our lives? “This is my body. This is my blood. As often as you do it, remember me!”
