Perceptions from a Pewboy

When was it in your life that you began to look upon the Lord’s Supper as something significant, something to treasure?

For me, the bread and cup became a treasure early on. When I was a boy of 4 or 5 years of age, I used to love Holy Communion Sundays at Grove City Grace United Methodist Church because that church used shortbread squares for the Lord’s Supper. They tasted like little cookies! Following worship on Communion Sundays, there would be about a five minute gap of time between the benediction and the arrival of the Communion stewards at the front of the sanctuary. During that five minute gap, I would leave my mother’s side, scurry up the altar, grab a handful of shortbread squares and head off to one of the Sunday school rooms for what might be described as an extended sacramental celebration.

The funny thing was that, even as a four or five year old, I knew that there was something important about those shortbread squares. I had seen enough people consuming them with reverence to know that they were something more than ordinary food. And so, as a 4 or 5-year-old, before I would consume the purloined squares, I would always try to pray some of the words that I could remember from the Communion liturgy. My truncated prayers, however, sounded something like this: “Dear Jesus, this is your body broken for us, but please help it to be like cookies because I don’t think that your body would taste very good.”

Somewhere in those childish words was the soul of a little boy who had already come to understand, at least in some elementary way, that the Lord’s Supper was something special, something to savor, something to treasure, something to crave.

About seventeen years later, when I was a junior in college, I attended a worship service on Palm Sunday evening at a British Methodist church in downtown London. It was at that service, as I sat alone in my pew, that I experienced my clearest sense of calling into the ordained ministry. That night, as I watched the pastor consecrate the elements, as I experienced afresh the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup, I could not shake the feeling that the Holy Spirit was creating a transformational intimacy with my soul. In those moments, I sensed that the Spirit was speaking to me and saying something like this: “Do you see that pastor consecrating the elements? That is what I want you to do for my people. I want you to help my people to celebrate the Lord’s Supper—not because you are better than anybody else, not because you are worthy of such a calling, but simply because that is the life into which I am calling you.”

The Lord’s Supper, you see, has figured prominently in my life’s journey. When I was a boy, I couldn’t keep my hands off the Communion elements. And when I was a young adult, those Communion elements became one of the primary means by which I experienced God’s calling to ministry. All of which is to say that I have no problem whatsoever thinking of the Lord’s Supper as a holy treasure. It is a treasure that has blessed my life in a thousand different ways.

I pray that you are able to say the same thing. Furthermore, I pray that you will join me in experiencing the treasure of the Lord’s Supper on this Holy Thursday. God bless you.

“Whoever, therefore, does not receive, but goes from the holy table, when all things are prepared, either does not understand his duty, or does not care for the dying command of his Saviour, the forgiveness of his sins, the strengthening of his soul, and the refreshing it with the hope of glory.
“Let every one, therefore, who has either any desire to please God, or any love of his own soul, obey God, and consult the good of his own soul, by communicating every time he can; like the first Christians, with whom the Christian sacrifice was a constant part of the Lord’s day service. And for several centuries they received it almost every day: Four times a week always, and every saint’s day beside. Accordingly, those that joined in the prayers of the faithful never failed to partake of the blessed sacrament.” (from John Wesley’s sermon entitled “THE DUTY OF CONSTANT COMMUNION,” published in 1788)

This sermon from Wesley , interestingly enough, was a rewrite of a sermon that Wesley had written 56 years earlier in 1732. He changed very little about the sermon in the rewrite, except that he used fewer words. His sacramental theology and the sense of urgency therein had remained intact for over a half a century! I can only aspire to that kind of sacramental consistency.

On this Maundy Thursday, for obvious reasons, I find myself thinking about the Eucharistic meal that I will experience with my congregation in just a few hours. I can hardly wait. It will be a sacred opportunity for all of us at Central Highlands Church to move beyond the mundane arguments with which we so often truncate the meaning of the sacrament. (What do I mean by mundane arguments? Try this one on for size. “We dare not celebrate the Lord’s Supper weekly because anything celebrated that frequently would lose its meaning and become routine.” Of course, no one makes this argument about the Lord’s Prayer. Or the Doxology. Or breakfast, lunch, or dinner…………………Or sex.)

At any rate, in the rhythms of the church’s year, Maundy Thursday affords to us a unique opportunity to lay aside such tedious discussions, long enough to gather at the table of our living Lord. I describe him as a “living Lord” for the purpose of emphasizing my conviction that Christ will be as dynamically and transformationally present with us in tonight’s sharing of the bread and cup as he was with the first disciples long ago.

The other day, I looked through one of our family photo albums. The album contains plenty of embarrassing childhood photographs of yours truly. There are also some pictures of Tara and me and our present life together. Interestingly, there are also several blank pages in the album, pages waiting to be occupied by photographs that have yet to be taken. The photo album, in other words, compelled me to look, metaphorically speaking, in three different directions. It compelled me to look to my past. It compelled me to look to my present. And it compelled me to look to my future.

It might be said that the Lord’s Supper functions as the church’s sacramental “photo album.” By that I mean that the eucharist compels us to look in three different directions. When we partake of Holy Communion, we are brought into a powerful remembrance of the things that Christ did for us some two-thousand years ago. But there is more to it than reflecting upon the past. When we share the bread and cup, we also celebrate a very PRESENT Christ, a Christ who saves and redeems in the here and now. Beyond that, the Lord’s Supper is also a foreshadowing of the eschatological banquet, an anticipation of the heavenly table where we will feast on an eternal Eucharistic meal with all the saints who have gone on before us.

In just a few hours, I will have the opportunity to join my congregation in opening up the sacramental “photo album” called the Lord’s Supper. As I said earlier, I can hardly wait.