On the night before Jesus died… he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
And ever since, the Church has.
Through the centuries, and across cultures and traditions, Christians have remained remarkably steadfast in their commitment to celebrate the Eucharist together. In a radically changing world, this enduring practice tells us something about its importance. Communion is a big deal to Christianity.
However, if you were to ask Christians why we share in communion, I imagine the answers would be so diverse, so contradictory, and so incomplete, that the rational mind might wonder whether we really know what we’re doing at all. Across time, culture, and tradition, not only have we persisted in gathering around the Lord’s Supper, but we also seem to have retained an inability to pin down precisely what it’s all about.
And it’s not for want of trying. If you study Christian theology, you’ll find centuries of debate witnessing to the truth that there simply isn’t a single, straightforward answer to what happens in the Eucharist. It is a confusing, mysterious, wonderful melding of the poetic, prophetic, the sacred and the profane, the metaphorical and the literal.
I love the Eucharist for this. It is a mystery. Not in the sense of saying, “We’ll never understand, so don’t bother thinking about it,” but in the sense of saying, “We’ll never understand, so prepare to spend the rest of your life being drawn into its depths.”
When I find myself drawn in, one of the immediately observable and more articulable facets that shimmers forth is an insistence on unity. God’s work in the world is a work of reconciliation: rejoining us wherever we have fallen apart: to God, to neighbour, to planet, and to self. In sharing communion, our human community finds itself re-unified, as we enact our oneness.
“We break this bread to share in the body of Christ,” I say.
And you respond: “Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.”
Some theologians have drawn out the significance of remembrance here. We have always been one body; all are one in Christ Jesus. But we forget. We become dis-membered, our parts separated by the ways we divide up the world and one another. Here, in this feast, Jesus invites us to share in one bread: to remember that we are one, and in so doing to be re-membered. To have our members brought back together into one body.
Week after week, Christians all over the world take part in this extraordinary ritual. Declaring, together: with so many others, “We are one!” It is a beautiful and astounding statement in a world so desperately falling apart.
But! With such astounding sentiment comes the need for some astounding logistics. How, in practice, do we involve everyone who comes, week in, week out, in this ritual feast? How do we shape our words and actions so that the table draws us together rather than driving us apart?
We grasp for fitting ways to express our lofty theological ideals. And, within the breadth of Christian tradition, we’ve actually become quite adept at doing so. If you visit other churches, you’ll see the many and varied ways they’ve sought to address these questions with some pretty sensible solutions.
Take the highly practical question of making space for each person to have their turn. In some churches, it’s a free-for-all: come when you’re ready. Us Anglicans, we love a queue. Row by row, we come and receive. Sometimes you follow the row in front. Sometimes a verger tells you when it’s your turn. Sometimes that verger even holds a wand and points it at you, as if to magic you up to the front.
And when you get there? Well, sometimes you kneel, sometimes you stand, sometimes you pause for a moment in silence, and sometimes you take a tiny shot glass back to your seat for a giant group ‘cheers’.
One logistical solution that most, if not all, churches have settled on is that this great Eucharistic feast tends to be a funny kind of feast indeed: mostly no more than a sip of wine and a tiny morsel of bread, with a distinctly cardboardy mouth-feel.
Please don’t hear me wrong. I don’t mean to belittle our time-honoured ways of being. Actually, I adore the absurdity of it all. This incredibly limited and mundane human reckoning with being itself is searching, sincere and somehow laughable. But these practices are far from trivial. They matter, because this meal matters.
And it truly does. There are few greater pleasures in my ministry than standing and greeting you with bread, with wine, with blessings as you come. You come forward with all sorts of things going on in your lives. People who are joyful, exhausted, uncertain, grieving, hopeful. People who may have very little in common with one another, except that they are here, receiving the same gift.
In those moments, you all look so beautiful. I know you might resist the word, but I simply can’t think of a better way to express it. Sometimes, as you come, I can’t help but well up- so overwhelming is the beauty of it all.
However, for all the splendour and beauty, and the wonderful contradictions of our limited meal of unlimited grace, there’s one part of our practice that I’ve found myself wondering about. It centres on our gluten-free provision.
Though we are many, we are one body! Because we all share in… two breads?
Each week I announce that, if anyone needs alternative provision for a gluten-free diet, there is a separate bread set aside for them. And, of course, that’s fine. It’s the common practice of plenty of churches. The imagery is metaphorical, not literal. We’ve not been doing it wrong. Jesus isn’t cross with us. And of course we can understand ourselves as one body, even though we have two types of bread.
But I have found myself wondering: if we could make a relatively small change and really allow the poetry to sing, why wouldn’t we? A single gluten-free bread would mean that everyone could receive from the same bread, rather than having to ask for an alternative. And the same might be said of moving to non-alcoholic wine: a small change could make full participation possible for more people.
As a PCC, we’ve been thinking about this, and we’ve come to the view that sometimes it’s right to adjust the way we do things so that more people can share more fully in what matters. That love means compromise.
And so, if you were around last Sunday, you’ll already know that this coming weekend we’re starting a month-long experiment in how we celebrate our Eucharist. During November, we’ll be celebrating with a vegan, gluten-free flatbread, dipped into a non-alcoholic wine.
We don’t know exactly how this will work in practice. There will probably be things we haven’t anticipated. The bread might behave differently; the process might be slower; it may taste weird. We may discover that some aspects work beautifully and others need adjusting. That’s why it’s an experiment.
This isn’t an announcement that we’ve solved the Eucharist. We’re trying something that we think is worth trying, and we’re going to pay attention to what happens. If you have questions, concerns or observations, please do speak to me or a member of the PCC. We want to hear them as we think about what this might look like in the longer term.
But even as the form changes, the invitation remains the same:
Come and receive. Come with your questions, your doubts, your joys and your sorrows. Come as you are.
So, draw near with faith: receive the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he gave for you, and his blood, which he shed for you.
All who hunger and thirst for true life: draw near.