The LORD will keep you from all
harm—he will watch over your life;. . .”
My father was an elder in the
church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened
when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights. Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn
not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t tell me because the
knowledge would have hurt me. I was,
after all, a child.
One part of his job, I
remember, was tallying after communion.
He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally
who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements,
or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even
though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little
gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.
What those elders were watching
for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered
past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody
watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then
because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know,
what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember
that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.
That post-communion tallying—as
well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted
sense I have that elders really should be Godly statesmen, dutiful, virtuous,
and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other
elderly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I was an elder,
giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the
kind of person who grows into the office of elder, having raised good kids and
having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder
was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.
Some years ago I was served the
sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many
years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from people who,
with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets,
used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand
why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, they were leaving behind a
childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.
I know them. I’ve walked into
their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I know that those
men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last night—were once so far gone in
treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine
some of the evil they’ve perpetuated.
Who’d have ever thought that someday they’d be doling out the body and
blood of Christ? Amazing.
But the promise of scripture,
and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you
from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in
war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his
eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy
thugs, and probably especially then.
He knew them. He was watching them, keeping them from harm,
when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body
and blood of Jesus.
Amazing grace. What a celebration. Hallelujah, what a savior.
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