Day #29--Sunday mystery

In my lifetime, much has changed in church and about church. My parents' view of what they called "close" communion, a supervised or guarded table, has disappeared by way of a far more democratic impulse. Not long ago, I saw a young father administer the sacrament to the little guy in his arms, whose understanding and perception of God is likely no more or less than any child's sensibility at two years old. 

Did that darling little boy know what he was doing, know what he was chewing on or drinking from that tiny cup? Probably not. But will his admission to the elements be enriching someday, when he comes to understand that he has been, all throughout his life, nurtured by that very body and the blood? Today's church banks on exactly that. What happens in communion today is a feast, not a test.

I'm not sure if today's practice is an astounding improvement. My parents' four-times-a-year practice, in their minds, made the body-and-blood special. How do I know that?--they told me as much during family devotions when I was just a boy. "There's communion this Sunday," my dad would say over the open Bible, "and it calls us to examine ourselves. . ."

That emphasis is ancient history. I didn't do it when my kids were little. Today, progressive churches, for very good reasons, practice communion every Sunday. 

So in our third gathering on-line, yesterday, in his congregational prayer, our pastor told the Lord how much we missed the fellowship of the sacrament by worshiping the way we are.

His telling the Lord that, got me to thinking. Why couldn't Barbara and I simply run upstairs, grab some bread and a glass of grape juice or wine, come back downstairs in front of the screen, and do the sacrament in the fellowship of each other and all the others gathered via Facebook? Wouldn't that count? Would the elements somehow less efficacy?

I don't think the pastor or any others in our church would go far as to say that only the bread and juice on the Covenant CRC's communion table could be classified as His body and blood. We're not Roman Catholic--we don't believe in transubstantiation, a word I learned to reject already as a boy in church catechism. Good, solid Reformed church practice always saw the bread and wine as symbols, not--for heaven's sake!--as somehow, via the great mystery, the actual, real thing.

So why, next week, couldn't the pastor send out, ahead of time, a note asking people to bring along the essential goods to the family room? Why couldn't he stand up front, as he does when we're not practicing "shelter in place," and walk us through the sacrament? 

At a cathedral in Florence we found ourselves surrounded by grandiose reliquaries, like this one, a museum full.

Elaborate things like this were created as a treasured storage to keep some relic of the apostles, or else the elements of the mass in a liturgical processional. As much as anyone raised by believers proud of their Reformational history, right there I could feel the attraction of "the mother church." Whenever I'm in a cathedral, even out here on the Plains, I can't help but feel that somewhere in me there worships a Roman Catholic. 

But I honestly don't know the argument that would make the sacrament in front of a screen, our individual practice of holy communion, to be anything less than our practice thereof were we within the walls of the church.

I don't have a Luther-like "here I stand!" in this discussion, but I'd love to be around when it takes place because I'm not sure we know what it is we're doing when we take the elements ourselves, Wonder bread or not. I'm not sure I do.

What's more, more than likely, you, me, and the little guy in his father's arms, never will. That's part of what our Catholic friends would call "the mystery," a word I don't believe my parents ever used.

But I do.