Commemoration ii

And then we had communion.

I had no idea how that job was going to get done, but a couple of dozen elders--all men--handed out slick little disposable communion doo-dad cups, complete with a paper-thin, tasteless wafer layered into the first level of a foil cap that vacuum-sealed the grape juice beneath it. I'd never seen anything like it, and, if I had my choice, I hope I never see one again. Communion, convenience-packed. Not even Jesus Christ could have imagined that his Last Supper meal could become assembly line-packaged.

It was someone's wonderful idea to take communion--all 3500 of us--and it must have seemed to the committee who planned it that there was no alternative to get the job done: we had to order up those cute little, convenient packages. 

I hated them, just hated them. Honestly, we could have all gone to the front in a dozen stations, taken the bread ourselves from a split loaf, and had ordinary cups--but that would have meant more work and more time. And some of the old fashioned would have thought it wrong, I'm sure--going to the front like that. Hence, McSacrament, the ultimate in protestant packaging.

Of course, if the bread and wine are only a symbol, as our creeds claim, then who needs the real thing because it's not the real thing anyway? We're talking Reformation principle here, of course. The bread and wine isn't Christ's body and blood, an argument over which Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists have gone to war.

But yesterday's commemoration was communion reductio ad absurdum. Really. All over the packed gym, people finger-nailed their sacramental vials in unison as the preacher said "This is the body," and "This is the blood." This? Give me a break.

The sentiment here is instructive: it's more important that we do it than that we do it meaningfully, and that idea itself is a hybrid legacy of our steeply Protestant past and our indulgent American pragmatic present. It was more important that we "had communion" than that we vitally celebrated the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ--and the body we've become as a church. By my standards, we came dangerously close to profanation.

But then there's this: Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. I think of that a lot lately.

And there's this other thing. I wonder if, my aesthetic rant aside, the uniting spiritual blessing of Lord's own supper can and does transcend even our worst celebrations. If I'm right about profaning, all we really profaned was the practice, not the Supper itself. What was most mightily affected and offended was my own precious sensibilities.

And I'm not the church. We are. The church--the chosen--is always far bigger than the sum of its parts or the silly paucity of its public piety. I don't doubt for a moment that a couple thousand people were blessed, even by that vapid bread and the thimble-full of wine.

I suppose it's like the church itself. Who knows what it's future is? Who knows how it will celebrate communion a century hence? Who knows if anyone will recognize the initials CRC? Who knows if we've got another fifty years? Nobody. But some things will last, despite their evolving forms.

Every last thinking soul in that gym yesterday knows very well that God almighty will have his way with us, that he won't abandon believers, even though he may see fit to re-congregate, re-allign, re-model our most precious designs, all in his own interests. Because we are--CRC or RCA or ELCA or PCA or whatever clump of initials--we are His to a far greater extent than He is ours.

 It's Reformation week, time to sing Luther, who wasn't wrong: "If we in our own strength [or wisdom or aesthetic perception] confide,/Our striving would be losing./Were not the right man on our side,/the man of God's own choosing." Sure, I can sing that.

But I think I'm still going to have trouble with vacuum-sealed sacraments.