I
gave two people their last communion this past week.
For
the first person, it was not a surprise. I could write many blogs about the small-scale
holiness of communion in a hospice room—the firm grip of hands for the Lord’s
Prayer when everything else is so weak, my delicate tipping of the little juice
cup into the chapped lips of a dying human, the intensity and irony of the
final prayer: “May the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen you,
and keep you in God’s grace,” and the gently hushed and holy “amen.”
The
second person was in more normal circumstances. I had brought communion to that
back pew many times as an extension of the table for a pair who cannot easily do
the pew shuffle and take the many quickened steps to come forward for
communion. Again, it is such a wonderful and strange promise from Jesus—take my
body, and may it strengthen yours. And gain: the soft-spoken, half-chewing-half-swallowing
voicing of “amen.”
At
St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco, they inscribed one of the
charges leveled against Jesus onto the communion table in the center of their
worship space: “This man welcomes sinners! And eats with them!”
It
is lines like that and this weekly habit of communion which have built this
strong image for me of Jesus as a waiter. If a title for the pope is the
servant of servants, then Jesus is the servant of the servant of the servants.
He is host and waiter and food all at once. And what is most interesting about
him is who he prefers as his dining clientele—not those who will leave behind
fat tips, but the hungry, and the meek, and the persecuted, and the lonely, and
those who starve after justice, and those who cannot afford healthcare and are
stripped of options, and those who suffer human trafficking, and those who are
denied entrance to a promise land of opportunity because of the faith they practice... ”Come
to me, ye weary,” says our waiter, “And I’ll feed you with my own body.”
Breaking
bread with strangers is my favorite part of church. It’s one of the parts of
worship that we really can’t mess up. The preaching may wander aimlessly, the
music might be too loud or too slow, but we can’t mess up ripping apart pieces
of bread and feeding the hungry masses. We certainly still try often to mess it
up, saying someone needs a membership card in order to dine at the common meal.
But if Jesus gave Judas communion, then who are we to ever say to anyone that she
or he isn’t worthy or doesn’t understand or hasn’t earned it? Following Jesus is
never about earning anything—grace, or acceptance, or a place at the table.
Following the waiter is an apprenticeship of learning how to love—radically,
relentlessly, extravagantly.
During
the two funerals over the weekend, I was thinking about those last communion
moments. But then I heard the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah read during
one of those services:
“On
this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
7 And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
8 he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
7 And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
8 he will swallow up death forever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
How
wrong it would be, I realized, to call those moments ‘last communion.’ We wait
together for one more meal, the full communion of Isaiah’s promised mountaintop
banquet feast of rich foods and well-aged wines. I look forward so strongly to
that next meal which will be so much more than an ounce of juice and bit of
stale wafer. These are just the appetizers, just the “foretaste of the feast to
come.”
I
have to admit—the carb-loving Italian in me loves it so much that this is the
image of heaven we are promised: a banquet table with mountain views where bread
will be broken and all will have a place. But of course, communion is never
about the bread. It’s about the [plural] bodies becoming [singular] body. It’s
about the miracle of connection and relationship that occur best through shared
meals. It’s about this relationship-focused God who cannot wait to greet us at
the restaurant entrance, who leaps forward with smiles and joy and enthusiasm
to show us our place at the table, who delights us with divine food straight
from the creator’s oven. Jesus is host, waiter, meal, and there’s no tab to
cover or split, because God’s abundance reigns forever and ever and ever. Amen!
