[Next to] Last Communion

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.

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!