THINKABOUT — TELLING THE STORY — from The Campfire Church today (a Eucharist).

 

Celebrating the Eucharist, which we often call “holy communion”, is about encountering Jesus for ourselves.

It’s about gathering in a circle of which he is part, opening our hearts to him in confession, bringing him our world in intercession, and entering the re-membering of his broken body and spilt blood.

It’s about finding him made whole in the circle of belonging and, by doing so, finding the healing and strength to embody him in our world.

Some of us grew up understanding Eucharist to be a very focused and specific event — a robed priest standing at the altar saying the special prayers, and then ourselves reverently  eating the blessed wafer of bread, sipping from the chalice of holy wine, returning with bowed heads and folded hands to kneel in our pew and wait to be dismissed.

But gradually, we have come to realise, it is so much more than that. What we saw and did in the church service was the ritualised re-enactment of something so huge we could never realistically bring it into focus.

Here is all the brokenness of the world. Here is every child whose only playground is the rubble of bombed buildings in a war zone. Here are the refugees in the biting cold of northern France, watching the flimsy shelter of their tents torn down and their belongings thrown into the mud by the police — the representatives of society. Here is the frightened Covid patient clutching the gloved hand of the anaesthetist who has come to put the respirator tube in. Here is the mother who drowned in the relentless exhaustion of lockdown pressure and suffocated her terribly disabled child. Here is the corrupt politician pocketing public funds. Here is the divorce and the redundancy, the bailiff knocking at the door, the food bank queue. This is the broken bread. This is humanity dismembered, Christ’s arms pulled out of joint by the weight of his body on the cross. This is the spilt blood of life, trickling down from the feet that brought the gospel of peace, held in place by a five inch forged iron nail hammered through them. 

But the miracle we express when we make our Eucharist, is the re-membering of our humanity — Christ’s humanity. We, who have so much to forgive, and so much for which we need to be forgiven, find hope and peace beyond our wildest dreams in the simplicity of bread broken and shared, of wine passed round.

There is a special Greek word — well, isn’t there always, in church? — for the moment of consecration: “epiclesis”. In this moment of blessing, our theologians have taught, the Holy Spirit becomes one with the bread and wine — and so, when we eat and drink, the Holy Spirit comes right inside of us.

May I dare to suggest it is not so one-directional? That maybe, in this re-membering, we are seeing life come to meet life, spirit recognising spirit, parts that always really belonged to one another draw into communion. For what are we anyway, if not clay (which is really star-dust) that lives by the breath of God — Holy Spirit? 

In the Eucharist, not only Christ, but we ourselves are re-membered. We are made whole.

But look, we belong not only to Jesus, and to one another in our familiar circle of fellowship — we also have families and colleagues, we have neighbours and acquaintances and friends. We are joined by a skein of invisible threads to everyone we have heard of, and everyone who has ever heard of us.

In this re-membering, light pulses along the whole web of interconnection. We are not separate. The sacred heart of Christ sends forth his blood into us, to circulate and nourish all humanity.

This small gathering, this home-based make-shift act of communion, this Eucharist, is not for ourselves only but for the healing of the world.

Do this, Jesus said, to re-member Me.