(This is mostly not my original work, but adapted from Why World Communion Sunday Is a Bad Idea By Debra Dean Murphy, 2 Oct 2012, which includes “Wheat” By BH Fairchild. Accessed at http://www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2012/10/why-world-communion-sunday-is-a-bad-idea). She wrote it as essay; I redrafted it as liturgy, for use with multiple voices.
This is World Communion Sunday, a day when Christians everywhere celebrate something special about this meal, about all being at the table together.
But is it such a good idea? Is communion really special?
We say we believe it gives life. But is the air we breathe “special”? Is the breakfast we eat “special”? These things are gifts, of course – breath and food – but they are quite ordinary. Things of the earth that keep us alive. So, too, the bread and wine of communion. Things of the earth are the things that give life.
In Clyde, Missouri, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration
cut unleavened bread into communion wafers
and gather them in plastic bags
folded, stapled, and later packed in boxes.
And I wonder, does calling something “World Communion Sunday” and celebrating it once a year suggests that it is somehow our human achievement?
It’s not, you know. Not our achievement. To the contrary: Grain and grape bear the spirit of God through a power not our own. Our only task is to receive these gifts: to take, bless, break, and share them. As Jesus did. And when we do this, we learn what it means to be a people for whom the whole of our life together is divine gift.
At the Exxon next door,
Walter Miller lifts his pickup’s hood,
then turns to stare at the acreage he used to own across the road.
Was his wheat, he wonders, even the smallest grain in its long ascent to final form,
ever changed into the body of our Lord?
And what of the rest of the year? Even “World Communion Sunday” can’t obscure the reality that the world is heavy with injustice and oppression, with domination and exploitation. What if we imagine that the whole world – the globe itself -- is the table on which we spread this meal? Jesus’ body links us to a suffering world. Our task, then, our joy, is to love this world, not any other world. And to love the suffering world is to be one with it in the charity of Christ. Perhaps even to see more of our meals as sacramental, sacred acts of hope and grace.
Doris Miller spreads ketchup on her Big Mac and salts her fries,
time and wages swallowed like a sacrament,
eternity the dregs that throng and cluster
in the shallows of her complimentary Styrofoam cup.
We are people of a meal. Jesus told us to. But he didn’t make it up. People of faith around the world share a holy meal – of memory, of solidarity, of hope.
He took the bread and gave thanks, broke it and gave it to his friends and said “eat this to remember me.”
He took a cup of wine, gave thanks, and gave it to them to drink. “drink and remember God’s covenant, which you’ve seen in me.”
We pray that God will make it so, will let us see, will recast us in divine imagination.
Holy from ordinary. Because that’s what God imagines.
With people of faith all around the world, come and eat.