One of the things A has been looking forward to (in and around his trials and tribulations) is being able to take communion at church. At home we break bread together but A so wants to take part in public too. I must confess that I find it extremely difficult to refuse children at the altar rail – they understand far more than we credit them (and sometimes far more than us)!
One of the talking points with adults preparing to take part in communion in church tends to be how and when does the bread and wine become Jesus?
Stanley Hauwerwas deals with that question far better than I:
“Too often accounts of how or when the elements (bread and wine) become the body and blood are attempts to provide mechanistic explanations, assuming that God cannot get into his creation is something “back there.” But we must remember that our salvation is created in the midst of the earth. The God who created us continues to create and redeem. The first sentence of Mathew’s gospel made that clear. By being made sharers in Jesus’ body and blood, we participate in the new creation.
The God who is in Christ, very God and very man, is also the God that has no difficulty in being found in the bread and the wine made for us the body and blood of Christ….The Eucharist is the feast that makes Christ’s time the time in which his people live… This meal, therefore, becomes the meal of unity binding Christians through time and space to be one body, one Christ, for the world.[1]
Whenever we share a meal with friends, family, colleagues etc. we come together in love and fellowship – don’t believe me, what does it feel like trying to eat a meal with some-one you have fallen out with!
Stanley Hauwerwas’s last sentence (highlighted in bold) is the one that really needs addressing in the institutional church and particularly across denominations!
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