Is there a busier time of year, a time when we feel less pressure than Christmas? Our lists of things to do grow and groan and some things fall off the bottom. If you glance at what you didn’t do, what you failed to get round to feelings of guilt seep in. You know the normal demands of life don’t go away because Christmas has arrived. Carers are still carers and parents are still parents, the bills need paying and the leak under the sink continues to drip. It wouldn’t be uncommon to find that one of those ‘to do things’ peeling off the bottom of our list is care for our soul, spiritual nourishment if you will. My spiritual life is the most important life I have but the first casualty when competing against the tangible cries of practical life. How strange that the very thing which refreshes us, brings us to a place of greater resilience can often hold the least ranking. It’s not that we need to read our Bible more, it’s that it helps us to read myself. Our prayer or meditation is all about creating space, silence, presence in a world crammed with stuff and speed and noise.
For so many people going to church on Sunday was so much more than a religious twitch, a habit waiting to be kicked. Getting together means getting together, climbing out of our castle and spending time on neutral ground – a levelling as it were. For Christians all over the world Christmas is one day, unusual and depending on the church you attend, occasionally odd! Easter can be like this too but communion – eucharist – breaking of bread, is the staple diet. We have missed passing the cup and chewing bread from the same loaf.
Kneeling or standing as we cup the host or hold the chalice, we are being reminded that being a Christian isn’t about what a week we had. Chewing the bread, we are reminded that our body and its performance isn’t what brought us to a place of knowing God. Drinking in the wine reminds us that however many words of scripture you read in the week or hours you prayed; your faith is built on the same thing as the woman next to you. Christ’s sacrifice. She got up every morning and went to sleep every night feeling rotten because her prayers were one brief anguished word – help! She arrived in the church car park three minutes after the service started and spent three more looking for her bible in the footwell, where she put it last week after church.
At the communion table you are both reminded that being a Christian is what God in Christ on the cross made us. We gather together to be reminded not of our feelings, personal spiritual assessments or contrast with the others. The bread and wine remind us we are a Christian because of Christ. Have you ever thought that the teller of the Lord’s supper points out that it was: ‘… on the night he was betrayed, He took bread’ – notice Jesus took the bread, gave us this reminder, instituted this act of remembrance to the backdrop of human failure and betrayal. On that basis, had I been around at the time, I’m guessing I would have been welcome.
I also love that in 1 Corinthians we are told that ‘After the supper He took the cup…’. So, the space between the bread and wine was not the proximity of two servers or the gap of a few words of blessing, but a long meal. Imagine all the stuff that happens, nipping to the loo, letting the mains settle before dessert. I’m guessing we can skip the idea of cigars and brandy but you get the picture.
My prayer is not that we will soon be back in church every week because of my right to be, I’m happy to miss this one Christmas service. Yet I long to be next to my friends holding bread and wine, that great reminder that we are Christians because of what God in Christ did and regardless of what we allowed to slip off the to do list in our busyness.
Rob Wykes 