Living the Quadrilateral

As a seminary student at Duke Divinity School I developed a whole new appreciation for the sacrament of Holy Communion. In retrospect, I had a long way to go when I arrived at the hallowed halls of Duke. I grew up in an fairly large United Methodist Church in eastern Ohio and there we celebrated Holy Communion once a quarter and on special holidays like Christmas Eve and Good Friday. It was largely a mechanical process with the congregation going through the motions and the idea of encountering God in the sacrament was subsumed by concerns over actually swallowing the cardboard like communion wafer and not spilling the tiny little cup of juice on the altar rail. Thankfully, the watchful eye of my mom kept my brother and me from taking two cups of juice from the tray in a vain effort to wash down the cardboard communion wafer.

Walking into the Divinity School chapel service 5 days a week and receiving communion each day was a new thing. First, they served awesome bread. No cardboard wafers adorned the carved wood communion table in the chapel. The little glasses of grape juice that I was accustomed to were replaced by four beautiful pottery chalices. I have to admit that this initially confused me because receiving communion through intinction (where the recipient dips their peice of bread into the chalice) was unheard of in my midwestern United Methodist congregation back home. The ordained faculty who consecrated the elements and led the liturgy used different versions of the various prayers and delivered them with emotion instead of gliding through a rote recitation of the same liturgy. The students and faculty who went forward to receive Holy Communion did so with humility and reverence rather than the impatience of the typical congregant in my home church who sped through the receiving line in thinly veiled impatience at the preacher for making them go through this little ritual on the way to the real attraction of the worship service which was the sermon. For the first time since my call to ministry that came during a communion service at a church camp, I encountered the presence of the Risen Christ in the sacrament. It was glorious. And it kept me coming back for more. You would think that a seminary might require attendance at chapel but this was not the case. Nevertheless, most students and faculty attended the daily chapel services with its daily celebration of the sacrament. Maybe my fellow students attended out of a reliance on God that the overwhelming workload of seminary quickly engenders. Maybe the faculty attended to help assuage their anxiety over the future of the church that would soon be led by the wide-eyed students who sat in their classes and produced mediocre work in their effort to find the path of least resistance on their way to ordination. I like to think that most of us attended because we found the love and grace of God in the daily celebration of the sacrament.

After three years of an almost daily spiritually feasting on the presence of the Risen Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion, I graduated and started serving my first full time appointment as a pastor. I was appointed to be the associate pastor at a large church in Charlotte. It was a church that was almost 150 years old with its origins in a brush arbor camp meeting. While they had learned many things over their long history, a deep appreciation for Holy Communion was not one of them. They had finally acquiesced to a monthly celebration of the sacrament during the tenure of another pastor – but they were not happy about it and they told their pastors so on many occassions. Needless to say, this was quite a shock and was completely different from my seminary experience.

I remember a gentleman approaching me after worship on a communion Sunday and venting his frustration with the celebration of the sacrament. He felt that we celebrated communion too frequently and that it would stop being special if we kept doing it so often. He suggested we return to the quarterly celebration of the sacrament. In retrospect I have titled this the “It will stop being special” myth about Holy Communion. On the surface the logic seems to hold up. If we do something frequently enough we can take it for granted and it fades into the background and we can cruise by it on autopilot. However, just because it happens some of the time does not mean it is a universal truth. Some things are too important to approach in this manner. Do we stop hugging our children and telling them that we love them because we want it to stay special or do we think that is important enough that they know our love and devotion to them each and every day? My guess is that it is the latter. Do we only tell our spouse that we love them once a quarter because we want it to be special when we finally say the words or do we seize every opportunity to tell the person who has covenanted to walk with us through life how much we appreciate them? Do we only hold their hand or give them a peck on the cheek once a quarter or do we express our affection for them more frequently? Again, my guess is that we tell our spouse that we love them on a daily basis and hold their hand every chance we get. Why? Because some things never lose their specialness. They matter and the frequency of our engagement in them does not diminish that specialness. If anything, frequency reinforces it.

I would suggest that this is the case with communion. The frequency of its celebration is not the problem. Maybe the real problem is that we see Holy Communion as some time-wasting ritual in the worship service instead of an opportunity to experience the love and grace of a Savior who loved us enough to carry the weight of our sins. Maybe the problem is that we don’t see communion as a chance to tell that Savior how much we appreciate what he has done for us by pausing and remembering his mighty acts of grace. If that is the way we feel, then we are missing the point of Holy Communion and the church is not wrong for offering it on a frequent basis. We are the ones who need to get a clue. Jesus promised to meet us in this holy meal. Of all the places we can find him in the world, he has guaranteed to be present in the sacrament. Can we really be in the presence of Jesus too much? Can it really stop being special because we did it last month? I don’t think so. If we look deep enough into our souls we know that our problem isn’t that we have had too much time with Jesus. No – the problem is that we haven’t had enough time with him.

The myth that Holy Communion will stop being special if we do it too frequently is just that – a myth.

About a year after the above discussion regarding the frequency of communion I came across another myth about the sacrament. I had noticed that one of our church members never came forward to receive Holy Communion. He would participate in all aspects of the liturgy but he always remained in his pew while the rest of the congregation came forward. This peaked my curiousity so I approached him one Sunday after the service and politely inquired about it. I expected to hear that he had ties to the Roman Catholic Church since many who abstain from receiving communion in the United Methodist Church do so because Roman Catholics should not receive communion in a Protestant church. They’ll attend worship in a Protestant church with a Protestant spouse or friend but draw the line at participation in Holy Communion. But that was not the case with this gentleman. In a sincere and humble voice he told me that he wasn’t worthy to receive Holy Communion. He remembered that Paul advised the Corinthian church to not partake of the holy meal in an unworthy manner and since he was a sinner (his words, not mine) he did not want to run afoul of the apostle’s direction. On one level he was right. None of us are worthy to receive the love and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ remembered and communicated through Holy Communion. However, we are invited to the table of the Lord anyway. Not being worthy and being invited anyway is one of the ways that the sacrament of Holy Communion communicates the grace of God to us.

The idea that we have to be worthy before we can receive communion is what I like to call it the “Monty Python myth” regarding communion. If you have seen The Holy Grail you may remember a scene where King Arthur and his knights encounter God and start bowing and scraping in awe and reverence. God tells them that he really quite tired of all the “I’m not worthy” talk and to stand up and stop grovelling. If we recall the ministry and teachings of Jesus we’ll see countless occassions where Jesus seeks out the unworthy and spends time with them. He invites himself to dinner with the notorious sinner and tax collector, Zacchaeus. He engages in an extended conversation with the Samaritan woman who had been in numerous questionable relationships with men. Indeed in Luke 15, Jesus explicity says that he came to seek out and save the lost. I see nothing in there that says anything about Jesus only being interested in the “worthy lost.”

So what did Paul mean when he said not to partake of communion in an unworthy manner? Paul was actually addressing a situation unique to the Corinthian church where the wealthy upper-class members arrived early for the fellowship meal that surrounded the first century celebration of the sacrament and ate all the food – leaving nothing but scraps for the poorer members of the church to dine upon. Paul thought such behavior unworthy of a remembrance of Jesus’ love hence his advice to the Corinthian church. His words were never meant to dissuade followers of Jesus from receiving the love and grace of the Lord present in the sacrament. So it is time to set aside the myth that we have to be worthy to receive Holy Communion because, in truth, we are preventing ourselves from encountering the presence of Christ who has the power to help us overcome our unworthiness. To insist that we have to stay away from the sacrament until we are worthy is to declare that our sin is greater than Christ’s love and I am reasonably confident that runs contrary to what Paul wrote in Romans 8 when he declared that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:38). It is time to get over ourselves and our sin and trust that God loves us. It is time to step down the aisle towards the table of Lord confident that his love is greater than our sin and experience his love and grace.

Instead of finding reasons not to participate in the celebration of Holy Communion, we should be looking for every opporunity to do so. I don’t know about you, but I can use all of the grace that Christ has to offer. I suspect that the same is true for you.

Over the summer I read Ian Cron’s amazing memior of his childhood entitled, Jesus, My Father, the CIA and Me.  He is a great writer with a true gift for storytelling.  The book made me laugh out loud on numeorus occassions and weep uncontrollably at other moments.  Those who know me are aware that I am not an overly emotional guy who wears his feelings on his sleeve so that is saying something about the power of the book.  I am currently re-reading the book with a small group of men who meet at our church early on Friday mornings and a passage stirred up some reflections that I wanted to share here.

In his book, Ian Cron remembers and reflects upon the difficult relationship that he had with his father who worked for the CIA and struggled with alcoholism.  At one point, Ian writes about the need that every boy has to feel the unconditional love and acceptance of his father.

A young boy needs a father who tells him that life is a loaner, who helps him discover why God sent him to this troubled earth so he doesn’t die without having tried to make it better. Most of all, a boy needs to be able to look into his father’s eyes and see admiration and delight.  Frederick Buechner once wrote, ‘The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.’

To see delight in your father’s eyes is to see his belief that the party of life would be a bust withoutyou….Boys without fathers, or boys with fathers who for whatever reason keep their loveundisclosed, begin life without a center of gravity.  They float like astronauts in space, hoping tofind ballast and a patch of earth where they can plant their feet and make a life.  Many of us wholive without these gifts that only a father can bestow go through life banging from guardrail toguardrail,trying to determine why our fathers kept their love nameless, as if ashamed. 1

As I read these words again last night, it hit me that much the same could be said of our relationship with God.  Without the assurance of God’s love in our lives, a nagging sense of insecurity lurks in the corners of our souls.  We veer this way and that looking for something or someone to keep us centered on the road of life.  But how could this happen?  How could someone believe that God doesn’t love them? Don’t we hear about the love of God time and time again in Sunday school and in sermon after sermon?  To a certain extent we do – especially in Christian denominations such as the United Methodist Church that stress the love and grace of God above the other attributes of the divine.  But another thread is woven into our descriptions and conceptions of God and that is the emphasis on God’s holiness and justice.  God is described as perfect and holy and unable to abide sin.  And despite our capacity for self-deception we know in our heart of hearts that we sin.  In big ways and little ways we sin against ourselves, the people around us and God.  Following that logic it is easy to conclude that God might not really love us because God cannot abide sin.

Both of these qualities (love and holiness) of God are scriptural so it is tough to discount either of them and so we bounce from guardrail to guardrail.  At times we feel that God loves us despite our imperfections and at other times we feel that the Lord could not abide our sinful presence and therefore cannot love us.  We swing between spritual peaks and valleys of despair.  If you have ever driven on the Blue Ridge Parkway with its twists and turns and ups and downs you know that it takes a lot of work to keep the car on the road and after a while you need to take a break.  You just can’t keep up that kind of pace indefinitely.  The same thing happens in our spiritual lives.  We get exhausted from all the wild swings and just want to park the car and get out.  And sometimes we don’t get back in the car.

The truth is that this situation is one of our own making.  It is the result of our insecurity running unchecked.  We think that if the imperfect human beings around us have a hard time overlooking our sin to love and accept us, then it would be impossible for the perfect God, the Lord of the Universe, to do so.  We make the mistake of thinking that God is just as petty and impatient as we are.  The good news is that God is not.  God is better than us in this regard.  It is also the result of our forgetting the story arc in the Bible leads to Jesus, the cross, and resurrection.  Our sin does not have the last word.  God’s love for us is greater than his disdain for sin.  In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus shares the familiar parable of the prodigal son and tells us that God is like the loving father who throws a huge party for the sinful son who comes home.  God’s love trumps our sin.  We see that God believes that the party isn’t complete without us. The apostle Paul writes that while we were yet sinners, God reconciled us to himself in Jesus Christ.  God didn’t wait for us to get our act together to love us.  He loved us anyway and took the initiative to make things right between us.

God has made his love known to us and continues to do so in countless ways but we are often not looking for it and consequently we miss it.  God does not keep his love for us a secret.  God is not ashamed of us.  As someone has said, “That is news that is too good not to be true.”

1 Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, p. 47

There are seasons in the spiritual life that come and go and each brings with them unique challenges and rewards. Perhaps the most feared is the spiritual drought. This is a time when you feel especially distant from God and your spiritual life seems to dry up. This can be devastating.  In many ways, the spiritual insight and faith we gain from prayer and reflection are akin to water which is so necessary for our survival and when it drys up we are left in a very desolate place. When this happens we face several choices: 1) Do nothing and wither from thirst 2) Drill new wells 3) Drill an existing well deeper.

The winter and spring of this year was a time of intense spiritual drought in my life and in my encounter with this crisis I tried all three of the above choices. Now that I have moved (with God’s love and grace) through this spiritual drought I thought I would share some of what I learned so that others might not make the same mistakes that I did.

One of the first things I did was reflect on how I ended up in a time of spiritual drought and, for me, the answer was pretty clear: I let my work at the church and my family responsibilities crowd out my time for prayer, scripture reading and personal reflection. Over time I just spent less and less of my time doing the things required to nurture my spiritual life. Now I did so for a number of “good” reasons: increasing responsibilities at work and at home, a desire to help others, the mistaken belief that time for personal spiritual formation was a selfish thing (and being selfish is a bad thing for a Christian to do), the desire to meet certain goals as a pastor, father, and husband. In all of this it is easy to lose sight of what gives you the energy to be and do what you want and need to do. In the Old Testament, God warned the Hebrews that this sort of thing can happen. As they were about to settle Canaan, God warned them of the dangers of forgetting who and whose they were. He warned them of the peril of crediting their ability as the source of the success they experienced. And of course, we know that is exactly what they did. So you begin to take the source of your spiritual energy for granted. You accomplish goals and complete tasks and you begin to think that it was your resolve, your intelligence, and your ability that made it all happen. Without time for prayer and reflection you will forget who and whose you are. And when that happens, many are the voices that will fill the void you have created. You fall prey to the temptation that you can be all the things you need to be and do all the things that you need to do on your own.

But the truth is you can’t do it on your own. Sooner or later you will reach the limits of your own strength and resolve as the debilitating effects of spiritual thirst set in. When this happens, it launches a cascade of undesirable effects in your life. My enthusiasm for ministry went way down and my work at the church felt mechanical and hollow. My creativity dried up and writing became extremely difficult. Insight into my own life vaporized. I stopped being patient in stressful situations at home or at work. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt as though I was “looking through a glass darkly” as the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12. And when you have trouble recognizing the person you have become, it is time to admit that you have a problem and take steps to remedy it.

I started taking those steps over the summer months. With the help of others, I started drilling the spiritual well deeper and also began to drill some new wells. Perhaps I should not be surprised by it but the living water was there all along waiting for me access it. As I reflect on what got the water flowing again several thoughts come to mind. Getting started is perhaps the most important thing. Don’t beat yourself up for what you have allowed to happen. Just begin the search for the living water. Don’t wait for the pefect book or tool or resource because there will never be the perfect book or tool or resource. Set aside the time for prayer and spiritual reflection. Don’t wait for the time to materialize. Don’t try to fit it into your schedule. Do it first and then fit the rest of your life around it. I would also recommend that you do what works for you. Try different things until you hit on the right combination of prayer, scripture, books, journaling, etc. And make sure you have realistic expectations. Not every day will be a “mountain top” experience where you feel God especially near. To borrow an anaology from baseball: you don’t have to hit a homerun every time at bat – just try and get on base. Some days will be more special or revelatory of spiritual insight than others and that is OK. God is also found in the normal routines and disciplines of life. God often meets us in the ordinary. Time spent in prayer and spiritual reflection attunes our senses to God’s presence in the places where we might have previously overlooked him.

John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) conceived of the spiritual life as a lifelong process way back in the 18th century and we would do well to remember his guidance. For Wesley, spirituality is the not the result of a singular event. It may begin there but it needs refreshment if we are to grow in our relationship with God. Each day brings us another opportunity to drill the spiritual well ever deeper. If we stop drilling, we run the risk of running out of water as the well dries up. I have learned the hard way about the dangers of letting that happen. It is not an experience I wish to repeat. It is my prayer that these words will either help you avoid such a crisis or will help you find your way out of it because living in spiritual thirst is no way to live.