When I would walk to church as a boy, the crippled grandmothers of our area would be walking up the steep hill toward church with rosaries in hand, saying (bieda, bieda forgive spelling of slavic tongues) poverty, poverty, a spiritual and material lack. the book of Lamentations starts out with a single exclamation, ekah.It’s a world of hurt rolled up in a word, like George Jones bending a note, or sinatra phrasing a line in a song such as It Never entered My Mind.
We speak of celebrating Communion, but it rarely feels like it. It often has the feel of a funeral service to me, as we have unthinkingly adopted the Baptist view of Communion as a mere memorial of the death of Jesus.That’s my lament this morning as we enter into this day. We have sadly relegated this sacrament ot the back of awareness and have accepted a poor substitute for its fullness, depth, and richness. For a generation the national PCUSA has been urging us to have Communion every week. Most congregations have responded by having it more frequently. World Communion Sunday does move us to examine the world of our fellow Christians.It also is a casue for lament that the great symbol of christian unity is riven by disagreements so that some of our chruches withhold the sacrament from each other.
Lament is a proper response to a world riven by conflict and pain. As Cornelius Plantinga says, lament makes sense only in the belief that god is active and is being called ot arrest obvious injustices. Lament makes sense only if we consider that we worship a god who listens.Our world does seem out of kilter, but then again, it has always been the case.Lament releases energies expended in suppressing thoughts and feelings.One of the trouble with laments is that God seems silent in the face of our suffering. A listening ear is vital, but we are looking for a response.Even here at the beginning of Lamentations, we sense some distance between the narrator and the suffering.
In part, communion speaks a word to us that we can handle in the face of laments. Yes, words of thanksgiving dominate our ritual, but its core is wordless: the breaking of bread and the pouring of wine.God speaks through the action of communion.I am sure that we have all been noting, re-reading, and celebrating the 450th anniversary of the heidelberg Catechism, the first reformed statement of faith that reached these shores in New York, before the Westminster confession was written. Look at its thick view of Communion. A19th century advocate of it, Nevin of Pennsylvania said this: “through the Holy “soirit we participate ...mystically,,dynamically, and substantially through the inmost soul-center of our being, int he divine life that springs up perpetually though the fountain of the humanity of christ, for our dreary and dying nature.”
Years ago, Communion was called the medicine of immortality. Applying the words of amazing Grace, it is healing balm for sin-sick souls.Communion does incorporate laments into its very fabric, but it also answers lament with the same word of hope that lies at the very center of Lamentations.Our hope lies, in part, in the very word Communion. We do not live all alone, but we live within the relationships of lf life through the church. We do not grieve alone or celebrate alone. This spiritual feast is not for hermits. More significantly, we are in Communion with the living risen Christ fully. both divine and human energies of Jesus Christ enter into our very lives as surely as the food becomes part of our body structure.God is part of the fabric of our lives.
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