column on Oregon and World Communion sunday

When I was a child, the nuns told us to offer up suffering to God. It was one of the many things I did not grasp, and I still don’t. I started writing this piece, but the news of another gun massacre, this time in Oregon, intruded. Why would God want to accept suffering as a gift? What would make us think it was a proper offering? Thursday night, people lit candles and made makeshift memorial to the lives lost and those injured. For almost two thousand years, Communion has been the key to the liturgy of suffering and hope in the midst of a violent world.

This Sunday is World Communion Sunday in many churches. It started by the great Hugh T. Kerr at Shadyside Presbyterian, Pittsburgh, in the depths of Depression in 1933, and the northern denomination picked it up three years later, and it was adopted by the Federal Council of Churches before we entered WWII. Just as a world was threatened in economic collapse and the rise of Hitler, Communion could imagine a new and brighter future.   

This celebration is steeped in irony. One can find the sacrament of Communion held in nearly every type of Christian church. One can also find few liturgical elements so little understood. Even with its manifest ignorance, it is also a part of the liturgy that we know we disagree. In this new century, Christians of different groupings cannot receive the sacrament that helps define the unity of the faith. Churches may be loath to excommunicate a church member, but we have little trouble excommunicating others.

Communion fits a time such as this (Esther 4:14). It is based on the broken, bleeding body of Jesus. It is a   stark reminder, reliving of trauma. It creates a community of the suffering.  Suffering isolates. Shame isolates. Communion is the sacrament of solidarity, public solidarity with those who suffer.

At the same time, it is a powerful evocation that suffering does not get the last word. After all, Jesus adapted the meaning of Passover to his own life as a representative of us. Passover saw the Destroyer pass over the houses of Israel, so it was a movement of life as they would move from the dying hand of slavery to the light of freedom. Communion is also a sacrament of healing. The broken can be healed, and pieces put back together. It is an enactment of life overcoming suffering and even death itself. While we may not agree on the meaning of the elements, we have a long tradition that bread and wine are changed from their basic separate elements. Sacramentally, those simple elements are transformed into vehicles for reception of Jesus Christ into the very marrow of our lives.

One of the theological missteps of the American church is permitting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to be merely of memory of that last Passover meal. For it to be Eucharist, it is grateful not only for a sacrifice of an innocent life, but for the raising of that self same life. However we struggle to define it, with Paul in First Corinthians (10:19) we get the awe-inspiring opportunity of sharing, participating in (koinonia) the living Christ. Does Christ bear the scars of crucifixion? According to John’s gospel (20:19-31,), yes.

Suffering without meaning destroys a person. We may never make sense of suffering, but when we attach some redemptive purpose for it, we get tethered to hope and life, not despair and death. Right now, I feel despair for a country bowing down to the god of death, the cult of the gun. Communion points us forward, to a future of peace.