… or, the joy of sharing Holy Communion round a table
A Bishop recently asked me if I thought the Church could exist without Sacraments. The conversation we were having revolved around the Eucharist – also known as the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. It is the bit of the service, usually at the end, when people share bread and wine together “in Remembrance” of Jesus.
My experience (or rather, absence) of Holy Communion growing up
The United Reformed Church in which I grew up had Holy Communion once a month, tacked on at the end of the morning service . Small cubes of sliced white bread and thimbles of alcohol-free wine were distributed to the seated congregation and consumed with grave seriousness. As teenagers we used to ask each other, “Will you be staying for Communion?” And the answer was almost always, “No.” Until we had made our ‘confession of faith’ and become church members we weren’t allowed to participate, and church was dull enough as it was without an extra 15 minutes tacked on the end!
I suppose, at that age, I was totally missing the point. No-one explained to me the point of Holy Communion, and my observation of the practice hardly invoked the feeling of awe and holiness that the liturgy (had I bothered listening to it) implied as we ate and drank together. By the time I was an adult I had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to the Sacraments.
Nowadays my approach is entirely different. Practising and participating in Holy Communion as part of a meal has made it more meaningful and moving than I could ever have imagined when I was young.
Sharing Holy Communion at the meal table
My first Holy Communion as a member of Hug Cullompton is an occasion I will never forget. A number of us gathered at my house and shared a meal. Each person had brought something. As we ate and drank we discussed our lives, our prayer requests and a piece of scripture that one of us had been reflecting on. Towards the end we moved into a time of worship, still seated round the table. I took a glass of wine and bread roll, told the story of what happened on the night Jesus was betrayed and said, by heart, the words of the prayer of thanksgiving. As we ate and drank, many of us were moved to tears. It was a truly holy moment, and there was an amazing corporate sense of God’s presence among us at that time in that place.
Looking back, I am sad that the sacramental life of the church used to have so little meaning for me. Although I hesitate to say I love the thimble-and-cube method, my experience now of sharing bread and wine in the context of a faith community is totally different. Not only does it fill me with the sense of awe and holiness I missed when I was young, it transports me ineffably to another place.
There is something very special about celebrating Holy Communion round a meal table with friends, something Biblical. It is what the first Christians did, and the way they did it was, in the first century Middle East, truly radical, marking them out both as a community of Jesus-believers and members of God’s eternal Kingdom.
That is what I believe Church should be – an experience which takes us beyond ourselves and into the realms of holiness; binding us together in community, so that we may in turn go out and ‘break bread’ with others.
To read more about the role of table fellowship in the earliest Jesus-believing communities, click here.
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