Tag: Communion

“Jesus Tastes like Cardboard”

·

I have always been fascinated with the Lord’s Supper. I was such a literally-thinking child that I used to understand it more as a sort of Eucharist—like I was actually eating Christ’s body and blood. Once my parents ironed that one out, I still thought it was an interesting thing. I’ve always been a bit imaginative, and a romantic. So when we, at our Baptist church, had a sort of ritual—where everyone had to be so quiet they could barely breathe and perform certain actions at prescribed times—I liked the feel of it, and the differentiation from the usual routine of three hymns, offering, a special, and a sermon. As a little girl, the Lord’s Supper reminded me of big words and dust, of mysticism and ‘the ancients.’ And I always got a warm feeling I couldn’t quite describe. I felt connected… to generations of Christians in Roman catacombs and European crypts and New England Churchyards.

And though I may not have understood the entire purpose of the procedure, I wasn’t too far off. I know today that the Lord’s Supper, or Communion, binds us together as a community. We share in and remember the sacrifice that Jesus gave for us. We remind ourselves that we are connected to each other by the same grace and the same savior. We feel intensely the bond between the future and the present. The young and the old. The saints, the apostles, the poets, the priests, the kings, the peasants, the natives, and the immigrants. In the words of C. S. Lewis, we remember our affinity with the Church as she truly is: “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners” (Screwtape Letters).

I have never lost my fascination with Communion. I wrote a couple of papers on its theology and practice in college, and I have experienced it in a handful of different ways with people from vastly different places in the world. I have come to see Communion, at least in my life, as a mile-marker, or a thermometer. It measures and records where I am with God, where I am physically, and what I am learning. There was a time when I experienced Communion as a solemn, solitary thing. I felt legalistically that I must confess every sin from my past and leave no stone unturned to be worthy to eat my wafer and swig my grape juice. I didn’t have the whole picture, but I was learning about the fear of the Lord, and about a holiness so pure and so complete as to be unapproachable. Later, I learned of our Father’s unfathomable forgiveness and grace, and of how he ate the Last Supper with his friends as brothers. I began to take Communion at more ease, understanding, while it is still a holy observance, my worthiness of it was never the point.

As I began to respond to God’s call to missions, I experienced Communion in different cultures. I served for a summer in inner-city Houston during high school, storying the Word, learning about people less fortunate than I, and discovering how to engage them as Jesus would. There I visited a church with friends I had closely bonded with. In Remembrance, we ate pinches off of a single loaf of real bread and took sips from a single cup. I was learning how people can be different from each other and worship in contrasting ways, yet be closely bonded and serve the same God wholeheartedly. Communion had its first savor of friendship for me. Jesus’ blood and body tasted… friendly. Like the communal parts of his message. It reminded me of the time long ago when 5,000 assorted and sundry people shared five loaves of bread as they listened to the Teacher.

I tell you these stories not to say that I have always had super-spiritual Communions and always prepared myself enough. I would be lying if I told you I had never gotten bored or failed to dig in down to my elbows and really remember the pain Jesus went through for my fellow believers and me. I went to a small, private, Christian college, and as a freshman, it was my Sunday ritual to grab a group of friends and go visit a new church. One time I took two friends to a yellowing, musty church downtown. We walked into the old, cavernous building and claimed a pew with a brilliant red velvet cushion, one of the vacant pews in the back third of the church that puffed with dust when we sat down. We sang the oldest hymns in the hymnal with words only a few could understand. Then we heard a brief sermon and accepted a pale, lifeless-looking wafer and a tiny plastic cup with half a swallow of grape juice. After we ate and drank, one of my friends, who didn’t grow up going to church, said in a carrying whisper, “Jesus tastes like cardboard!” I didn’t realize then the profound, if unintentional, wisdom of her words. The Jesus we often serve up in our dying, creaky, old churches tastes dry, boring, and stale. But the Jesus in the pages of my Bible is anything but cardboard. He has humor, and sarcasm, and severity, and intensity, and compassion, and irritation, and penetrating wisdom, and authoritative teachings. He is full of abundant life. The Jesus we share in our communion should be that Jesus. He should taste like life and love and repentance and wholeness. Not cardboard.

My favorite Communion to date occurred in Romania, wedged in-between members of the family that took me in for a month while I worked with the Roma people. I felt a tangible connectedness with people I could barely speak to as we sat rubbing shoulders and laughing with joy. I felt the warm, vibrant love of Christ pulsing between us like a circulatory system while we were squished together into the tiny building. To this day I don’t have words to describe the connectedness I felt. We cut up a loaf of bread just like those we used at each meal and all took a piece. We passed a bottle around and all drank from it. That day Jesus’ sacrifice tasted like family. And the mysterious bond of unity God gives his people across time and place. I was learning about the grace we share and the body broken for all of us. In Philippians 1:7, Paul says “… whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me.” No matter our location or situation, we as the Church are united by God’s grace—a single Body broken for the Church body. From that day on, Communion has never been a solitary thing for me.

Yesterday I had what will probably be my last communion with my home Church family for at least the next two years. And this time I took it with 9 people squeezed onto a 5-person pew. My family all sat to my left and I sat with a child on either side in my arms and one on my lap. I could smell their minty gum breath and the oils in the hair of the girl on my lap and the unwashed clothes they came to church in. They don’t have parents or a big sister or brother who’ll bring them to church. My family and I were happy to have them. I know that in time they’ll grow up and get to taste the Lord’s Supper for themselves and learn about what it means. I know that because of their inclusion in our church family, their lives have already changed and they have begun maturing. And as I ate Communion wedged between and under those beautiful blessings, Jesus tasted like the hope of a different life, the peace that can calm even a child from a broken home, and the unsurpassable love of our Savior. Jesus didn’t taste like cardboard. He tasted like let the little children come, and the joy of the kingdom of God. My prayer for you, reader, is that wherever you are, and whatever your communion looks like, that your Jesus wouldn’t taste like cardboard. Let him work in your life and shine through so that when the people you rub shoulders with partake of the Jesus in your life, he would taste like family, like love, like miracles and acceptance and salvation and joy and healing. And let us strive together toward this goal, in communion with each other and with our God.

The Suffering Servant

·

*Contains some graphic material

Many members of our team have already had their turns being sick or injured. We’ve got someone maybe coming down with strep throat, someone’s got painful blistered hives covering hands and feet, someone’s got a fractured foot, and all but one of us have run fever and had body aches. We try not to whine and to pick up and keep going. This kind of thing happens all the time overseas. But in the last couple of days we’ve had experiences that have put our small aches into perspective.

Today at a service we shared communion. As we all drank, we knew that we drank a cup of suffering. We heard a message about the Son sending out his followers from the upper room (Jn. 20:19-23). We cross-referenced a few stories to compare and expound, but the bulk of the message was on the idea that the Son’s words there are about incarnational ministry. We learned that he showed his followers the scars in his hands and side right before he said, “As my Father has sent me, so send I you.” He meant that they were to suffer as He had, perhaps even to the same extent. We heard that just as the Ark was YWH’s presence among his people, so was the Son in his turn and the Body of believers in ours. We are meant to suffer and to love, for it is only by that love that people will identify us for what we are. Only through that Love can they identify the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we have.

So while the suffering may not be comfortable, it is a way for us to show love. We do have stories worth suffering for. We should be glad to endure heat, sore throats, and nights of little sleep for the sake of sharing those stories. It demonstrates the Divine Presence we wish to be in our communities here, because only something that good would motivate and sustain us through whatever suffering comes our way.

The other experience that put our aches and pains into perspective was Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. This was a very difficult experience and I am still dealing with it in my own heart and mind, so I apologize if my writing seems scattered. I do not want to shock you with my stories. I want to make you weep. Weep for humanity and corruption and violence and mercilessness. Cry out to our Father like Habakkuk. Seek healing and wash the blood from your own hands. This issue is not political or ideological; it is about sin and humanity. I want to prepare you for what you are about to read so that you are not shocked by the words you will see: Interrogation. Torture. Whip. Beat. Knife. Noose. Electric wire. Infanticide. Genocide. Mass grave. Bloodstain. Merciless. Kill. Do not focus on the traumatic impact of those words. Run through the images and associations brought to your mind before you move on. I want you to identify with the heart of this issue.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. People fled from the city and it was entirely empty twenty-four hours later. For four and a half years the country lived in fear and the constant threat from the Khmer Rouge as the unchallenged ruling power. Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge party attempted a cultural revolution of sorts. The educated, the resistance, and the religiously affiliated were caught, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered, sometimes in the name of ethnic cleansing or genetic planning, sometimes in the name of totalitarianism. But these deaths were many and senseless. Some estimate 3,000,000 deaths in those years, and 20,000 mass graves have been found throughout the country to substantiate those claims.

Tuol Sleng was a high school before the takeover, but it was converted into a prison and torture facility. Only twelve of the thousands who passed through its gates survived. Captors photographed each new prisoner and well-documented deaths and torture from whips, poison, severed limbs and digits, broken facial bones, and dunking prisoners into filthy water as they hung upside down from their ankles. All who came through were tortured and interrogated to produce coerced confessions before the victims were killed. There are still bloodstains on the floor and walls. Torture instrument lie where they were left. An artist who was spared death because of his skills was forced to paint graphic pictures of the torture methods, which hang hauntingly throughout the buildings. But worst of all, hundreds of pictures of victims look straight out of wide, terrified eyes from the walls.

And the Killing Fields were even worse. Sunken pits cover the landscape, their sheer volume an indication of the number of bodies since exhumed from the mass graves. A towering, ten-level stupa houses only a fraction of the intact skulls from some of the thousands of exhumed victims. I walked past a tree where babies were held by their ankles and beat against the tree just like someone would beat out a dirty rug. One mass grave had been full of people who’d been beheaded. Another had held only women and children, most of whom had been naked at the time of their death. We walked past a shed where chemicals were kept to sprinkle on the graves to cut the stench and finish killing those buried alive. There was another painting of a child flung up into the air with a bayoneted gun primed to catch him as he fell. And even after careful excavations, bones still remained in the ground. They, along with victims clothes, wash to the surface after rain. I could not avoid stepping on pieces of bone and rags of clothes and was deeply chilled.

What should our response be to such senseless violence? How could our Father let this happen? How could we, as humans, have the capacity for such unadulterated evil? One of the signs at the Killing Fields was captioned: “In the End Justice was Found for the Cambodian People,” but how can that ever happen? How can millions of broken families be repaid? How can there be justice in the face of such extreme evil? When many of the officials remain alive today, some are even still involved in the government?

I cannot give an answer. Lost people sin like lost people. Demons and evil spirits will stop at nothing to cause and incite death and destruction, violence and chaos. Does the Evil One win this battle? We believe that YWH is more powerful. That even in the darkness he is a great light. Habakkuk asked many of the same questions, and he was given an answer that was not easy. The prophets tell us that we have blood on our hands—blood of orphans, widows, runaways, aliens, and fatherless. Our Love should compel us to reach out to them and to minister to them in their distress. We are to drink the cup of suffering with them and weep as they weep. The Son wept. As he looked over Jerusalem in Lk. 19 he pondered the corruption, violence, and lostness of the city; he was overcome with tears of compassion. But he did not stop at tears. He ventured on into the city and set about restoration and redemption. That is the work we should be about. But we should begin by weeping. We cannot hide ourselves from the hurting. And we cannot hope to make a difference in their lives if we do not cry with them. So weep with me. And lift up the lost in the darkness of the past and the present.

I have a few more scattered thoughts to leave you with, and I apologize again for my verbosity. As I walked through the museum at the Killing fields I saw an agricultural tool used for slitting throats. I was reminded of our promise that one day, swords will be beaten into plowshares, but until then, the plowshares will be beaten into swords. We live in an age in which we wait for the coming of peace. It has not yet come fully on the earth. And even as I pondered these things in my heart, I remember another who had been cruelly beaten and tortured. As I saw paintings of striped backs being burned with salt water, I remembered the back of One whose stripes healed me—who is the balm for the healing of the nations. And as I thought on Him I understood his words of comfort. “I have felt this pain too. And it was not senseless; I did it for your sake… and for theirs.” He did. He suffered as much as the faces covering the walls of Tuol Sleng. His suffering brought glory to the Father, as should ours. Suffering gives us a change to deliver up true praise. This kind of praise does not come from a place of happiness and contentment. Anyone can praise in those situations. True praise comes from a place of suffering, when you praise in spirit and in truth because our Father is sovereign—because you know that he has a wonderful, beautiful plan that maybe you don’t understand, but you know it will be for His glory. So, in the words of Habakkuk:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,

Though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,

Though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

He makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

He enables me to go on the heights.

A Child’s Communion

·

Most people have a candlelight service on Christmas Eve. Everyone celebrates the story of when Darkness had seen a Great Light by coming together as a body, sharing bread and fruit of the vine, and a single flame, multiplied to fill a room. Christmas is, after all, a community celebration. We celebrate one of our founding stories together—as the Body. We celebrate the coming of the Body that was broken for us. There is something beautiful in the cycle of the calendar and the movement of the seasons that reminds us: there is a time to celebrate the Birth, and there is a time to celebrate the Death—the single human cycle that changed movements of the world.

But that single human who changed everything came as a child. He did not have his Father. He was not living in the comforts of the home He had known since the beginning of time. Regardless of all of this, that small child had a communion, of sorts. The Body had not yet been broken, but there was a gathering to celebrate the gift of new life. Joseph and Mary were there. A ragamuffin band of shepherds even came to goggle at the birth of their redemption. In fact, the whole of the created order was present for this first restored communion. The animals in the stable witnessed the birth of this Second Adam, just as they had witnessed the birth of the First. The baby was even nestled into a bed of hay—part of the vegetation that played such a prominent part in the story of creation and was to provide for the needs of all humankind. All was brought together for one shining moment of perfect community in perfect communion. And as we are told, Mary treasured these things in her heart, just as many of us savor the taste of the bread and the grapes as we meditate over their meaning and history.

My Christmas experience this year reminded me of a few of these essential elements of the first Christmas. On Christmas Eve my team and I found ourselves in a little village in Southeast Asia. We arrived too late to find any food, and all but a few vendors with day-old bread had shut their stalls and gone home to bed. We found a room in the inn, but we shared a meditative meal of crusty bread and some liter bottles of water. Mosquitoes buzzed around our lights instead of visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. We made due with what we had in a place with which we were not familiar. And we had our little communion. We met as members of the body and shared stories of triumphs and loss. After talking about our futures on or off the Field, we heard about the believers’ work here and glorified in their successes and ached for their disunity. We savored the taste of an already-but-not-yet redemption, given, but not yet brought to fullness.

I mulled my experience over in my head, read a bit of the Word, and went to sleep. We woke up on Christmas morning and traveled to a home for children—children missing parents or whose parents cannot take care of them at home anymore. My communion experience continued with them in a different way. I shared with them about a child born into a very similar situation long ago on this day we celebrate, missing instead a Heavenly Father and away from his home. I saw in their eyes the all-surpassing understanding of children. They too knew what it meant to be out-of-place but completely belonging. There were in a communion of the Saints, brought together by nothing except a shared grace. Their community was whole and beautiful, complete with the same already-but-not-yet redemption as in that lonely stable long ago.

The End

·

Well, I was going to post today during my layover in Amsterdam, but after I typed everything up I found out that I didn’t have internet. 🙂 So, enjoy!

I am posting this blog from an airport terminal in Amsterdam. I’m on my way back home, and I’m fixing to board a plane to timewarp back to Dallas. I leave here at 10:30 in the morning and I’ll land in Dallas at about 2 in the afternoon. How is it possible that my flight over the Atlantic Ocean will take only as long as my drive home from the airport? I’ll tell you how… I’ll lose 7 hours (crossing time zones) during my 10 hour flight. I like to think that I’ll be traveling at the speed of time. Maybe that will make it easier for me to leave behind my friends and family in Romania.

Seriously though, I want to thank you all for praying for me while I’ve been gone. It has been a wonderfully blessed experience, and I am certainly not the same as when I sat in this airport waiting on the plane that would take me to Romania. In my last week God strengthened the bonds He has given me with my sisters and brothers in Romania, and leaving comes very hard. I am ready to be home, and I miss my family and friends dearly, but my chest is still tight from the grief of leaving behind my home here. God blessed me beyond my wildest imagination with the family I lived with, and I feel like I’m leaving behind a mother and father and some brothers and two little sisters. I will also miss my church family here and the beautiful children I got to work with every day. I almost want to be mad at God for the unity he gave me with the Body of Christ here for the fact that I have to leave, but I know that it is His timing, and I feel very strongly that He will bring me back. So, don’t stop praying now. Re-adjustment will be hard and I will be seeking God’s will about how and when to return and who to come with.

I left letters with the church and my foster family and my translators explaining how grateful I was for their help and for their time spent with me as we served the Lord together. I couldn’t bear to say most of the things I could write, nor could I take the frustration of imprecise translation, so I just left the letters. I know that someone (probably Florin) will end up translating them later, and so long as I’m not there, it’ll be alright. I wrote most of them Monday and I almost cried then, even though I still had a few days left.

Sunday morning we had communion at the church and I really understood for the first time the communal aspect of that meal. I have broken bread with my brothers and sisters here almost at every meal, and I thought nothing of it, just like the disciples probably thought when Jesus began to break the bread at the Last Supper. But, as we were all eating from the same loaf of bread and drinking from the same (incredibly strong!!) wine, I felt the connectedness of the community of the Kingdom wash over me like a tangible wave. It was a really odd/exciting experience. I wanted to grab the hands of the people sitting next to me and squeeze them and kiss them on the cheeks. While that is the appropriate way to express friendship or kinship here, I didn’t think it was quite appropriate for communion, so I restrained myself. It’s just become second nature now to greet people and tell them goodbye with the cheek kisses. Anyhow, after reading a bit and studying, I learned that Paul is so mad with the Corinthians (1 Cor 11) about the way they celebrate communion not only because they did so irreverently. Verses 17 to 22 indicate that Paul was fuming because the Lord’s Supper was not practiced in a way to unify, as it should have been. Instead of uniting the body, they were eating in such a way as to tear it apart into factions. It is a symbolic act to help us remember what Jesus did for us, but also to remind us that we all share in the same grace (Phil 1:7) and salvation, no matter where we are or how we are serving God. The same Body was broken for all of us, and the same blood spilt. Communion unites the Body of Christ in the same mystical way that the physicality of marriage unites a couple and makes them “one.” Paul describes this a little when he talks about the Body of Christ (the church), Christ himself, the individual believer, and married people (1 Cor 6:16-17, Eph 5:28-33). This view of communion makes sense, especially when taken in the larger context of the 1 Corinthians. Paul is talking about creating and keeping unity in the Body from chapter 10 to chapter 14. He speaks of things that divide and things that unite and he instructs on the way things should be done so as to promote unity and cooperation. I say all of that to say that I experienced communion in a completely different way Sunday, and I became even more attached to my church family here.

Sunday afternoon things just got worse (I’m getting ready to leave, people! Quit being so nice to me and inclusive; you’re making it even harder!!!). Gaby and Gigi took me and the family camping for the rest of the day. We were on a tributary of the Danube (so it was wide and shallow and great for playing in – even if no one brought a swimsuit) in a beautiful forest. Florin still couldn’t walk, so he stayed home, but Alex and Catalin (cousins) and Gaby and Gigi and I all went. We dug a fire pit and grilled some pork and toasted bread to eat, and we had dinner under the trees. Alex and Catalin caught some small fish and I took them off the hooks, and then we all played in the water. Afterwards Gigi fished with the boys and Gaby and I walked through the woods and talked. We went back and the boys finished fishing and we started to pack up. With my impeccable balance I managed to slip into the mud by the banks twice at this point, and the second time I was laughing so hard that I couldn’t get up again. Catalin and Gaby came over to pull me out and then Gaby gave me a thorough washing before we left. She made me stand on one foot so she could wash the other (or one of my shoes) and I was afraid I was going to slip again, but I didn’t. 🙂

Of course, on my last full day here (Thursday) things got even worse. Gaby and Gigi and the FARM team and I went to Dobrogei to see and play in some mountains with caves. Florin is, thankfully, on the mend. He’s had an infection but he is getting better. Dobrogei was a lot of fun, and I got closer to the FARM team. We may or may not have illegally fed the şobolani (fieldmice) our croissants. They were just so cute that we couldn’t help it. The FARM team members are from Bucareşti and they got here about the same time I did. They only have part of next week left before they go home. Ana translated for me again at Barǎci that morning and she did an excellent job. We both prayed for her to do well. She can’t speak probably about the same amount of English that I can Romanian, but she understands well. I can’t translate, of course, but I know enough words to be able to tell if I’ve gotten a true translation. After Barǎci we went straight to Dobrogei, and then we picked up Monica and dropped off FARM and headed to Peştera for my last day there. Those kids are wonderful. I’m really going to miss them. After that we went to Bible study at the church in Medgidia and then all the young people had a going-away party for me. I cried at church because of the church family I was leaving, and Ana (the FARM girl) almost made me cry at the party.

I finished up my story sets at Barǎci and Peştera this week. I did a chronological set at Peştera because the kids had enough background to the stories that I could skip a few in order to have enough time to make the historical connections and explain the order of events. They have never heard the stories that way before, so they didn’t realize the Nebuchadnezzer’s dream of the statue explained the changing empires all the way up to and through the 400 years of silence, and they didn’t realize that the mountain was Christ’s first coming and the growth of the kingdom. The story quilt Olivia made for me was a WONDERFUL help to connect the stories for the kids. I could point to Jesus and his blood on the cross and move my finger just a few inches to the picture of the Passover lamb’s blood on the doorpost to make the connection for them. I could point to the picture of Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrifice up Mount Moriah and remind the kids how Jesus carried his cross up to Golgotha. Tuesday I did the story of Jesus (birth, twelve-year-old, baptism, miracles, teachings, healings, parables, crucifixion, tomb, resurrection, ascension… *gasping for air*), and Wednesday I started Acts and explained how the rock that fell on Nebuchadnezzar’s statue became the kingdom of God and began to fill the whole earth. At Barǎci I told a cultural set because the kids had almost no background. This last week they learned about every human’s sinfulness, the punishment we deserve, and that someone was beaten for us from the story of Balaam and his donkey; about God’s power of forgiveness and cleansing from the Gaderene Demoniac; and about His overwhelming love for us and His gift of life from the resurrection of Lazarus. I’ll probably write another blog after I’ve gotten home and processed a few more things. I’ll try to give you a recap of the trip and point out the important parts, but until then, la revedere (goodbye). Thanks for the prayers, and I’ll see you soon. Thanks, guys! You were a blessing!

Blessings,

Caroline