I didn't take Communion
until I was 13.
The Southern Baptist church
I grew up in takes its sacraments seriously, although it does not call them
that. Following an “evangelical salvation experience," believer’s
baptism is the pinnacle act of a Southern Baptist childhood. You get saved, get
baptized, and then you can take the Lord’s Supper. This was always understood,
if you hadn’t been brave enough to step up in front of the church and say, “I’m
saved only in the cross of Christ” and get dunked, then you didn’t get to sit
at the Communion table.
My “evangelical salvation
experience” left much to be desired—as it does for many church kids who grow up
learning to accept Jesus into their hearts the same way they learn how to love
their parents—but it still came a little later than my friends. The shame of
being behind even applies to salvation in Sunday school classes. So, I forwent
being baptized because a public declaration of salvation was a public
declaration of being late to the party. This was something I had to work
through, and doing so was a pivotal point of my spiritual growth.
My church does Communion
quarterly, my dad always told me this is because it is supposed to be special,
not an every Sunday routine. The nice old, men ushers would walk slowly to the
front, and we would all wait for the seemly lengthy amount of time it took to
properly distribute the stacked silver plates. Then they went about
systematically passing these silver stacks around until everyone has one pale
little cracker and a centimeter of grape juice in a tiny thick plastic cup. We
would sit quietly as the organ played and everyone passed. Then the men would
make their way back up, and the pastor would read one of the standard passages
about the night Jesus was betrayed.
Before November of 2009, I
would let the plate pass by me the fourth Sunday of every third month,
embarrassed and concerned what everyone thought, but not as concerned as I was
about taking Communion falsely, before I was fully committed.
Instead, I sat back and
watched as everyone simultaneously threw their heads back to drink the grape
juice blood out of the tiny thick plastic cup that would then be quickly
stacked and slid into their church chair nook. There was so much unity in that
movement. Many profess the unity of a single alter cup, the walk up and drink
method; I profess the unity of the simultaneous throwing back of heads; the
unity of chomping small round crackers together; the unity of the Sunday
afternoon church family lunches at the fast-food restaurant across the street.
Somehow in taking His Body, we become His Body. Somehow by being His Body, we
find the joy of salvation more fully together.
I was 13 when I finally
decided to look past the people I thought were looking at me and get baptized.
The next Sunday I took communion for the first time. These two sacraments are
so woven in my mind that they are hard to separate. My first communion wasn’t
preceded by a class; I didn’t buy a new dress, no one knew it was momentous but
me. When I finally partook I felt the unity of the body, not just the people
surrounding me, but the greater body who called back to the beauty of a simple
meal and a wooden cross and I cried to myself quietly. I felt the grafting in
to the body of Christ then more tangibly than during my evangelical conversion
or my Baptist dunking. The reality of God’s sacrifice resonated in me more
deeply than ever after “take and drink” and before the benediction.
Baptism was my public
confession to God; Communion is God’s public confession to me.
Then and still now I let
the small cracker that had to have been purchased from some religious
superstore roll around my tongue as I considered what it meant that Jesus was
broken, broken and bruised and beat, for my sins. That truth snaps and sits dry
in your throat, lingers in your mouth longer than you wished it would. It begs
for something more. But then, then, I taste how sweet the small sip of juice is
after a morning of forgotten breakfast. The blood from the cup of the covenant
is sweet, it was hard and bitter and it flowed because of sin and for sin, but
it is as sweet as poorly mixed grape juice concentrate on a Sunday morning. The
little bit of juice is enough to wash down the brokenness of a dry cracker just
as the blood washed down the pain of his broken body. It is the atonement being
professed in the simplest way: sin has broken the bread and Christ has
conquered with the cup.
The Lord’s Supper is a
physical reminder sitting in my stomach reminding me of the simple truth that
holds me afloat. When I am flooded by confusion and doubt, when I lack the
understanding I desire and feel disconnected from the truth, communion sits in
my stomach and reminds me that salvation, the salvation of a confusing big God
who mysteriously atoned for the sins of the world on a cross, is as easy as a
cracker and a sip of juice.
When I got to college
people started telling me I didn't understand the sacraments because I had
never called them that before, because I didn't know the word Eucharist and
didn't want to take the wine at Anglican Church they said I didn't know the
mystery of the body and the blood. It was embarrassing the first time I
crossed my arms at the Episcopal alter on a Sunday visit. When I got back to
the pew and my friends asked me why I hadn’t received, I just shrugged my
shoulders and pretended I wasn’t ashamed of my ingrained Southern Baptist
discomfort with alcohol. That Eucharist wouldn’t have been the sacramental
promise that God and I had worked out; it would have just been my first drink
of watered-down wine.
I have thought deeply and
felt fully what it means to take the body and blood—this doesn’t change because
I don’t agree with the doctrines of substantiation and don’t particularly
prefer using pita bread and wine. It makes me nervous to consider that people
think my quarterly cracker and grape juice aren’t sacred. They are deeply
sacred to me and they call back to my baptism and my salvation. They remind me
how unable I am to save myself. Communion is deeply personal and deeply
communal, it is a mystery—a mystery I know full well.
The Lord’s Supper is a
call. To remember—remember the truth of a savior who atoned for sin. Who loved
and professed Himself through community and a meal, through the simplicity of
bread and cup and the mystery of the metaphor they represent. To remember the
love of a convent that was created, fulfilled, and made new by a God so big, gracious,
and just we cannot wrap our heads around Him. This covenant that was impossible
for me to complete, it provides God to me even though I can’t do my part. The
blood of Jesus came and fulfilled that covenant for me. It tore the veil that
separated me and let the light of salvation pour down on me, and so I get to
sit and drink it in like grape juice.
These are my sacraments;
they are God being real to me because of my being real to God.
