Sunday Communion

The tradition that nurtured my faith for the first 27 years of my life did not include the Lord's Supper as a part of its weekly worship. They celebrated a service of the Word with preaching, praying and singing. Occasionally there would be a service of the Lord's Supper scheduled for a Sunday Evening Service. Only those who were members of that local church need show up. Outsiders would not be fed.
I've often thought the church of my childhood gorged me on judgment and guilt and starved me on grace and acceptance. What was lacking in our Sunday worship may have, in part, been supplied by my Mother after worship each Sunday. She'd always put a roast on to cook while we were at church. Just as surely as the preacher would give an invitation I knew what our house would smell like when I walked through the door after church. No incense ever raised more expectation. The frangrance from the kitchen told you in just a few minutes the table would be set with roast beef and gravy, mashed potatoes and corn and beans, a salad, and always dessert. Sometimes it would just be our family that gathered and sometimes room would be made for a visiting professor who'd spoken that morning or a friend come to spend the afternoon. That table was an extension of the worship we experienced at church. It was a place of fellowship, a place of welcome, a place where life was good.
Last Sunday I did something I've not been able to do in several years. I shared Sunday dinner with my mother. She didn't cook the meal and the food wasn't nearly as tasty or aromatic as what I would have experienced at her table long ago. My mother's illness has taken her memory of how to feed herself away, so I cut up her food and fed her until she told me, "That's enough of that. I don't want anymore." I don't know if she knew who I was. I was familiar enough that she felt secure around me. And she laughed as I talked with her and tried to tell her little stories. That Sunday dinner could have brought me sadness for what has been lost. It could have frightened me because I carry some of my mother's genes. It could have filled me with emptiness about what is no more. But it was a blessed, God-given moment of communion, a time formed in me by a memory of what had gone before, a moment formed in her by the simple task of eating and laughing.
A book I'm reading written by Lee Wandel entitled, The Eucharist in the Reformation, states that both Augustine and John Calvin didn't believe we are capable of knowing God, only knowing the presence of God. I do believe last Sunday, at that table of communion where chicken and dumplings were served, God was present, the host who not only gives life, but shows us how to break it open and pour it out each day.