“Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the Lord’s body eat and drink judgment against themselves. . . . But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. . . . So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat [the Lord’s Supper], wait for one another.”
1 Corinthians 11:28, 29, 31, 33
One
thrust of Paul’s instructions in this epistle, is that we should come to the
Lord’s Table with “clean and contrite hearts.” In order for the bread and wine
to truly make present for us Christ’s
death and resurrection, we must know and take responsibility for our own
failings.
More
striking to me about today’s passage from 1 Corinthians was the particular sin,
and the amends for it, that Paul was focused on. The Corinthians had been
splitting into factions, some of them cutting ahead in line and getting drunk,
while others were left hungry. To Paul, it is very important that we all approach
the table as equals: “when you come
together to eat, wait for one another.”
Having
drifted from the Episcopal Church in 1979, I had first seen communion offered
in a circle around the altar, only in 2001, at my cousin’s ordination as a
Congregationalist minister. “Standing equidistant from the table makes for a
lovely ceremony,” I thought, “for Congregationalists,” but I assumed that that
sort of thing wouldn’t fly back ‘home’ in the church of Bishops, Priests and
Deacons.
I
am so glad that I was very wrong in that assumption. Standing around the altar
in a circle, as we do here, my new home, is a way of living the instructions of
St. Paul: of waiting for one another. The
Lord’s supper feels so much more communal to me, when we stand in a circle,
equidistant from the table and nearly level with the servers, rather than
approaching the altar from below, with a railing barricading the table and the
officials from the people receiving the supper.
― Patsy Goolsby
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