As my body is nourished by the bread and the wine, my soul is strengthened by the Body and Blood of Christ. I receive God’s forgiveness, and I am renewed in the love and unity of the Body of Christ, the Church. I should continue to grow in holiness, avoiding sin, showing love and forgiveness to all, and serving others in gratitude.
To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism
As Anglicans, we do not merely take the bread and wine in a memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection. We participate with and receive the grace of both the visible and invisible symbols. We understand and join the narrative by reenacting the four-fold shape of Holy Communion taught by Christ at the Last Supper through the shape of our liturgy.
In the readings of Jesus feeding the thousands and his last meal with the disciples, we see this reoccurring model:
- take/took (Offertory)
- thank (Eucharistic prayer)
- break (Fraction)
- give (Communion; with God, with others)
Each week we pray through and engage with this Eucharistic model in our liturgy. It is communicating a story in which we become participants. It is the story of Christ self-emptying for all humanity. This kenosis-form is the shape we are ingesting, inhabiting, and being discipled to model in the world. By habitually participating and receiving Eucharist, it is forming us to live the cruciform life. We are quite literally becoming what we eat.
Anglican priest, Tish Harrison Warren in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, explains it best. “The Scriptures and the sacraments reorient us to be people who feed on the bread of life together and are sent out as stewards of redemption. We recall and reenact Christ’s life poured out for us, and we are transformed into people who pour out our lives for others. We are formed by our habits of consumption.”
Next time you pray the liturgy of the Eucharistic Rite take pause to notice how the community is enacting Christ’s story as our own when we participate in this four-fold ritual.
Take: We take all of ourselves to Christ; our gifts, our finances, our abilities, our families, all we think we own over to God’s loving will. As we take ourselves to the altar, we self-empty before Christ. This is our offering of surrender to God’s will in all areas of our lives.
Thanks: We then give thanks for all God’s provided for us in this life. We recognize all we have is not our own, but given by God’s good grace. We praise God for the grace to live, move, and have our being. (Acts. 17:28 NIV)This is our act of worship.
Break: Then we recall Christ’s brokenness as our own. We suffer with Christ as he suffers on our behalf. This is the corporate recognition of our sinfulness, need for forgiveness, and mercy offered to us as we approach the table. We remember it is through death that life is possible.
Give: Only then are we able to corporately give of ourselves. When we receive Christ’s spiritual food we are enacting our corporate consent to our ongoing transformation into Christ’s real body. We are consenting to being Christ’s real hands and feet to those in need.
Holy Communion is the enactment of becoming one with God’s flesh and blood. This formational act of discipleship empowers us to emulate Christ’s self-emptying love to those suffering among us: the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, our enemies, our friends, our family, and our brothers and sisters.
I’d like to end with an excerpt from Oswald Chamber’s devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest. I read this book as a teen and remember how moving this particular devotion awakened an awareness of what it means to partake in Christ’s body and blood. Over the course of many years of struggling within varying denominational practices of communion, I’ve only recently begun to understand the spiritual reality of how God forms us as we habitually and communally participate in this four-fold Eucharist Rite. Oswald’s age-old words of “becoming broken bread and poured out wine” speak frankly about how God forms us when we let ourselves be taken, give thanks, become broken/crushed, and poured out.
September 30 ~ Colossians 1:24
“I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” (NRSVA)
“[Our] call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. God can never make us wine if we object to the fingers he uses to crush us with. If ever we are going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed. To be a sacramental personality means that the elements of the natural life are presented by God as they are broken providentially in His service. We have to be adjusted into God before we can be broken bread in His hands.”
True participation in the Holy Communion form is consenting to enter into God’s hands to be crushed, transformed, and presented to the world humbly for service. The world doesn’t need bullet proof super heroes for Jesus, she needs broken and poured out souls transformed by Christ and living the cruciform life of compassion.
Next Week– Eucharist: Becoming the “real presence”
