Value 5- Week 4 Communion
Word: “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. . . . Day by day they spent much time together in the temple; they broke bread from house to house.” Acts 2:42, 44
“But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall.”
Ephesians 2:13-14
Devotion: Oneness
John tells us that on the night before Jesus died he prayed for his disciples and for all who would come to believe (the Church) that they may be one. He said our oneness with him and with each other would be the testimony to the truth about who he is. I believe it is a prayer he is still praying and one that sadly is not yet answered. Still today in the church we are divided by so many things: doctrine and theology, politics and polity, race and socio-economics, worship styles and mission focus; not to mention our personal and family conflicts that bleed over into our congregations. We are so divided that it is no wonder there are so many on the outside that have no desire to be part of us.
Paul said that in his death, Jesus has broken down the dividing walls between us. Few places in the life of the church is that experienced more than at the communion table. The old saying is that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross” and when we kneel at the table, the cross looms before us. At the open table all are welcome and we are invited not by merit, but by grace.
Few things are more personal to us than to eat together and it is more personal still when we eat from the same plate and drink from the same cup. Something that most of us would resist outside the church, we welcome at the table. The beautiful prayer in our liturgy for the breaking of the bread says, “Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf. The bread which we break is a sharing in the body of Christ.”
One of the amazing characteristics of the early church in the book of Acts was its diversity. As Paul put it, “there are no longer male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, for all are one in Christ Jesus.” The table was a part of the early church’s life together every time they gathered. Nothing else had the power to break down the religious, ethnic, and cultural barriers that were so deeply ingrained in them. The same remains true today. Unlike the world, at the communion table, money, power, position, or name mean nothing and open no doors, for Christ has opened the door for all who would come “seeking to live in peace with one another”.
The table then is more than an act of remembering what Christ has done or experiencing anew what Christ is doing, it is also where we get a foretaste of God’s future and what the Kingdom in its fullness will be when all are one in Christ and our prayer is answered: “make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world.”
Practice: Ask God at the table this week to break me of all pride and prejudice and to give me eyes to see all people like God sees them.
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