What a Difference a Slide Makes
Jan
22
Written by:
1/22/2009 4:41 PM
"Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid..."
We celebrate the Lord's Supper every week at Emmaus. This is beautiful. It's an act of worship that involves taste and touch and smell -- senses that typically get left out in a worship service. I think it was Luther who said something like, "God gave us five senses. Why would we ever use less than that in worship?" And yet we do. So often our experience of God in a worship service is nothing more than auditory; we hear a sermon and some songs. Sometimes it's visual too as we see the cross or some other images that frame our experience. But in communion...
In communion we are called out of our seats. We're brought face to face with someone who looks us in the eye, calls us by name and tells us that Christ's body was broken for us and Christ's blood was shed for us. Then we touch this body. And we smell and taste and savor this moment. It's truly beautiful.
For the next 7 weeks we'll be working our way through the prayer for communion that has been prayed at Emmaus for the last 200 weeks. That's right - every week since the church began meeting, people at Emmaus have prayed the same prayer to enter into the experience of Christ at the table. It begins like this: "Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid..." Some of it is led by the person serving communion. Some of it is recited together by the congregation. But every week it's the same. The same prayer. The same words. The same inflection in our corporate recitation. Even the picture on the slide that serves as the backdrop for the experience is the same.
To be honest, there is something in me that resists this. As embarrassing as it is to admit, the practice of communion has sometimes felt stale - a bit too ordinary. I know that the fault lies solely with me. But regardless, I have found myself simply going through the motion of this supper. Simply saying words without meaning. Almost hypnotized by the monotony - nearly asleep in the sea of voices around me. It's not every week, but sometimes...
Something happened this week though. The slide was different. It wasn't the picture of brownish-gold candles that I've seen during communion every week since I've been at Emmaus. Instead there was a glorious image of Christ and the disciples at the last supper - celebrating the ritual just like us. Somehow this seemingly small change (it's one image - 400 x 300 pixels on a computer) snapped me out of a trance. Somehow I was aware again of the feel of the bread in my fingers and the taste and the smell of the juice on my tongue. I was aware of the moment.