Communion in the Time of COVID
One year ago this weekend, we gathered with our fellow IACers in the freezing cold at a park on the Westside. Used to cramming shoulder to shoulder in the pews, instead we sat spread out on blankets and folding chairs with new words in our vocabulary, like “social distancing,” “flatten the curve,” “masking,” and “pandemic.” We looked at each other with eyes wide, half laughing in unbelief, wondering aloud to each other if this would be over by Easter (ah, weren’t we cute…). Still, we came forward to the table—staggered, but still together—to receive the bread and the wine. We had no idea it would be months before we would participate in communion in person again.
I’ve been reflecting today on what Sundays have looked like over the past year. We’ve had to adapt and re-adapt our meeting space, gathering sizes, music and sermon lengths, and liturgy selections, to name just a few of the moving targets of worshipping in a pandemic. I bet your church has too. And though communion has remained the central component of our church’s life together, the way we’ve come to the table has had to adapt too. Even with the knowledge that the changes to the way we participate in communion are temporary, these changes have brought a sense of loss, and have been one of my deepest griefs of this past year.
And yet as I have reflected this afternoon, I have found that my gratitude to God for this means of grace is fuller, my love for the people around this table is fiercer, and my dependence on the broken body and shed blood of Christ to sustain me is deeper and more joyful than it was a year ago.
I will never forget how our parish leaders cautiously handed off the consecrated bread in the corner of the grocery store parking lot (a spot that makes me smile every time I pass it) each Saturday in those early days of worshipping together on Zoom. Our determination to make communion possible even when we weren’t physically together stands as a reminder of the union we experience with one another as we are united to Christ through his body and blood. Just as Christ gave his body in love as a sacrifice for sins, participating in communion marks us as a people who are given as holy and living sacrifices, and empowers us by the Spirit to give ourselves for each other and the life of the world.
I remember the first Sunday we gathered in person at parks across the city after so many weeks apart. It was pure joy and relief to wave at each other and pass the peace, even if it was from six feet apart. And the view wasn’t too bad either. You’d better believe there were smiles under those masks. As we heard each other’s actual voices confess that “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again,” and ate the bread together, I was overwhelmed by the gift of presence—of God and of our brothers and sisters in Christ—when we come to the table together. It is a tangible reminder that he is with us, closer than our skin.
Since Jane was born at the first of the year, we’ve worshipped with our IAC family online. I cannot wait to return in person in the coming weeks, but these moments at home have been sweet. Today while those gathered in person in the sanctuary processed one row at a time to the front of the sanctuary, my family received the bread in our living room. I will always cherish the memory of our three-year-old giving the bread to his Daddy, saying in his little raspy voice, “This is the Body of Jesus, broken for you, because he loves you.” The act of participating in communion is forming his identity—even now—as part of the family of God that stretches around the world and throughout time.
When we come to the table, it is not only a sign of what Jesus has done for us as our full and perfect sacrifice, but also a display of who he is—our very Life. It’s an invitation to participate in what he is doing and will do among us and in us as his Kingdom comes. This past year, communion has been for me a powerful, physical reminder of the sustaining power of Christ’s life in us. It has been a discipline in hope, an anchor, and a clarifying lens through which to view “these unprecedented times.” (Side note: Can we all agree to retire that phrase once this is all over?).
What a year this has been. Let’s continue to urge each other to abide in the sustaining presence of Christ as we move toward the day when we will feast on the bread and the wine side by side again.