Communion Meditation

COMMUNION MEDITATION

By Bill Vamos

TO RISK EUCHARISTIC LOVE

Mark 14:17-31

In the Eucharist or to use the term with which we are more familiar, Holy Communion, Jesus gives us Himself. He says, as recorded in Mark 14:22: “This is my body.”

As we partake of communion we become His body. We renew ourselves and we reclaim our identity as the church, the Body of Christ.

In First Corinthians 12:27, Paul writes: “All of you are Christ’s Body, and each one is a part of it.” (community) In the preceding verse, Paul makes clear just how closely connected we are as members of Christ’s Body: “If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it; if one part is praised, all the other parts share its happiness.” (compassion)

There is a story about a carpenter that can help us see and feel what Paul means. The authors of the book, The Rule of the Cross reflect the understanding that we are Christ’s Body when they write: The mandate of Eucharistic love is to be united with Christ and with one another. When one person suffers we all suffer. As Christ had compassion for the hungry multitudes (Matthew6:30-44 and 8:1-10), we, too are called to help feed one another. In fact, we are called to become Eucharist’s for one another in the midst of betrayal and denial. To be blessed, broken, and given for one another is to risk love at all costs.”

In our day Christ Jesus is calling the members of His Body to live the Eucharist. I believe there are 4 major areas in which we can be living vessels of the sacrament of Holy Communion: in ourselves; our families; our churches; and in our society.

1. To live the Eucharist is to make peace within ourselves. That happens through mutual support and sharing, through our own continued study and reading and conscious raising for ourselves. And through public worship. It also happens in a primary way through each persons own devotional life. Peace is won outwardly, by people who make peace in the battle within. We simply must sustain and deepen our own life of solitude and prayer, and our group prayer life.

One of the reasons that prayer is so irreplaceably essential is because prayer empowers to engage in the spiritual struggle to be forgiven and to forgive.

In our praying we need consistently to ask God for the grace to be forgiven. The depth of our need for forgiveness came home to me in a fresh way when I read an article in the September 23, 1981 issue of the CHRISTIAN CENTURY. It is entitled “More Third-World Anger” and it is by Parker Rossman.

Dr. Rossman found anger at North Americans at the Ecumenical Institutes’ Stress and death Workshops held in Switzerland this past June. Listen to a portion of Dr. Rossman’s report: “…Some of the deepest disunity today between Christians – often separating Catholic from Catholic and evangelical from evangelical – comes from disagreement over what God calls Christians today to do about hungry children or the arms race, or the use and abuse of power and wealth.

“My agenda at the workshop on Families Under Stress was research for a book I am completing on support networks to help families with problems. I came with a carefully prepared list of the causes of stress in families, categorized by family cycle, physical disabilities and stressful problems such as death in the family, senility, a young person on drugs…(etc.)

“The majority of the workshop delegates, however, were from the Third World, and they were loud and angry in their insistence that the prime causes of stress in families are economic and political: a result of the failure of the rich nations to negotiate with the poor nations on a basis for a new international economic order founded on equality and justice. Pioneer missionaries abroad use to say that it was futile to try to preach the gospel to hungry people until they were fed, and the Third World people at Bossey were saying much the same thing…

“…It is especially difficult for the U.S. Christians…to realize that the anger is often directed not against (U.S. Presidents), but against American Christians…”

Somehow, reading that article made me feel deeply my own need to pray for the grace to be forgiven, so that I can repent and start over, and respond creatively and caringly to the aching needs in our world.

Living the Eucharist also means praying for the grace to forgive and especially to forgive our enemies. This is surely a primary step in our own risk of the cross.

“One day I was asked to visit an old man, how old I could only guess. I had not met him before. I walked into the stillness of his bedroom and there he was. The most vital part of him was the smoldering fire in his eyes. He was frail, and the odor of old sickness filled the room. He said, ‘You are looking at a man who cannot die.’ While I struggled to understand that statement, he continued, ‘Not long before the war over slavery I barely escaped from the plantation with my life. I was accused of doing something I had not done. The master himself had me dragged to the empty smoke house. I was stripped to my waist and my hands were tied to one of the cross beams. I was beaten until I fainted, then revived with buckets of cold water and flogged again. The next thing I remember was the darkness of the night and someone was cutting me loose and helping me to dress in fresh clothes that hurt my skin. Oh, reverend how it hurt! Whoever this was helped me to escape into the woods. Finally I came to the river and got across to Ohio and ever since I have been kept alive by hatred for the man who beat me. I suppose he has long since died—at least I hope he was killed in the war. The only thing I know is I cannot die until I forgive him. Now, don’t waste your prayer and your words on me.’ (Howard Thurman says:) I sat until the upheaval in me subsided. We did not pray, but we spoke together quietly for a while and then I left. As the weeks passed I would drop by for a few minutes from time to time just to chat. One morning when I came to see him he greeted me with great excitement. ‘It happened last night! It happened!” For a swirling moment I could not make the connection. Then I knew. In a few days he was dead.”

As long as you and I live we will need to keep praying for the grace to forgive our enemies—especially the enemies of peace, both those who live within the world and those who live within ourselves. When we continue to pray for those who have wronged us, we set free Christ’s power of peace on earth.

Such praying affects us in all of our discipleship and mission. In fact, such praying has a powerful affect on world peace. There is a correlation between what happens in the inner and the outer world. We can live the Eucharist in ourselves.

2)And we can also incarnate the Eucharist in our families. Sometimes the enemy whom we need to forgive is very close at home. I’m beginning to realize that facing my fears of nuclear war and praying my way into and through those fears, makes me treasure the other members of my family and my friends more than ever. I value each day with them more than I used to.

I don’t mean that I have stopped ever being angry. That would be seriously abnormal. Anger is not sinful, but hurting other people is. As Paul says in Ephesians, “Be angry but do not sin.” So we look for ways to ventilate our anger that does not hurt others. It takes not only creative thinking it requires also laying a foundation in prayer which can help us clarify our feelings. We are living as members of Christ’s body when we are family peacemakers.

3)And we can also live Holy Communion in the life and mission of the particular congregations of which we are members. Here again, prayer is the integrating center. We need to keep praying for the grace to listen to our fellow members of Christ’s body. We need especially to listen from the other side,that is to listen in the context of viewpoints which are much different from our own, so that we can discern the thoughts and feelings of others.

That is something which is not always easy to do. In fact, sometimes major peacemaker efforts are needed in the church. I still appreciate some advice which I received from a veteran member of the clergy, which he gave me before I entered my first parish. He said: “There are times when the pastor’s main task is to keep the saints from biting each other.”

I challenge each one of us to return from this retreat not with the idea of overwhelming others in the church with everything that we have learned and experienced together here at Turkey Run. Let’s return from this retreat in order to be united in spirit with the folks back home

Let’s return to our fellow church members and our families with the purpose of listening to them. God has been at work with and within them just as much as He has with us. Maybe what the people back home need most is for someone to hear them into being. We can live the Eucharist in our churches.

4)And we can also be doers of Holy Communion in society. Here too, our praying is the integrating center.

If you don’t do anything else as a result of this retreat experience, I challenge each of you to take a new step; spend at least five minutes everyday hereafter, praying for world peace. Ask for the grace and the discipline to keep praying for peacemakers. Pray for them by name: Focus on one at a time. “Lord, I pray for your servant, Ronald Reagan; or Leonid Breshniv; or Menachim Began; or Hosni Mubarak; or Muaamar Quadaffy, etc.”

Linger tenderly over each name, as though you were praying for a member of your own family. Don’t pray for these persons simply as a means to an end. Pray for them as people. Ask God to give each one His grace and forgiveness. His healing and wholeness and His guidance. Then pray for their power to make peace. And against their power to make war.

Add to your intercessory prayers a prayer for God to guide you to at least one specific action of your own for world peacemaking. Stay with that action until the specific goal is accomplished, the move on to another.

Are you thinking that you really don’t have enough influence to affect the world for Christ? Think again. Consider how much power each of us really has. I have a friend who has a friend who is a physicist. And she told me that the physicist gave her this information. Every time anyone of us jumps up and down on the ground the core of the earth itself moves. Every time you or I wave a hand in the air, every molecule in the universe is a re-arranged. Do you really think you don’t have very much influence? Think of the people you know and the people they know and the people they know.

As we ponder the impact that each of us really has in this world, let’s keep asking God the following in prayer: “Lord what do I really want to do in your world as my risk of the cross? Let’s not try to answer that question ourselves. We can let God guide each of us. We can let Him control the flow of His guidance. It may come while we are still on this retreat, or it may come later, or both may happen. That is up to God. Our task is to stay connected with Him in prayer.

Our praying will help us to remember the source of all peace, both inner and outer peace, because in prayer we remember that Jesus is always taking the risk of the Cross for us. Arnold Prater, in his book, RELEASE FROM PHONINESS tells a story which grips me with the reality of the risk that Jesus continues to take for us. In a certain province in Japan many centuries ago, crops failed because of a draught and that autumn famine was imminent so the emperor decreed that all persons over the age of 70 years must be destroyed in order that the young might live through the winter.

Sorrowfully, one young man in the village picked up his aged and weakened mother and began to search for a place in which he could take her life and bury her. He climbed slowly and painfully to the top of a high mountain to a clearing in the woods. He tenderly laid his mother upon the ground and rested for a moment before doing what he had been ordered to do.

“One thing mother,” he asked, “Why did you keep tearing bits of your shawl loose as we came up to this place?”

And the weakened mother replied, “I wanted you to be able to find your way back down the mountain!”

Arnold Prater adds these words. Could God do this for us? Would God do this? Yes, precisely. We have made a mess of things. Famine has come over our lives. We even carried Him up a mountain outside and ancient city and there we crucified Him. But He has scattered some signs all along the way so we could find our way back to Him.”