At the Last Supper, Jesus speaks a sort of incantation prior to serving the bread and wine: “As often as you do this, do it in my memory.” In the Church of Christ, we took this story to be the establishment of what we called “The Lord’s Supper.”
Later New Testament passages speak of Christians “breaking bread” on the “first day of the week.” In most cases, these passages don’t mention “the Lord’s Supper,” and, frankly, it can be difficult to tell whether the disciples are having communion or serving dinner on the grounds.
In the C of C, we mashed these scriptures together and created a policy: communion must be served and taken every Sunday. We took this conclusion with a seriousness that bordered on obsession.
We served communion on Sunday morning. In fact, we served communion every Sunday morning. In case members were too sick or too busy to attend the Lord’s Supper during a morning service, we served a “follow-up” communion on Sunday nights. Shut in? Hospitalized? No problem; after church, we offered free delivery of wafers and Welch’s directly to your door.
During deer season, one of our church elders (an authoratative leader, given absolute control over others) would frequently miss church in order to hunt bucks … but he wouldn’t miss communion. Once, he proudly showed me his communion kit: a bit of bread and a cup of juice in a pocket-sized, velvet-lined snap-shut case. “I commune with the Lord right there in the deer stand,” he explained.
In the minds of some members, snagging that juice and cracker became the be-all, end-all of Sunday service. At one point, a significant number of our members started walking out after communion — a practice that didn’t please our preacher, whose sermons they avoided in the process. The elders responded by shifting communion to the end of the service — after the sermon’s conclusion. (If you wanna pay, you gotta pay, I suppose.)
In other words: our focus was not so much on the function of communion (our common bond in the death of Christ), but on the forms of communion:
– having the right kind of bread (it had to be unleavened bread)
– having the right kind of juice (okay, okay, the Scriputre says Jesus used wine, but everyone knows all real Christians never touch the stuff, so the Holy Spirit got a bit confused there, and said wine, but meant grape juice, because Jesus would never drink wine, no matter what the Bible says)
– having the right frequency of service (every Sunday, despite the fact that no Scriptures specify this schedule).
Why were we so focused on externals? Looking back, I think it’s because a focus on externals makes it easier for fundamentalists to divide people into two groups: those who “do it right” (and are therefore pleasing to God) and those who don’t (and therefore aren’t).
Sure, other churches took communion — but they did it monthly, or used real wine, or did it at events like weddings. Insisting that real communion had to be done our way made it easy for the simplest minds among us to grasp who was “in” and who was “out.”
You might beat your wife, abuse your kids, steal from your job, cheat on your taxes, and lie like a dog … but at least you knew you were supposed to get your juice and cracker every week, and in this, you could feel superior to those around you who didn’t.
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