The Eucharistic Way to Pentecost
by Robert K. Martin
As the church year moves from Eastertide to Pentecost this weekend (May 27, 2007), it is easy for us to get swept up in the disciples’ spiritual combustion or their evangelistic fervor in the marketplace. But what is it that prepared them for being fired-up and what is it that they carried out into the marketplace that attracted so many? It was their communal life in which the categories of rich and poor, slave and free, male and female held no superiority or inferiority and in which the lowly and outcast were lifted up and honored. It was a communion in which each person gave their all and everyone received as they had need (Acts 1-4).
If a Christian version of “Letterman” were to have a “Top 10” list of “Ways the Church Can Be Recognized,” many would give the number 1 spot to preaching or teaching, mission or service. The Reformers of the church have consistently pointed to ‘right preaching’ and ‘right administration of the sacraments’. For Jesus, however, the love of the disciples, one for another, was the definitive mark by which they would be recognized as Jesus’ disciples (John 17). We find this affirmation as well in the Letters of Paul: Whether Christians love each other in real, tangible, life-transforming ways is the key evidence by which people decide whether Jesus is really the Christ and whether the church is really the Body of Christ. And this communal life in the Spirit is actually the primary substance of Paul’s ‘right’ preaching and his teaching about the sacramental life.
The Word of God is proclaimed most explicitly and powerfully as Christians build a common life of self-sacrificial love and extend that fellowship beyond all visible boundaries. Eucharistic life in Christ, our communion with one another in the Spirit of Christ, is the end-all and be-all of what the church is and what it does. The title of a book by Paul McPartlan says it succinctly: The Eucharist Makes the Church.
If Eucharistic unity is the heart of ecclesial life, and I believe it is, then it would behoove church folks like us to grapple with one of the major obstacles to enacting the eucharist in congregational life: middle- and upper-class lifestyles predominant in American society. With respect to two of those values, we have adopted unreservedly the value of self-sufficiency through material accumulation. Hoping and praying and striving for affluence, we blanch at the thought of being openly dependent upon others for the basic necessities of life. Our corporate worship on Sunday morning usually reflects these social values. We congregate as separate and independent individuals who have grown accustomed to “drive-by” passing of the peace: a smile, a handshake, and a polite how-do-you-do. The separation to which we have become culturally accustomed has become that to which church members aspire.
Mutual dependence is what catalyzed the early church. Sharing all things in common set the stage for Pentecostal transformation. They clung desperately to each other in part because they were being persecuted. They gave their lives to one another because their lives were literally at stake. But most of the time, when we are ‘at church’ what do we do? We talk. We share our experiences and feelings and thoughts. But let’s be clear about it: we share, but we share mostly by talking. That’s ok as far as it goes, but talking to each other is not the same thing as sharing a common life, as depending upon one another for our very survival.
In such an individualistic milieu, how do congregations come to reorient themselves to the common life we, in fact, share? And how might that common life in Christ be enacted more fully in the congregations’ worship and mission? Well, in a word, we must relearn it. And we will learn it best the same way we learn how to do any activity better: by practicing.
If eucharistic living is to break out of the confines of bourgeois values of independence and self-sufficiency, then we need to share our lives more fully – every aspect of life, including the basic necessities. In order to learn eucharistic living, we need to think about every aspect of church life as a teaching-learning venue. We need to practice our worship services, mission efforts, pastoral care, and mission as opportunities to cultivate and extend a fellowship of koinonia.
We’ve all heard the reports of folks returning from an arduous but productive mission trip, who can’t wait to go again because of the concrete impact they made and the spirit-filled friendship that formed among missioners and their hosts. These experiences are demonstrations that we shouldn’t think about communion within the church apart from its mission beyond its walls. To experience koinonia in and through mission is commonplace among those whose lives are unified in interdependent mission to others. Unfortunately, and to the church’s shame, these experiences are compartmentalized and set apart from the ordinary practices of worship, education, and other aspects of congregational life. When the mission trip ends, everyone returns to their pews and the deep sharing of a common life is relegated to a nice memory.
There are two principles I want to lift up in this blog by which a greater communal life can be developed in congregations. First, lift up before the people the ways in which they are, perhaps unaware, already sharing their lives eucharistically. Here congregations of struggling and suffering people, of hard-pressed urban and rural communities, may have one-up on more affluent, suburban congregations. People for whom economic struggle is a way of life are usually already serving each other interdependently. Because their lives are woven together in mutual support, they may more fully understand what it is to be in communion. For example, when a farmer is sick during harvest time, it is not unusual for the neighbors to help bring in the crop. When I was a member of an inner city, multi-racial congregation, after evening meetings we would, for safety’s sake, accompany each other to our means of transportation. In that congregation, it was also assumed that during the year, some members of the congregation would go through hard times and would need our assistance. Regularly and without fanfare, offerings were taken and groceries were delivered, all as expressions of the congregation’s mutuality. These diaconal acts of compassion are marks of a robust, material communion, a sharing in the necessities of life, much like the early church in Acts.
Usually, this kind of sharing is not connected explicitly with the sacrament of communion. But it should be. If we were more attentive to the ritual of the sacrament itself, taking its implicit cues, we could incorporate the congregation’s diaconal service of one to another as a means by which Christ is shared among the Body. That way, the sacrament of communion would vividly consummate the sacramental unity already at work among the members. One way, among many others, of making the connection between the daily acts of love among the people and the Lord’s Supper is to make the offertory more than a fund-raiser. During the offertory time, usually considered to be a necessary inconvenience, people might stand to give testimony of what others have done for them and what the congregation has done for others. Much more than cold, hard cash can be brought to the altar: food, clothing, building materials, etc. These gifts are symbols of our very lives that we are giving to each other and to our God. And even the bread and wine for the eucharist can be brought up and placed on the altar by the people who made them.
Make it clear to everyone, through all kinds of symbolic gestures, that we are giving not only our money but our lives. And we are giving not only to “the church” as an institution but to one another and to the larger society. As the gifts of the people are placed on the altar as bread and wine, they are then transfigured by the Spirit to be Body and Blood of Christ for the Body of Christ. To partake of what we have made and done together vividly demonstrates that the Eucharistic bread is not just a symbol but an ecclesial relation that is the very substance of our lives. During the last supper, didn’t Jesus instruct us to ‘do this’ - to lay our lives on the altar as bread and wine, to be transformed by the Spirit, to be given back and received one to another for the redemption of the world – in remembrance of him?
A second principle of developing communal awareness and intention among the congregation has already been anticipated in the first point: make the worship service more than a mere expression, make it a vibrant enactment of what the church is in Christ. Rather than conceiving the worship service as primarily oriented away from the congregation to a distant God, reimagine the service as an opportunity for the Spirit to fill the assembly, unify it, and send it outward. Every Sunday is Pentecost! Look at it this way: the praise and glory we ascribe to God is much more acceptable to God when it arises out of our unity in Christ and mission through the Spirit. The worship service should be the time when the assembly more fully becomes – in reality – the Body of Christ. When we leave the service, we should feel that we have not only come to “know” God better, but that we have experienced our unity in Christ more intensely.
A major hindrance to this kind of communal enactment, it seems to me, is the circumscribed nature of the service itself. Most of the time, corporate worship is a thing unto itself, isolated from the mundane activities of life. But it doesn’t have to be. I have been privileged to experience worship that was more thoroughly integrated with the rest of the congregation’s life. The same multi-racial congregation I mentioned earlier shared its buildings with a Korean congregation. The differences between the way these two congregations structured their worship were stark. Not that one was necessarily “better” than another, but to me it was clear that the Korean congregation had a better sense of what a communal life together meant. The most striking difference was the order of worship. First, the Koreans would gather bringing all kinds of food to the kitchen area. Men, women, and children would help prepare the meal they would later share. Off to the side, a small group would practice their choir music, filling the hall with a beautiful if incomplete work-in-progress. People would flow in and out of the “rehearsal,” coming from or going to other responsibilities. In a room off to the side, many of the children gathered with a couple of adults for a type of Sunday School. But again, this classroom was not isolated from the rest of the activities; children were enlisted to set the tables and to help in other ways. When all was ready, everyone would sit down and enjoy the meal and afterward would slowly assemble in the main sanctuary for the worship service.
I was fascinated to find out that the Koreans believed the “preparatory time” to be as much a time of worship as the actual service. The linkage between the “preparatory time” and the service was crucial to their understanding of what it meant to worship God in spirit and truth. When they partook of the eucharist bread and wine, they had in mind (and body) the feast they shared earlier. For them, the Eucharist was the explicit enactment that vividly demonstrated an abiding way of life. Not all congregations will be able to do what these Koreans did, but in many communities, for example, the “pot-luck supper” could easily be incorporated more intentionally into the worship time to serve the same purpose. Isn’t that exactly the structure of church life in Acts and I Corinthians?
There might be any number of ways the worship service can become more robust and more integrated with the rest of the congregation’s life. As church leaders in congregational learning, we should strive to engage our faith communities in everyday rituals and practices that enact more fully the communion we share in Christ. Then, unexpectedly and without warning, the Spirit may descend upon us, igniting our hearts aflame with the Good News of the Gospel, sending us out into a dangerous world with a risky message. Who knows, we too may become church.