Pastor’s Corner: World Communion Sunday

September 30, 2020

This Sunday is World Communion Sunday. It is one of my favorite days on the worship calendar. It is a glorious day. It is also a mirror of our fractured world.

From the earliest recorded days, Christians gathered to eat together. The three thousand newly baptized on Pentecost, says the book of Acts, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” My worship professor in seminary – a minister in the United Church of Christ – told his class full of UCCs and American Baptists that normative Christian worship includes communion. That is, a complete service of worship includes both the sharing of the Word and the sharing of the bread and cup. Services without one or the other, he told us, are not wrong or sinful. They don’t meet the definition of complete Christian worship.

Definition is one thing; experience is something else. Is our worship incomplete? Well, yes. That is the nature of the world, of human beings, and of our practice of faith. We always work toward completion in our relationship with God. Even those we call saints do not fully attain it. In our worship, we remain thoroughly human, striving to draw nearer to God – and in the incompleteness of our worship, not quite reaching.

World Communion Sunday starkly reveals that the Church of Jesus Christ is also fractured and incomplete. The day exists on the calendar because Christians do not take communion on every Sunday. It exists because some Christians will not welcome other Christians to their table. It exists because the Body of Christ is not whole.

Join us via stream this week for our incomplete service that dreams of completion. Join us to honor the Christians with whom we argue, and those with whom we closely agree. Join us to nurture the spirit that we might become more like the Church Jesus envisions.

With aloha,

Pastor Eric

Photo by fir0002/flagstaffotos [at] gmail.comCanon 20D + Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 – Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=483792