Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 6, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

My late mother of blessed memory wouldn’t do Communion. She said it was cannibalism. You see, Mom wasn’t Catholic, but her father was; and I imagine she’d heard enough of the Catholic language of the elements as being truly the body and blood of Christ to convince her that the thing really was cannibalism. It isn’t of course, but Mom wasn’t interested in the subtleties of Eucharistic theology. So she just said no. I’m sure she never partook of Communion her entire adult life.

Yet Communion is very important to me. I look forward to presiding at the Sacrament here with all of you. I appreciate the rare occasions when I’m at a service where someone else presides, and I can simply worship and partake. I have often felt the powerful, very real presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament. So this morning I ask: What is Communion actually, and why does it play such a central role in Christian worship?

To me, as indeed for all Christian traditions despite their different understandings of just how it all works, Communion is about the real presence of Christ. Christ is really present in the Sacrament. Yet that presence is not a physical one. I will not tell you, as I once heard a Catholic priest tell a church full of seven year olds taking their first Communion, that we really are eating the physical body and blood of Christ when we partake of the Sacrament. The real presence of Christ here is not a physical presence. That real presence is instead symbolic, and it is spiritual. It is symbolic in the elements and in our eating. It is spiritual in the Christian community gathered for Communion.

You may be asking: Is symbolic presence, is spiritual presence, really real? Isn’t physical presence real presence, and aren’t symbolic and spiritual presence a kind of make believe presence? Not surprisingly, I suppose, my answer is that the symbolic and spiritual presence of Christ in the Sacrament is just as real, indeed it is more real, than mere physical presence. Let me explain.

In the Eucharist there are three symbols. We normally think of only two, the bread and the wine; but the act of eating and drinking that is part of the Sacrament is also a symbol. A symbol is something physical, something created, that points beyond itself to the greater reality that it symbolizes. More than that, a symbol participates in that greater reality. It connects us to that reality. It mediates between the created and the divine. It connects us to the divine and the divine to us. In the Sacrament, the bread and the wine are symbols in this sense of Christ. They represent Christ to us. They bring Christ to us. They are channels of the divine reality of Christ. Through them Christ flows into the world and into our lives.

Yet something more is required to complete their symbolic reality, their symbolic work of connecting us to Christ. If all we did was consecrate the elements and leave them sitting on the table, they might still to some extent connect us to Christ through our seeing them and hearing the prayers of the Communion service and the words of institution. Yet it is our symbolic act of eating the bread and drinking the wine that completes the symbolic connection between Christ and us. That eating and drinking are themselves symbolic. We don’t eat enough to satisfy a physical hunger. We don’t drink enough to slake a physical thirst. The eating and drinking are our symbolic response to the symbolic presence of Christ in the elements. Our eating and drinking symbolize our acceptance of the gift of Christ. They symbolize our desire to bring Christ into our lives. They close the circle of grace. They bring Christ into our presence and us into Christ’s. Yes, we do physically ingest a bit of bread and a few drops of wine, but the physical act has meaning only as symbol, as our act of connecting with the Christ who seeks always to connect with us.

There’s another powerful aspect to Communion too. Note the similarity of the words Communion and community. That similarity is no accident. The two are intimately linked. It may look like Communion is something a priest or a minister does up in front of and apart from the gathered community, but it isn’t. A minister celebrating Communion alone is an oxymoron. The Sacrament of Communion is indeed the act of the Christian community. It may be a large gathering of the community in a big church, or it may be a minister and a single patient together in a hospital room. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the Christian community is in some way present. That’s because the Christian community is the home of the Holy Spirit. In the relationships of the community the Holy Spirit is present. In those relationships the Spirit of Christ is at work, extending God’s grace and working for reconciliation and peace. As the community large or small gathers for Communion, Christ becomes a real spiritual presence among us.

Friends, symbolic and spiritual presence are so much more real than mere physical presence. Symbol and spirit have a depth and a power that mere physicality can’t begin to match. The symbolic and spiritual presence of Christ saves us the way nothing merely physical can. So don’t get hung up on the physicality of eating the body and blood of Christ the way my mother did. That’s not what we’re doing. That’s not what Communion is about. Communion is about the very real symbolic and spiritual presence of Christ with Christ’s community and each one of us its members, bringing us God’s grace in the most real and powerful way possible. And for that we can only give God our thanks and praise and say a heartfelt: Amen.