The Eucharist and Hospitality

Lots of thoughts--some pretty disconnected--about the readings for this week:
First, the word Eucharist--I so like the thought that this meal we partake of is our Thanksgiving meal. We gather as the family of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, and are welcomed and fed. It is a welcoming Table--a Table opened to us by the sacrifice of Christ, to be sure--but a Table which, I think, says less of that sacrifice and more of the welcome, the tender open-arms of God toward us.

I am so struck by that tenderness of God. God accomplishes salvation by mercy and grace toward us--transforming the cruelty of the sacrifice on a cross into a sign of His tender mercies. Jesus' self-sacrifice is the Way He conquered--not by coercion or force, but by the deepest love. It is, indeed, that raising up of Jesus on the cross that draws all people to him--not in the way people are drawn to blood and gore and accident scenes, but the way children are drawn to people who love them deeply and tenderly, taking them very seriously...

One of my favorite movies is Places in the Heart, which begins with scenes of families gathered around their Sunday dinner tables and quickly moves to a dead man ( a murdered man) laid out on his family's dining room table and ends with a Communion Sunday scene in a tiny Church--a scene where the sacrifice of forgiveness is made visible and where the Communion of the Saints is made plain. I think that movie so well captures the meaning of this Meal in the life of God's people--who live simply day-by-day in ordinary time, sinning, supporting, confessing, suffering, holding, coming together, eating, dancing, working...

I like Peterson's linking of the Eucharist with hospitality. Just as the Communion meal is a sign of God's generous openness to us, so hospitality is our opportunity to be generously open with others. Genuine hospitiality--whether for "company" or toward our families--is a kind of sacrifice of the self, of my own "druthers," for other people. Truly welcoming hospitality seeks to care for the other, to provide for the other. The Biblical image of the Great Feast in Isaiah 25--the Feast of which provides "a foretaste of glory divine"--is again such a welcoming image in which God cares for the whole of humanity, wiping away all those things which cause tears and grief and division.

When my son Matthew was very sick and needing to be fed through a feeding tube, I remember the sensate similarity between holding up the Communion chalice and holding up that feeding tube. It was a powerful moment for me as I reflected on the nurture and the grace proffered by both. It certainly relieved the very real drudgery of those tube feedings for that moment.

On the controlling of rituals--do we try to control them? Do we think we are in charge of them--we pastors?