But our Great Host gives us a responsibility as well. Whenever we eat this bread and drink this wine, we are reminded of Jesus’ words on the night he was betrayed: do this in remembrance of me. The importance of “doing this” is reflected in the spiritual discipline of hospitality. Communion is not just about our individual relationship with God; instead we are commanded by the remembrance of our Lord to welcome one another, to share food and drink, and to pray together. Just as the mission of the seventy was made possible by the hospitality of strangers, so our acts of welcome can have a profound impact upon others.
Journalist Sara Miles was an atheist. One day, for no apparent reason, she happened to walk into a service and receive communion for the first time. She had never been to this particular church before, yet she was invited to receive the sacrament. What happened next was nothing less than miraculous; in her words, “Jesus happened to me.”3
Her personal experience of Jesus was so profound that Miles converted to Christianity and began to worship regularly at that church. But the story does not end there; something equally as miraculous as her experience of Christ occurred when she started practicing hospitality as a spiritual discipline. She writes, “What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: you can’t be a Christian by yourself.”4
After this dramatic revelation, Miles started a food pantry to feed the homeless. Her ministry grew until her food pantries fed more than a thousand families every week! How does she explain such an amazing ministry? She wrote in her memoir, “It was about action. Taste and see, the Bible said, and I did. My first, questioning year at church ended with a question whose urgency would propel me into work I’d never imagined: now that you’ve taken the bread, what are you going to do?”5
As we celebrate the transformative power of Holy Communion in our lives, I want to take this question to heart. Miles’ emphasized that her experience at the Lord’s Table was about action: taste and see! Communion is an eye-opening experience.
This morning, I invite us to see hospitality as a spiritual discipline. I challenge us to receive communion as a life-altering experience. In just a moment, I invite you to pray the Communion Prayer of Thanksgiving with your eyes open.6
By keeping our eyes open, we see the bread being broken and the cup being poured. By keeping our eyes open, we see the people around us. We are reminded that the Lord is our Great Host and that we are called to be hosts for one another. We remember God’s grace that invites us to the table and to serve in our communities.
This table is the Lord’s Table and it is wide open to anyone who would take the bread and the cup. So then, may we come with our eyes wide open, remembering Jesus our Great Host, and staring grace directly in the faces of one another. My friends, taste and see that the Lord is good.
1. Galbreath, Leading from the Table, 109–110.
2. Ibid., 56–57.
3. Miles, Take This Bread, 58.
4. Ibid., 96.
5. Ibid., 97.
6. Galbreath, Leading from the Table, 109–110.
3
Take My Hand
PRACTICING SELF-CARE
MY BROTHER, JOHN, AND his wife, Kelly, came to visit shortly after I arrived in the town of Dublin. They live in Brooklyn, which is a long way from my home in more ways than one. Kelly remarked that it was amazing to hear the crickets at night instead of the traffic. Her comment took me by surprise; I had been thinking about next week’s sermon. My mind was as busy and congested as a street in Manhattan. After only a few weeks on the job, I realized that I needed to take better care of myself.
Sabbath is a time of rest and renewal. It is also one of the Ten Commandments (Exod 20:8–11; Deut 5:12–15). While no sermon would suggest that the other nine laws are optional, even the best pastors sometimes act as if honoring the Sabbath was merely a friendly suggestion. When Barbara Brown Taylor worked in the parish, she stayed just as busy on her “day off” as any other day. With refreshing candor, she examines her inability to rest: “Taking a full day off was so inconceivable that I made up reasons why it was not possible. If stopped for a whole day, there would be no more weekend weddings . . . Sick people would languish in the hospital and begin to question their faith. Parishioners would start a rumor that I was not a real shepherd but only a hired hand . . . If I stopped for a whole day, God would be sorely disappointed in me.”1
It is due to such anxiety that Stanley Hauerwas refers to most Protestant pastors as quivering masses of availability. I am aware that I often bend over backwards to please people, rather than make any effort to take care of myself. The desire to be needed often trumps the desire to relax. Like Taylor, I don’t want a poor reputation among my parishioners. I don’t want to miss an opportunity for ministry. Perhaps on a deeper level, I don’t want God to be disappointed in me either. On the very first night of my first vacation as a pastor, I dreamed that one of my parishioners had just lost her mother in a tragic accident. I knew full well that this person’s mother has been dead for years. In my dream, however, she had died suddenly and everyone was waiting for me at the funeral. What a nightmare!
In my conscious mind, I know that Sabbath-keeping is not a luxury. Not only was it mandated in the Ten Commandments, the first creation story beautifully illustrates that rest was part of the original divine intention (Gen 2:1–3). Following a long tradition of Jewish interpreters, Jesus maintained that the practice was for our health and well-being: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Scripture teaches that God is not “disappointed” with those who honor the spiritual practice of renewal and refreshment.
When I had that nightmare about the funeral, my family was in Scotland for my father’s first sabbatical after twenty-five years of ministry. This was an amazing opportunity, and I tried to relax. From a train window, I looked over the landscape of northwestern Scotland and noticed a great similarity to southwestern Virginia. Just like back home, I saw purple wildflowers, red farmhouses, gray distant mountains, and green rolling hills. Yet not everything was the same: because Scotland is farther north, the climate is colder and the growing season is later. While grain was still growing in their fields, the hay was cut and baled back in Dublin. I have come to think of this difference as a fitting metaphor for the Sabbath. My time away is not the time for harvesting; the work I was called to do at New Dublin is finished like the baled hay. This realization has continued to help me relax, even long after my family came back and I returned to work.
I’ve also tried to honor the Sabbath as part of my worship of God. In retrospect, Taylor learned a profound spiritual reason, not simply to take a day off, but to obey the Sabbath commandment: “The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing towards their graves.”2 No longer quivering masses of availability, we are free to serve others out of love. I once told my wife that I would stop at nothing until I had led her to happiness. I was referring to my new position as a pastor and about how I was going to make everything perfect in Dublin for us. Ginny replied, “Take my hand, and we’ll find our way together.”
As we are all on a journey through life, I have come to believe that we need the support of other people in order to keep the Sabbath.
SABBATH FOR US
There is an Amish community less than thirty miles from New Dublin Presbyterian Church. Since some of my parishioners live in this area, I have a unique window and fascinating insight into the Amish lifestyle.