Theological Journal - March 27: Let;s Celebrate Communion Digitally - NOT!

 

The move to digital communication as a surrogate for the gathered fellowship and worship we cannot and ought not share at present is very appropriate under the circumstances. But it is only a surrogate. If it were an adequate form of the community’s worship, then why don’t we do it all the time?

But there is something in our bodily, gathered community that alone reflects what God wants for us as we wait for his kingdom to come in its fullness (which will be intensification or even more real experience of our bodiliness). After all, it was God’s dream to take on a body too so he could be one with us in our bodiliness. We don’t become more “spiritual” (that is, less bodily, immaterial) to be more like God, it’s the other way around.

And God in bodily form, present in the bread and wine of communion, is the center of Christian life and worship. And it’s as one body, his body, that we gather, and his one body that is broken and his blood shed that he shares his life with us and gives life to our mortal bodies. While digital worship is an important stopgap in this pandemic it ought to leave us with a sense of absence for however long we must engage in it. And it is good to feel that absence and longing and even a sense of emptiness after participating in it. Loss of that bodiliness and the necessary absence at present of that even greater bodiliness that awaits and will finally fulfill us is a wound we must bear till that day.

While digital worship can simulate some aspects of our life together it can never simulate that bodiliness or evoke the hope that such gathered bodiliness brings us. Even less so, in my judgment, can it do that for the bodiliness of Christ at the heart of worship and his self-giving to us in the bread and wine of the Supper.

I think we do better to accept the limited simulations of life together the digital medium gives us and allow what can’t be adequately simulated to remain an absence, a wound, we must endure.

To attempt these inappropriate (in my judgment) simulations not only attempts to “paper over” a necessary wound in our communal body but also keeps us from asking what God might be trying to tell us through this enforce “fast” from the table.

In 1 Cor.11 Paul calls for an examination and discernment of the body, by which he means the quality of our life together as Christ’s body, before partaking unworthily and eating and drinking judgment on ourselves. Might not this fast afford us an opportunity we can ill afford to pass up? Is not some examination and discernment over the fractious, rancorous, vindictive, and even gleeful division from one another not a clarion call for such a practice and the repentance it may indicate.

We bear a necessary woundedness we must, in my judgment, not “paper over” with a thoroughly inadequate simulation. And we bear many serious self-inflicted wounds that undealt with by a genuine repentance might make such a eucharistic fast a necessity for a season. Not that we have to be “good enough” to come to the Table -of course not! But we mut be serious enough about what we do and who we do it for that we dare not bring despite to his name and reproach to his work in and through us that we partake in an unworthy manner. Perhaps God in his infinite grace would have us accept this moment as a gracious provision for our desperate need!