Tomorrow is Sunday. Currently, I'm the one in charge of setting up who communicates the communion meditation. This past week, I had someone set up for it but completely forgot to tell them about it. Minor problem, right? This has happened in the past and what I usually end up doing is just communicating the meditation myself. Tonight, I'm sitting here wondering about just how to do that.
How do I communicate something that is so central to the Christian message and so central to my life? Communion is that time every Sunday in my church (other churches do it once a month or once a quarter, each denomination cites various passages as to why they do it in different intervals as I understand it) when we reflect on the sacrifice of Jesus to reconcile us to God.
Different religions have various methods of getting to God. What makes Christianity unique is that we believe you can't earn your way into heaven. Being a good person doesn't mean you get to see God for eternity when you die. To me, though, that's not the point of having faith. It isn't to make life easier, if anything it makes it more difficult as promised in Scripture. The point to having faith is that it leads us into an understanding of how to glorify God, which we were created to do from the beginning. Outside of bringing glory to God, people ascribe glory to all sorts of things. Money, power, sex are some of the more popular ones that come to mind. Oh, and the self is in my opinion the biggest idol of all. We tend to be more concerned about our own security than in bringing glory to God.
Jesus wasn't just a great moral teacher, He was the Son of God. He died, was buried, and raised from the dead. How can a modern person believe that? By faith. It took some apologetics reading on my part to confirm it but ultimately you have to have faith. Just like you have to have faith if you say we came from monkeys. Which is more ridiculous, to say a deity in human form raised from the dead and that God created the world or that we come from monkeys and the intricacies of life that we experience on a daily basis all just come from randomness? To scientists, I know that sounds ludicrous. Some would even say heretical in a sense to the scientific world, which is ironic since heresy originated in the world of religion.
Anyways, back to the idea of a communion meditation. I wonder if they gave these in the early church? I've read through the book of Acts before and the early Church sounds a lot more like a commune today than a 'typical' church like we think of in today's world. They listened to the disciples' teaching which was centered on Christ, so in that sense it's similar. There was a book I once read that talked about living eucharistically. What he meant by saying this was living a life that was poured out for others. Maybe the Eucharist has more to do with how we live on a daily basis than the 5 minutes on a Sunday morning when we hear someone talk about Christ's sacrifice and listen to music in the background. Do we live in light of the Resurrection? Do we live with an awareness that Christ is reconciling all things to Himself? Or do we merely compartmentalize our faith like we do with so many other aspects of our lives?
As Christians, everything we do should stem from our belief in God and in Jesus His Son. What if we lived sacrificially to the world around us? What if Christians were known for their hospitality instead of their hostility? What if we were as generous as Christ called us to be? A lot of Christians argue that welfare is the job of the Church, not the government. I'd like to agree with that, but that being said we have to face reality and admit that our giving is no more than the world around us. Look at the things we put our money towards in the American church. It is said that you can tell what's important to a person by looking at their checkbook. The same can be said of our churches. We have billions of dollars worth of land and buildings while there are millions in our own nation who are homeless. Why is the Church not known for creating more homeless shelters as opposed to creating more mega-sized churches? The other big part of a church's budget is staff salary. Maybe I'm just defending this since I'm on staff at a church now and am on salary that I've raised, but I don't think the staff salary would be such a big portion of the budget if every Christian gave a tithe. That being said, I might take myself off salary once my year is up and just work for the church as a gift. If every Christian gave a tithe, what could the Church do? Would it simply waste its resources like it often has in the past? I have a vision for my church to get to 50% of our budget to go towards outside missions. I have the same vision for my own life. As it turns out, a good starting point in my opinion is to go for a percent per year, for example 12% in 2012, 13% in 2013 and so on. If we want our people to give sacrificially than we must set the example in our churches' budgets.
What does communion mean to me? It means that Christ paid the ultimate sacrifice, and expects nothing less of me than to pour out my life for others in obedience to His will. How can I live more sacrificially? It's a good question to ask for a communion meditation, don't ya think?
1 comment:
Excellent thoughts, as always. I'm on the rotation for communion meditation at my church, partially because my fiance is the worship pastor and it's kind of expected and partially because I like the challenge and the opportunity. We do communion weekly. I'm usually a nervous wreck because public speaking is not my forte in the slightest. Let me speak to a congregation of kids or let me sing my communion meditation and I'd feel much more at ease. Ha.
To me, the act of doing Communion at church should be an outward symbol of our heart and mind's daily focus. Being grateful for Christ's sacrifice for us. Challenging ourself to be good stewards of His sacrifice and live it out in everything we do.
That being said, I try hard to make my communion meditations something that people will hopefully take with them out of church and reflect on through the week. I'm a visual person as many people are, so I try to incorporate a visual concept of some kind and instill some sort of mental image or concept that will (hopefully) stick with people.
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