Waiter for the hungry masses

For a variety of reasons and a scheduling conspiracy, I was away from my congregation’s communion services for about a month, but finally last Sunday we had a guest presider come in while my supervisor is away on vacation.

I didn’t realize until that moment how much I had missed communing with this congregation. I had been to Eucharist serivces at Synond Convention and LOMAN Joint Staff Training, and I deeply appreciated those times.

However, communing with this congregation that I have been journeying with this past year was like coming home. Maybe I realized that I will only be with them a few more Sundays, or that we had two services of morning prayer in a row…

I don’t know if I have ever been so moved by just a simple sharing of the Lord’s Supper before. I wonder if this is part of that section that every evaluation form I have been writing over the past 3 some years that has asked me to say something about my growing pastoral identity. Somehow, knowing the authors of those forms, I doubt it. Yet, I think that is what I experienced. Being the Body Christ, sharing the Body of Christ has taken on new meaning this year, in such a way that serving the assembly of God’s people is becoming part of who I am. God’s waiter for the hungry masses.

As Gordon Lathrop says (paraphrase), the assembly, the primary symbol of Christ in our Worship, proclaims that God is in our midst giving us bread and forgiving us. And as a sign of that belief, we act it out, we practice it each time we worship. And we do this so that in our lives outside of the assembly we may be God’s giving of bread and forgiving in the world. Being called to lead and speak in the midst of that practicing is starting to imprint itself on everything I do as one who serves.