Spiritual Hiccups - The Social Contract

When we train church officers here so they can take communion to our members who are unable to attend worship, I almost always tell a story I heard many years ago.  A pastor and church elder had taken the Lord's Supper to an elderly woman who had been very active in her congregation for years but whose failing health now prevented her. As the pastor repeated the words of institution (found in today's epistle reading) and handed her the bread, she closed her eyes and began to describe people sitting in the sanctuary.  "I see Mabel sitting in the choir loft, and I see..." 

Even though this was "private communion," the woman correctly sensed that it was a communal event and not a private devotional experience.  As she took communion, she saw the body of Christ.  That is, she saw the gathered individuals who made up her congregation, the living body of Christ of which she was a part.

I have often heard people understand the Apostle Paul's words, "For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves," as referring to the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper itself.  And while my tradition does speak of a genuine, spiritual presence in the meal, the body Paul speaks of is not the bread.  He is addressing divisions in the Corinthian congregation, and he sees those particularly present in the way they hold the Lord's Supper, with those who arrive early not waiting for those who cannot, for those with plenty not sharing with those who have little.  And just a bit later in his letter, Paul makes explicit his understanding of the congregation as the body, insisting that each of them is an integral and essential part of that body.

We Americans have long had a strong individualistic streak in us, but for much of our history this was tempered by a strong sense of community, by the notion of a "social contract" of which all were a part.  But this social contract seems to have faded in recent decades, and our the dark side of our individualism has run rampant.  The causes of this are likely many, but I have to think that the privatization of faith has played a role. 

The standard practice for serving the Lord's Supper in the congregations where I grew up was to pass plates of bread and trays of cups down the pews in a manner similar to passing offering plates.  Theologically speaking, we could speak of a communal act of members serving one another.  In practice, however, it became a very private event.  When I first became a pastor, I watched this with some care, and I noticed that people generally served themselves.  They took the plate or tray from the person next to them, took bread or cup for themselves, and then handed to the next person.  And rarely did anyone look at anyone else.

At that church, I tried to institute a practice of each person speaking to the person they handed the plate saying, "The bread of life," or the tray saying, "The cup of salvation."  But I found that people were very resistant.  They did not want to look at or speak to one another.  Sometimes I could not even get the church elders, the ones who took the plates and trays from the table to the pews, to start things off with "The bread of life."  Even though I had talked about it with them in meetings; even though they were given written instructions explaining the process, many would not speak when they started the plate down a pew.

The notion that faith can be mostly about personal belief and piety is a strange one.  Jesus was clear that the core of being God's people was an absolute love of God paired with love of neighbor.  The two are inseparable.  Yet in modern Christian practice, we have often separated them.

This surely has had a negative impact on our society at large, this loss of faith as a force that binds us together and encourages us to sacrifice for the good of the other.  When religious people lament faith's diminishing role in our culture, they usually talk about prayer in school and so forth.  But I see those as minor issues compared to a loss that was not imposed on the Church from the outside.  No one told us we had to turn faith into a private affair.  We did that on our own. 

Fortunately there are signs that a shift is underway.  More and more of us are recognizing that faith cannot be practiced in private.  It must be lived out in communities of practice that help form us into the body of Christ we are called to be.  And just as we cannot celebrate the Lord's Supper without discerning the body - the larger faith community - neither can we fully experience salvation in private.  The healing, wholeness, and newness that Jesus means by salvation always involves the other.  And I can't help but think that if those in the Church truly experienced this salvation, it would have profound impacts on recovering a renewed sense of a social contract in our nation as a whole.

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