All Together

There is a certain moment in the Sunday morning liturgy that captures me every time. Pastor Ken takes the bread in his hands, raises it up and breaks it in two saying,

“We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.”

And all together we respond,

“Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.”

What I’ve just heard is that I am no longer an outcast. No one can trump any one with their suffering, or with their success, with their goodness or with their badness. Christ has united all in their suffering and sin and need for redemption. In this act and with these words we humble ourselves to share in the one bread.

All together we share the bread of suffering. Lately I’ve been thinking of the suffering of waiting. There are many things that we wait for. We wait for clarity, or health, for a place to rest or a direction to travel, for a loved one to return or for justice to be done.

But the deepest waiting we do is for the unnamable, as John says, “what we will be has not yet been made known.” And it is here in the open unnamable that we are called to be. To remain open to what the Lord hasn’t yet made known is also to remain empty and inherent in emptiness is pain. Emptiness is unnatural. The soul, as nature, abhors a vacuum and so it aches in the emptiness. Everything in me and you wants to avoid the ache, to be full, sated and at rest. We are willing to fill it with anything and even God has said to us that “your desire will be for . . . and . . . will rule over you.”

So, to remain open is to chose suffering, but it is a holy suffering and one we share with Christ. As he groans for his return we share his groan and that draws us into his very heart. There is the cost though of those often compelling, but lesser desires, but when we are drawn into his heart we know the exchange of the rule of desires for the presence and rule of his love. This is the kind of suffering that the faithful of Hebrews chose for “none of them received what had been promised” before they died, and yet God loved them and celebrated them for continuing to want and wait on God’s fulfillment.

And so we also share in the bread of redemption. Redemption now, but also in the end. It’s striking what Hebrews says in the next breath. “God had planned something better” than the faithful getting what they desired in their time. God’s plan is that “only together with us would they be made perfect.”

All together we will share in the final redemption. That is something better. I don’t know what you expect when the Lord returns, in the moment that we “see him as he is” and in the split second it takes for us to be transformed into his likeness. I expect to be stunned upon seeing him and exclaim, “It’s him!” and then turning around to tell someone else, only to be stunned again, “It’s you!” and then the dawning realization “oh my, it’s me too!” I can’t wait to see Abraham’s face or Jacob’s face or David’s face as they finally see, finally receive what they have always longed for. I can’t wait to celebrate all your dear faces, having known your specific pains and longings, having endured the openness together, in that moment of you and everything becoming what it truly is.