The Eucharist
challenges our notion
of what God does
and does not touch
and what He does
or does not fill.
+ Strahan Coleman,
Beholding
Along with The Deep Down Things by Amber and Seth Haines and The Ache for Meaning by Tommy Brown, I continue to return to Beholding by Strahan Coleman during this season (along with some regular meals of Deep Down Faith by Cornelius Planting Jr. with the teens connected to Emmaus City Church I get to spend time with). "Beholding" has been a theme in my life that I think Jesus wants to regularly invite me back to.
And there is mystery in beholding.
Where I have learned this posture of embracing mystery as a way of life the most in recent years has been at the The Lord's Supper. Jesus continues to serve us at His Communion Table, a humble and eternal Giver providing us generous nourishment from His humble and eternal meal of the Eucharist.
And in honor of a friend who was recently wondering about how such a miniscule meal could be a life-changing gift, here are some excerpts from Strahan Coleman's Beholding.
| 1 | Real Presence
Christ is mysteriously yet
substantially present in the Eucharist
in a real and true way
The Eucharist is the name we give to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. On the night before Jesus was crucified, He broke bread and poured wine, saying it was His body and blood. He told His disciples that whenever they gathered like they did that night, they should do the same in remembrance of Him. Since the earliest moments of Jesus' Church, believers have done this together every Sunday, teaching that it is one of the unique ways that God meets, loves, and empowers His Church with grace.
This genuinely humble sacrament
of eating bread and drinking wine
helps us to see, feel, and touch,
literally, what life looks like
when God fills it.
It's the place where imaginary
spirituality becomes earthed
spirituality, and through some
of the most widely shared
and commonly held elements
humanity has at her disposal.
Of all the ways Jesus might have
commanded us to celebrate the
mystery of His God-humanness,
of what it looked like when God
walked the earth as one of us,
He chose this.
It challenges our notion of
what God does and does not touch
and what He does or does not fill.
In the incarnation of Jesus, we experience God as someone who is unafraid of not only human flesh but human nature as well. We discover that the world and all its mundane responsibilities and necessities are no barrier for the miracle of divine life. In Jesus we ourselves are invited to be unafraid to be human and, even more shockingly, to see it as the home of God. In the Eucharist, we eat and drink of that very same reality.
As I was awakening to what it meant to bring all my humanity to God, I felt drawn to understand the Eucharist and what it had to teach me even more.
| 2 | Holy Mysteries
Continuing the spiritual practice
of receiving in faith, not sight
The word sacrament itself being derived from the Greek mustérion, which is where we get our word mystery, and as we've already seen, a great mystery it is.
The bread and wine
look the same,
taste the same,
and smell the same,
but in the Eucharist
they've become enchanted
by the Spirit.
It's a mystery in the same sense that we are born again of God. Externally we look exactly how we used to, though with a little more life in the eyes. But in reality we are a "new creation." And it's also in the same manner that somehow Jesus could be totally God and totally man simultaneously without tension, issue, or compromise.
It's a miracle that demands to be embraced, not sense-made, to fully appreciate its beauty. Or as my friend and mentor Bishop Bruce Gilberd put it,
"In the Eucharist
reality and mystery are fused;
there is no either-or."
Wasn't it the same with Jesus?
The living God Himself lived
among humanity for decades
unknown as such
by those around Him.
Think about that:
God lived, spoke, made tables,
and laughed and cried amidst
humanity in such an ordinary way
that He lived undetected
most of His life.
Even when He did "go public,"
He was still so much made up
of normal stuff that
He wasn't believed!
In His form, Jesus looked
sublimely ordinary.
In His nature, He was
shockingly divine.
And so it may also be
with the Eucharist.
Jesus lived, died, resurrected and ascended 2,000 years ago. We could be forgiven for forgetting how ordinary and natural He must have seemed to the world around Him; we weren't there! But the Eucharist lives this truth out again and again in our present lives.
| 3 | Supernaturally Natural
Walking with God,
and Heaving invading our world,
is more natural than you think
Whilst we often spend so much of our lives seeking the spiritually extraordinary, God came to us embodied in our mundane ordinary and said, "Look! This is what divine life looks like!" To live fully alive, in obedience to, and in pleasure with Me is to be more human, not less!"
So often we're participating in God's activities without knowing it. Because as it turns out, just as with Jesus, God's divine purposes are ordinary too. For thirty quiet years Jesus went about eating, cleaning, building, being a friend, being a son, being a participant in community. He lived this way because these are all good things God has made. And so is every aspect of our lives.
That's what the Eucharist does for us. It lands our experience of God in our lives. Then we're invited to see the rest of our lives in the same Spirit-enlivened way. If humans experienced Jesus and passed Him off as just an ordinary person, we're likely to make the same mistake in our lives.
The Eucharist invites us to accept
how ordinary divine life can be,
and when it comes to beholding,
this is liberating.
Sometimes when we pray
and look out to God,
all we see is nature,
ourselves,
quiet,
or the day-to-day feelings
of malaise and struggle
we feel —
the bread and wine.
But with a Eucharistic mind,
we can see too that those things
aren't separated from God,
but the places, people, and things
His divine life is filling.
We can see Him there.
To look at the world
is to see Christ hidden amidst it,
and though it may not always
feel ecstatic or outer body,
it's as valid as sharing a meal
with Jesus in Cana,
where before He transformed
water into wine,
He was just another
ordinary guest.
The Eucharist demands
that we see the world
enchanted.
The miracle of God filling
ordinary stuff is
that ordinary stuff
suddenly becomes sacred
and otherworldly again.
To say that God fills our
mundane lives is the same
as saying once we see
the world Eucharistically,
there is no such thing
as the mundane.
Jesus' disciples probably
didn't really understand
much of the weight of what
was going on that first night
Jesus led through the
Lord's Supper,
but that wasn't the point.
Because the table isn't
mental assent but about
receiving Christ and
letting Him be enough.
When we eat and drink
together with the intention
of celebrating Christ's life,
death, resurrection, and return,
we're embarking on
the highest form of theology
in the most practical
and ordinary way.
If it's the ordinary stuff
of grains and grapes
that God visits in
communion to make it
Christ,
then it's the ordinary stuff
of my day-to-day life that I can
trust He'll do the same with.
+ Strahan Coleman
in Beholding*,
pgs. 116-126, 139-140
*If you are intrigued or excited by what you read, purchase Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God by Strahan Coleman as there is more to be enchanted by in Chapter 6: The Importance of Eating God and Chapter 7: Sharing the Table then what I can include in this one post.
Bonus Deep Down Faith Goods
Q. What does it mean to eat
the crucified body of Christ and
to drink His poured-out blood?
A. It means to accept
with a believing heart the
entire suffering and death of Christ
and thereby to receive forgiveness
of sins and eternal life.
But it means more.
Through the Holy Spirit,
who lives both in Christ and in us,
we are united more and more
to Christ's blessed body.
And so, although He is in heaven
and we are on earth,
we are flesh of His flesh
and bone of His bone.
And we forever live on and
are governed by one Spirit,
as the members of our body are
by one soul.
+ Catechism Q&A 76
Eating and drinking not only nourish us, however; they also nourish others. When we share a meal with others, we are saying we don't want them to die. We want them to flourish and thrive and be alive with us to nourish them too.
The Lord's Supper is a meal of this kind. In this meal we act out the death of our Lord by spilling wine or juice into a cup and breaking a loaf into pieces. Then, by eating and drinking, we identify ourselves as people of the cross and all that this means. And by taking nourishing bread and refreshing drink into the center of our bodies, we sign and seal our union with Christ.
In the Lord's Supper,
we are also doing something else.
We are nourishing the body of the Lord,
Jesus' Church.
We are sharing the gifts of His food and drink
as a way of building up
our fellowship together.
As believers lift the cup
and take in a piece of broken bread,
they also serve and offer and pass
these good things to other Christians.
They are saying,
"We don't want your faith to die.
We want you to flourish and thrive
and be alive to Jesus Christ with us.
Here, take and eat.
Here, take and drink this cup."
For Reflection
If you currently participate
in the Lord's Supper,
how does taking communion benefit you
and help you as a follower of Jesus?
If you don't currently participate
in communion, how do you think doing so
would benefit your faith?
Prayer Starter
Say a prayer of thanks to Jesus
for His Supper,
for reminding us of His death
for our sins,
and for binding us close to Him
and to each other.
Bonus Eucharist Song
Anchor Hymns, 2024 A.D.
Oh, oh, oh, oh
You are the Living Word
Come down from heaven
And anyone who eats this bread
Is gonna live forever. (Repeat)
Blessed are the desperate ones
Who knows where their help comes from.
Oh Lord, my Lord,
Where else can I go?
(Repeat)
Oh, oh, oh, oh
You are the blood poured out on the altar
And anyone who drinks this wine
Is one with the Father. (Repeat)
Blessed are the desperate ones
Who knows where their help comes from.
Oh, oh, oh, oh
I’m gonna follow Jesus the Holy One.
Next post
More Eucharist posts:
May God's Kingdom come, His will be done.
Que le Royaume de Dieu vienne,
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇
With anticipation and joy,
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